This paper is about the metaphysical debate whether objects persist over time by the selfsame object existing at different times (nowadays called “endurance” by metaphysicians), or by different temporal parts, or stages, existing at different times (called “perdurance”). I aim to illuminate the debate by using some elementary kinematics and real analysis: resources which metaphysicians have, surprisingly, not availed themselves of. There are two main results, which are of interest to both endurantists and perdurantists. (1) I describe a precise formal (...) equivalence between the way that the two metaphysical positions represent the motion of the objects of classical mechanics (both point-particles and continua). (2) I make precise, and prove a result about, the idea that the persistence of objects moving in a void is to be analysed in terms of tracking the continuous curves in spacetime that connect points occupied by matter. The result is entirely elementary: it is a corollary of the Heine–Borel theorem. (shrink)

Reasoning about underlying causal relations drives responsibility judgments: agents are held responsible for the outcomes they cause through their behaviors. Two main causal reasoning approaches exist: dependence theories emphasize statistical relations between causes and effects, while transference theories emphasize mechanical transmission of energy. Recently, pluralistic or hybrid models, combining both approaches, have emerged as promising psychological frameworks. In this paper, we focus on causal reasoning as involved in third-party judgements of responsibility and on related judgments of intention and control. In (...) particular, we used a novel visual paradigm to investigate the combined effects of two well-known causal manipulations, namely omission and pre-emption, on these evaluations. Our findings support the view that people apply a pluralistic causal reasoning when evaluating individual responsibility for negative outcomes. In particular, we observed diminished responsibility when dependence, transference, or both fail, compared to when these mechanisms are upheld. Responsibility judgement involves a cognitive hybrid of multiple aspects of causal reasoning. However, important differences exist at the interindividual level, with most people weighting transference more than dependence. (shrink)

One way of assessing the philosophical literature on causation is to consider views on the nature of the causal relation. Early theorists were 'monists', taking there to be one causal relation. More recent theorists, however, have turned to pluralism, which holds that the causal relation is only accurately captured by two (or more) relations. I argue that one way of being a pluralist – the way which takes there to be exactly two types of causation – is self defeating, if (...) it promises to handle intuitions about all causal situations. I illustrate the point via neuron diagrams. (shrink)

Ever since Wesley Salmon’s theory, the mechanical approach to causality has found an increasing number of supporters who have developed it in different directions. Mechanical views such as those advanced by Stuart Glennan, Jim Bogen and Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver have met with broad consensus in recent years. This paper analyses the main features of these mechanical positions and some of the major problems they still face, referring to the latest debate on mechanisms, causal explanation and the (...) relationship between mechanisms and counterfactuals. I shall claim that the mechanical approach can be recognised as having a fundamental explanatory power, whereas the counterfactual approach, recently developed mainly by Jim Woodward and essentially linked to the notion of intervention, has an important heuristic role. Claiming that mechanisms are by no means to be seen as parasitic on counterfactuals or less fundamental than them – as it has been recently suggested –, and that yet counterfactuals can play a part in a conceptual analysis of causation, I shall look for hints in support of the peaceful coexistence of the two. (shrink)

In many fields in the life sciences investigators refer to downward or top-down causal effects. Craver and Bechtel defended the view that such cases should be understood in terms of a constitution relation between levels in a mechanism and causation as solely an intra-level relation. Craver and Bechtel, however, provided insufficient specification as to when entities constitute a higher-level mechanism. In this paper I appeal to graph-theoretic representations of networks that are now widely employed in systems biology and neuroscience to (...) identify mechanisms with the modules that exhibit high clustering. As a result of the interconnections of nodes in these modules/mechanisms, they often exhibit complex dynamic behaviors that constrain how the individual components respond to external inputs, an important feature of cases viewed as involving top-down causation. (shrink)

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and the use of (...) explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes. (shrink)

This is the first instalment of a two-part paper on the counterfactual theory of causation. It is well known that this theory is ridden with counterexamples. Specifically, the following four features of the theory suffer from problems: it understands causation as a relation between events; counterfactual dependence is understood using a metric of similarity among possible worlds; it defines a non-discriminatory concept of causation; and it understands causation as transitive. A number of philosophers have recently proposed that causation is contrastive (...) because making contrasts explicit defuses counterexamples. A contrastive causal claim has the following form: C rather than C* causes E rather than E*, where C* and E* are alternative or contrast events. In this paper, I show that making contrasts explicit does indeed defuse some counterexamples. However, I also argue that the examples discussed in the literature all share a common feature, viz. that the original causal judgement is ambiguous in one way or another. Contrasting does not help with counterexamples that do not have this feature. Part II of this paper then takes up the hard cases. (shrink)

I propose an analysis of harm in terms of causation: harm is when a subject is caused to be worse off. The pay-off from this lies in the details. In particular, importing influential recent work from the causation literature yields a contrastive-counterfactual account. This enables us to incorporate harm's multiple senses into a unified scheme, and to provide that scheme with theoretical ballast. It also enables us to respond effectively to previous criticisms of counterfactual accounts, as well as to sharpen (...) criticisms of rival views. (shrink)