Abstract
It is events, rather then objects or properties, that are usually taken by philosophers to be the terms of the causal relationship. But an event typically consists of a change in the properties or relationships of one or more objects, the latter being what Jaegwon Kim has called the “constituent objects” of the event.1 And when one event causes another, this will be in part because of the properties possessed by their constituent objects. Suppose, for example, that a man takes a pill and, as a result, breaks out into a rash. Here the cause and effect are, respectively, the taking of the pill and the breaking out into a rash. Why did the first event cause the second? Well, the pill was penicillin, and the man was allergic to penicillin. No doubt one could want to know more — for example, about the biochemistry of allergies in general and this one in particular. But there is a good sense in which what has been said already explains why the one event caused the other. Here the pill and the man are the constituent objects of the cause event, and the man is the constituent object of the effect event. Following Kim we can also speak of events as having “constituent properties” and “constituent times”. In this case the constituent property of the cause event is the relation expressed by the verb ‘takes’, while the constituent property of the effect event is expressed by the predicate ‘breaks out into a rash’. The constituent times of the events are their times of occurrence. Specifying the constituent objects and properties of the cause and effect will tell us what these events consisted in, and together with a specification of their constituent times will serve to identify them; but it will not, typically, explain why the one brought about the other. We explain this by mentioning certain properties of their constituent objects. Given that the pill was penicillin, and that the man was allergic to penicillin, the taking of the pill by the man was certain, or at any rate very likely, to result in an allergic response like a rash. To take another example, suppose a branch is blown against a window and breaks it. Here the constituent objects include the branch and the window, and the causal relationship holds because of, among other things, the massiveness of the one and the fragility of the other.
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Notes
See Jaegwon Kim, `Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event’, Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), 27–36. I should mention that it was reflection on this excellent paper that first led me to the views developed in the present one.
Peter Geach, God and the Soul, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, p. 71. See also Jaegwon Kim, Non-Causal Relations’, Noüs8 (1974), 41–52, and `Events as Property Exemplifications’, in M. Brand and D. Walton (eds.), Action Theory, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1976, pp. 159–177.
I take this example from Kim, `Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event’.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature1.3.14, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford University Press, London, 1888, p. 170.
“When any objects resemble each other, the resemblance will at first strike the eye, or rather the mind, and seldom requires a second examination” (Treatise 1.3.1, p. 70).
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols., 2.23.8, ed. by A. C. Fraser, Oxford University Press, London, 1894, Vol. 1, p. 398.
Essay 2.8.8, Vol. 1, p. 398.
What does “in virtue of” mean here? For the moment we can say that a thing has a power in virtue of having certain properties if it is a lawlike truth that whatever has those properties has that power. On the theory I shall be defending it turns out that this is a matter of the possession of the properties entailing the possession of the power (that is, its being true in all possible worlds that whatever has the properties has the power).
In speaking of “circumstances” I have in mind the relations of the object to other objects; instead of speaking of “presence in circumstances of a particular sort” I could instead speak of `possession of particular relational properties’. Being in such and such circumstances is a mere-Cambridge property of an object, not a genuine (intrinsic) property of it.
After this was written I found that Peter Achinstein has advanced a causal account of property identity which, despite a different approach, is in some ways similar to the account proposed here. See his `The Identity of Properties’, American Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1974), 257–276. There are also similarities, along with important differences, between my views and those presented by D. H. Mellor in `In Defense of Dispositions’, Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 157–181, and those presented by R. Harre and E. H. Madden in Causal Powers: A theory of Natural Necessity, Blackwell, Oxford, 1975.
See. S. F. Barker and P. Achinstein, `On the New Riddle of Induction’, Philosophical Review 69 (1960), 512–522. The definition given there is not equivalent to that originally given by Goodman, in Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 3rd ed., Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1975, p. 74 (originally published by University of London Press, London, 1954), and it is the latter which is employed elsewhere in the present paper.
This was called to my attention by Nicholas Sturgeon.
See Boyle, `The Origins and Forms of Qualities’, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 5 vols., A. Millar, London, 1744, Vol. 2, p. 461ff.
See Saul Kripke, `Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1972, pp. 253–355.
There is another reason why these conditional powers should not count as constituting a single property: the instantiation of the second of them is causally incompatible with the activation of the first, since something that is such as to be malleable at 100°F cannot be made of steel.
For the notion of `reference fixing’, see Kripke, op. cit., pp. 269–275.
Ibid., pp. 331–342.
See, for example, Donald Davidson, `Causal Relations’, Journal of Philosophy64 (1967), 691–703.
Earlier versions of this paper were read at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., in 1975, at the University of Toronto and Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1976, and at the
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Shoemaker, S. (1980). Causality and Properties. In: Van Inwagen, P. (eds) Time and Cause. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3528-5_7
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