Abstract
This chapter will introduce the notion of causation based on counterfactual dependence. This notion forms the basis of the counterfactual account of causation. Different cases of overdetermination will be considered and it will be explained how these pose problems to the counterfactual account of causation. These problems motivate new ways of defining causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals, such as the account of causal influence or the causal modelling account. The point of view of causal contextualism will also be introduced—namely, the view that the truth of causal claims may vary relative to the context from which they are evaluated. Causal contextualism will be defended in many ways within this work. I will argue in this chapter that event fine-graining in the light of causal contextualism is at the basis of any strategy used to clarify overdetermination scenarios.
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Notes
- 1.
This definition has a further development in the regularity account of causation. A brief exposition and discussion of this theory is given in Appendix B.
- 2.
This example was mentioned to me by André Fuhrmann.
- 3.
This definition also applies to cases of stepwise redundant causation (cf. Loeb 1974). In such cases, there might be two additional events d and d′, such that if neither c nor c′ had occurred, then neither d nor d′ would have occurred; and if neither d nor d′ had occurred, e would not have occurred. However, if c or c′ had not occurred, then d or d′ would have caused e. Then, we would also say that if c had not occurred, c′ would have caused e and if c′ had not occurred, c would have caused e.
- 4.
Initially, Lewis (1986, p. 198) avoids this strategy because it produces more questions than it solves. Assuming extreme standards for the specification of the effect, spurious causes may arise. A death by poison at a specific time may causally depend on what the victim ate. In most contexts, however, we hesitate to say that the victim’s dinner caused her death. Yet, we might want to say this in some contexts. With regard to this double standard, Lewis claims that a more detailed examination is needed, but he does not elaborate on this in his first account: ‘It is not out of the question that there should be a double standard. But if there is, an adequate theory of causation really ought to say how it works. […] To say how the double standard works may not be a hopeless project, but for the present it is not so much unfinished as unbegun’ (Lewis 1986, p. 199). Lewis’s (2000) later theory of causal influence reconsiders the fine-graining strategy.
- 5.
- 6.
According to Collins (2004), we assign a different causal status to chains that are intrinsic duplicates. This shows that whether a chain is a causal chain or not does not fundamentally depend on intrinsicness. Note, however, that although the would-be analysis does not appeal to intrinsicness, it demands the negation of propositions about preempted events to be not too far-fetched, thereby restricting the way in which we think of the replicas.
- 7.
One example of trumping involves two wizards casting spells of incantation (Schaffer 2000) in such a way that if an alteration of the spell that actually causes the enchantment occurred, then the enchantment would not have been different: The second wizard would have caused it in exactly the same way. However, these cases appear to be too contrived to deserve further discussion.
- 8.
Consider an alteration according to which Billy’s throw occurs so early that his rock hits the bottle before Suzy’s rock does. Given this alteration, Billy’s throw would have a causal influence on the bottle’s shattering. However, this would be a too-distant alteration of Billy’s throw. Hence, it should not be considered.
- 9.
An account that works based on a set of maximally fine-grained events is briefly described in Appendix C. This possibility is not only compatible with causal contextualism, but it is an excellent example of how causal contextualism can be applied.
- 10.
Note that the strategy of fixing BH to its actual value is similar to the strategy of quasi-dependence and to the strategy adopted by the would-be account of causation.
- 11.
As described in Appendix A, Lewis’s possible world semantics for counterfactuals based on the similarity metric does not render the causal analysis circular in the same straightforward way as Pearl’s interpretation does. However, it may be that some notion closely related to causation turns out to be crucial when analysing the role of similarity in the interpretation. Dorothy Edgington (2011) argues remarkably, for instance, that in order to identify the features of the actual world that hold constant when evaluating counterfactuals, one must appeal to causal independence. Lewis’s account regards the notion of similarity as primitive; hence, it avoids this kind of circularity.
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Céspedes, E. (2016). The Counterfactual Account of Causation. In: Causal Overdetermination and Contextualism. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33801-9_1
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