Switch to: References

Citations of:

Physical Causation

New York: Cambridge University Press (2000)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Some Reflections on Causation.Yafeng Shan - 2024 - In Alternative Philosophical Approaches to Causation: Beyond Difference-making and Mechanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1-12.
    Philosophical analyses of causation have been centred on the question of what causation is. More precisely speaking, philosophers tend to address four different issues: metaphysical (what is causation out there?), epistemological (how can a causal claim be established and assessed?), conceptual (what does the word ‘cause’ mean?), and methodological (what methods ought one to use in order to establish and assess causal claims?). This chapter argues that the practical issue of causation (what is a causal claim for in practice?) is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Causation as Constraints in Causal Set Theory.Marco Forgione - manuscript
    Many approaches to quantum gravity -the theory that should account for quantum and gravitational phenomena under the same theoretical umbrella- seem to point at some form of spacetime emergence, i.e., the fact that spacetime is not a fundamental entity of our physical world. This tenet has sparked many philosophical discussions: from the so-called empirical incoherence problem to different accounts of emergence and mechanisms thereof. In this contribution, I focus on the partial order relation of causal set theory and argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Mental Causation for Standard Dualists.Bram Vaassen - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    The standard objection to dualist theories of mind is that they seemingly cannot account for the obvious fact that mental phenomena cause our behaviour. On the plausible assumption that all our behaviour is physically necessitated by entirely physical phenomena, there appears to be no room for dualist mental causation. Some argue that dualists can address this problem by making minimal adjustments in their ontology. I argue that no such adjustments are required. Given recent developments in philosophy of causation, it is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Barren Worlds: The Scientific Image of Ontic Structural Realism.Federico Benitez - 2022 - Disputatio 14 (65):65-90.
    This work explores issues with the eliminativist formulation of ontic structural realism. An ontology that totally eliminates objects is found lacking by arguing, first, that the theoretical frameworks used to support the best arguments against an object-oriented ontology (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, quantum field theory) can be seen in every case as physical models of empty worlds, and therefore do not represent all the information that comes from science, and in particular from fundamental physics, which also includes information about local (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Causal Theories of Spacetime.Sam Baron & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2023 - Noûs 58 (1):202-224.
    We develop a new version of the causal theory of spacetime. Whereas traditional versions of the theory seek to identify spatiotemporal relations with causal relations, the version we develop takes causal relations to be the grounds for spatiotemporal relations. Causation is thus distinct from, and more basic than, spacetime. We argue that this non-identity theory, suitably developed, avoids the challenges facing the traditional identity theory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Metaphysics of Causation.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Consider the following claims: -/- 1. The drought caused the famine. -/- 2. Drowsy driving causes crashes. -/- 3. How much I water my plant influences how tall it grows. -/- 4. How much novocaine a patient receives affects how much pain they will feel during dental surgery. -/- The metaphysics of causation asks questions about what it takes for claims like these to be true—what kind of relation the claims are about, and in virtue of what these relations obtain.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Sparse Causation and Mere Abundant Causation.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (11):3259-3280.
    Setting off from a familiar distinction in the philosophy of properties, this paper introduces a tripartite distinction between sparse causation, abundant causation and mere abundant causation. It is argued that the contrast between sparse and mere abundant causation allows us to resolve notorious philosophical issues having to do with negative causation, causation involving institutional properties and physical macro-causation in a way that is unified, intuitive and in line with scientific doctrines and practices.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Halfway Proportionality.Bram Vaassen - 2022 - Philosophical Studies (9):1-21.
    According to the so-called 'proportionality principle', causes should be proportional to their effects: they should be both enough and not too much for the occurrence of their effects. This principle is the subject of an ongoing debate. On the one hand, many maintain that it is required to address the problem of causal exclusion and take it to capture a crucial aspect of causation. On the other hand, many object that it renders accounts of causation implausibly restrictive and often reject (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Philosophical Naturalism and Empirical Approaches to Philosophy.Jonathan Y. Tsou - forthcoming - In Marcus Rossberg (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
    This chapter examines the influence of the empirical sciences (e.g., physics, biology, psychology) in contemporary analytic philosophy, with focus on philosophical theories that are guided by findings from the empirical sciences. Scientific approaches to philosophy follow a tradition of philosophical naturalism associated with Quine, which strives to ally philosophical methods and theories more closely with the empirical sciences and away from a priori theorizing and conceptual analysis.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How to Trace a Causal Process.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):95-117.
    According to the theory developed here, we may trace out the processes emanating from a cause in such a way that any consequence lying along one of these processes counts as an effect of the cause. This theory gives intuitive verdicts in a diverse range of problem cases from the literature. Its claims about causation will never be retracted when we include additional variables in our model. And it validates some plausible principles about causation, including Sartorio's ‘Causes as Difference Makers’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Causation comes in degrees.Huzeyfe Demirtas - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-17.
    Which country, politician, or policy is more of a cause of the Covid-19 pandemic death toll? Which of the two factories causally contributed more to the pollution of the nearby river? A wide-ranging portion of our everyday thought and talk, and attitudes rely on a graded notion of causation. However, it is sometimes highlighted that on most contemporary accounts, causation is on-off. Some philosophers further question the legitimacy of talk of degrees of causation and suggest that we avoid it. Some (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Actual Causation.Enno Fischer - 2021 - Dissertation, Leibniz Universität Hannover
    In this dissertation I develop a pluralist theory of actual causation. I argue that we need to distinguish between total, path-changing, and contributing actual causation. The pluralist theory accounts for a set of example cases that have raised problems for extant unified theories and it is supported by considerations about the various functions of causal concepts. The dissertation also analyses the context-sensitivity of actual causation. I show that principled accounts of causal reasoning in legal inquiry face limitations and I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Possibility of Emergent Conscious Causal Powers.Lok-Chi Chan & Andrew J. Latham - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1):195-201.
    ABSTRACT Lewtas [2017] recently articulated an argument claiming that emergent conscious causal powers are impossible. In developing his argument, Lewtas makes several assumptions about emergence, phenomenal consciousness, categorical properties, and causation. We argue that there are plausible alternatives to these assumptions. Thus, the proponent of emergent conscious causal powers can escape Lewtas’s challenge.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Constitutive relevance & mutual manipulability revisited.Carl F. Craver, Stuart Glennan & Mark Povich - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8807-8828.
    An adequate understanding of the ubiquitous practice of mechanistic explanation requires an account of what Craver termed “constitutive relevance.” Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon. Craver’s mutual manipulability account extended Woodward’s account of manipulationist counterfactuals to analyze how interlevel experiments establish constitutive relevance. Critics of MM argue that applying Woodward’s account to this philosophical problem conflates causation and constitution, thus rendering the account incoherent. These criticisms, we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Occasionalism in a Contemporary Context.Douglas Kutach & Özgür Koca - manuscript
    This essay was completed in January 2016 and accepted for publication in a collection on occasionalism by Nazif Muhtaroglu. It attempts to update the doctrine of occasionalism to make it independent of theism and fit better with contemporary physics and a modern understanding of causation. We find that modern physics provides an avenue to support the essential core of occasionalism.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Some Reflections on Conventions.Carlo Penco & Massimiliano Vignolo - 2019 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 19 (3):375-402.
    In Overlooking Conventions Michael Devitt argues in defence of the traditional approach to semantics. Devitt’s main line of argument is an inference to the best explanation: nearly all cases that linguistic pragmatists discuss in order to challenge the traditional approach to semantics are better explained by adding conventions into language, in the form of expanding the range of polysemy or the range of indexicality (in the broad sense of linguistically governed context sensitivity). In this paper, we discuss three aspects of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Mechanistic and Normative Structure of Agency.Jason Winning - 2019 - Dissertation, University of California San Diego
    I develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents and agency as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and economics. The framework I develop is internal perspectivalist. That is to say, it counts agents as real in a perspective-dependent way, but not in a way that depends on an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Kim’s dilemma: why mental causation is not productive.Andrew Russo - 2016 - Synthese 193 (7):2185-2203.
    Loewer (in: Physicalism and its discontents, 2001; Philos Phenomenol Res 65:655–663, 2002; in: Contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, 2007) has argued that the nonreductive physicalist should respond to the exclusion problem by endorsing the overdetermination entailed by their view. Kim’s (Physicalism, or something near enough, 2005; in: Contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, 2007) argument against this reply is based on the premise that mental causation must be a productive relation in order to sustain human agency. In this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The Absentminded Professor.Justin Tiehen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I argue that absences pose a challenge to our understanding of physicalism that has not been properly appreciated. I do this by setting out a thought experiment involving a being in whom absence properties occupy the causal roles that functionalists take to define mental properties, in which case these absence properties realize the being’s mental properties. Such a being should be compatible with the truth of physicalism, I argue, even though its mental properties are neither themselves physical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Moral Responsibility.Matthew Talbert - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral responsibility.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   50 citations  
  • A dynamical systems approach to causation.Peter Fazekas, Balazs Gyenis, Gábor Hofer-Szabó & Gergely Kertesz - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6065-6087.
    Our approach aims at accounting for causal claims in terms of how the physical states of the underlying dynamical system evolve with time. Causal claims assert connections between two sets of physicals states—their truth depends on whether the two sets in question are genuinely connected by time evolution such that physical states from one set evolve with time into the states of the other set. We demonstrate the virtues of our approach by showing how it is able to account for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The creation of institutional reality, special theory of relativity, and mere Cambridge change.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2021 - Synthese 198 (6):5835-5860.
    Saying so can make it so, J. L. Austin taught us long ago. Famously, John Searle has developed this Austinian insight in an account of the construction of institutional reality. Searle maintains that so-called Status Function Declarations, allegedly having a “double direction of fit”, synchronically create worldly institutional facts, corresponding to the propositional content of the declarations. I argue that Searle’s account of the making of institutional reality is in tension with the special theory of relativity—irrespective of whether the account (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Is hybrid formal theory of arguments, stories and criminal evidence well suited for negative causation?Charles A. Barclay - 2020 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 28 (3):361-384.
    In this paper, I have two primary goals. First, I show that the causal-based story approach in A hybrid formal theory of arguments, stories and criminal evidence is ill suited to negative causation. In the literature, the causal-based approach requires that hypothetical stories be causally linked to the explanandum. Many take these links to denote physical or psychological causation, or temporal precedence. However, understanding causality in those terms, as I will show, cannot capture cases of negative causation, which are of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Causal after all : a model of mental causation for dualists.Bram Vaassen - 2019 - Dissertation, Umeå University
    In this dissertation, I develop and defend a model of causation that allows for dualist mental causation in worlds where the physical domain is physically complete. In Part I, I present the dualist ontology that will be assumed throughout the thesis and identify two challenges for models of mental causation within such an ontology: the exclusion worry and the common cause worry. I also argue that a proper response to these challenges requires a thoroughly lightweight account of causation, i.e. an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Conservation Laws and the Philosophy of Mind: Opening the Black Box, Finding a Mirror.J. Brian Pitts - 2019 - Philosophia 48 (2):673-707.
    Since Leibniz's time, Cartesian mental causation has been criticized for violating the conservation of energy and momentum. Many dualist responses clearly fail. But conservation laws have important neglected features generally undermining the objection. Conservation is _local_, holding first not for the universe, but for everywhere separately. The energy in any volume changes only due to what flows through the boundaries. Constant total energy holds if the global summing-up of local conservation laws converges; it probably doesn't in reality. Energy conservation holds (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Meaning, autonomy, symbolic causality, and free will.Russ Abbott - 2018 - Review of General Psychology 22 (1):85-94.
    As physical entities that translate symbols into physical actions, computers offer insights into the nature of meaning and agency. • Physical symbol systems, generically known as agents, link abstractions to material actions. The meaning of a symbol is defined as the physical actions an agent takes when the symbol is encountered. • An agent has autonomy when it has the power to select actions based on internal decision processes. Autonomy offers a partial escape from constraints imposed by direct physical influences (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Processes, pre-emption and further problems.Andreas Hüttemann - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1487-1509.
    In this paper I will argue that what makes our ordinary judgements about token causation true can be explicated in terms of interferences into quasi-inertial processes. These interferences and quasi-inertial processes can in turn be fully explicated in scientific terms. In this sense the account presented here is reductive. I will furthermore argue that this version of a process-theory of causation can deal with the traditional problems that process theories have to face, such as the problem of misconnection and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Did the bacterium really kill the colonel? Systemic view, inter-level causation, and levels of quasi-decompositionality in mechanistic explanations.Emilio Cáceres Vázquez & Cristian Saborido - 2018 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 33 (1):129-148.
    In this paper, we critically analyze the mechanicist approach to scientific explanation and propose to complement this view with a conception of level as interval of quasi-decompositionality. This conception allows us to metaphysically base the mechanicist proposals on characteristic systemic features. By means of concrete examples, we claim that this proposal is able to overcome some of the alleged limitations of predominant models of mechanistic explanation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Determinants of judgments of explanatory power: Credibility, Generality, and Statistical Relevance.Matteo Colombo, Leandra Bucher & Jan Sprenger - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology:doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01430.
    Explanation is a central concept in human psychology. Drawing upon philosophical theories of explanation, psychologists have recently begun to examine the relationship between explanation, probability and causality. Our study advances this growing literature in the intersection of psychology and philosophy of science by systematically investigating how judgments of explanatory power are affected by the prior credibility of a potential explanation, the causal framing used to describe the explanation, the generalizability of the explanation, and its statistical relevance for the evidence. Collectively, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • On the Argument from Physics and General Relativity.Christopher Gregory Weaver - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (2):333-373.
    I argue that the best interpretation of the general theory of relativity has need of a causal entity, and causal structure that is not reducible to light cone structure. I suggest that this causal interpretation of GTR helps defeat a key premise in one of the most popular arguments for causal reductionism, viz., the argument from physics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Causal Closure Argument is No Threat to Non-Reductive Physicalism.Peter Menzies - 2015 - Humana Mente 8 (29).
    Non-reductive physicalism is the view that mental events cause other events in virtue of their mental properties and that mental properties supervene on, without being identical to, physical properties. Jaegwon Kim has presented several much-discussed arguments against this view. But the much simpler causal closure argument, which purports to establish that every mental property is identical to a physical property, has received less attention than Kim’s arguments. This paper aims to show how a non-reductive physicalist should rebut the causal closure (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Molecular pathways and the contextual explanation of molecular functions.Giovanni Boniolo & Raffaella Campaner - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4):24.
    Much of the recent philosophical debate on causation and causal explanation in the biological and biomedical sciences has focused on the notion of mechanism. Mechanisms, their nature and epistemic roles have been tackled by a range of so-called neo-mechanistic theories, and widely discussed. Without denying the merits of this approach, our paper aims to show how lately it has failed to give proper credit to processes, which are central to the field, especially of contemporary molecular biology. Processes can be summed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Real and Virtual Clinical Trials: A Formal Analysis.Barbara Osimani, Marta Bertolaso, Roland Poellinger & Emanuele Frontoni - 2018 - Topoi 38 (2):411-422.
    If well-designed, the results of a Randomised Clinical Trial can justify a causal claim between treatment and effect in the study population; however, additional information might be needed to carry over this result to another population. RCTs have been criticized exactly on grounds of failing to provide this sort of information Evidence, inference and enquiry. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011), as well as to black-box important details regarding the mechanisms underpinning the causal law instantiated by the RCT result. On (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Beliefs as inner causes: the (lack of) evidence.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (6):850-877.
    Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle’s alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • The Compatibility of Downward Causation and Emergence.Simone Gozzano - 2017 - In Michele Paolini Paoletti & Francesco Orilia (eds.), Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Downward Causation. New York: Routledge. pp. 296-312.
    In this paper, I shall argue that both emergence and downward causation, which are strongly interconnected, presuppose the presence of levels of reality. However, emergence and downward causation pull in opposite directions with respect to my best reconstruction of what levels are. The upshot is that emergence stresses the autonomy among levels while downward causation puts the distinction between levels at risk of a reductio ad absurdum, with the further consequence of blurring the very notion of downward. Therefore, emergence and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • An Emergentist Argument for the Impossibility of Zombie Duplicates.Reinaldo Bernal - 2016 - Working Papers Series - FMSH.
    Some influential arguments in the metaphysics of consciousness, in particular Chalmers’ Zombie Argument, suppose that all the physical properties of composed physical systems are metaphysically necessitated by their fundamental constituents. In this paper I argue against this thesis in order to debate Chalmers’ argument. By discussing, in non-technical terms, an EPR system I try to show that there are good reasons to hold that some composed physical systems have properties which are nomologically necessitated by their fundamental constituents, i.e., which emerge (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • In Defense of Methodological Mechanism: The Case of Apoptosis.Stavros Ioannidis & Stathis Psillos - 2017 - Axiomathes 27 (6):601-619.
    This paper advances the thesis of methodological mechanism, the claim that to be committed to mechanism is to adopt a certain methodological postulate, i.e. to look for causal pathways for the phenomena of interest. We argue that methodological mechanism incorporates a minimal account of understanding mechanisms, according to which a mechanism just is a causal pathway described in the language of theory. In order to argue for this position we discuss a central example of a biological mechanism, the mechanism of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • The New Mechanical Philosophy.Stuart Glennan - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   124 citations  
  • Grounding-mechanical explanation.Kelly Trogdon - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (6):1289-1309.
    Characterization of a form of explanation involving grounding on the model of mechanistic causal explanation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  • Free will, grace, and anti-Pelagianism.Taylor W. Cyr & Matthew T. Flummer - 2018 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 83 (2):183-199.
    Critics of synergism often complain that the view entails Pelagianism, and so, critics think, monergism looks like the only live option. Critics of monergism often claim that the view entails that the blame for human sin ultimately traces to God. Recently, several philosophers have attempted to chart a middle path by offering soteriological accounts which are monergistic but maintain the resistibility of God’s grace. In this paper, we present a challenge to such accounts of the resistibility of grace, namely that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Conservation of Energy is Relevant to Physicalism.Ole Koksvik - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (4):573-582.
    I argue against Barbara Montero's claim that Conservation of Energy has nothing to do with physicalism. I reject her reconstruction of the argument for physicalism from CoE, and offer an alternative reconstruction that better captures the intuitions of those who believe that there is a conflict between interactionist dualism and CoE.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Conservation Laws and Interactionist Dualism.Ben White - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267):387–405.
    The Exclusion Argument for physicalism maintains that since (1) every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, and (2) cases of causal overdetermination are rare, it follows that if (3) mental events cause physical events as frequently as they seem to, then (4) mental events must be physical in nature. In defence of (1), it is sometimes said that (1) is supported if not entailed by conservation laws. Against this, I argue that conservation laws do not lend sufficient support to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Causal exclusion and the limits of proportionality.Neil McDonnell - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (6):1459-1474.
    Causal exclusion arguments are taken to threaten the autonomy of the special sciences, and the causal efficacy of mental properties. A recent line of response to these arguments has appealed to “independently plausible” and “well grounded” theories of causation to rebut key premises. In this paper I consider two papers which proceed in this vein and show that they share a common feature: they both require causes to be proportional to their effects. I argue that this feature is a bug, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • The measurement of consciousness: a framework for the scientific study of consciousness.David Gamez - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • A priori causal laws.Darren Bradley - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (4):358-370.
    Sober and Elgin defend the claim that there are a priori causal laws in biology. Lange and Rosenberg take issue with this on Humean grounds, among others. I will argue that Sober and Elgin don’t go far enough – there are a priori causal laws in many sciences. Furthermore, I will argue that this thesis is compatible with a Humean metaphysics and an empiricist epistemology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Doing, allowing, and the problem of evil.Daniel Lim - 2017 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (3):273-289.
    Many assume that the best, and perhaps only, way to address the so-called Problem of Evil is to claim that God does not do evil, but that God merely allows evil. This assumption depends on two claims: the doing-allowing distinction exists and the doing-allowing distinction is morally significant. In this paper I try to undermine both of these claims. Against I argue that some of the most influential analyses of the doing-allowing distinction face grave difficulties and that these difficulties are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Causal Argument.Ulrike Hahn, Frank Zenker & Roland Bluhm - 2017 - In Michael Waldmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 475-494.
    In this chapter, we outline the range of argument forms involving causation that can be found in everyday discourse. We also survey empirical work concerned with the generation and evaluation of such arguments. This survey makes clear that there is presently no unified body of research concerned with causal argument. We highlight the benefits of a unified treatment both for those interested in causal cognition and those interested in argumentation, and identify the key challenges that must be met for a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • A New Epistemic Argument for Idealism.Robert Smithson - 2017 - In K. Pearce & T. Goldschmidt (eds.), Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics. Oxford University Press. pp. 17-33.
    Many idealists have thought that realism raises epistemological problems. The worry is that, if it is possible for truths about ordinary objects to outstrip our experiences in the ways that realists typically suppose, we could never be justified in our beliefs about objects. Few contemporary theorists find this argument convincing; philosophers have offered a variety of responses to defend the epistemology of our object judgments under the assumption of realism. But in this paper, I offer a new type of epistemic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Connection and Influence: A Process Theory of Causation.Alexander Rueger - 2006 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 37 (1):77-97.
    A combination of process and counterfactual theories of causation is proposed with the aim of preserving the strengths of each of the approaches while avoiding their shortcomings. The basis for the combination, or hybrid, view is the need, common to both accounts, of imposing a stability requirement on the causal relation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • A Matter of Principle: The Principles of Quantum Theory, Dirac’s Equation, and Quantum Information.Arkady Plotnitsky - 2015 - Foundations of Physics 45 (10):1222-1268.
    This article is concerned with the role of fundamental principles in theoretical physics, especially quantum theory. The fundamental principles of relativity will be addressed as well, in view of their role in quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, specifically Dirac’s work, which, in particular Dirac’s derivation of his relativistic equation of the electron from the principles of relativity and quantum theory, is the main focus of this article. I shall also consider Heisenberg’s earlier work leading him to the discovery of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations