In response to commentaries by Esa Díaz León, Jennifer Saul, and Ra- chel Sterken, I develop more fully my views on the role of structure in social and metaphysical explanation. Although I believe that social agency, quite generally, occurs within practices and structures, the relevance of structure depends on the sort of questions we are asking and what interventions we are considering. The emphasis on questions is also relevant in considering metaphysical and meta-metaphysical is- sues about realism with respect to (...) gender and race. I aim to demon- strate that tools we develop in the context of critical social theory can change the questions we ask, what forms of explanation are called for, and how we do philosophy. (shrink)

Even though the talk of causal bases is commonplace in traditional and contemporary discussions about dispositions, the concept of causal bases has never been systematically investigated. This paper aims to fill this gap by developing the causal-grounding account. This account takes two roles as definitory for causal bases. First, causal bases are possible causes of disposition manifestations. Second, causal bases are metaphysical grounds of disposition instantiations. In this paper, we show that the causal-grounding account (CGA) achieves crucial distinctions (for example (...) between causal bases and manifestation conditions), captures relevant traditional features of causal bases, and can be invoked to support the causal efficacy of disposition instantiations. At the same time, CGA does not require that causal bases have to be categorical or intrinsic. This, in turn, allows us to remain neutral concerning fundamental properties, the existence of dispositional or extrinsic causal bases, multi-track dispositions, and the reducibility of dispositions. This neutrality grants the suitability of our account for different philosophical projects and discussions. (shrink)

According to orthodoxy, the most fundamental kind of causation involves one event causing another event. I argue against this event‐causal view. Instead, the most fundamental kind of causation is thing causation, which involves a thing causing a thing to do something. Event causation is reducible to thing causation, but thing causation is not reducible to event causation, because event causation cannot accommodate cases of fine‐grained causation. I defend my view from objections, including C. D. Broad's influential “timing” argument, and I (...) conclude with implications for agent‐causal theories of free will. (shrink)

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 (...) Press, Chicago, 1993), I divide the forms of productive causal processes into five classes, corresponding to Aristotle's ontological categories: there are processes that cause change in location, in state, and in quantity; and that lead to the creation and destruction of substances. These broader categories are then subdivided into other ones, corresponding to different Levin classes, according to further differences in the causal processes they involve. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this argument to research in metaphysics and experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Social scientists appeal to various “structures” in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that social structure can be explanatory in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A novel causal framework (...) is provided for understanding these explanations–this framework addresses puzzles regarding the mysterious causal influence of social structure, how to understand its relation to individual choice, and what makes it the main explanatory (and causally responsible) factor for various outcomes. (shrink)

My students sometimes worry that if eternalism is true then they can’t have libertarian freedom. They aren’t alone, as this sentiment is also expressed, albeit typically briefly, by various philosophers. However, somewhat surprisingly, those working within the free will literature have largely had nothing to say about libertarianism’s relationship to time, with this also being similar in the case of those working in the philosophy of time, apart from some work which has mainly focused on nonlibertarian views of freedom. In (...) this short paper I note why I’m currently unconvinced that there’s an incompatibility between eternalism and libertarianism, and in doing so one will see why I think they are compatible. (shrink)

An important divide in the free will literature—one that is arguably almost as common as the distinction between compatibilism and incompatibilism—concerns the distinction between event and substance causation. As the story typically goes, event-causalists maintain that an action is free only if it is caused by appropriate mental events, and agent-causalists maintain that an action is free only if it is caused directly by a substance (the agent). This paper argues that this dichotomy is a false one. It does this (...) by introducing a new view called Causal Pluralism, which maintains that free will is compatible with both event and substance causation. Furthermore, it is argued that agent-causalists have good reason to adopt Causal Pluralism, and also that that the view has interesting implications for the free will dialectic. (shrink)