Though common sense says that causes must temporally precede their effects, the hugely influential interventionist account of causation makes no reference to temporal precedence. Does common sense lead us astray? In this paper, I evaluate the power of the commonsense assumption from within the interventionist approach to causal modeling. I first argue that if causes temporally precede their effects, then one need not consider the outcomes of interventions in order to infer causal relevance, and that one can instead use temporal (...) and probabilistic information to infer exactly when X is causally relevant to Y in each of the senses captured by Woodward’s interventionist treatment. Then, I consider the upshot of these findings for causal decision theory, and argue that the commonsense assumption is especially powerful when an agent seeks to determine whether so-called “dominance reasoning” is applicable. (shrink)

The subject of time travel has been receiving increasing attention in the recent philosophical literature. Most of the articles that deal with it have been concerned to defend the logical consistency of time travel against those who claim that it entails one or more contradictions. Two sorts of defences have been offered. The first sort of defence involves showing that time travel does not entail those consequences which other philosophers allege it does entail. The second sort of defence involves an (...) admission that time travel does indeed involve that which its opponents allege it does involve, e.g., being in more than one place at a time, but arguing that such consequences in no way vitiate the logical consistency of this notion.My first aim in this paper is to provide a defence of time travel of the second sort. More specifically, I want to cut the ground from under an argument which might run thus:Time travel entails that certain effects can precede their causes.It is logically impossible for an effect to precede its cause. (shrink)

Can a present or future event bring about a past event? An answer to this question is demanded by many other interesting questions. Can anybody, even a god, do anything about what has already occurred? Should we plan for the past, as well as for the future? Can anybody precognise the future in a way quite different from normal prediction? Do the causal laws and the past jointly preclude free action? Does current physical theory entail a consistent version of backwards (...) causation? Recent articles on the problem of backwards causation have drawn attention to the importance of the principle of the fixity of the past: that the past is now fixed. It can be shown that the standard argument against backwards causation (the bilking experiment) simply builds in the assumption of past fixity. A fixed past deprives future events of past efficacy. This has naturally led to the speculation that by abandoning past fixity real power over the past may be possible.In this paper I show that in order to have an interesting thesis of backwards causation it is not enough simply to drop past fixity. More must go. In particular, to ensure what could be called future-to-past efficacy we must abandon two entrenched principles of permanence: the principle of permanent fixity, and the principle of permanent truth. The only alternative for backwards causal theorists is to embrace real contradictions in nature. (shrink)

Whereas many philosophers take backwards causation to be impossible, the few who maintain its possibility either take it to be absent from the actual world or else confined to theoretical physics. Here, however, I argue that backwards causation is not only actual, but common, though occurring in the context of our social institutions. After juxtaposing my cases with a few others in the literature and arguing that we should take seriously the reality of causal cases in these contexts, I consider (...) several objections. These objections involve whether the cases should be reinterpreted, whether they are properly within the institution, whether they involve necessitation or else Cambridge changes, whether and how they involve changing the past, and whether this should call us to question institutional reality. I end by suggesting that it is a virtue of our institutions that they allow backwards causation, that this is a kind of technology that they are often built to incorporate. (shrink)

Past entities, events, and circumstances are neither observable nor manipulatable. Several philosophers argued that this inaccessibility precludes a realistic conception of the past. I survey versions of antirealism and agnosticism about the past formulated by Michael Dummett, Leon Goldstein, and Derek Turner. These accounts differ in their motivations and reasoning, but they share the opinion that the reality of at least large swathes of the past is unknowable. Consequently, they consider statements about them as referring, at most, to present constructs. (...) These antirealists about the past are not, however, antirealists or skeptics about time or chronology. They accept, among other things, that present traces can be dated and statements about their temporal provenances are referring and truth-apt.I posit that an antirealist who accepts that at least some of the present traces can be truth-aptly dated while holding that these traces do not support knowledge about past events and circumstances commits herself to a radically skeptic stance. Otherwise, she would be diluting her position so that it will be hardly distinguishable from realism. This problem could be avoided if antirealists about the past would extend their antirealism to estimates of the age of present traces. Such a position, however, would imply a very drastic form of scientific antirealism. I conclude that the past’s inaccessibility is insufficient to support antirealism about the past, either as a part of moderate scientific antirealism or as a stand-alone position. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to introduce philosophers of science to some recent philosophical discussions of the nature and origin of the direction of time. The essay is organized around books by Hans Reichenbach, Paul Horwich, and Huw Price. I outline their major arguments and treat certain critical points in detail. I speculate at the end about the ways in which the subject may continue to develop and in which it may connect with other areas of philosophy.

Newcomb’s problem involves a decision-maker faced with a choice and a predictor forecasting this choice. The agents’ interaction seems to generate a choice dilemma once the decision-maker seeks to apply two basic principles of rational choice theory : maximize expected utility ; adopt the dominant strategy. We review unsuccessful attempts at pacifying the dilemma by excluding Newcomb’s problem as an RCT-application, by restricting MEU and ADS, and by allowing for backward causation. A probability approach shows that Newcomb’s original problem-formulation lacks (...) causal information. This makes it impossible to specify the probability structure of Newcomb’s univocally. Once missing information is added, Newcomb’s problem and RCT re-align, thus explaining Newcomb’s problem as a seeming dilemma. Building on Wolpert and Benford :1637–1646, 2013), we supply additional details and offer a crucial correction to their formal proof. (shrink)

Tim Maudlin's argument for the inconsistency of Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of quantum theory has been considered in some detail by Joseph Berkovitz, who has provided a possible solution to this challenge at the cost of a significant empirical lacuna on the part of TI. The present paper proposes an alternative solution in which Maudlin's charge of inconsistency is evaded but at no cost of empirical content on the part of TI. However, Maudlin's argument is taken as ruling out Cramer's heuristic (...) "pseudotime" explanation of the realization of one transaction out of many. (shrink)

Kenneth Silver has recently argued that backwards causation is common in the context of social institutions. I consider this claim in detail and conclude that backwards causation is not the most plausible interpretation of what is going on in the cases Silver considers. Nonetheless, I show that these cases can teach us some interesting lessons about institutional facts. In particular, I argue that in order to avoid contradiction due to conflicting declarations in these cases, we must conclude that the properties (...) involved in institutional facts are relational properties. (shrink)

The paper proposes a solution to the problem of counterfactuals, building on both Rescher’s epistemic and Tichý’s semantic approaches. The core of the proposed solution is the thesis that when expressing a true counterfactual, the speaker assumes a set of background indicative premises as an implicit parameter. When added tacitly to an unreal antecedent, these premises entail the consequent logically or analytically. We draw a distinction between a potentially unreal and an absolutely unreal condition expressed in the antecedent. We view (...) counterfactuals with a positive time vector and an absolute unreal condition as abbreviated deductive retrodictions. Similarly, we consider counterfactuals with a potentially unreal condition to be abbreviated deductive predictions. In a similar manner, we also explain the truth (falsity) of vacuously true counterpossibles or counterpossible conditionals. In the second part, we discuss the enigmatic backtracking counterfactuals. We propose that their negative time direction is due to their being abductive retrodictions, i.e., explanations of unreal effects based on possible causes in which the conditions remain tacit or unexpressed. The backtracking temporal direction of counterfactual abductive retrodictions is in accordance with the thesis on the positive temporal direction from cause to effect. Thus, we demonstrate that in order to explain backtracking counterfactuals, there is no need to assume violations of laws of nature or a special logic. What we need to do is to take into account the third parameter, i.e., a set of tacit or unexpressed additional propositions, as well as the principle of ceteris paribus as the background. (shrink)

My intention in this paper is to outline and criticise some of the main ideas in Michael Dummett’s classic article “Bringing about the Past”. From Dummett’s remarks we can reconstruct two sceptical arguments designed to show that it can never be rational to attempt to bring about past events. Dummett is critical of both arguments. Though happy with Dummett’s reply to the first sceptical argument, I disagree with his reply to the second.

In this discussion paper I argue that Max Black's well-known bilking argument does not succeed in showing the impossibility of backwards causation.

La critica all’antirealismo costruttivista del pensiero postmoderno è al centro della riflessione di Maurizio Ferraris per lo meno a partire da Il mondo esterno (Ferraris 2001). Forme radicali di costruttivismo sono state però difese anche al di fuori del pensiero postmoderno tanto nella tradizione della filosofia analitica quanto, più recentemente, nell’ambito delle scienze cognitive. Nell’articolo viene dapprima presentata e criticata un’affermazione dal netto sapore costruttivista fatta da Vittorio Gallese e George Lakoff in uno degli articoli più influenti nel dibattito degli (...) ultimi anni sulla natura dei concetti: The Brain’s Concepts (Gallese, Lakoff 2005). Tale posizione viene quindi messa in relazione con quella forma di antirealismo costruttivista, detta anche relativismo concettuale, difesa, in modi e con esiti diversi, da filosofi quali Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam e Richard Rorty. Si sostiene quindi che tutte queste forme di antirealismo costruttivista incorrono in un dilemma: o esse abbracciano la problematica tesi metafisica di un’efficacia causale a ritroso delle nostre menti sul mondo oppure si riducono a una plausibile, ma ontologicamente innocua, affermazione dell’esistenza, in linea di principio, di molteplici modi di categorizzare la realtà e, nel caso delle teorie cosiddette incarnate della cognizione, della dipendenza di tali modi dalle forme che assume l’interazione senso-motoria di un organismo col suo ambiente. Viene infine mostrato come dall’osservazione dei molteplici modi in cui è possibile categorizzare la realtà sia possibile trarre conclusioni metafisiche di segno opposto all’antirealismo costruttivista. (shrink)

Constant conjunction theory of causation had been the dominant theory in philosophy for a long time and regained attention recently. This paper gives a logical framework of causation based on the theory. The basic idea is that causal statements are empirical, and are derived from our past experience by observing constant conjunction between objects. The logic is defined on linear time structures. A causal statement is evaluated at time points, such that its value depends on what has been in the (...) past. We first give a semantics that contains basic conditions that, we think, must hold for a concept of causation, on which we define the minimal causal logic. Then we discuss its possible extensions for various concepts of causation. Complete deductive systems are given. (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)