scholarly journals Kant’s Causal Power Argument Against Empirical Affection

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-51
Author(s):  
Jonas Jervell Indregard
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Spatial Effects ◽  
Decisive Reason ◽  
The Right

AbstractA well-known trilemma faces the interpretation of Kant’s theory of affection, namely whether the objects that affect us are empirical, noumenal or both. I argue that, according to Kant, the things that affect us and cause representations in us are not empirical objects. I articulate what I call the Causal Power Argument, according to which empirical objects cannot affect us because they do not have the right kind of power to cause representations. All the causal powers that empirical objects have are moving powers, and such powers can only have spatial effects. According to Kant, however, the representations that arise in us as a result of the affection of our sensibility are non-spatial. I show that this argument is put forward by Kant in a number of passages, and figures as a decisive reason for rejecting empirical affection and instead endorsing affection by the things in themselves.

A Dormitive Virtue?

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-216
Author(s):  
Neil E. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
The Right

Chapter 9 considers objections to the account of persistence offered in chapter 8. The bulk of the chapter is taken up with the question of explanatory significance: according to the objection from dormitive virtues, powers cannot properly be said to be explanatory. In response, it is argued that causal explanations must reflect the ontological facts, and therefore that explanations are ontology-relative. Consequently, on the assumption that the correct ontology is one that countenances fundamental causal powers, powers come out as explanatory. Powers-based explanations—in the right contexts—are thus vindicated. Further objections regarding the possibility of random creation and gunk are considered.

Powerful Perdurance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil E. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Prima Facie ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Temporal Parts ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

It is commonly held that the right sort of ‘glue’ for uniting the temporal parts of persisting objects should be causal. To date, very little has been said about the nature of this causal glue (except to give it unhelpful names like ‘immanent causation’ or ‘gen-identity’). To my mind, causal powers look well suited to the task: two consecutive object stages are part of the same persisting object just in case the latter is part of the manifestation of an appropriate power of the former. However, before any such project could hope to get off the ground, a number of prima facie objections must be dealt with. For instance: temporal parts look too short-lived to instantiate or exercise powers; the exercise of powers tends to be a mutual affair not suited to the causal line of single objects; and powers are typically thought of as incapable of having themselves as their manifestations. The aim of this paper is to answer these objections, thereby providing a greater understanding of the nature of powers and thus clearing the way for a powers-based account of perdurance.

Temporal and Spatial Aftereffects of a Border on an Afterimage and a Possible Laterality Difference

1975 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 939-946
Author(s):  
Paul Tyson ◽  
Ken Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Light Adaptation ◽  
Spatial Effects ◽  
Laterality Difference ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right

Five subjects were asked to report the brightness and duration of afterimages formed in a region where a border had previously been exposed. The temporal and spatial aftereffects of the border on the formation of the afterimage varied with the duration of the border and these aftereffects were within the area predicted by a photochemical bleaching hypothesis. In addition to these major findings, the experiment yielded some surprising secondary observations. For example, increasing the degree of bleaching or light adaptation made the afterimage brighter if it was on the right side but decreased the brightness if on the left. The difference between afterimages on the right and left sides was discussed in terms of spatial effects of borders and laterality differences.

scholarly journals The Roots of Occasionalism? Causation, Metaphysical Dependence, and Soul-Body Relations in Augustine

Vivarium ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Tamer Nawar
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Dependence Relations ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Metaphysical Dependence

Abstract It has long been thought that Augustine holds that corporeal objects cannot act upon incorporeal souls. However, precisely how and why Augustine imposes limitations upon the causal powers of corporeal objects remains obscure. In this paper, the author clarifies Augustine’s views about the causal and dependence relations between body and soul. He argues that, contrary to what is often thought, Augustine allows that corporeal objects do act upon souls and merely rules out that corporeal objects exercise a particular kind of causal power (that of efficient or sustaining causes). He clarifies how Augustine conceives of the kind of causal influence exercised by souls and bodies.

of supposing that there are intrinsic qualitative features of mental representations—I doubt that this is a mistake—but the mistake of supposing that these intrinsic qualitative features represent the world by mirroring or picturing it so that representation goes first and foremost by way of intrinsic similarity. What could be intrinsically similar to an array of sense qualities across a sense field? Answer: an array of qualities across space and time. If this is what is primarily represented by a perceptual representation then the problem is how it is we arrive at representational contents to the effect that there are persisting objects. The natural answer is that we derive such contents; it is as if we infer them demonstratively or non-demonstratively from what is primarily represented. So persisting objects are either constructions out of distributions of qualities or the inferred causes of such distributions. It is this whole empiricist problematic which must be rejected. Representation is our characteristic activity. What justifies a particular kind of representation or judgement made immediately as a result of perceptual experience is not that it mirrors or pictures or is intrinsically similar to an independently characterizable reality but that it is the representation or judgement which we would standardly and non-collusively make under just those conditions of perceptual experience. So it is with perceptual judgements of persistence. We spontaneously and non-collusively make them on the basis of perceptual experience. Although particular judgements of persistence may be overturned by the discovery of the sort of trickery mentioned above, the overturning takes place by means of accounting for the illusory appearance of persistence as due to the causal powers of a more inclusive framework of persisting objects. The global commitment to the effect that the world is made up of persisting objects is not a reasoned consequence of some prior commitment to the effect that the world contains at least distributions of qualities over space­ time. It is something we spontaneously and dogmatically employ as a fundamental theme in our everyday representation of the way the world is. How do we earn the right to this dogmatism? How do we earn the right to spontaneously go in for representations as of persisting objects? (By what right do we so synthesize the

2013 ◽  
pp. 216-217
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

scholarly journals Why Rosenberg and Kaplan's attempt to reconcile physicalism and antireductionism concerning biology is unsatisfactory

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
Slobodan Perovic
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Physical Systems ◽  
Molecular Systems ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
Reductive Physicalism ◽  
Biological Laws ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Physical Laws

A. Rosenberg and D. Kaplan argue that their account of the Principle of Natural Selection (PNS), as a law of physical systems (including those systems studied by biology) underived from familiar physical laws, provides the precisely explanatory autonomy of biology sought after by antireductionists, without violating the principles of reductive physicalism. I argue, however, that the possibility of the PNS being an underived law of physical systems may be neutral to the explanatory autonomy of biology. In fact, if wedded with reductive physicalism (the possibility considered by these authors), it may yield only a very limited explanatory autonomy of biology, no stronger than the quasi-autonomy generally ascribed to it by reductionists. In the physicalist world, the PNS is operational and thus discoverable at the higher ontological levels (those concerning living cells, individuals, groups, populations and species), because the operation of a law concerning higher-level systems is grounded in its operation at the lower levels (atoms and molecules). Consequently, in terms of the explanatory criterion, a generalization discovered by biologists may be established as a law only if its status is confirmed in the form of its applicability to molecular and other systems studied by chemistry and physics. Otherwise, there is a danger that it could be a 'just so story.' The authors' narrow understanding both of antireductionism and biological laws as reducible to those concerning molecular systems provides only an illusory vindication of the explanatory autonomy: in the case of the PNS, although biologists happened to be the first to utilize it, their research concerning cells, individuals, populations and species could not possibly have established it as a law. This results, at best, in the inter-theoretic irreducibility of molecular biology as a discipline of physical science. I argue that a substantial explanatory autonomy of biology concerns the causal powers of biological systems at multiple levels, where the PNS, or any other biological law, is a basic law of nature in that it is concerned with the entities whose causal power is irreducible to that of the lower-level entities. Thus, only if confirmable at the levels higher than the molecular, could the generalizations discovered by biologists reflect such autonomy.

Property Causation

2020 ◽  
pp. 245-276
Author(s):  
Paul Noordhof
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Supervenience Base ◽  
Explanatory Virtues ◽  
Target Effect ◽  
The Right ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Explanatory Virtue ◽  
Target Effects ◽  
Base Properties

If one set of properties supervenes upon another, then the former have causal powers if: first, the supervenience base properties minimally metaphysically necessitate the supervening properties; second, part of the minimal supervenience base causes the target effect; third, instances of the supervening properties would all cause certain target effects in the right kind of circumstances, as a result of this. When these conditions are met, the causal relationship holds not only in virtue of the supervenience base properties but also the supervening ones. Two further explanatory virtues that citing property causes may display are: when a property has a distinctive causal profile (when it makes a causal contribution that no other property would) and when an instance of the property supplies the precise contribution required for a certain effect. Pragmatic appeal to the second explanatory virtue explains away our tendency to hear certain explicitly contrastive statements mistakenly as true.

Causal Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Richard Corry
Keyword(s):  
Force Fields ◽  
Causal Power ◽  
Conditional Analysis ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Reductive Explanation ◽  
Causal Influence

This chapter investigates the ontology of causal power and causal influence that was suggested by the discussion of reductive explanation in the previous two chapters. In particular, it is suggested that we should understand causal powers to be dispositions to manifest causal influence. Such powers, it is shown, can be given a conditional analysis that is less susceptible to counterexamples than conditional analyses of dispositions more generally. It is further argued that the conditional analysis can be extended to cover multi-track powers by using functions, rather than conditionals, to describe powers. Functional descriptions of powers connect nicely to the descriptions of force fields that one finds in physics, suggesting that we can interpret forces as influences in the sense described here.

Aristotelian Powers at Work

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Agent ◽  
Mutual Interaction ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Fundamental Idea

This paper puts powers to work by developing a broadly Aristotelian account of causation, built on the fundamental idea (which Aristotle found in Plato, attributed by him to Heraclitus) that causation is a mutual interaction between powers. On this Aristotelian view, causal powers manifest them-selves in dependence on the manifestation of their mutual partners. (See also Heil, this volume; Mumford, this volume; and Martin 2008.) The manifestations of two causal power partners are co-determined, co-varying, and co-extensive in time. (See Marmodoro 2006.) Yet, causation has a direction and is thus asymmetric. This asymmetry is what underpins metaphysically the distinction between causal agent and patient. The proposed Aristotelian analysis of the interaction between mutually manifesting causal powers is distinctive, in that it pays justice to the intuition that there is agency in causation. That is, agency is not a metaphorical way of describing what causal powers do. For some powers, it is a way of being that instantiates the non-anthropomorphic sense in which powers are causal agents. This point is brought out in the paper in relation to the explanation of the concept of change. In an Aristotelian fashion, the paper argues that the distinction be-tween agent and patient in causation is pivotal to offering a realist account of causation that does not reify the interaction of the reciprocal causal partners into a relation. On the proposed view, the interaction between mutually manifesting causal partners consists in the power of one substance being realized in another substance. Specifically, the agent’s causal powers metaphysically belong to the agent, but come to be realized in the patient. The significance of this is that the interaction of the agent’s and the patient’s powers is not a relation; rather, it is an ex-tension of the constitution of the agent onto the patient, which occurs when agent and patient interact and their powers are mutually manifested. Thus the proposed Aristotelian account of causation explains the mutual interaction between manifestation partners—potentiality, agency, and change—as irreducible to one another, but interconnected.

Scepticism, Causal Science and ‘The Old Hume’

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Subjective Impression ◽  
Pyrrhonian Scepticism

This paper replies to Peter Millican (Mind, 2009), who argues that Hume denies the possible existence of causal powers which underlie the regularities that we observe in nature. I argue that Hume's own philosophical views on causal power cannot be considered apart from his mitigated skepticism. His account of the origin of the idea of causal power, which traces it to a subjective impression, only leads to what he calls ‘Pyrrhonian scepticism’. He holds that we can only escape such excessive skepticism by way of a natural judgment based on the association of ideas, which forms the basis of what he calls ‘a legitimate ground of Assent’.

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