Abstract
We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is.
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Notes
Cf. Alexander (1927).
For a defense of Hume’,s thesis, see Frank Jackson (1996).
By ‘necessitates’, I mean metaphysically necessitates, though I think (P2) is plausible even if ‘necessitates’, means nomologically necessitates. See §4.4 below.
Shoemaker (unpublished) claims that any two objects having the same causal features necessarily have the same properties, but he thinks that these causal features might include backward-looking as well as forward-looking features. For instance, he thinks that two compounds, X and Y, having exactly the same causal powers might not have the same properties if X and Y were created from different substances. I tend to think that if X and Y have all the same causal powers then they share the same properties; their causal histories, it seems to me, are mere Cambridge differences. But we needn’,t settle this dispute for our purposes.
And though I am in the minority, I am not alone. See Shoemaker (unpublished and 1980) as well as Martin (1992, 1994, and 1996).
The arguments registered below are just a sampling of those registered by Shoemaker (1980 and unpublished). My conviction is that Shoemaker’,s (unpublished) will unsettle much of our faith in the traditional position, handed down from Hume, that causal laws are contingent.
Worries about probabilistic causal powers is beside the point. If it’,s true that some properties contribute only probabilistic causal powers, then it remains an open question whether it contributes those probabilistic powers necessarily. So everything I have to say about the necessary relationship between something’,s having a certain property and its having certain causal powers applies to probabilistic as well as deterministic causal powers.
Although Shoemaker still maintains that properties have their causal features essentially, he (unpublished) now employs this epistemological strategy only to support the weaker claim that sameness of causal features guarantees intraworld property identity. I’,m not sure whether Shoemaker has lost faith in his original argument, or, as I suppose, he simply no longer feels that he needs it. In either case, Shoemaker now puts the epistemological argument this way: “if there are sets of properties whose members are identical with respect to their causal features, we necessarily lack the resources for referring to particular members of these sets. Supposing that there are such properties, it cannot be these that we intend to be referring to when we use singular property-referring terms.… So if there are such properties, they don’,t fall within the extension of our term ‘property.’, Which seems to imply that if there are such properties, they aren’,t properties; which seems to imply that there are no such properties” (unpublished: 13-4). And he then argues that constraints on intraworld variation are also constraints on interworld variation. If you are like me and Pollyanna in being suspicious of talk about contingent identities, you will not require this additional argument. Otherwise, see Shoemaker (unpublished).
Anomalous monism is, of course, the position famously defended by Donald Davidson (1980 and 1993).
My thanks to Jim Garson for pointing out a confusion in my way of putting this problem in an earlier draft.
Also see Jackson and Pargetter (1987) and Prior, et al (1982).
My thanks to Randy Clarke for this criticism.
I thank Eric Saidel and Tony Dardis for pushing me on this point.
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Aristotle (2002). Colors, Dispositions, and Causal Powers. In: Rediscovering Colors. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0562-3_5
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