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Chapter XI: Causality
- University of Ottawa Press
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I That causality, in some sense, exists in the world is not open to serious dispute. Having your head chopped off, for example, leads causally to your death (and, most likely, to your non-being, though that need not be insisted on here). What has been in dispute is just what causality is and what its extent is—including what may be called its modal extent. As for the former, there is the matter of a so-called common-sense conception of causality and what is involved in it; and the degree to which anything objectively in the world corresponds to that conception. this is a problem of conceptual analysis: what do we mean by holding that something causes something? it is also an appearance–reality problem: given that there is some degree of fit between our concept and what is objectively in the world, how close is that fit? is it often complete, for example? the second pole of contention and uncertainty that causality poses— extent—is the question whether anything escapes causality, and, if so, how contracausal a world could be. Positions on the extent of causality have ranged from one extreme, reasonably attributed to Spinoza, according to whom every state of every possible world is wholly subject to causality, to another, rather more doubtfully attributed to Hume but plausibly assigned some twentieth-century empiricists, according to whom some states of the actual world escape causality and every state of some possible world does. i discount the positions of some metaphysicians and empiricists for C H A P t e R X i Causality 174 ReALitY: Fundamental topics in Metaphysics whom there is no such thing at all as causality. these positions i dismiss, perhaps dogmatically, as unserious, or as more or less immediately confuted by experience. We must address first what we mean by causality because we could not otherwise have adequate confidence in exploring other topics involving causality, nor that it is a single thing, since one position argues that there is more than one kind of causality. An anchored datum with which we may begin is that effects—the things that are caused, whatever precisely it is to be caused, and even if there is more than one sort of causality—are facts, states, processes, or events of the world.1 Among such facts or states are that particular objects exist. However, no object, all by itself, is or could be an effect. effects are invariably what we have been calling complexes. they are also, it is clear, sometimes individual or “singular” fact (state, process, event) tokens, in one vocabulary, and sometimes classes of facts (states, processes, events)—types. (e.g., Oswald, or his actions, caused Kennedy’s death, and carelessness causes accidents, respectively.) in general, in what follows i shall talk indifferently of effects, whether types or tokens; indifferently also of whether the effects are states or events. either term should be assumed to be meant abbreviatively (for state, event, process, or fact). Most would certainly hold and try to argue, presumably correctly, that all effects are contingent, that is, they need not have existed or obtained, and, in some possible ways of the world’s being, they do not exist or obtain. However, it does seem an independent matter whether a fact or state of the world might be metaphysically necessary, something that exists in every possible world. that is to say, even if some fact or event of the world were absolutely necessary in this sense, it would seem to remain possible that, in some or all worlds, such an event should have had a cause. if so, then it would be a mistake to suppose that, as we try to begin to specify and offer commentary on the frame L . . . causes Y L , we can affirm it to be analytic that a relevant Y must be contingent. However, for our purposes it can be reasonably assumed that we are confining our attention to events that are metaphysically contingent. the analysis of causality for necessary events, if there are any, can be reserved for some other occasion. Something that is caused must be a complex. Moreover, there must, if there is an effect, be a cause. We justifiably take the skeletal frame for causality to be L X causes Y L : causality is, or instantiates, a binary relation. [54.226.68.181] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:49 GMT) Causality 175 II We note, in addition to the frame L X...