Results for 'causal connection'

983 found
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  1. Are Causal Connections Relations Between Events?Paul Needham - 1980 - In Th.D.: Philosophical Essays Dedicated to Thorild Dahlquist. Uppsala, Sverige: pp. 94-107.
    Davidson’s account of singular causal statements as expressing relations between events together with his views on event identity lead to inferences involving causal statements which many of his critics find counterintuitive. These are sometimes said to be avoided on Kim’s view of events, in terms of which this line of criticism is often formulated. It is argued that neither Davidson nor Kim offer a satisfactory account of events - an essential prerequisit for the relational theory - and an (...)
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  2. Causal Connections, Logical Connections, and Skeptical Theism: There Is No Logical Problem of Evil.Perry Hendricks - forthcoming - Religions.
    In this paper, I consider Sterba’s recent criticism of skeptical theism in context of his argument from evil. I show that Sterba’s criticism of skeptical theism shares an undesirable trait with all past criticisms of skeptical theism: it fails. This is largely due to his focus on causal connections and his neglect of logical connections. Because of this, his argument remains vulnerable to skeptical theism.
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  3. Causal Connections Between Anorexia Nervosa and Delusional Beliefs.Kyle De Young & Lindsay Rettler - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (3):795-816.
    Numerous studies of the beliefs of people with anorexia nervosa (AN) suggest that a subset of such individuals may experience delusions. We first describe what makes a belief delusional and conclude that such characteristics can be appropriately applied to some beliefs of people with AN. Next, we outline how delusional beliefs may relate to the broader psychopathological process in AN, including: (1) they may be epiphenomenal; (2) they may be an initial partial cause of AN; (3) they may be caused (...)
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  4. Anchoring Causal Connections in Physical Concepts.Roland Poellinger & Mario Hubert - 2014 - In M. C. Galavotti (ed.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 501-509.
    In their paper "How Fundamental Physics represents Causality", Andreas Bartels and Daniel Wohlfarth maintain that there is place for causality in General Relativity. Their argument contains two steps: First they show that there are time-asymmetric models in General Relativity, then they claim to derive that two events are causally connected if and only if there is a time-asymmetric energy flow from one event to the other. In our comment we first give a short summary of their paper followed by a (...)
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  5. Overdetermination and causal connections.Ezra Rubenstein - 2025 - Philosophical Studies 182 (1).
    Some theories are alleged to be implausible because they are committed to systematic ‘overdetermination’. In response, some authors defend ‘compatibilism’: the view that the putative overdetermination is benign, like other unproblematic cases of a single effect having many sufficient causes. The literature has tended to focus on the following question: which relations between sufficient causes of a single effect ensure that problematic overdetermination is avoided? This paper argues that several widely endorsed answers to this question are subject to counterexample. It (...)
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  6. Hume, the New Hume, and Causal Connections.Ken Levy - 2000 - Hume Studies 26 (1):41-75.
    In this article, I weigh in on the debate between "Humeans" and "New Humeans" concerning David Hume's stance on the existence of causal connections in "the objects." According to New Humeans, Hume believes in causal connections; according to Humeans, he does not. -/- My argument against New Humeans is that it is too difficult to reconcile Hume's repeated claims that causal connections are inconceivable with any belief that they these inconceivable somethings still exist. Specifically, Hume either assumes (...)
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  7. Causal powers and conceptual connections.David Christensen - 1992 - Analysis 52 (3):163-8.
    In "A Modal Argument for Narrow Content" ("Journal of Philosophy", LXXXVIII, 1991, pp 5-26), Jerry Fodor proposes a necessary condition for the distinctness of causal powers. He uses this condition to support psychological individualism. I show that Fodor's argument relies on inconsistent interpretations of his condition on distinct causal powers. Moreover, on no consistent interpretation does Fodor's condition yield the results claimed for it.
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  8. Decision, causality, and predetermination.Boris Kment - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):638-670.
    Evidential decision theory (EDT) says that the choiceworthiness of an option depends on its evidential connections to possible outcomes. Causal decision theory (CDT) holds that it depends on your beliefs about its causal connections. While Newcomb cases support CDT, Arif Ahmed has described examples that support EDT. A new account is needed to get all cases right. I argue that an option A's choiceworthiness is determined by the probability that a good outcome ensues at possible A‐worlds that match (...)
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  9. Beyond the causal theory? Fifty years after Martin and Deutscher.Kourken Michaelian & Sarah Robins - 2018 - In Kourken Michaelian, Dorothea Debus & Denis Perrin (eds.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory. New York: Routledge. pp. 13-32.
    It is natural to think of remembering in terms of causation: I can recall a recent dinner with a friend because I experienced that dinner. Some fifty years ago, Martin and Deutscher (1966) turned this basic thought into a full-fledged theory of memory, a theory that came to dominate the landscape in the philosophy of memory. Remembering, Martin and Deutscher argue, requires the existence of a specific sort of causal connection between the rememberer's original experience of an event (...)
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  10. Causal Production as Interaction.Rognvaldur Ingthorsson - 2002 - Metaphysica 3 (1):87-119.
    The paper contains a novel realist account of causal production and the necessary connection between cause and effect. I argue that the asymmetric relation between causally connected events must be regarded as a product of a symmetric interaction between two or more entities. All the entities involved contribute to the producing, and so count as parts of the cause, and they all suffer a change, and so count as parts of the effect. Cause and effect, on this account, (...)
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  11. Causal-logical Ontology.Johan Gamper - manuscript
    In this paper we begin categorizing a plurality of possible worlds on the basis of permitting or not permitting ontologically different things to be causally connected. We build the work on the dual principle that all universes are causally closed either because no universe causes anything outside itself or because no universe has anything in it that is caused by another universe.
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  12. Causal Models and the Logic of Counterfactuals.Jonathan Vandenburgh - manuscript
    Causal models show promise as a foundation for the semantics of counterfactual sentences. However, current approaches face limitations compared to the alternative similarity theory: they only apply to a limited subset of counterfactuals and the connection to counterfactual logic is not straightforward. This paper addresses these difficulties using exogenous interventions, where causal interventions change the values of exogenous variables rather than structural equations. This model accommodates judgments about backtracking counterfactuals, extends to logically complex counterfactuals, and validates familiar (...)
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  13. Explaining causal closure.Justin Tiehen - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2405-2425.
    The physical realm is causally closed, according to physicalists like me. But why is it causally closed, what metaphysically explains causal closure? I argue that reductive physicalists are committed to one explanation of causal closure to the exclusion of any independent explanation, and that as a result, they must give up on using a causal argument to attack mind–body dualism. Reductive physicalists should view dualism in much the way that we view the hypothesis that unicorns exist, or (...)
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  14. Causal Scepticism or Invisible Cement.David-Hillel Ruben - 1982 - Ratio (Misc.) 24 (2):161.
    I defend the view, hardly original with me, that there is no evidence, deductive or non-deductive, for any of our causal beliefs, that does not already assume that there are some causal connections, and hence that there is no way in which experience on its own, or with causalität-free principles, can support the structure of out causal knowledge. The deductive case is perhaps obvious. In the case of non-deductive arguments, I consider how experience of constant conjunctions, together (...)
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  15. Wants and Acts: Logical, Causal and Material Connections.Edward Allen Francisco - 1974 - Dissertation, Purdue University
    This inquiry is addressed to two questions: (1) what if any logical relations might exist between the concepts of desire and action (as they and the distinctions to which they commit us are ensconced in ordinary parlance), and (2) what if any causal or significant non-causal (i.e., material) relations might ever exist between instances of desire and action? -/- It is held that any credible move to deal with such questions must initially, and at some length, specify the (...)
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  16. Teoria causal da memória: uma introdução em filosofia da memória.Glaupy Fontana Ribas - 2021 - Griot : Revista de Filosofia 21 (3):148-163.
    This paper is an introduction on the Causal Theory of Memory, one of the most discussed theories in philosophy of memory in the present days. We begin with Martin & Deutscher’s formulation of the theory, in which the authors present three criteria in order for a given mental state to be considered an instance of memory, amongst them, the famous causal criterion, which stipulates that a memory must be causally connected to the past experience. Subsequently, we discuss if (...)
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  17. What Do Deviant Causal Chains Deviate From?Geert Keil - 2007 - In Christoph Lumer & Sandro Nannini (eds.), Intentionality, deliberation and autonomy: the action-theoretic basis of practical philosophy. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 69-90.
    The problem of deviant causal chains is endemic to any theory of action that makes definitional or explanatory use of a causal connection between an agent’s beliefs and pro-attitudes and his bodily movements. Other causal theories of intentional phenomena are similarly plagued. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, to defend Davidson’s defeatism. In his treatment of deviant causal chains, Davidson makes use of the clause “in the right way” to rule out causal (...)
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  18. Causal Conditionals, Tendency Causal Claims and Statistical Relevance.Michał Sikorski, van Dongen Noah & Jan Sprenger - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1:1-26.
    Indicative conditionals and tendency causal claims are closely related (e.g., Frosch and Byrne, 2012), but despite these connections, they are usually studied separately. A unifying framework could consist in their dependence on probabilistic factors such as high conditional probability and statistical relevance (e.g., Adams, 1975; Eells, 1991; Douven, 2008, 2015). This paper presents a comparative empirical study on differences between judgments on tendency causal claims and indicative conditionals, how these judgments are driven by probabilistic factors, and how these (...)
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  19. Causal copersonality: in defence of the psychological continuity theory.Simon Beck - 2011 - South African Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):244-255.
    The view that an account of personal identity can be provided in terms of psychological continuity has come under fire from an interesting new angle in recent years. Critics from a variety of rival positions have argued that it cannot adequately explain what makes psychological states co-personal (i.e. the states of a single person). The suggestion is that there will inevitably be examples of states that it wrongly ascribes using only the causal connections available to it. In this paper, (...)
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  20. Causal Theory of Reference of Saul Kripke.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Since the 1960s, Kripke has been a central figure in several fields related to mathematical logic, language philosophy, mathematical philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology and set theory. He had influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic, and analytical philosophy, with a semantics of modal logic involving possible worlds, now called Kripke semantics. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke proposed a causal theory of reference, according to which a name refers to an object by virtue of a causal connection (...)
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  21. Causality, Human Action and Experimentation: Von Wright's Approach to Causation in Contemporary Perspective.Elena Popa - 2017 - Acta Philosophica Fennica 93:355-373.
    This paper discusses von Wright's theory of causation from Explanation and Understanding and Causality and Determinism in contemporary context. I argue that there are two important common points that von Wright's view shares with the version of manipulability currently supported by Woodward: the analysis of causal relations in a system modelled on controlled experiments, and the explanation of manipulability through counterfactuals - with focus on the counterfactual account of unmanipulable causes. These points also mark von Wright's departure from previous (...)
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  22. Causal Factors, Causal Inference, Causal Explanation.Elliott Sober & David Papineau - 1986 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 60 (1):97 - 136.
    There are two concepts of causes, property causation and token causation. The principle I want to discuss describes an epistemological connection between the two concepts, which I call the Connecting Principle. The rough idea is that if a token event of type Cis followed by a token event of type E, then the support of the hypothesis that the first event token caused the second increases as the strength of the property causal relation of C to E does. (...)
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  23. Causal Projectivism, Agency, and Objectivity.Elena Popa - 2016 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (2):147-163.
    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, (...)
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  24. Causal Modeling and the Efficacy of Action.Holly Andersen - 2019 - In Michael Brent & Lisa Miracchi Titus (eds.), Mental Action and the Conscious Mind. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This paper brings together Thompson's naive action explanation with interventionist modeling of causal structure to show how they work together to produce causal models that go beyond current modeling capabilities, when applied to specifically selected systems. By deploying well-justified assumptions about rationalization, we can strengthen existing causal modeling techniques' inferential power in cases where we take ourselves to be modeling causal systems that also involve actions. The internal connection between means and end exhibited in naive (...)
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  25. Berkeley and the Causality of Ideas; a look at PHK 25.Richard Brook - manuscript
    I argue that Berkeley's distinctive idealism/immaterialism can't support his view that objects of sense, immediately or mediately perceived, are causally inert. (The Passivity of Ideas thesis or PI) Neither appeal to ordinary perception, nor traditional arguments, for example, that causal connections are necessary, and we can't perceive such connections, are helpful. More likely it is theological concerns,e.g., how to have second causes if God upholds by continuously creating the world, that's in the background. This puts Berkeley closer to Malebranche (...)
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  26. Causal reasoning.Christoph Hoerl - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (2):167-179.
    The main focus of this paper is the question as to what it is for an individual to think of her environment in terms of a concept of causation, or causal concepts, in contrast to some more primitive ways in which an individual might pick out or register what are in fact causal phenomena. I show how versions of this question arise in the context of two strands of work on causation, represented by Elizabeth Anscombe and Christopher Hitchcock, (...)
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  27. Causal and Logical Necessity in Malebranche’s Occasionalism.A. R. J. Fisher - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (4):523-548.
    The famous Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) espoused the occasionalist doctrine that ‘there is only one true cause because there is only one true God; that the nature or power of each thing is nothing but the will of God; that all natural causes are not true causes but only occasional causes’ (LO, 448, original italics). One of Malebranche’s well-known arguments for occasionalism, known as, the ‘no necessary connection’ argument (or, NNC ) stems from the principle that ‘a true cause… (...)
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  28. Causal Order and Kinds of Robustness.Arnon Levy - 2017 - In Snait Gissis, Ehud Lamm & Ayelet Shavit (eds.), Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 269-280.
    This paper derives from a broader project dealing with the notion of causal order. I use this term to signify two kinds of parts-whole dependence: Orderly systems have rich, decomposable, internal structure; specifically, parts play differential roles, and interactions are primarily local. Disorderly systems, in contrast, have a homogeneous internal structure, such that differences among parts and organizational features are less important. Orderliness, I suggest, marks one key difference between individuals and collectives. My focus here will be the (...) between order and robustness, i.e. functional resilience in the face of internal or environmental perturbations. I distinguish three varieties of robustness. Ordered robustness is grounded in the system’s specific organizational pattern. In contrast, disorderly robustness stems from the aggregate outcome of many similar parts. In between, we find semi-ordered robustness, wherein a messy ensemble of elements is subjected to a selection or stabilization mechanism. I give brief characterizations of each category, discuss examples and remark on the connection between the order/disorder axis and the notions of individual versus collective. (shrink)
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  29. The development of human causal learning and reasoning.M. K. Goddu & Alison Gopnik - 2024 - Nature Reviews Psychology 3:319-339.
    Causal understanding is a defining characteristic of human cognition. Like many animals, human children learn to control their bodily movements and act effectively in the environment. Like a smaller subset of animals, children intervene: they learn to change the environment in targeted ways. Unlike other animals, children grow into adults with the causal reasoning skills to develop abstract theories, invent sophisticated technologies and imagine alternate pasts, distant futures and fictional worlds. In this Review, we explore the development of (...)
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  30. Causality in the McDowellian World.Alan Charles McKay - 2014 - Dissertation, Queen's University Belfast
    The thesis explores and suggests a solution to a problem that I identify in John McDowell’s and Lynne Rudder Baker’s approaches to mental and intention-dependent (ID) causation in the physical world. I begin (chapter 1) with a brief discussion of McDowell’s non-reductive and anti-scientistic account of mind and world, which I believe offers, through its vision of the unbounded conceptual and the world as within the space of reasons, to liberate and renew philosophy. However, I find an inconsistency in McDowell’s (...)
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  31. The Evidence for Free Trade and Its Background Assumptions: How Well-Established Causal Generalisations Can Be Useless for Policy.Luis Mireles-Flores - 2022 - Review of Political Economy 34 (3):534-563.
    In this article, I offer a methodological analysis of the empirical research on the causal effects of trade liberalisation, and assess whether such studies can be of any use for guiding policy prescriptions in real-world economies. The analysis focuses on the mainstream economic research that has been used to support arguments in favour of trade liberalisation during the last decades. Even though there are empirical results that could be taken as valid evidence for a causal connection between (...)
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  32. Causality and Hume’s foundational project.Miren Boehm - 2018 - In Angela Michelle Coventry & Alex Sager (eds.), _The Humean Mind_. New York: Routledge.
    The last few decades have witnessed intense debates in Hume scholarship concerning Hume’s account of causation. At the core of the “old–new Hume” debate is the question of whether causation for Hume is more than mere regularity, in particular, whether Hume countenances necessary connections in mind-independent nature. This chapter assesses this debate against the background of Hume’s “foundational project” in the Treatise. The question of the role and import of Hume’s account of the idea of cause is examined and compared (...)
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  33. The good, the bad, and the timely: How temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selection.Kevin Reuter, Lara Kirfel, Raphael van Riel & Luca Barlassina - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5 (1336):1-10.
    Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge (...)
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  34.  91
    The Logic of Counterfactuals and the Epistemology of Causal Inference.Hanti Lin - manuscript
    The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics recognizes a type of causal model known as the Rubin causal model, or potential outcome framework, which deserves far more attention from philosophers than it currently receives. To spark philosophers' interest, I develop a dialectic connecting the Rubin causal model to the Lewis-Stalnaker debate on a logical principle of counterfactuals: Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM). I begin by playing good cop for CEM, developing a new argument in its favor---a Quine-Putnam-style indispensability argument. (...)
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  35. Economics, Agency, and Causal Explanation.William Child - 2019 - In Peter Róna & László Zsolnai (eds.), Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics. Springer Verlag. pp. 53-67.
    The paper considers three questions. First, what is the connection between economics and agency? It is argued that causation and explanation in economics fundamentally depend on agency. So a philosophical understanding of economic explanation must be sensitive to an understanding of agency. Second, what is the connection between agency and causation? A causal view of agency-involving explanation is defended against a number of arguments from the resurgent noncausalist tradition in the literature on agency and action-explanation. If agency (...)
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  36. Genetic traits and causal explanation.Robert Northcott - 2012 - In Kathryn S. Plaisance & Thomas A. C. Reydon (eds.), Philosophy of Behavioral Biology (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science). Springer. pp. 65-82.
    I use a contrastive theory of causal explanation to analyze the notion of a genetic trait. The resulting definition is relational, an implication of which is that no trait is genetic always and everywhere. Rather, every trait may be either genetic or non-genetic, depending on explanatory context. I also outline some other advantages of connecting the debate to the wider causation literature, including how that yields us an account of the distinction between genetic traits and genetic dispositions.
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  37. How do medical researchers make causal inferences?Olaf Dammann, Ted Poston & Paul Thagard - 2019 - In Kevin McCain (ed.), What is Scientific Knowledge?: An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology of Science. New York: Routledge.
    Bradford Hill (1965) highlighted nine aspects of the complex evidential situation a medical researcher faces when determining whether a causal relation exists between a disease and various conditions associated with it. These aspects are widely cited in the literature on epidemiological inference as justifying an inference to a causal claim, but the epistemological basis of the Hill aspects is not understood. We offer an explanatory coherentist interpretation, explicated by Thagard's ECHO model of explanatory coherence. The ECHO model captures (...)
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  38. Mental Disorder and Suicide: What’s the Connection?Hane Htut Maung - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3):345-367.
    This paper offers a philosophical analysis of the connection between mental disorder and suicide risk. In contemporary psychiatry, it is commonly suggested that this connection is a causal connection that has been established through empirical discovery. Herein, I examine the extent to which this claim can be sustained. I argue that the connection between mental disorder and increased suicide risk is not wholly causal but is partly conceptual. This in part relates to the way (...)
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  39. Metaphysical implications of causal non separability.Laurie Letertre - 2022 - Dissertation, Universite Grenoble Alpes
    In quantum mechanics, quantum nonseparability is at the core of philosophical debates regarding its meaning. In the context of the process matrix formalism, causal nonseparability characterises quantum processes (connecting the inputs and outputs of different local quantum operations) that are incompatible with any definite causal structure among interacting parties. One talks about indefinite causal orders. A famous example of causally nonseparable processes is called the quantum switch (QS). It is extensively studied in the literature in virtue of (...)
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    The Connection Between Mind Creativity and Free Will.Angelito Malicse - manuscript
    The Connection Between Mind Creativity and Free Will -/- The relationship between mind creativity and free will is a fascinating and complex subject that lies at the heart of human consciousness and decision-making. Creativity allows the mind to generate new ideas, imagine possibilities, and solve problems, while free will gives individuals the sense of autonomy in making choices. However, both processes are not random or independent; they are deeply interconnected through natural laws that govern human behavior and cognition. This (...)
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  41. An inexplicably good argument for causal finitism.Ibrahim Dagher - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (2):199-211.
    Causal finitism, the view that the causal history of any event must be finite, has garnered much philosophical interest recently—especially because of its applicability to the Kalām cosmological argument. The most prominent argument for causal finitism is the Grim Reaper argument, which attempts to show that, if infinite causal histories are possible, then other paradoxical states of affairs must also be possible. However, this style of argument has been criticized on the grounds of (i) relying on (...)
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  42. A Psychological Approach to Causal Understanding and the Temporal Asymmetry.Elena Popa - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (4):977-994.
    This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice (...)
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  43. Skill-based acquaintance : a non-causal account of reference.Jean Gové - 2024 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    This thesis provides an account of acquaintance with abstract objects. The notion of acquaintance is integral to theorising on reference and singular thought, since it is generally taken to be the relation that must exist between a subject and an object, in order for the subject to refer to, and entertain singular thoughts about the object. The most common way of understanding acquaintance is as a form of causal connection. However, this implies a problem. We seem to be (...)
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  44. Conditionals, Causal Claims and Objectivity.Michał Sikorski - 2020 - Dissertation, Università di Torino
    In my thesis, I develop two distinct themes. The first part of my thesis is devoted to indicative conditionals and approaching them from an empirically informed perspective. In the second part, I am developing classical topics of philosophy of science, specifically, scientific objectivity and the role of values in science, in connection to recent methodological developments, revolving around the Replication Crisis.
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  45. Hume on Our Notion of Causality.Alan Schwerin - 1989 - Philosophy 64 (247):104 - 106.
    Does Hume want to weaken our notion of causality? For some he does. My paper is an attempt to refute this interpretation of Hume. My analysis of the texts is an attempt to show that Hume actually endorses the view that the idea of necessary connection, that is associated with the idea of causality, is important and that this idea does exist. Furthermore, this idea is produced by an interesting impression. This impression is unusual as it is a specific (...)
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  46. The proximate–ultimate distinction and evolutionary developmental biology: causal irrelevance versus explanatory abstraction.Massimo Pigliucci & Raphael Scholl - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):653-670.
    Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction has received renewed interest in recent years. Here we discuss its role in arguments about the relevance of developmental to evolutionary biology. We show that two recent critiques of the proximate–ultimate distinction fail to explain why developmental processes in particular should be of interest to evolutionary biologists. We trace these failures to a common problem: both critiques take the proximate–ultimate distinction to neglect specific causal interactions in nature. We argue that this is implausible, and that the (...)
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  47. The Metaphysics of Creation: Secondary Causality, Modern Science.James Dominic Rooney - 2022 - In Eleonore Stump & Thomas Joseph White (eds.), The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. [New York]: Cambridge University Press. pp. 107-125.
    This chapter moves from the most fundamental parts of Aquinas’s metaphysics to Aquinas’s thought about the created world, and especially the way in which things in the created world are able to act as beings in their own right, without altering their dependence on the creator. The result is an account of the causality of creatures that does not impugn their connection to the more basic causality of the Deity and that allows this part of Aquinas’s account to be (...)
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  48. Is there room in quantum ontology for a genuine causal role for consciousness?Paavo Pylkkänen - 2017 - In Emmanuel Haven & Andrei Khrennikov (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Quantum Models in Social Science: Applications and Grand Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 293-317.
    Western philosophy and science have a strongly dualistic tradition regarding the mental and physical aspects of reality, which makes it difficult to understand their possible causal relations. In recent debates in cognitive neuroscience it has been common to claim on the basis of neural experiments that conscious experiences are causally inefficacious. At the same time there is much evidence that consciousness does play an important role in guiding behavior. The author explores whether a new way of understanding the (...) role of mental states and consciousness could be provided by the ontological interpretation of the quantum theory (Bohm and Hiley, Phys. Rep. 144:323–348, 1987; Bohm and Hiley, The undivided universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. Routledge: London, 1993). This interpretation radically changes our notion of matter by suggesting that a new type of active information plays a causal role at the quantum level of reality. The author thus considers to what extent the alleged causal powers of consciousness involve information, and then moves on to consider whether information in (conscious) mental states can be connected to the information at the level of quantum physics. In this way he sketches how quantum theory might help to throw light upon one of the grand challenges facing the social sciences and the humanities, namely the question of whether consciousness plays any genuine causal role in the physical world. (shrink)
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  49. Omissive Overdetermination: Why the Act-Omission Distinction Makes a Difference for Causal Analysis.Yuval Abrams - 2022 - University of Western Australia Law Review 1 (49):57-86.
    Analyses of factual causation face perennial problems, including preemption, overdetermination, and omissions. Arguably, the thorniest, are cases of omissive overdetermination, involving two independent omissions, each sufficient for the harm, and neither, independently, making a difference. A famous example is Saunders, where pedestrian was hit by a driver of a rental car who never pressed on the (unbeknownst to the driver) defective (and, negligently, never inspected) brakes. Causal intuitions in such cases are messy, reflected in disagreement about which omission mattered. (...)
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  50. The freedom we mean: A causal independence account of creativity and academic freedom.Maria Kronfeldner - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-23.
    Academic freedom has often been defended in a progressivist manner: without academic freedom, creativity would be in peril, and with it the advancement of knowledge, i.e. the epistemic progress in science. In this paper, I want to critically discuss the limits of such a progressivist defense of academic freedom, also known under the label ‘argument from truth.’ The critique is offered, however, with a constructive goal in mind, namely to offer an alternative account that connects creativity and academic freedom in (...)
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