Causal relevance

1996 ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
Glenn Shafer
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relevance

Criticism of D.B Volkov’s Teleofunctional Solution to the Problem of Mental Causation

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-135
Author(s):  
Anton V. Kuznetsov
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Physical Factors ◽  
Multiple Realizability ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Local Properties ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
First Editions

The articles examines the teleofunctional solution to the problem of mental causation, presented by Dmitry Volkov in his recently published book Free Will. An Illusion or an Opportunity. D.B. Volkov proposes solutions to three big metaphysical problems – mental causation, personal identity, and free will. Solving the first problem, Volkov creatively combines the advantages of Dennett’s teleofunctional model and Vasilyev’s local interactionism. Volkov’s teleofunctional model of mental causation seeks to prove the causal relevance of mental properties as non-local higher order properties. In my view, its substantiation is based on three points: (a) critics of the exclusion problem and Kim’s model of mental causation, (b) “Library of first editions” argument, (c) reduction of the causal trajectories argument (CTA 1) by Vasilyev to the counterpart argument (CTA 2) by Volkov. Each of these points faces objections. Kim’s criticism is based on an implicit confusion of two types of reduction – reduction from supervenience and from multiple realizability. The latter type does not threaten Kim’s ideas, but Volkov uses this very type in his criticism. The “Library of first editions” argument does not achieve its goal due to compositional features and because non-local relational properties are a type of external properties that cannot be causally relevant. The reduction of CTA 1 to CTA 2 is unsuccessful since, in the case of this reduction, important features of CTA 1 are lost – these are local mental properties, due to which the influence of non-local physical factors occurs. My main objection is that the concept of causally relevant non-local properties is incompatible with the very concept of cause. The set of causally relevant properties of cause can only be local.

Production and Relevance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Fundamental Physics ◽  
Causal Chains

This chapter offers an account of mechanistic production, which is contrasted with Salmon and Dowe’s theory of physical production. It provides a new analysis of the nature of events, and an account of how those events can form productive causal chains. This account identifies three distinct kinds of production: constitutive, precipitating, and chained. The chapter shows how the New Mechanist account addresses a number of standard problems for theories of causation, and for mechanistic theories in particular. These include how mechanistic production could be grounded in fundamental physics, how productive theories can explain causation by omission, prevention, and disconnection, how to explain causal relevance without appeal to counterfactuals, and how to understand the relation between production and constitution in inter-level causal claims. The chapter concludes by discussing how the New Mechanist approach to causation and constitution leads to a sensible account of the nature and limits of reduction and emergence.

Mechanisms and Causation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter motivates a theory of causation according to which causal claims are existential claims about mechanisms. The chapter begins with a review of the variety of causal claims, emphasizing the differences between singular and general claims, and between claims about causal production and claims about causal relevance. I then argue for singularism—the view that the truth-makers of general causal claims are facts about collections of singular and intrinsic causal relations, and specifically facts about the existence of particular mechanisms. Applying this account, I explore possible truth conditions for causal generalizations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between mechanistic and manipulability approaches to causation. I argue that Woodward’s manipulability account provides valuable insights into the meaning of causal claims and the methods we use to assess them, but that the underlying truth-makers for the counterfactuals in that account are in fact mechanisms.

Mental causation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Loewer
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Completeness Of Physics

Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent non-reducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena have challenged these assumptions. In the case of mental events (such as someone’s thinking about Vienna), one proposal has been simply to identify not ‘types’ (or classes) of mental events with types of physical events, but merely individual ‘token’ mental events with token physical ones, one by one (your and my thinking about Vienna may be ‘realized’ by different type physical states). The role of mental properties (such as ‘being about Vienna’) in causation is more problematic. Properties are widely thought to have three features that seem to render them causally irrelevant: (1) they are ‘multiply-realizable’ (they can be realized in an indefinite variety of substances); (2) many of them seem not to supervene on neurophysiological properties (differences in mental properties do not always depend merely on differences in neurophysiological ones, but upon relations people bear to things outside their skin); and (3) many of them (for example, ‘being painful’) seem inherently ‘subjective’ in a way that no objective physical properties seem to be. All of these issues are complicated by the fact that there is no consensus concerning the nature of causal relevance for properties in general.

Can a truth value have causal power?

1998 ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Josefine Papst
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Deflationary Theory Of Truth ◽  
Deflationary Theory

John Gibbons tries to show that the notion of similarities and differences between different cases of events reveals the relevance of relational properties, which are of causal relevance. Based on such considerations, Gibbons' main claim is that the truth value somebody assigns to his or her beliefs has causal power. This means that the deflationary theory of truth becomes false. The questions therefore are: (1) What are the similarities and differences between different cases? (2) What kind of properties are relational properties? (3) What is the causal relevance of such relational properties, and why should the truth value be of causal relevance? (4) Why can Gibbons not show that the truth value has the relevant causal power?

Does Anything Break Because it is Fragile?

1998 ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
Paul Raymont
Keyword(s):  
David Lewis ◽  
Alternative Conception ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Recent Attempt ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Frank Jackson ◽  
Negative Argument

I maintain that dispositions are not causally relevant to their manifestations. The paper begins with a negative argument, which is intended to undermine David Lewis’ recent attempt to restore causal potency to dispositions by identifying their instantiations with the instantiations of their causal bases. I conclude that Lewis’ attempt to vindicate the causal credentials of dispositions meets obstacles that are analogous to (though importantly different from) those that beset Donald Davidson’s attempt to accord a causal role to the mental. I then consider an argument recently given by Frank Jackson against the causal relevance of dispositions (to their manifestations). Jackson’s argument relies on a conception of dispositions that is not likely to be shared by those who defend their causal relevance. I sketch an alternative conception of dispositions that links them more closely to their causal bases, but argue that even on this model dispositions are causally impotent. The paper closes with a defense of the claim that dispositions, in spite of their causal irrelevance to their manifestations, are nevertheless causal-explanatorily relevant to them.

scholarly journals Investigating children as cultural magnets: do young children transmit redundant information along diffusion chains?

2008 ◽  
Vol 363 (1509) ◽  
pp. 3541-3551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Redundant Information ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Puzzle Box

The primary goal of this study was to investigate cultural transmission in young children, with specific reference to the phenomenon of overimitation. Diffusion chains were used to compare the imitation of 2- and 3-year-olds on a task in which the initial child in each chain performed a series of relevant and irrelevant actions on a puzzle box in order to retrieve a reward. Children in the chains witnessed the actions performed on one of two boxes, one which was transparent and so the lack of causality of the irrelevant actions was obvious, while the other was opaque and so the lack of causal relevance was not obvious. Unlike previous dyadic research in which children overimitate a model, the irrelevant actions were parsed out early in the diffusion chains. Even though children parsed out irrelevant actions, they showed fidelity to the method used to perform a relevant action both within dyads and across groups. This was true of 3-year-olds, and also 2-year-olds, therefore extending findings from previous research.

Determinables, Determinates, and Causal Relevance

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Walter
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Exclusion ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Exclusion Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Manifest Image

Mental causation, our mind's ability to causally affect the course of the world, is part and parcel of our ‘manifest image’ of the world. That there is mental causation is denied by virtually no one. How there can be such a thing as mental causation, however, is far from obvious. In recent years, discussions about the problem of mental causation have focused on Jaegwon Kim's so-called Causal Exclusion Argument, according to which mental events are ‘screened off’ or ‘preempted’ by physical events unless mental causation is a genuine case of overdetermination or mental properties are straightforwardly reducible to physical properties.

The Causal Relevance of the Mental: More on the Mattering of Minds

1991 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
LOUISE ANTONY
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relevance
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