Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-21T10:18:49.707Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

General Causation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

John W. Carroll
John W. Carroll*
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Philosophers of science, e.g. Cartwright (1979) and Skyrms (1980), have given accounts of general causation in probabilistic terms; not surprising since we often accept general causal sentences as true despite being aware of apparent counterinstances. Consider:

(E1) Smoking is a cause of heart attacks.

We accept (E1) as true though aware of smokers who never have a heart attack. Here I quickly review familiar problems in two existing probabilistic accounts, offer a new objection, and suggest the beginnings of an alternative account.

The traditional model of general causation maintains that causes, and only causes, raise the probability of the effect That is:

(TM) F is a cause of G if and only if .

Despite some intuitive appeal, the traditional model faces at least three basic objections. First, consider cases of epiphenomena in which there are properties F, G, and H such that F is a cause of G, F is a cause of H, but G is not a cause of H and H is not a cause of G.

Type
Part X. Causation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 310 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

Thanks to John Pollock, Roy Sorensen, Mark Johnston, and David LeWine for helpful discussions on causation and probability.

References

Carlson, G. (1980). Reference to Kinds in English. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.Google Scholar
Cartwright, N. (1979). “Causal Laws and Effective Strategies.” Nous 13: 419–437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eells, E. (1986). “Probabilistic Causal Interaction.” Philosophy of Science 53: 52–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eells, E. and Sober, E. (1983). “Probabilistic Causality and the Question of Transitivity.” Philosophy of Science 50: 35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D. (1973). “Causation.” Journal of Philosophy 70: 556–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollock, J. (1984). “Nomic Probability.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9: 177–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skyrms, B. (1980). Causal Necessity. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sorensen, R. (manuscript). “Process Vagueness.”Google Scholar