This paper argues against evidential decision-theory, by showing that the newest responses to its biggest current problem – the medical Newcomb problems – don’t work. The latest approach is described, and the arguments of two main proponents of it – Huw Price and CR Hitchcock – clearly distinguished and examined. It is argued that since neither new defence is successful, causation remains essential to understanding means-end agency.

In his influential book 'Making Things Happen' and in other places, Jim Woodward has noted some affinities between his own account of causation and that of Menzies and Price, but argued that the latter view is implausibly ‘subjective’. In this piece I discuss Woodward’s criticisms. I argue that the Menzies and Price view is not as different from Woodward’s own account as he believes, and that in so far as it is different, it has some advantages whose importance Woodward misses; (...) but also that the Menzies and Price view lacks some elements whose importance Woodward rightly stresses. When properly characterized, however, the ‘subjectivity’ survives unscathed. (shrink)

Panpsychism is the view that every concrete and unified thing has some form of phenomenal consciousness or experience. It is an age-old doctrine, which, to the surprise of many, has recently taken on new life. In philosophy of mind, it has been put forth as a simple and radical solution to the mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996, 2003;Strawson 2006; Nagel 1979, 2012). In metaphysics and philosophy of science, it has been put forth as a solution to the problem of accounting for (...) the intrinsic nature of the physical itself (Strawson 2006, Seager 2006). In this thesis, I show that panpsychism can also be defended on the basis of an argument from our (arguable) acquaintance with the nature of causation in agency. This argument has made frequent appearances throughout the history of philosophy, with philosophers such as Leibniz, Schopenhauer and James, and I construct and defend an updated version of it. Furthermore, I offer a solution to the combination problem: how can complex (human and animal-type) consciousness result from simple (fundamental particle-type) consciousness? This is generally regarded as the most serious problem facing contemporary panpsychism. I propose that mental combination can be construed as kind causal process culminating in a fusion, and show how this avoids the main difficulties with accounting for mental combination. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine two important issues concerning the agency theory of causality: the charge of anthropomorphism and the relation of simultaneous causation. After a brief outline of the agency theory, sections 2–4 contain the refutation of the three main forms in which the charge of anthropomorphism is to be found in the literature. It will appear that it is necessary to distinguish between the subjective and the objective aspect of the concept of causation. This will (...) lead, in section 5, to contrast two kinds of anthropomorphism, one which has been rightly rejected by modern science and one which is fully compatible with the objective reality of the causal processes. Finally, section 6 will apply the preceding considerations to simultaneous causation. On the one hand, in a basic sense, there can be no simultaneous causal relations. On the other hand, simultaneous causation arises when we consider the natural change by abstracting from the agent and from her/his projects of interven.. (shrink)

Andy Egan has presented a dilemma for decision theory. As is well known, Newcomb cases appear to undermine the case for evidential decision theory. However, Egan has come up with a new scenario which poses difficulties for causal decision theory. I offer a simple solution to this dilemma in terms of a modified EDT. I propose an epistemological test: take some feature which is relevant to your evaluation of the scenarios under consideration, evidentially correlated with the actions under consideration albeit, (...) causally independent of them. Hold this feature fixed as a hypothesis. The test shows that, in Newcomb cases, EDT would mislead the agent. Where the test shows EDT to be misleading, I propose to use fictive conditional credences in the EDT-formula under the constraint that they are set to equal values. I then discuss Huw Price’s defence of EDT as an alternative to my diagnosis. I argue that my solution also applies if one accepts the main premisses of Price’s argument. I close with applying my solution to Nozick’s original Newcomb problem. (shrink)

The paper argues that on three out of eight possible hypotheses about the EPR experiment we can construct novel and realistic decision problems on which (a) Causal Decision Theory and Evidential Decision Theory conflict (b) Causal Decision Theory and the EPR statistics conflict. We infer that anyone who fully accepts any of these three hypotheses has strong reasons to reject Causal Decision Theory. Finally, we extend the original construction to show that anyone who gives any of the three hypotheses any (...) non-zero credence has strong reasons to reject Causal Decision Theory. However, we concede that no version of the Many Worlds Interpretation (Vaidman, in Zalta, E.N. (ed.), Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 2014) gives rise to the conflicts that we point out. (shrink)

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)

In this thesis, I give a metascientific account of causality in medicine. I begin with two historical cases of causal discovery. These are the discovery of the causation of Burkitt’s lymphoma by the Epstein-Barr virus, and of the various viral causes suggested for cervical cancer. These historical cases then support a philosophical discussion of causality in medicine. This begins with an introduction to the Russo- Williamson thesis (RWT), and discussion of a range of counter-arguments against it. Despite these, I argue (...) that the RWT is historically workable, given a small number of modifications. I then expand Russo and Williamson’s account. I first develop their suggestion that causal relationships in medicine require some kind of evidence of mechanism. I begin with a number of accounts of mechanisms and produce a range of consensus features of them. I then develop this consensus position by reference to the two historical case studies with an eye to their operational competence. In particular, I suggest that it is mechanistic models and their representations which we are concerned with in medicine, rather than the mechanism as it exists in the world. -/- I then employ these mechanistic models to give an account of the sorts of evidence used in formulating and evaluating causal claims. Again, I use the two human viral oncogenesis cases to give this account. I characterise and distinguish evidence of mechanism from evidence of difference-making, and relate this to mechanistic models. I then suggest the relationship between types of evidence presents us with a means of tackling the reference-class problem. This sets the scene for the final chapter. Here, I suggest the manner in which these two different classes of evidence become integrated is also reflected in the way that developing research programmes change as their associated causal claims develop. (shrink)

I apply some of the lessons from quantum theory, in particular from Bell’s theorem, to a debate on the foundations of decision theory and causation. By tracing a formal analogy between the basic assumptions of causal decision theory (CDT)—which was developed partly in response to Newcomb’s problem— and those of a local hidden variable theory in the context of quantum mechanics, I show that an agent who acts according to CDT and gives any nonzero credence to some possible causal interpretations (...) underlying quantum phenomena should bet against quantum mechanics in some feasible game scenarios involving entangled systems, no matter what evidence they acquire. As a consequence, either the most accepted version of decision theory is wrong, or it provides a practical distinction, in terms of the prescribed behaviour of rational agents, between some metaphysical hypotheses regarding the causal structure underlying quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Abstract In an engaging and ingenious paper, Irvine (1993) purports to show how the resolution of Braess? paradox can be applied to Newcomb's problem. To accomplish this end, Irvine forges three links. First, he couples Braess? paradox to the Cohen?Kelly queuing paradox. Second, he couples the Cohen?Kelly queuing paradox to the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). Third, in accord with received literature, he couples the PD to Newcomb's problem itself. Claiming that the linked models are ?structurally identical?, he argues that Braess solves (...) Newcomb's problem. This paper shows that Irvine's linkage depends on structural similarities?rather than identities?between and among the models. The elucidation of functional disanalogies illuminates structural dissimilarities which sever that linkage. I claim that the Cohen?Kelly queuing paradox cloaks a fine structure that decouples it from both Braess? paradox and the PD (Marinoff, 1996a). I further assert that the putative reduction of the PD to a Newcomb problem (e.g. Brams, 1975; Lewis, 1979) is seriously flawed. It follows that Braess? paradox does not solve Newcomb's problem via the foregoing and herein sundered chain. I conclude by substantiating a stronger claim, namely that Braess'paradox cannot solve Newcomb's problem at all. (shrink)

The paper criticizes the attempt to account for the direction of causation in terms of objective statistical asymmetries, such as those of the fork asymmetry. Following Ramsey, I argue that the most plausible way to account for causal asymmetry is to regard it as "put in by hand", that is as a feature that agents project onto the world. Its temporal orientation stems from that of ourselves as agents. The crucial statistical asymmetry is an anthropocentric one, namely that we take (...) our actions to be statistically independent of everything except (what we come to call) their effects. I argue that this account explains the intuitive plausibility of Reichenbach's principle of the common cause. (shrink)

Manipulablity theories of causation, according to which causes are to be regarded as handles or devices for manipulating effects, have considerable intuitive appeal and are popular among social scientists and statisticians. This article surveys several prominent versions of such theories advocated by philosophers, and the many difficulties they face. Philosophical statements of the manipulationist approach are generally reductionist in aspiration and assign a central role to human action. These contrast with recent discussions employing a broadly manipulationist framework for understanding causation, (...) such as those due to the computer scientist Judea Pearl and others, which are non-reductionist and rely instead on the notion of an intervention. This is simply an appropriately exogenous causal process; it has no essential connection with human action. This interventionist framework manages to avoid at least some of these difficulties faced by traditional philosophical versions of the manipulability theory and helps to clarify the content of causal claims. (shrink)

Questions about the metaphysics of causation may be usefully divided as follows. First, there are questions about the nature of the causal relata, including (1.1) whether they are in spacetime immanence), (1.2) how fine grained they are individuation), and (1.3) how many there are adicity). Second, there are questions about the metaphysics of the causal relation, including (2.1) what is the difference between causally related and causally unrelated sequences connection), (2.2) what is the difference between sequences related as cause to (...) effect, and those related as effect to cause or as joint effects of a common cause direction), and (2.3) what is the difference between sequences involving the cause, and those involving mere conditions selection). (shrink)

Pragmatists recommend that in approaching a problematic concept in philosophy, we should begin by examining the role it plays in the practical, cognitive and linguistic lives of the creatures who use it. This paper stems from an interest in pragmatic accounts, in this sense, of the various modal notions we encounter in science. I propose that pragmatists about these notions should avail themselves of the vocabulary of theoretical models. This vocabulary brings to the foreground the issues of function, use and (...) role in practice, on which pragmatists want to focus; while downplaying the naive representationalism that pragmatists see as an impediment to good philosophy. I show how this framework may be used to delineate a kind of pragmatic perspectivalism about probability, and argue that the same template offers a promising way to make sense of the link between causation and manipulability. (shrink)

This essay explains what the Causal Markov Condition says and defends the condition from the many criticisms that have been launched against it. Although we are skeptical about some of the applications of the Causal Markov Condition, we argue that it is implicit in the view that causes can be used to manipulate their effects and that it cannot be surrendered without surrendering this view of causation.

The paper begins with a discussion of Russell's view that the notion of cause is unnecessary for science and can therefore be eliminated. It is argued that this is true for theoretical physics but untrue for medicine, where the notion of cause plays a central role. Medical theories are closely connected with practical action (attempts to cure and prevent disease), whereas theoretical physics is more remote from applications. This suggests the view that causal laws are appropriate in a context where (...) there is a close connection to action. This leads to a development of an action-related theory of causality which is similar to the agency theory of Menzies and Price, but differs from it in a number of respects, one of which is the following. Menzies and Price connect ‘A causes B’ with an action to produce B by instantiating A, but, particularly in the case of medicine, the law can also be linked to the action of trying to avoid B by ensuring that A is not instantiated. The action-related theory has in common with the agency theory of Menzies and Price the ability to explain causal asymmetry in a simple fashion, but the introduction of avoidance actions together with some ideas taken from Russell enable some of the objections to agency accounts of causality to be met. Introduction Russell on causality Preliminary exposition of the action-related theory Differences between the action-related theory and the agency theory of Menzies and Price Explanation of causal asymmetry Objections to the action-related theory Extension of the theory to the indeterminate case. (shrink)

I argue that Lewis's counterfactual theory of causation, given his treatment of counterfactuals in terms of world-comparative similarity faces insuperable problems in the form of the problem of effects and the problem of epiphenomena.

The physical and/or intrinsic connection approach to causation has become prominent in the recent literature, with Salmon, Dowe, Menzies, and Armstrong among its leading proponents. I show that there is a type of causation, causation by disconnection, with no physical or intrinsic connection between cause and effect. Only Hume-style conditions approaches and hybrid conditions-connections approaches appear to be able to handle causation by disconnection. Some Hume-style, extrinsic, absence-relating, necessary and/or sufficient condition component of the causal relation proves to be needed.

We argue that the health sciences make causal claims on the basis of evidence both of physical mechanisms, and of probabilistic dependencies. Consequently, an analysis of causality solely in terms of physical mechanisms or solely in terms of probabilistic relationships, does not do justice to the causal claims of these sciences. Yet there seems to be a single relation of cause in these sciences - pluralism about causality will not do either. Instead, we maintain, the health sciences require a theory (...) of causality that unifies its mechanistic and probabilistic aspects. We argue that the epistemic theory of causality provides the required unification. (shrink)

I present a game-theoretic way to understand the situation describing Newcomb’s Problem (NP) which helps to explain the intuition of both one-boxers and two-boxers. David Lewis has shown that the NP may be modelled as a Prisoners Dilemma game (PD) in which ‘cooperating’ corresponds to ‘taking one box’. Adopting relevant results from game theory, this means that one should take just one box if the NP is repeated an indefinite number of times, but both boxes if it is a one-shot (...) game. Causal decision theorists thus give the right answer for the one-shot situation, whereas the one-boxers’ solution applies to the indefinitely iterated case. Because Nozick’s set-up of the NP is ambiguous between a one-shot and a repeated game, both of these solutions may appear plausible – depending on whether one conceives of the situation as one-off or repeated. If the players’ aim is to maximize their payoffs, the symmetric structure of the PD implies that the two players will behave alike both when the game is one-shot and when it is played repeatedly. Therefore neither the observed outcome of both players selecting the same strategy (in the PD) nor, correspondingly, the predictor’s accurate prediction of this outcome (in the NP) is at all surprising. There is no need for a supernatural predictor to explain the NP phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper we defend the view that the ordinary notions of cause and effect have a direct and essential connection with our ability to intervene in the world as agents.1 This is a well known but rather unpopular philosophical approach to causation, often called the manipulability theory. In the interests of brevity and accuracy, we prefer to call it the agency theory.2 Thus the central thesis of an agency account of causation is something like this: an event A is (...) a cause of a distinct event B just in case bringing about the occurrence of A would be an effective means by which a free agent could bring about the occurrence of B. In our view the unpopularity of the agency approach to causation may be traced to two factors. The first is a failure to appreciate certain distinctive advantages that this approach has over its various rivals. We have drawn attention to some of these advantages elsewhere, and we summarize below. However, the second and more important factor is the influence of a number of stock objections, objections that seem to have persuaded many philosophers that agency accounts face insuperable obstacles. In this paper we want to show that these objections have been vastly overrated. There are four main objections. (shrink)

Ismael traces our sense that the past is fixed and the future open to what she calls ‘the practical arrow’ – ‘the sense that we can affect the future but not the past.’ In this piece I draw a sharper distinction than Ismael herself does between agents and mere observers, even self-referential observers; and I use it to argue that Ismael’s explanation of the practical arrow is incomplete. To explain our inability to affect the past we need to appeal to (...) our own temporal orientation as agents, and not merely to the ingredients from physics that allow us to predict the consequences of our actions. [This piece is a commentary on J Ismael’s ‘The Open Universe: Totality, Self-Reference and Time’, to appear in the Australasian Philosophical Review.]. (shrink)

Are the distinctions between past, present and future, and the apparent ‘passage’ of time, features of the world in itself, or manifestations of the human perspective? Questions of this kind have been at the heart of metaphysics of time since antiquity. The latter view has much in common with pragmatism, though few in these debates are aware of that connection, and few of the view’s proponents think of themselves as pragmatists. For their part, pragmatists are often unaware of this congenial (...) application of their methodology; some associate pragmatism with the other side of the old debate in the metaphysics of time. In my view, this link between time and pragmatism only scratches the surface of the deep two-way dependencies between these two topics. The human temporal perspective turns out to be deeply implicated not merely in our temporal notions themselves, but in many other conceptual categories – arguably, in fact, in all of them, and in the nature of language and thought. In this way, reflection on our own temporal character vindicates James’ famous slogan for global pragmatism: ‘The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.’. (shrink)

– We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural (...) way for them to receive imprecise probabilities. The mathematics of non-measurable sets is arcane, but its epistemological import is far-reaching; even apparently mundane propositions are liable to be affected by non-measurability. The phenomenon of non-measurability dramatically reshapes the dialectic between critics and proponents of imprecise credence. Non-measurability offers natural rejoinders to prominent critics of imprecise credence. Non-measurability even reverses some of the critics’ arguments—by the very lights that have been used to argue against imprecise credences, imprecise credences are better than precise credences. (shrink)

We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic (DT) statistical causality, which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as “assisted decision-making” and aims to understand when, and how, I can make use of external data, typically observational, to help me solve a decision problem by taking advantage of assumed relationships between the data and my problem. The relationships embodied in any representation of a causal problem require deeper justification, (...) which is necessarily context-dependent. Here we clarify the considerations needed to support applications of the DT methodology. Exchangeability considerations are used to structure the required relationships, and a distinction drawn between intention to treat and intervention to treat forms the basis for the enabling condition of “ignorability.” We also show how the DT perspective unifies and sheds light on other popular formalisations of statistical causality, including potential responses and directed acyclic graphs. (shrink)

Um dos grandes desafios da era da informação consiste em filtrar informações claras, rigorosas e atualizadas sobre tópicos importantes. O mesmo vale para a filosofia. Como encontrar conteúdo filosófico confiável em meio a milhares de artigos publicados diariamente na internet? Para ir ainda mais longe, como encontrar uma introdução a algum tópico com uma lista de referências bibliográficas atualizadas e que seja organizada por um especialista da área? Já que você começou a ler este livro, é provável que tenha ouvido (...) falar em algum momento da Enciclopédia Stanford de Filosofia, disponível gratuitamente na internet desde 1995. A página da Stanford faz exatamente isso. Ela cobre inúmeros verbetes sobre quase tudo em filosofia, oferecendo informação confiável sobre temas como feminismo, filosofia na América Latina, zumbis, metafísica e milhares de outros tópicos. A sugestão típica aos profissionais da filosofia que têm interesse em começar a estudar algum tópico, mas não sabem sequer por onde começar, é procurar pelo verbete relevante da Stanford. Infelizmente, o grande empecilho da página para o nosso contexto é que todos os verbetes estão disponíveis apenas em inglês, algo que cria um obstáculo a inúmeros estudantes e interessados que não dominam a língua. Neste sentido, acreditamos que esta publicação preencha um hiato importante na filosofia brasileira. Embora a filosofia no Brasil tenha se profissionalizado e expandido ao longo dos anos, há ainda lacunas em diversas áreas, e os verbetes foram aqui selecionados cuidadosamente no intuito de preencher ao menos algumas dessas lacunas. Este livro apresenta quatro verbetes cruciais para a filosofia, aqui divididos em quatro capítulos: (1) condições necessárias e suficientes, (2) referência (3) causação e (4) consciência. (shrink)

The dispute in philosophical decision theory between causalists and evidentialists remains unsettled. Many are attracted to the causal view’s endorsement of a species of dominance reasoning, and to the intuitive verdicts it gets on a range of cases with the structure of the infamous Newcomb’s Problem. But it also faces a rising wave of purported counterexamples and theoretical challenges. In this paper I will describe a novel decision theory which saves what is appealing about the causal view while avoiding its (...) most worrying objections, and which promises to generalize to solve a set of related problems in other normative domains. (shrink)

Causation has always been a philosophically controversial subject matter. While David Hume’s empiricist account of causation has been the dominant influence in analytic philosophy and science during modern times, a minority view has instead connected causation essentially to agency and manipulation. A related approach has for the first time gained widespread popularity in recent years, due to new powerful theories of causal inference in science that are based in a technical notion of intervention, and James Woodward’s closely connected interventionist theory (...) of causation in philosophy. This monograph assesses five manipulationist or interventionist theories of causation, viewed as theories that purport to tell us what causation is by providing us with the meaning of causal claims. It is shown that they cannot do this, as the conditions on causation that they impose are too weak, mainly due to ineliminable circularities in their definitions of causal terms. It is then argued that a subset of Woodward’s theory can nevertheless contribute crucially to an explanation of the unique role that manipulation has in our acquisition of causal knowledge. This explanation differs from the common regularist explanation of the epistemic utility of manipulation and experiment, and it is taken to confirm several important manipulationist intuitions. However, the success of the explanation depends on (this subset of) interventionism not itself being understood as a theory of causation, but as a theory of intervention. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente artículo es proponer una nueva interpretación del concepto de información en contextos comunicacionales: una interpretación físicocausal. Apelando a las teorías manipulabilistas de la causación, principalmente en su versión intervencionista, buscaremos mostrar que la información comunicacional es una propiedad física que podemos manipular para generar situaciones comunicacionales. Este enfoque nos permite entender la naturaleza de la comunicación como estructura causal, puesta de manifiesto mediante criterios manipulabilistas. Confiamos en que el enfoque propuesto logra superar ciertas dificultades de las (...) interpretaciones de la información actualmente vigentes en la literatura. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSellars’s relationship with Hegel is complex and itself ‘dialectical‘ in interesting ways. Sellars follows Hegel in recognizing that the normativity essential to intentionality and conceptu...

This paper argues that there are notable similarities between Collingwood’s method of investigating absolute presuppositions and contemporary strands of pragmatism, focusing on two areas - the critique of realism and causation. It is first argued that there are methodological similarities between Collingwood’s argument against realism and his Kantian-inspired critique of metaphysics, and Putnam’s critique of externalism. Regarding causation, it is argued that Collingwood’s view and Price’s pragmatist approach have a common method – investigating causation in the context of specific human (...) practices. Both authors place causation in the framework of scientific inquiry as opposed to making it the subject of the inquiry itself. Thus, Collingwood’s work proves to be in line with current metaphilosophical debates, particularly in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Do time travellers retain their normal freedom and abilities when they travel back in time? Lewis, Horwich and Sider argue that they do. Time-travelling Tim can kill his young grandfather, his younger self, or whomever else he pleases—and so, it seems can reasonably deliberate about whether to do these things. He might not succeed. But he is still just as free as a non-time traveller. I’ll disagree. The freedom of time travellers is limited by a rational constraint. Tim can’t reasonably (...) deliberate on killing his grandfather, certain that he’ll fail. If Tim follows his evidence, and appropriately self-predicts, he will be certain he won’t kill his grandfather. So if Tim is both evidentially and deliberatively rational, he can’t deliberate on killing his grandfather. This result has consequences. Firstly, it shows how evidential limits in the actual world contribute to our conception of the future as open. Secondly, it undercuts arguments against the possibility of time travel. Thirdly, it affects how we evaluate counterfactuals in time travel worlds, as well as our own. I’ll use the constraint to motivate an evidential and temporally neutral method of evaluating counterfactuals that holds fixed what a relevant deliberating agent has evidence of, independently of her decision. Using this method, an agent’s local abilities may be affected by what happens globally at other times, including the future. (shrink)

Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? 'No', say some authors, for 'Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction' (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce's rejection of DCOP rests (...) on terminological choices about terms such as 'intention', 'prediction', and 'belief'. Once these choices are in view, they reveal underlying agreement between Joyce and the DCOP-favouring tradition that descends from Ramsey. Joyce's Evidential Autonomy Thesis (EAT) is effectively DCOP, in different terminological clothing. Both principles rest on the so-called 'transparency' of first-person present-tensed reflection on one's own mental states. (shrink)

Price’s :157–176, 1991; 44:187–203, 1993 ; 2007, 2017) agency theory of causation has takes itself to provide a use-theory of our causal discourse. The theory’s aim is to describe the rules implicit to our linguistic behaviour when we describe things in causal terms. According to this theory, the rules governing our use of the concept of causation are based on our perspective as agents and our associated experiences of manipulating events. I argue that the observed relation between agency and our (...) concept of causation cannot exhaustively describe the conditions under which we enter into causal discourse. In particular, I demonstrate that the agency theory faces familiar problems with accounting for causal ascriptions to token cases. (shrink)

This article examines how specific realist and projectivist versions of manipulability theories of causation deal with the problem of objectivity. Does an agent-dependent concept of manipulability imply that conflicting causal claims made by agents with different capacities can come out as true? In defence of the projectivist stance taken by the agency view, I argue that if the agent’s perspective is shown to be uniform across different agents, then the truth-values of causal claims do not vary arbitrarily and, thus, reach (...) a satisfactory level of objectivity. My argument connects Price’s considerations on the situation of deliberation, whose structure, common to all agents, is the same with respect to both decision making and causal claims on a concept inspired by Douglas’s classification of objectivity of thought processes: the perspective of the detached agent. I further argue that, despite his agent-independent concept of intervention, Woodward’s claim of a stronger objectivity standard cannot be achieved, as the relativity of causal concepts to a variable set brings about the issue of the agent’s choice of variables. Consequently, a more permissive objectivity standard applies to both views. (shrink)

Despite of its formal precision and its great many applications, Shannon’s theory still offers an active terrain of debate when the interpretation of its main concepts is the task at issue. In this article we try to analyze certain points that still remain obscure or matter of discussion, and whose elucidation contribute to the assessment of the different interpretative proposals about the concept of information. In particular, we argue for a pluralist position, according to which the different views about information (...) are no longer rival, but different interpretations of a single formal concept. (shrink)

In the present paper we develop different arguments to show that there are no reasons to consider that there exists quantum information as qualitatively different than Shannon information. There is only one kind of information, which can be coded by means of orthogonal or non-orthogonal states. The analogy between Shannon’s theory and Schumacher’s theory is confined to coding theorems. The attempt to extend the analogy beyond this original scope leads to a concept of quantum information that becomes indistinguishable from that (...) of quantum state. But information is essentially linked with communication, as it is clear in both Shannon’s and Schumacher’s proposals. If we detach information from this link, we are not talking about information but about quantum mechanics. We also stress the neutrality of information with respect to the physical theories that describe the systems used for its implementation. This view opens the way towards a non-reductive unification of physics: if different physical theories can be reconstructed on the same neutral informational basis, they could be meaningfully compared with no need of searching for reductive links among them. (shrink)

I distinguish three views, a defence of any one of which would go some way towards vindicating the view that there is something objective about the passage of time: the view that the present moment is objectively distinguished; the view that time has an objective direction – that it is an objective matter which of two non-simultaneous events is the earlier and which the later; the view that there is something objectively dynamic, flux-like, or "flow-like" about time. I argue that (...) each of these views is not so much false as doubtfully coherent. In each case, it turns out to be hard to make sense of what the view could be, at least if it is to be non-trivial, and of use to a friend of objective passage. I conclude with some remarks about avenues that seem worth exploring in the philosophy of time, when we are done with trying to make sense of passage. (shrink)

Concepts employed in folk descriptions of the world often turn out to be more perspectival than they seem at first sight, involving previously unrecognised sensitivity to the viewpoint or 'situation' of the user of the concept in question. Often, it is progress in science that reveals such perspectivity, and the deciding factor is that we realise that other creatures would apply the same concepts with different extension, in virtue of differences between their circumstances and ours. In this paper I argue (...) that causal concepts are perspectival in this way, and describe the 'situation' on which they depend in terms of an abstract characterisation of the viewpoint of a deliberating agent. I argue that this approach makes better sense than rivals of the apparent asymmetry and temporal orientation of the causal relation. (shrink)

has offered evidential decision theorists a defence against the charge that they make unintuitive recommendations for cases like Newcomb's Problem. He says that when conditional probabilities are assessed from the agent's point of view, evidential decision theory makes the same recommendation as intuition. I argue that calculating the probabilities in Price's way leads to no recommendation. It condemns the agent to perpetual oscillation between different options. Price's Argument Instability Objections Conclusion.

In this paper I study dynamical models of rational deliberation within the context of Newcomb's problem. Such models have been used to argue against the soundness of the "tickle'" defense of evidential decision theory, which is based on the idea that sophisticated decision makers can break correlations between states and acts by introspecting their own beliefs and desires. If correct, this would show that evidential decision theory agrees with the recommendations of causal decision theory. I argue that an adequate understanding (...) of rational deliberation leads to deliberative processes for which this idea works. My proposal is modest, though. Evidential decision theory cannot always be reconciled with causal decision theory along the lines suggested here, but the agreement between the two theories is broader than previously thought. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, I provide a framework – based on Sellars' distinction between the manifest and the scientific image – for illuminating the distinction between liberal and ‘orthodox’ scientific naturalism. Second, I level a series of objections against expanded liberal naturalism and its core commitment to the autonomy of manifest-image explanations. Further, I present a view which combines liberal and scientific naturalism, albeit construed in resolutely non-representationalist terms. Finally, I attempt to distinguish my own (Sellars- (...) and Peirce-inspired) position from the very similar pragmatic liberal naturalist view, that of Huw Price. I do this by suggesting that a ‘monistic’ Peircian evolutionary naturalism which accepts the Sellarsian scientia mensura principle not only is consistent with ungrudging recognition of the irreducibility of normative facts and the plurality of our discursive practices, but also shows how this irreducibility, by being understood in terms of an evolution-by-selection of a population of perceptual-practical-inferential habits, can be at the same time considered as naturalistically explicable – without any appeal to an expanded manifest-image conception of nature. (shrink)

Newcomb problems turn on a tension between two principles of choice: roughly, a principle sensitive to the causal features of the relevant situation, and a principle sensitive only to evidential factors. Two-boxers give priority to causal beliefs, and one-boxers to evidential beliefs. A similar issue can arise when the modality in question is chance, rather than causation. In this case, the conflict is between decision rules based on credences guided solely by chances, and rules based on credences guided by other (...) sorts of probabilistic evidence. Far from excluding cases of the latter kind, Lewis’s Principal Principle explicitly allows for them, in the form of the caveat that credences should only follow beliefs about chances in the absence of "inadmissible evidence". In this paper I exhibit a tension in Lewis’s views on these two matters. I present a class of decision problems –- actually, I argue, a species of Newcomb problem –- in which Lewis’s view of the relevance of inadmissible evidence seems to recommend one-boxing, while his causal decision theory recommends two-boxing. I propose a diagnosis for this dilemma, and suggest a remedy, based on an extension of a proposal due to Ned Hall and others from the case of chance to that of causation. The remedy dissolves many apparent Newcomb problems, and makes one-boxing non-controversial in those that remain. (shrink)

Causal analysis in the social sciences takes advantage of a variety of methods and of a multi-fold source of information and evidence. This pluralistic methodology and source of information raises the question of whether we should accordingly have a pluralistic metaphysics and epistemology. This paper focuses on epistemology and argues that a pluralistic methodology and evidence don’t entail a pluralistic epistemology. It will be shown that causal models employ a single rationale of testing, based on the notion of variation. Further, (...) I shall argue that this monistic epistemology is also involved in alternative philosophical theories of causation. (shrink)

In the philosophy of causation, manipulationist literature is broadly divided into agency and interventionist accounts. The division between these accounts is partially due to a dispute regarding the meaning of “manipulation”, which specifically questions, “Must one analyse manipulation by appealing to human agency?” This paper attempts to clarify the notion of manipulation and defends the thesis that agency theorists and interventionists analyse manipulation by appealing to human agency. However, following Collingwood's work, I argue that there are two ways to interpret (...) “human agency”. With an extended notion of agency in place, I reveal a pathway towards a consensus between the agency and interventionist accounts. Further, I highlight the alleged discrepancies between agency and interventionist accounts, including the issues of scope and objectivity, and suggest additional pathways towards a consensus. (shrink)