The Non‐Occurrence Of Events
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):269-285 (2017)
Abstract
What is it for an event not to occur? This is an urgent, yet under explored, question for counterfactual analyses of causation quite generally. In this paper I take a lead from Lewis in identifying two different possible standards of non-occurrence that we might adopt and I argue that we need to apply them asymmetrically: one standard for the cause, another for the effect. This is a surprising result. I then offer a contextualist refinement of the Lewis approach in light of initial problems, and discuss how the asymmetry remained hidden until now. I then relate the non-occurrence problem to issues of transitivity and proportionality in causation, before showing that a parallel problem exists for contrastivist and interventionist approaches to causation too.
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2016-10-19
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2016-10-19
Total views
243 ( #21,491 of 55,867 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
25 ( #29,922 of 55,867 )
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