Abstract
The characteristic intrinsic properties of some microevents are causal powers. This chapter concerns these causal microevents. Why think that basic contents include causal microevents?
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Notes
There are certain qualifications to this, which will emerge shortly.
This might imply that others are true as well.
Note that this isn’t a centering of the sort which we have already seen that some basic contents exhibit.
Note also that hence not all stories of C will generate power descriptions, since for instance some include no causal microevents at all.
These might be fused to other causal microevents if there is a substantival space, a space which is distinct from the material entities it contains.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (editors) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985);Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,in David Hume, Enquiries,L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (editors) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
There are alternative, pretty implausible but coherently conceivable, sorts of laws: Laws might be ghostly things which themselves exercise causal powers, either somehow reading how the events of the world are and then acting alone on that information, or acting along with those worldly events. But in any case these alternatives provide no grounds for objection to this argument.
Except, of course, that the world in which a power is instantiated must meet the content of that restriction.
David Lewis, “Causation”, Journal of Philosophy [vn70, 1973, 556–567.
Jaegwon Kim, “Causes and Counterfactuals”, Journal of Philosophy 70, 1973, 570–572.
David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
At least within their home content.
George Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous,Dialogue Three.
This seems like a reasonable inference for a case involving ordinary concrete properties, but not for a case involving the mere bare dissimilarity introduced by relative haecceities. This is because of the very different ways in which thoughts with the first pair of features would be realized.
Eye-hand coordination which constitutes merely know how, and also direct feedback and reflex arcs, are no doubt involved in the execution of motor action, but still there seem to be motor intentions of this sort as well.
We were lucky that a plausible and coherent theory was there to be adopted, but we will see that in the end it isn’t all that plausible, and up to some point we had good luck with phenomenal colors as well.
We will return to these issues in Chapter Sixteen.
More than one causal microevent may be found at the same location, I think, and this may help underwrite our capacity to distinguish between concrete material entities and occupied locations in a containing substantival space.
For reasons which will become relevant in Part Three, it may be important to distinguish between two kinds of metrical structure which may be present in a causal field. The “affine structure” of a field is fixed when it is fixed which paths between points are the geodesies, the locally shortest paths. On the other hand, there might be a fuller and more familiar sort of metrical structure.
And phenomenal microevents which are fused to or caused by those causal microevents.
Such a relation isn’t necessarily symmetric. Consider for instance situations in which there is a finite upper speed by which causal influence can spread, and in which event A can causally influence B but B cannot influence A.
Lawrence Sklar, “What Might be Right about the Causal Theory of Spacetime”, Synthese 77, 155–171, 161.
On the definition of the metric in this way see Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time(New York: Dover, 1958), 14.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Mendola, J. (1997). Causal Elements. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_7
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