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Postscripts to `causation'

In David K. Lewis (ed.), Philosophical Papers Vol. II. Oxford University Press (1986)

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  1. Graded Causation and Moral Responsibility.Vera Hoffmann-Kolss & Matthias Rolffs - 2024 - Erkenntnis:1-19.
    Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A second question is whether (...)
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  • Causal Role of Phenomenal Consciousness.de Sá Pereira Roberto Horácio - 2022 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 26 (2): 299–312.
    My account of the causal role of consciousness in a physical world is modeled on Dretske’s celebrated explanation of the causal role of beliefs (something that Dretske himself never offered). First, behavior must be understood as a (broadly individuated) process that begins with some external stimulus causing some neurological event C, and ends with causing a bodily movement M (e.g., the Kennedy assassination is a process that begins with Oswald pulling the trigger at 12:30pm CST on November 23 in 1963 (...)
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  • The categories of causation.John Schwenkler - 2023 - Synthese 203 (1):1-35.
    This paper is an essay in what Austin (_Proc Aristotel Soc_ 57: 1–30, 1956–1957) called "linguistic phenomenology". Its focus is on showing how the grammatical features of ordinary causal verbs, as revealed in the kinds of linguistic constructions they can figure in, can shed light on the nature of the processes that these verbs are used to describe. Specifically, drawing on the comprehensive classification of English verbs founds in Levin (_English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation_, University of Chicago (...)
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  • Naïve Realism Face to Face with the Time Lag Argument.Fabio Bacchini - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (1):185-209.
    Naïve realists traditionally reject the time lag argument by replying that we can be in a direct visual perceptual relation to temporally distant facts or objects. I first show that this answer entails that some visual perceptions—i.e., those that are direct relation between us and an external material object that has visually changed, or ceased to exist, during the time lag—should also count as illusions and hallucinations, respectively. I then examine the possible attempts by the naïve realist to tell such (...)
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  • Why Your Causal Intuitions are Corrupt: Intermediate and Enabling Variables.Christopher Clarke - 2023 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):1065-1093.
    When evaluating theories of causation, intuitions should not play a decisive role, not even intuitions in flawlessly-designed thought experiments. Indeed, no coherent theory of causation can respect the typical person’s intuitions in redundancy (pre-emption) thought experiments, without disrespecting their intuitions in threat-and-saviour (switching/short-circuit) thought experiments. I provide a deductively sound argument for these claims. Amazingly, this argument assumes absolutely nothing about the nature of causation. I also provide a second argument, whose conclusion is even stronger: the typical person’s causal intuitions (...)
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  • Should we be skeptics or contextualists about counterfactual conditionals?Yael Loewenstein - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (10).
    Just as knowledge contextualism offers a way out of knowledge skepticism in the face of powerful skeptical arguments, counterfactual contextualism purports to answer the many compelling arguments for the skeptical thesis that most ordinary counterfactuals of the form ‘if A had happened, C would have happened’, are false. In this article I review a few of the arguments for counterfactual skepticism, before surveying the various types of contextualist responses. I then discuss some of the recent objections to counterfactual contextualism, with (...)
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  • Preemption and a counterfactual analysis of divine causation.Ryan Kulesa - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (2):125-134.
    This paper aims to outline a counterfactual theory of divine atemporal causation that avoids problems of preemption. As a result, the presentation of the analysis is structured such that my counterfactual analysis directly addresses preemption issues. If these problems can be avoided, the theist is well on her way to proposing a usable metaphysical concept of atemporal divine causation. In the first section, I outline Lewis’ original counterfactual analysis as well as how these cases of preemption cause problems for his (...)
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  • Being implicated: on the fittingness of guilt and indignation over outcomes.Gunnar Björnsson - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (11):1–18.
    When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions: The Asymmetry Thesis Rejected.David Palmer & Yuanyuan Liu - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1225-1237.
    There is an important contemporary debate in moral responsibility about whether the following asymmetry thesis is true: moral responsibility for actions does not require alternative possibilities but moral responsibility for omissions does. In this paper, we do two things. First, we consider and reject a recent argument against the asymmetry thesis, contending that the argument fails because it rests on a false view about the metaphysics of omissions. Second, we develop and defend a new argument against the asymmetry thesis, one (...)
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  • Causation in terms of production.Holger Andreas & Mario Günther - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1565-1591.
    In this paper, we analyse actual causation in terms of production. The latter concept is made precise by a strengthened Ramsey Test semantics of conditionals: \ iff, after suspending judgement about A and C, C is believed in the course of assuming A. This test allows us to verify or falsify that an event brings about another event. Complementing the concept of production by a weak condition of difference-making gives rise to a full-fledged analysis of causation.
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  • Making a Contribution and Making a Difference.Neil McDonnell - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (3):303-312.
    There are at least two different concepts that philosophers might target when analyzing causation: a pre-selective notion and a selective notion. This paper argues that these two distinct conceptions have been conflated to date, citing the puzzles of overdetermination, extensionality, and transitivity as evidence. The primary aim of the paper is to help reset the methodological scene concerning analyses of causation.
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  • 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.
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  • The Argument for Panpsychism from Experience of Causation.Hedda Hassel Mørch - 2019 - In William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge.
    In recent literature, panpsychism has been defended by appeal to two main arguments: first, an argument from philosophy of mind, according to which panpsychism is the only view which successfully integrates consciousness into the physical world (Strawson 2006; Chalmers 2013); second, an argument from categorical properties, according to which panpsychism offers the only positive account of the categorical or intrinsic nature of physical reality (Seager 2006; Adams 2007; Alter and Nagasawa 2012). Historically, however, panpsychism has also been defended by appeal (...)
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  • XIII—Hearing Properties, Effects or Parts?Casey O'callaghan - 2011 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (3pt3):375-405.
    Sounds are audible, and sound sources are audible. What is the audible relation between audible sounds and audible sources? Common talk and philosophy suggest three candidates. The first is that sounds audibly are properties instantiated by their sources. I argue that sounds are audible individuals and thus are not audibly instantiated by audible sources. The second is that sounds audibly are effects of their sources. I argue that auditory experience presents no compelling evidence that sounds audibly are causally related to (...)
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  • Moderate scientism in philosophy.Buckwalter Wesley & John Turri - 2018 - In Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels & Rene van Woudenberg (eds.), Scientism: Prospects and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Moderate scientism is the view that empirical science can help answer questions in nonscientific disciplines. In this paper, we evaluate moderate scientism in philosophy. We review several ways that science has contributed to research in epistemology, action theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. We also review several ways that science has contributed to our understanding of how philosophers make judgments and decisions. Based on this research, we conclude that the case for moderate philosophical scientism is strong: scientific (...)
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  • Explanation beyond causation? New directions in the philosophy of scientific explanation.Alexander Reutlinger - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (2):e12395.
    In this paper, I aim to provide access to the current debate on non-causal explanations in philosophy of science. I will first present examples of non-causal explanations in the sciences. Then, I will outline three alternative approaches to non-causal explanations – that is, causal reductionism, pluralism, and monism – and, corresponding to these three approaches, different strategies for distinguishing between causal and non-causal explanation. Finally, I will raise questions for future research on non-causal explanations.
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  • Causalidade.Eduardo Castro - 2014 - Compêndio Em Linha de Problemas de Filosofia Ananlítica.
    State of art paper on the topic causation, around the problem of the nature of causation. Central theories of contemporary philosophical literature are discussed and analysed, namely, regularity theories of Hume and Mackie, counterfactual theories of Lewis, probabilistic theories of Reichenbach, Lewis and Menzies and causal processes theories of Salmon and Dowe.
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  • 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, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Does the Counterfactual Theory of Explanation Apply to Non-Causal Explanations in Metaphysics?Alexander Reutlinger - 2016 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science:1-18.
    In the recent philosophy of explanation, a growing attention to and discussion of non-causal explanations has emerged, as there seem to be compelling examples of non-causal explanations in the sciences, in pure mathematics, and in metaphysics. I defend the claim that the counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE) captures the explanatory character of both non-causal scientific and metaphysical explanations. According to the CTE, scientific and metaphysical explanations are explanatory by virtue of revealing counterfactual dependencies between the explanandum and the explanans. I (...)
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  • Against the PCA-analysis.A. Byrne & N. Hall - 1998 - Analysis 58 (1):38-44.
    Jonardon Ganeri, Paul Noordhof, and Murali Ramachandran (1996) have proposed a new counterfactual analysis of causation. We argue that this – the PCA-analysis – is incorrect. In section 1, we explain David Lewis’s first counterfactual analysis of causation, and a problem that led him to propose a second. In section 2 we explain the PCA-analysis, advertised as an improvement on Lewis’s later account. We then give counterexamples to the necessity (section 3) and sufficiency (section 4) of the PCA-analysis.
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  • Imprecise Probability and Chance.Anthony F. Peressini - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (3):561-586.
    Understanding probabilities as something other than point values has often been motivated by the need to find more realistic models for degree of belief, and in particular the idea that degree of belief should have an objective basis in “statistical knowledge of the world.” I offer here another motivation growing out of efforts to understand how chance evolves as a function of time. If the world is “chancy” in that there are non-trivial, objective, physical probabilities at the macro-level, then the (...)
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  • Events and their counterparts.Neil McDonnell - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1291-1308.
    This paper argues that a counterpart-theoretic treatment of events, combined with a counterfactual theory of causation, can help resolve three puzzles from the causation literature. First, CCT traces the apparent contextual shifts in our causal attributions to shifts in the counterpart relation which obtains in those contexts. Second, being sensitive to shifts in the counterpart relation can help diagnose what goes wrong in certain prominent examples where the transitivity of causation appears to fail. Third, CCT can help us resurrect the (...)
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  • Transitivity and Proportionality in Causation.Neil McDonnell - 2018 - Synthese 195 (3):1211-1229.
    It is commonly assumed that causation is transitive and in this paper I aim to reconcile this widely-held assumption with apparent evidence to the contrary. I will discuss a familiar approach to certain well-known counterexamples, before introducing a more resistant sort of case of my own. I will then offer a novel solution, based on Yablo’s proportionality principle, that succeeds in even these more resistant cases. There is a catch, however. Either proportionality is a constraint on which causal claims are (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Foundations of Epistemic Decision Theory.Jason Konek & Ben Levinstein - 2019 - Mind 128 (509):69-107.
    According to accuracy-first epistemology, accuracy is the fundamental epistemic good. Epistemic norms — Probabilism, Conditionalization, the Principal Principle, etc. — have their binding force in virtue of helping to secure this good. To make this idea precise, accuracy-firsters invoke Epistemic Decision Theory (EpDT) to determine which epistemic policies are the best means toward the end of accuracy. Hilary Greaves and others have recently challenged the tenability of this programme. Their arguments purport to show that EpDT encourages obviously epistemically irrational behavior. (...)
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  • A simple argument for downward causation.Thomas Kroedel - 2015 - Synthese 192 (3):841-858.
    Instances of many supervenient properties have physical effects. In particular, instances of mental properties have physical effects if non-reductive physicalism is true. This follows by a straightforward argument that assumes a counterfactual criterion for causation. The paper presents that argument and discusses several issues that arise from it. In particular, the paper addresses the worry that the argument shows too many supervenient property-instances to have physical effects. The argument is also compared to a similar argument that has been suggested by (...)
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  • The Role Functionalist Theory of Absences.Justin Tiehen - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (3):505-519.
    Functionalist theories have been proposed for just about everything: mental states, dispositions, moral properties, truth, causation, and much else. The time has come for a functionalist theory of nothing. Or, more accurately, a role functionalist theory of those absences that are causes and effects.
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  • Trumping and contrastive causation.Christopher Hitchcock - 2011 - Synthese 181 (2):227 - 240.
    Jonathan Schaffer introduced a new type of causal structure called 'trumping'. According to Schaffer, trumping is a species of causal preemption. Both Schaffer and I have argued that causation has a contrastive structure. In this paper, I analyze the structure of trumping cases from the perspective of contrastive causation, and argue that the case is much more complex than it first appears. Nonetheless, there is little reason to regard trumping as a species of causal preemption.
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  • Introduction to Special Issue on 'Actual Causation'.Michael Baumgartner & Luke Glynn - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (1):1-8.
    An actual cause of some token effect is itself a token event that helped to bring about that effect. The notion of an actual cause is different from that of a potential cause – for example a pre-empted backup – which had the capacity to bring about the effect, but which wasn't in fact operative on the occasion in question. Sometimes actual causes are also distinguished from mere background conditions: as when we judge that the struck match was a cause (...)
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  • Relativity, Quantum Entanglement, Counterfactuals, and Causation.Luke Fenton-Glynn & Thomas Kroedel - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (1):45-67.
    We investigate whether standard counterfactual analyses of causation imply that the outcomes of space-like separated measurements on entangled particles are causally related. Although it has sometimes been claimed that standard CACs imply such a causal relation, we argue that a careful examination of David Lewis’s influential counterfactual semantics casts doubt on this. We discuss ways in which Lewis’s semantics and standard CACs might be extended to the case of space-like correlations.
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  • Learning Conditional Information.Igor Douven - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (3):239-263.
    Some of the information we receive comes to us in an explicitly conditional form. It is an open question how to model the accommodation of such information in a Bayesian framework. This paper presents data suggesting that there may be no strictly Bayesian account of updating on conditionals. Specifically, the data seem to indicate that such updating at least sometimes proceeds on the basis of explanatory considerations, which famously have no home in standard Bayesian epistemology. The paper also proposes a (...)
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  • Causal foundationalism, physical causation, and difference-making.Luke Glynn - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):1017-1037.
    An influential tradition in the philosophy of causation has it that all token causal facts are, or are reducible to, facts about difference-making. Challenges to this tradition have typically focused on pre-emption cases, in which a cause apparently fails to make a difference to its effect. However, a novel challenge to the difference-making approach has recently been issued by Alyssa Ney. Ney defends causal foundationalism, which she characterizes as the thesis that facts about difference-making depend upon facts about physical causation. (...)
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  • Explanation in Metaphysics?Johannes Persson - 2011 - Metaphysica 12 (2):165-181.
    Arguments from explanation, i.e. arguments in which the explanatory value of a hypothesis or premise is appealed to, are common in science, and explanatory considerations are becoming more popular in metaphysics. The paper begins by arguing that explanatory arguments in science—even when these are metaphysical explanations— may fail to be explanatory in metaphysics; there is a distinction to be drawn between metaphysical explanation and explanation in metaphysics. This makes it potentially problematic to deploy arguments from explanation in, for instance, metaphysics (...)
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  • Lewis Causation is a Special Case of Spohn Causation.Franz Huber - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (1):207-210.
    This paper shows that causation in the sense of Lewis is a special case of causation in the sense of Spohn.
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  • Tropes for Causation.M. J. Garcia-Encinas - 2009 - Metaphysica 10 (2):157-174.
    Tropes, as distinguished from other possible kinds of entities such as universals, states of affairs, events and bare particulars, are best-suited to play the role of causal relata.
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  • Can determinable properties earn their keep?Robert Schroer - 2011 - Synthese 183 (2):229-247.
    Sydney Shoemaker's "Subset Account" offers a new take on determinable properties and the realization relation as well as a defense of non-reductive physicalism from the problem of mental causation. At the heart of this account are the claims that (1) mental properties are determinable properties and (2) the causal powers that individuate a determinable property are a proper subset of the causal powers that individuate the determinates of that property. The second claim, however, has led to the accusation that the (...)
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  • Joint responsibility without individual control: Applying the Explanation Hypothesis.Gunnar Björnsson - 2011 - In Nicole A. Vincent, Ibo van de Poel & Jeroen van den Hoven (eds.), Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism. Springer.
    This paper introduces a new family of cases where agents are jointly morally responsible for outcomes over which they have no individual control, a family that resists standard ways of understanding outcome responsibility. First, the agents in these cases do not individually facilitate the outcomes and would not seem individually responsible for them if the other agents were replaced by non-agential causes. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility as overlapping individual responsibility; the responsibility in question is essentially joint. Second, (...)
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  • Cause and Norm.Christopher Hitchcock & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy 106 (11):587-612.
    Much of the philosophical literature on causation has focused on the concept of actual causation, sometimes called token causation. In particular, it is this notion of actual causation that many philosophical theories of causation have attempted to capture.2 In this paper, we address the question: what purpose does this concept serve? As we shall see in the next section, one does not need this concept for purposes of prediction or rational deliberation. What then could the purpose be? We will argue (...)
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  • Mackie Remixed.Michael Strevens - 2007 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. Bradford. pp. 4--93.
    Cases of overdetermination or preemption continue to play an important role in the debate about the proper interpretation of causal claims of the form "C was a cause of E". I argue that the best treatment of preemption cases is given by Mackie's venerable INUS account of causal claims. The Mackie account suffers, however, from problems of its own. Inspired by its ability to handle preemption, I propose a dramatic revision to the Mackie account – one that Mackie himself would (...)
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  • (1 other version)Counterfactuals, causal independence and conceptual circularity.Jonathan Schaffer - 2004 - Analysis 64 (4):299–308.
    David Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals remains the standard view. Yet counter-examples have emerged, which suggest a need to invoke causal independence, and thus threaten conceptual circularity. I will review some of these counter-examples (§§1–2), illustrate how causal independence proves useful (§3), and suggest that any resulting circularity is unproblematic (§4).
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  • Can structuralism solve the ‘access’ problem?Fraser MacBride - 2004 - Analysis 64 (4):309–317.
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  • Common Causes and the Direction of Causation.Brad Weslake - 2005 - Minds and Machines 16 (3):239-257.
    Is the common cause principle merely one of a set of useful heuristics for discovering causal relations, or is it rather a piece of heavy duty metaphysics, capable of grounding the direction of causation itself? Since the principle was introduced in Reichenbach’s groundbreaking work The Direction of Time (1956), there have been a series of attempts to pursue the latter program—to take the probabilistic relationships constitutive of the principle of the common cause and use them to ground the direction of (...)
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  • Do causes raise the chances of effects?Helen Beebee - 1998 - Analysis 58 (3):182-190.
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  • (1 other version)Dretske on the metaphysics of freedom.Hugh J. McCann - 1993 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (4):619-630.
    Contrary to Dretske's view, treating actions as causal complexes wherein inner states produce external results does not permit us to claim that even if their components are caused, the actions are not. What triggers the initial element of a causal sequence causes the sequence itself, so whatever might cause the relevant inner state would also cause the action. Dretske's claim that the failure of my agency to extend to the results of actions I induce in others is owing to the (...)
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  • Mental causation as multiple causation.Thomas Kroedel - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 139 (1):125-143.
    The paper argues that mental causation can be explained from the sufficiency of counterfactual dependence for causation together with relatively weak assumptions about the metaphysics of mind. If a physical event counterfactually depends on an earlier physical event, it also counterfactually depends on, and hence is caused by, a mental event that correlates with (or supervenes on) this earlier physical event, provided that this correlation (or supervenience) is sufficiently modally robust. This account of mental causation is consistent with the overdetermination (...)
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  • Causal Proportionality as an Ontic and Epistemic Concept.Jens Harbecke - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2291-2313.
    This paper is concerned with the content of the causal proportionality constraint. It investigates two general versions of the constraint, namely “horizontal” and “vertical” proportionality. Moreover, it discusses whether proportionality is considered an ontic or an epistemic, i.e. explanatory, constraint on causation in the context of some of the most prominent theories of causation. The following main claims are defended: (1) The horizontal (HP) and the vertical version (VP) of the proportionality constraint are logically independent. (2) HP is implied by (...)
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  • How to construct Remainder Sets for Paraconsistent Revisions: Preliminary Report.Rafael Testa, Eduardo Fermé, Marco Garapa & Maurício Reis - 2018 - 17th INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON NON-MONOTONIC REASONING.
    Revision operation is the consistent expansion of a theory by a new belief-representing sentence. We consider that in a paraconsistent setting this desideratum can be accomplished in at least three distinct ways: the output of a revision operation should be either non-trivial or non-contradictory (in general or relative to the new belief). In this paper those distinctions will be explored in the constructive level by showing how the remainder sets could be refined, capturing the key concepts of paraconsistency in a (...)
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  • Physicalism without supervenience.Lei Zhong - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (5):1529-1544.
    It is widely accepted that supervenience is a minimal commitment of physicalism. In this article, however, I aim to argue that physicalism should be exempted from the supervenience requirement. My arguments rely on a parallel between ontological dependence and causal dependence. Since causal dependence does not require causal determination, ontological dependence should not require ontological determination either. Moreover, my approach has a significant theoretical advantage: if physicalism is not committed to supervenience, then the metaphysical possibility of zombies—which is still wide (...)
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  • Functional Properties are Epiphenomenal.Matthew Rellihan - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (3):1171-1195.
    I argue for the epiphenomenality of functional properties by means of thought experiments and general principles. General principles suggest that an object’s causal powers nomologically supervene on its intrinsic properties and that its functional role does not. This implies that it is possible for an object to lose its functional role without undergoing any change to its intrinsic properties or causal powers. Nor is it difficult to conceive of such scenarios. Various thought experiments are introduced for just this purpose. But (...)
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  • Grounding Entails Counterpossible Non‐Triviality.Alastair Wilson - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3):716-728.
    This paper outlines a non-reductive counterfactual account of grounding along interventionist lines, and uses the account to argue that taking grounding seriously requires ascribing non-trivial truth-conditions to a range of counterpossible counterfactuals. This result allows for a diagnosis of a route to scepticism about grounding, as deriving at least in part from scepticism about non-trivial counterpossible truth and falsity.
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  • Causal Overdetermination and Modal Compatibilism.Kevin W. Sharpe - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (4):1111-1131.
    Compatibilists respond to the problem of causal exclusion for nonreductive physicalism by rejecting the exclusionist’s ban on overdetermination. By the compatibilist’s lights there are two forms of overdetermination, one that’s problematic and another that is entirely benign. Furthermore, multiple causation by “tightly related” causes requires only the benign form of overdetermination. Call this the tight relation strategy for avoiding problematic forms of overdetermination. To justify the tight relation strategy, modal compatibilists appeal to a widely accepted counterfactual test. The argument of (...)
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