Causation 1500 – 2000: Abstracts1
BSHP Conference: Causation 1500 – 2000
Abstracts
Tom Baldwin (University of York), ‘Russell on Causation’
Russell’s 1913 paper ‘On the Notion of Cause’ is still rightly esteemed. In discussing it, I shall concentrate on its place within Russell’s general philosophical programme, on its relationship to broader debates about causation at the time, and on the connections between that debate and contemporary discussions of causation.
Martha Brandt Bolton (RutgersUniversity), ‘Causality, Physical and Mathematical Induction: the necessitarian and “skeptical” theory of Lady Mary Shepherd’
Early in the 19th century, Lady Mary Shepherd advocated an anti-Humean theory of causality. Shepherd opposed not only the view that the relation between cause and effect consists of nothing but regularity (and a mental disposition), but also Hume’s contention that cause and effect are temporally successive objects (events), that they are discovered by repeated experience, that causal inference is due to an acquired habit rather than reasoning, and that it is possible that nature’s course should change. This paper is not mainly concerned with Shepherd’s objections to Hume’s reasoning (in Treatise and Enquiry), although they are acute, nor with the argument by which she claims to show it is necessary that that every event we experience has a cause. Rather the paper mainly concerns Shepherd’s own account of the relation between cause and effect and her closely connected theory of induction.
Shepherd maintains that cause and effect are simultaneous. Indeed, she apparently holds that there can be no strictly necessary connection between temporally disparate events. On her view, a cause consists of several properly assembled objects and the effect is a quality that necessarily pertains to the assembly. To put this in contemporary terms, an effect supervenes on a certain collection of objects; more exactly, causality is a compositional determination relation. According to Shepherd’s theory of perception and knowledge, we directly perceive, i.e. perceive without inference, nothing but effects. The existence of causes is discovered by an elementary form of reasoning, but we do not experience the nature of causes, and our inferential knowledge is restricted to certain relations among them. Shepherd is, without doubt, a “skeptical realist”, to use the popular term. To use another current phrase, causal generalizations are a posteriori necessary truths. It is a consequence of this account that we know causal relations are necessary, but have no grasp of the necessary connection between different relata. For example, conceptual understanding of the necessity is not required.
This analysis seems to have been motivated by Shepherd’s youthful reflections on the method of discovering general mathematical truths. She propounds a theory of induction which she applies to universal propositions in both physics and mathematics. Discovery that a certain combination of “objects” determines certain properties of the composite in one case suffices to discover a necessity which, because it is a necessity, holds in all (relevantly) similar cases. Since several objections are likely to occur to one at this point, some discussion is needed to show how this is supposed to work. Still, I believe it is a coherent theory. It has the consequence that we can, and do, prove that mathematical truths are necessary without needing an intellectual grasp of their necessity. Thus we are, or at least may well be, as ignorant of the nature of mathematical necessity as we are of causal necessity—a result that is, to my mind, very attractive.
Angela Breitenbach (SidneySussexCollege, Cambridge), ‘Kant and the Limits of the Mechanical Explanation of Nature’
Kant famously presents the principle of the causal determination of nature, developed in the Second Analogy of his Critique of Pure Reason, as an a priori principle of the understanding rather than an empirically discoverable fact about the world. According to this principle, Kant explains, we cannot experience or know of anything that is not determined by natural causes. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant furthermore distinguishes the mechanism of nature, its continuous determination by causal laws, from freedom. He argues that we can only prove the existence of natural causes but not that of freedom. In the Critique of Judgment, finally, Kant claims that although mechanical explanation is the only type of explanation of nature available to us, there are certain things, that is, all organisms, that are inexplicable by reference to mechanical laws.
The combination of these claims made by Kant throughout his Critiques raises an important question. For if anything we can experience about the natural world must be caused, and if the causal determination of nature is identified with its mechanism, how can there be objects in the natural, and hence knowable, world that are inexplicable in mechanical terms? In what sense can Kant’s theory of nature, celebrated for showing the a priori and necessary nature of the principle of natural causality, incorporate the claim that some parts of nature fall outside the mechanistic framework? The paper aims to tackle these questions, firstly, by investigating the relationship between Kant’s concepts of causality and mechanism and, secondly, by exploring the limits of the explicability of nature by means of these concepts.
Different commentators have contrasted the mechanism of nature, on Kant’s account, with freedom from the laws of nature, with the life of organised beings, and with the relationship of a material whole to its parts. The paper argues that these three approaches stress important aspects of Kant’s concept of the mechanism of nature. Considered in isolation, however, they each present an incomplete characterisation. An alternative reading is proposed according to which mechanical explanations refer to a particular species of empirical causal laws. Just like any other empirical causal law, however, mechanical laws can never be known with full certainty on Kant’s account. The conception according to which we can explain all of nature by means of mechanical laws, it turns out, is based on what Kant calls ‘regulative’ or ‘reflective’ considerations about nature. By means of the proposed reading of natural mechanism, the paper aims to show how Kant could hold on to the claim that all objects of experience are determined by the a priori principle of causality, while at the same time arguing that, considered from a different perspective, some objects of experience cannot be regarded as mechanically determined material wholes.
Aaron D. Cobb (Saint LouisUniversity), ‘An Eighteenth-Century Critique of Productive Cause Explanations’
Eighteenth-century philosophers, including George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid, reject the view that the proper aim of natural philosophy is to discover the productive causes of natural phenomena. They argue that productive cause explanations are neither necessary nor warranted in natural philosophy. In the place of this account of explanation they offer a revisionary conception which holds that a proper explanation of some phenomenon consists in showing that it can be subsumed under an experientially-grounded law. They derive this novel approach to scientific explanation primarily from their reflection upon the discussions of methodology in Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton’s explicit disavowal of causal hypotheses concerning the underlying productive causes of gravity in the General Scholium combined with Newton’s achievements suggested that natural philosophy could dispense with inquiry into underlying productive causes. Rather than speculating about the causes of gravity, Newton considers this task unnecessary for establishing the mathematical principles of physics.
But the eighteenth-century rejection of productive cause explanations was not based solely upon their interpretative understanding of a Newtonian methodology. It was also predicated upon a common critique of the legitimacy of specific kinds of causal inquiry. Berkeley, Hume, and Reid all contend that inquiry into the underlying productive causes of phenomena is not warranted within the legitimate scope of natural philosophy. This critique does not undermine all forms of causal inquiry, but it does require a specification of the proper understanding of causal inquiry and use of causal terminology in natural philosophy. Following the Lockean analysis of the evidential grounds of one’s ideas concerning causal powers, they argue (i) that there is no clear evidence indicating that physical substances or their qualities are capable of acting as productive causes of phenomena and (ii) that the methods and sources of justification proper to natural philosophy cannot warrant ascribing effects to the productive powers of agents. Furthermore, they contend that all other explanatory entities (e.g., forces) are either reducible to physical substances, their qualities, or agents, in which case they are not legitimate explanations of phenomena, or they are occult entities and, hence, are not genuinely explanatory. If Newton shows that one can dispense with inquiry into productive causes, this eighteenth-century critique shows that one should dispense with this form of causal inquiry.
In this paper, I reconstruct the eighteenth-century criticism of productive cause explanations and discuss the philosophical motivations underpinning their revisionary conception of scientific explanation. I argue that a central assumption of this novel understanding of scientific explanation is an underlying pragmatism concerning the aims of a theory of scientific explanation. Berkeley, Hume, and Reid argue that one of the most important aspects of scientific understanding produced by nomological explanations of phenomena is its utility in directing human action. Knowledge of the produtive causes of phenomena is not necessary for the goal of successful action.
Aisling Crean (AustralianNationalUniversity), ‘New Hume’
We thought we knew what Hume said about causation. He said that causation was nothing but constant conjunction, a mere regularity obtaining between events. But recent news from the field of Hume studies is telling us that this is precisely what Hume did not think. Recent interpreters of Hume such as John Wright (1983), Edward Craig (1987), Galen Strawson (1989), Helen Beebee (2006) and Peter Kail (2007) have all argued in one way or another that Hume was a sceptical realist about causal powers grounding necessary connections in nature. A sceptical realist about these things is one who believes in their existence but deems them to be somehow unknowable – ‘secret’ as Hume says – epistemically inaccessible in some non-trivial way. This sceptical realist interpretation of Hume is sometimes called The New Hume, and in opposition to it are defenders of the old view – the Old Hume, let’s say (Bennett, Blackburn, Winkler). My aim here is not to say decisively whether or not Old Hume or New Hume is the true Hume. Instead, I want to examine a problem for New Hume – a problem threatens to make his philosophical position dialectically crippling.
The problem has its root in New Hume’s claim that there exist causal powers grounding necessary connections in nature and that these are unknowable. This claim is problematic because it’s difficult to square with Hume’s epistemology in a way that avoids making the claim self-defeating. Section one sets up the problem. Section two sketches a familiar aspect of Hume’s epistemology, explains in more detail New Hume’s position and says more about why it’s problematic. Section three takes a less traditional line: it explores a neglected externalist dimension to Hume’s epistemology. Section four gets into the details of this. Section five then shows how to bring the lessons of sections three and four to bear on the apparent problem for New Hume and dissolves it in a way that squares well with Hume’s texts. Whether or not Old Hume or New Hume is the true Hume, New Hume’s position is not dialectically crippling after all.
Michael Funk Deckard (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), ‘Edmund Burke on Formal, Material and Efficient Causes of Beauty’
In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke wrote:
Such a confusion of [the] ideas [of the sublime and beautiful] must certainly render all our reasonings upon subjects of this kind extremely inaccurate and inconclusive. Could this admit of any remedy, I imagined it could only be from a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus of exciting our passions. (Preface)
Rehabilitating Aristotelian causation for the new science of aesthetics that was developing in Britain after Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, Burke devotes part I of his text to the formal cause (i.e. ‘a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts’), parts II and III to the material cause of sublimity and beauty (i.e. ‘a careful survey of the properties of things’), and part IV to the efficient cause (‘a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature’). By examining specifically the causation of beauty, it is possible to argue that Burke is working from both a typical early modern view of mind/body relations (i.e. whatever effects the mind also effects the body and vice versa) combined with an Aristotelian understanding of object relations (i.e. there are characteristics of an object that are causally uniform throughout nature). In this paper, I will examine closely how Burke argues for formal, material and efficient causes in the terms of subject/object relations such that certain uniform causal events in the human mind occur universally.
Giuseppina D’Oro (KeeleUniversity),‘The Reasons/Causes Debate Before and After Davidson’
This paper explores the way in which the conception of the reasons/causes debate changed after the publication of Davidson’s seminal 1963 essay “Actions, reasons and causes”. Prior to Davidson the reasons/causes debate was essentially a conceptual debate about the nature of explanation in different forms of enquiry. Both supporters (Hempel) and critics (Dray/Collingwood) of the thesis for methodological unity were at one in the belief that the task of a philosophy of action was to determine whether the logical structure of action-explanation was or was not reducible to the logical structure of event-explanation, not to address the metaphysical problem of mental causation. Indeed this generation of non-reductivists would have regarded the very posing of the question “how is mental causation possible?” as resting on a category mistake because answering it requires applying the explanatory framework of one science to the explanandum of another. The publication of “Actions, reasons and causes”, altered the conception of the very nature of the reasons/causes debate because in this essay Davidson argued that a philosophy of action should address not only the conceptual questions, “What are actions? What are events? What kind of explanation is appropriate to the former and which to the latter?” but also the metaphysical question of how can mind have an impact onto the physical world. Davidson’s essay brought about a paradigm shift in the philosophy of action because it altered the very perception of the reasons/causes debate, from a purely conceptual debate about the nature of explanation at work in different sciences to an ontological/metaphysical debate about the possibility of mental causation.
The paper argues two theses. The first is that the kind of conceptual non-reductivism which dominated prior to the publication of Davidson’ essay and encapsulated in the slogan “reasons are not causes” thrived against the background of a conception of philosophy as an epistemologically first science whose task is to reflect on the explanatory practices of different sciences and tease out the heuristic principles which govern them. Davidson’s own brand of non-reductivism, by contrast thrives against the background of a return of real metaphysics (a kind of ontological backlash against linguistic philosophy) and a conception of philosophy as the underlabourer of science. The second is that Davidson’s argument in “Actions, reasons and causes” fails to provide sufficiently strong grounds for abandoning the non-causalist consensus that dominated in mid twentieth century and that the move from a non-causalist to a causalist consensus in the philosophy of action may have to be explained sociologically by a change in the philosophical Zeitgeist.
Steffen Ducheyne (GhentUniversity), ‘Galileo’s Interventionist Notion of Cause’
In this essay, I shall take up the theme of Galileo’s notion of cause, which has already received considerable attention. I shall argue that the participants in the debate as it stands have overlooked a striking and essential feature of Galileo's notion of cause. Galileo not only reformed natural philosophy, he also introduced a new notion of causality and integrated it in his scientific practice (hence, this new notion also has its methodological repercussions).Galileo’s conception of causality went hand in hand with his methodology (see section 3). Galileo's new notion of causality was closely intertwined with a new conception of how to discover causal relations. His new notion of causality focused on heuristics rather than on ontology. This is the main message of this essay. It is my claim that Galileo was trying to construct a new scientifically useful notion of causality. This new notion of causality is an interventionist notion. According to such a notion, causal relations can be discovered by actively exploring and manipulating natural processes. In order to know nature, we have to intervene in nature. Generally: if we wish to explore whether A is a cause of B, we will need to establish whether deliberate and purposive variations in A result in changes in B. If changes in A produce changes in B, the causal relation is established. It will be shown that this notion first emerged from Galileo's work in hydrostatics and came to full fecundity in his treatment of the tides.