Theistic modal realism and causal modal collapse

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
NUNO MAIA
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Modal Realism

Abstract Theistic modal realism argues for an extension of Lewis's modal realism capable of accommodating a theistic God. By affording elegant solutions to many atheistic challenges, the view is of great theoretical utility for the theist. However, it has been objected that within a Lewisian framework God cannot be causally efficacious on pain of collapsing intuitively distinct modal notions. In this article I explain why these worries are ill-founded and show how God's existence and causal power over the pluriverse can be consistently understood. If successful, the proposal offers a congenial theistic way to adopt modal realism and address the atheological problems.

Beyond metaphors and semantics: A framework for causal inference in neuroscience

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto A. Gulli
Keyword(s):  
Causal Inference ◽  
Causal Power

Abstract The long-enduring coding metaphor is deemed problematic because it imbues correlational evidence with causal power. In neuroscience, most research is correlational or conditionally correlational; this research, in aggregate, informs causal inference. Rather than prescribing semantics used in correlational studies, it would be useful for neuroscientists to focus on a constructive syntax to guide principled causal inference.

The Problem of Enhanced Control

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Essential Difference ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

dAccording to the problem of enhanced control, while indeterminism may not diminish control, it does not enhance control, and thus indeterminism is superfluous to freedom and responsibility. It is often thought that the problem of enhanced control is a problem only, or at least especially, for event-causal libertarians. The idea is that whereas agent-causal libertarianism differs from compatibilism in requiring that free agents possess the agent-causal power, the only essential difference between event-causal libertarianism and compatibilism is that the former requires the presence of indeterminism. It is first argued that the problem of enhanced control, if a problem for event-causal libertarians, is just as much a problem for agent-causal libertarians. It is then argued that minimal event-causal libertarianism secures enhanced control vis-à-vis compatibilism because it accords agents the opportunity to exercise their abilities of reflective self-control in more than one way.

The Failure of Conceptual Analysis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer McKitrick
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Causal Power ◽  
Possible Worlds Semantics ◽  
Conditional Statements ◽  
Reductive Analysis

Dispositions are often regarded with suspicion. Consequently, some philosophers try to semantically reduce disposition ascriptions to sentences containing only non-dispositional vocabulary. Typically, reductionists attempt to analyze disposition ascriptions in terms of conditional statements. These conditional statements, like other modal claims, are often interpreted in terms of possible worlds semantics. However, conditional analyses are subject to a number of problems and counterexamples, including random coincidences, void satisfaction, masks, antidotes, mimics, altering, and finks. Some analyses fail to reduce disposition ascriptions to non-modal vocabulary. If reductive analysis of disposition ascriptions fails, then perhaps there can be metaphysical reduction of dispositions without semantic reduction. However, the reductionist still owes us an account of what makes disposition ascriptions true. But to posit a causal power for every unreduced dispositional predicate is an overreaction to the failure of conceptual analysis.

scholarly journals Neoliberalism with Scandinavian characteristics: The slow formation of neoliberal common sense in Denmark

2021 ◽  
pp. 030981682110290
Author(s):  
Rune Møller Stahl
Keyword(s):  
International Economic ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Causal Power ◽  
Policy Instrument ◽  
Alternative Analysis ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Economic Council ◽  
Ideational Change ◽  
Economic Developments

This article describes the ascension of neoliberal economic ideas in the macroeconomic establishment in Denmark. Based on a systematic analysis of documents from the Danish government and the Economic Council from the 1970s to the early 2000s, the article traces the development of the economic ideas and policy instrument that dominate the analytical process of the Danish macroeconomic establishment. The article applies a Gramscian-inspired framework to track the gradual and uneven process under which neoliberal economic ideas became common sense in the Danish context. This framework challenges some of the assumptions of the ideational focus of much constructivist literature, and offers an alternative analysis focused on the legitimating role of economic ideas. As much of the ideational change took place after policy adaptions to international economic developments, the Danish case provides little support for the theory of the causal power of ideas. Rather, it seems as though economic models and ideas are imported as ‘after the fact’ legitimations of changes in policy.

scholarly journals Necessitism, Contingentism, and Lewisian Modal Realism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Nencha
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Modal Realism ◽  
Timothy Williamson ◽  
Restricted Quantification

AbstractNecessitism is the controversial thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something, namely that everything, everywhere, necessarily exists. What is controversial about necessitism is that, at its core, it claims that things could not have failed to exist, while we have a pre-theoretical intuition that not everything necessarily exists. Contingentism, in accordance with common sense, denies necessitism: it claims that some things could have failed to exist. Timothy Williamson is a necessitist and claims that David Lewis is a necessitist too. The paper argues that, granted the assumptions that lead to interpret the Lewisian as a necessitist, she can preserve contingentist intuitions, by genuinely agreeing with the folk that existence is contingent. This is not just the uncontroversial claim that the Lewisian, as a result of the prevalence of restricted quantification in counterpart theoretic regimentations of natural language, can agree with the folk while disagreeing with them in the metaphysical room. Rather, this is the claim that it is in the metaphysical room that the Lewisian can endorse the intuitions lying behind contingentism.

Genuine Modal Realism: Still Limited

Mind ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 115 (459) ◽  
pp. 731-740 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Divers ◽  
Joseph Melia
Keyword(s):  
Modal Realism ◽  
Genuine Modal Realism

Lewis' Indexical Argument for World-Relative Actuality

Dialogue ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Gale
Keyword(s):  
David Lewis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
The Other ◽  
Abstract Entity ◽  
Modal Realism ◽  
Possible World ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Reductio Ad Absurdum ◽  
Critical Scrutiny

David Lewis has shocked the philosophical community with his original version of extreme modal realism according to which “every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is”. Logical Space is a plenitude of isolated physical worlds, each being the actualization of some way in which a world could be, that bear neither spatiotemporal nor causal relations to each other. Lewis has given independent, converging arguments for this. One is the argument from the indexicality of actuality, the other an elaborate cost-benefit argument of the inference-to-the-best explanation sort to the effect that a systematic analysis of a number of concepts, including modality, causality, propositions and properties, fares better under his theory than under any rival one that takes a possible world to be either a linguistic entity or an ersatz abstract entity such as a maximal compossible set of properties, propositions or states of affairs. Lewis' legion of critics have confined themselves mostly to attempts at a reductio ad absurdum of his theory or to objections to his various analyses. The indexical argument, on the other hand, has not been subject to careful critical scrutiny. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this argument cannot withstand such scrutiny. Its demise, however, leaves untouched his argument from the explanatory superiority for his extreme modal realism.

The methodology of genuine modal realism

Synthese ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 162 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris John Daly
Keyword(s):  
Modal Realism ◽  
Genuine Modal Realism

The moral import of modal realism

Theoria ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
TORBJÖRN TÄNNSJÖ
Keyword(s):  
Modal Realism
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