For at least three decades, philosophers have argued that general causation and causal explanation are contrastive in nature. When we seek a causal explanation of some particular event, we are usually interested in knowing why that event happened rather than some other specified event. And general causal claims, which state that certain event types cause certain other event types, seem to make sense only if appropriate contrasts to the types of events acting as cause and effect are specified. In recent (...) years, philosophers have extended the contrastive theory of causation to encompass singular causation as well. In this article, I argue that this extension of the theory was a mistake. Although general causation and causal explanation may well be contrastive in nature, singular causation is not. (shrink)

Causal claims are context sensitive. According to the old orthodoxy (Mackie 1974, Lewis 1986, inter alia), the context sensitivity of causal claims is all due to conversational pragmatics. According to the new contextualists (Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Schaffer 2005, and Hall ms), at least some of the context sensitivity of causal claims is semantic in nature. I want to discuss the prospects for causal contextualism, by asking why causal claims are context sensitive, what they are sensitive (...) to, and where they are sensitive to it. (shrink)

If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done so intentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others like them) has motivated questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action. Beyond the matter of her moving, when (...) the person moves her head, she may be indicating agreement or shaking an insect off her ear. Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, of physical behavior as constituents of an action distinct from but ‘generated by’ the movement? Or should we think that there is a single action describable in a host of ways? Also, actions, in even the most minimal sense, seem to be essentially ‘active’. But, how can we explain what this property amounts to and defend our wavering intuitions about which events fall in the category of the ‘active’ and which do not? (shrink)

Causation is widely assumed to be a binary relation: c causes e. I will argue that causation is a quaternary, contrastive relation: c rather than C* causes e rather than E*, where C* and E* are nonempty sets of contrast events. Or at least, I will argue that treating causation as contrastive helps resolve some paradoxes.

In Part I of ‘Causality and Determination” (CD), Anscombe writes that (1) we understand causality through understanding specific causal expressions, (2) efficient causation can be perceived, (3) “causality consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes”, and 4) no “analysis in terms of necessity or universality” has a place for this. Theses (1) and (2) represent fundamental and important insights. (3) is unsatisfactory; for, taken in a sense that does not already build on the general notion of causation, (...) deriving from does little to elucidate this notion. CD is however right to urge the need to identify a “core, the common feature, of causality in its various kinds”—a kind of criterion, such as the one suggested by Makin (2000), that takes account of (4) in that it is more substantial than, but does not entail, “necessity or universality”. What CD seems to underestimate is the important role of regularities, possibly neither necessary nor exceptionless, for our understanding of the causal relation. Finally, such understanding also requires us, not only to rely on a common criterion of causation, but also on a subjective component of this idea: the consciousness of our own causal agency. Anscombe’s own investigations into non-observational practical knowledge open the door to the study of this aspect of causality. (shrink)

We argue in favor of merely disjunctive effects, namely cases in which an event or fact, C, is not a cause of an effect, E1, and is also not a cause of a distinct effect, E2, and yet C is a cause of the disjunctive effect (E1 orE2). Disjunctive effects let us retain the additivity and the distributivity of causation. According to additivity, if C is a cause of E1 and C is a cause of E2, then C is a (...) cause of E1 and E2. According to distributivity, if C is a cause of E1 and E2, then C is a cause of E1 and C is a cause of E2. We draw an analogy between causation and intensional notions like believing, wanting, and owing, which also admit of merely disjunctive cases. We argue that both the Lewisian counterfactual account of causation (including its recent emendation by Sartorio) and the contrastive account of causation fail to properly account for this phenomenon. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Michael Levin argues that both statements reporting causal relations and causal explanatory statements are extensional. We show that his argument for the extensionality of causal explanatory statements fails to establish that conclusion. His claim that certain 'because' statements are elliptical for statements of what he terms the 'causal explanatory' form is unsubstantiated. The argument for the referential transparency of the allegedly explanatory form, regardless of whether it is a distinct explanatory form, fails because of scope problems. (...) Finally, we argue that the apparent referential opacity of explanations, the attribution of certain kinds of properties to explanations, and our satisfaction with explanations in what appear to be disparate forms are best accounted for, not by the assumption of ellipticality of statements in various forms for statements in some inherently explanatory form, but rather by an account of explanation as a speech act, the success or failure of which may be affected by which of several co-referring expressions is employed. (shrink)

I argue that 'c' occurs extensionally in 'c caused e' and 'D' occurs extensionally in 'c caused e because c is D'. I claim that this has been insufficiently appreciated because the two contexts are often run together and because it has not been clear that the description D of c is among the referents of an explanatory argument. I argue as well that Hume's analysis of causation is consistent with taking causation to be a relation between single events, and (...) that even if events are eliminated as virtual entities, extensionality holds for all terms in the resulting context. (shrink)

According to the standard opinions in the literature, blocking the unacceptable consequences of the notorious slingshot argument requires imposing constraints on the metaphysics of facts or on theories of definite descriptions (or class abstracts). This paper argues that both of these well-known strategies to rebut the slingshot overshoot the mark. The slingshot, first and foremost, raises the question as to the adequate logical formalization of statements about facts, i.e. of factual contexts. It will be shown that a rigorous application of (...) Quine’s maxim of shallow analysis to formalizations of factual contexts paves the way for an account of formalizing such contexts which blocks the slingshot without ramifications for theories of facts or definite descriptions. (shrink)

This critical reader covers Joseph Margolis's controversial views of mind, truth, science, and reality, along with his revolutionary theories about culture, art, language, personhood, and morality.

The main purpose of the paper concerns the question of the existence of hard mathematical facts as truth-makers of mathematical sentences. The paper defends the standpoint according to which hard mathematical facts do not exist in semantic models of mathematical theories. The argumentative line in favour of the defended thesis proceeds as follows: slingshot arguments supply us with some reasons to reject various ontological theories of mathematical facts; there are two ways of blocking these arguments: through the rejection of the (...) principle of extensionality for individual terms or through the rejection of the principle of Wittgenstein; the first way cannot be accepted because it leads to the practice of softening mathematical facts; the second way, called fine-graining facts, cannot be accepted because it also results in the practice of softening facts. Hence, only soft mathematical facts can be introduced into semantic models of mathematical theories. Because they should be rather interpreted as mental representations of mathematical objects, they no longer satisfy the semantic role of truth-makers in relation to mathematical sentences. The argument formulated in the paper is based on the analysis of mathematical extensions of the basic non-Fregean logic. Sixty-two definitions of potential fact-identity connectives are also presented. The paper's conclusion may be interpreted as undermining the situational paradigm of building semantics for mathematical languages. (shrink)

How can a present or future event causally influence one in the past? Even though the case of such a relationship is often quickly dismissed as impossible, this paper suggests that this reaction is hasty and omits interesting as well as substantive arguments and considerations. In an introductory synopsis of the metaphysics of causality, we first present and discuss arguments for and against the possibility of backwards causation. On the other hand, we suggest that a probabilistic notion of causality according (...) to Suppes need not exclude that causes occur temporally after their effects. (shrink)

Causal slingshots are formal arguments advanced by proponents of an event ontology of token-level causation which, in the end, are intended to show two things: (i) The logical form of statements expressing causal dependencies on token level features a binary predicate ‘‘... causes ...’’ and (ii) that predicate takes events as arguments. Even though formalisms are only revealing with respect to the logical form of natural language statements, if the latter are shown to be adequately captured within a corresponding formalism, (...) proponents of slingshots usually take the adequacy of their formalizations for granted without justifying it. The first part of this paper argues that the most discussed version of a causal slingshot, viz. the one e.g. presented by Davidson (Essays on actions and events. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980), can indeed be refuted for relying on an inadequate formal apparatus. In contrast, the formal means of Gödel’s (The philosophy of Betrand Russell. New York, Tudor, 1944) often neglected slingshot are shown to stand on solid ground in the second part of the paper. Nonetheless, I contend that Gödel’s slingshot does only half the work friends of event causation would like it to do. It provides good reasons for (i) but not for (ii). (shrink)