Non-Causal Counterfactual Dependence and Intrinsicality

When counterfactuals hold concerning entities with properties that stand in some kind of loose existential dependency relation, counterfactual dependence only indicates a causal relationship if part of their corresponding minimal supervenience bases satisfies the analysis of causation. The idea has application even if properties are understood in ways proponents of a powers ontology recommend. An analysis of intrinsic properties in this chapter appeals to three features—External Independence, Duplication Characterization, and Maximizing Recombination—each of which, by itself, doesn’t quite work to demarcate what we have in mind. This provides a second way of approaching the issue as well as assisting with later analysis of varieties of Humean supervenience.

Should Special Science Laws Be Written into the Semantics of Counterfactuals?

Adam Elga has presented an anti-thermodynamic process as a counterexample to Lewis’s default semantics for counterfactuals. The outstanding reaction of Jonathan Schaffer and Boris Kment is revisionary. It sacrifices Lewis’s aim of defining causation in terms of counterfactual dependence. Lewis himself suggested an alternative: «counter-entropic funnybusiness» should make for dissimilarity. But how is this alternative to be spelled out? I discuss a recent proposal: include special science laws, among them the laws of thermodynamics. Although the proposal fails, it serves to uncover the limits of Elga’s example.

Causation, further themes

The traditional focus of philosophical interest in causation has been token causation: the kind of causation that relates particular dated events. There has been controversy in recent times over the nature of such events. Donald Davidson proposed that events are concrete particulars: like objects, they have spatio-temporal locations, identity conditions, and can be described in many different ways. However, most philosophers espouse one or other property-based conception of events in order to capture the idea that causation relates events in virtue of properties associated with those events. More generally, philosophers have usually been concerned to provide a priori analyses of the concept of causation, though recently some have attempted to provide empirical analyses by investigating what physics says about the processes underlying causal relations. A recent much-discussed conceptual analysis of causation is David Lewis’s counterfactual theory. This theory ingeniously elaborates the idea that an event c causes an event e just when it is true that if c had not occurred e would not have occurred. However, the theory encounters difficulty explaining examples of pre-emption in which there are several possible causal pathways leading to some effect, only one of which goes through to completion. Such examples highlight the centrality of the idea of a process to the concept of causation. A recent functionalist theory attempts to capture this fact by defining causation as the intrinsic relation that typically accompanies a counterfactual dependence of one event on a distinct event. Such a theory takes the existence of a counterfactual dependence to be a defeasible marker of the presence of the structural feature of reality that is the causal relation. While it has some success explaining examples of pre-emption, this functionalist theory has been criticised on the grounds that causation is not a relation at all, as evidenced by causal statements involving absences and omissions as causes or effects. The question whether it is possible to give a full conceptual analysis of causation is the subject of a currently vigorous philosophical debate.

Causal Relevance

A causally efficacious or relevant property is a property of a cause. However, not every property of a cause is causally relevant to its effect. Further conditions are needed to screen off causally irrelevant properties. Proposals for further conditions include: The causally relevant property must have explanatory power; there must be counterfactual dependence of the effect on the causally relevant property; there must be a lawful connection between the causally relevant property and its effect; the complete set of causally relevant properties must exclude any other properties from playing a causal role; the causally relevant property must be independent from its effect, in some sense; and finally, the causally relevant property is a member of a set of properties that is minimally sufficient for the effect. The most plausible accounts count dispositions as causally relevant.

Symmetries and Explanatory Dependencies in Physics

Many important explanations in physics are based on ideas and assumptions about symmetries, but little has been said about the nature of such explanations. This chapter aims to fill this lacuna, arguing that various symmetry explanations can be naturally captured in the spirit of the counterfactual-dependence account of Woodward, liberalized from its causal trappings. From the perspective of this account symmetries explain by providing modal information about an explanatory dependence, by showing how the explanandum would have been different, had the facts about an explanatory symmetry been different. Furthermore, the authors argue that such explanatory dependencies need not be causal.

The Problem of Counterfactual Isomorphs

Counterfactual isomorphs are pairs of systems where: (1) the pattern of counterfactual dependence among the variables is isomorphic; but (2) the relations of actual causation need not be. Counterfactual isomorphs present a prima facie challenge to any theory of actual causation that is framed in terms of counterfactuals. Menzies responds to this problem by proposing that actual causation be defined in terms of counterfactual dependence under ideal coonditions. Determination of what constitute ideal conditions is motivated by the intuition that actual causation should depend only on the intrinsic process consisting of the events connecting the cause and the effect. Since counterfactual isomorphs need not have isomorphic ideal conditions, they can differ with respect to relations of actual causation.

Causation and Locality

By moving to the context of relativistic space-time structure, this chapter completes the argument of Chapter 4 that we can use quantum theory locally to explain correlations that violate Bell inequalities with no instantaneous action at a distance. Chance here must be relativized not just to time but to a space-time point, so that an event may have more than one chance at the same time—it may even be certain relative to one space-time point but ‘at the same time’ completely uncertain relative to another. This renders Bell’s principle of Local Causality either inapplicable or intuitively unmotivated. Counterfactual dependence between the outcomes of measurements on systems assigned an entangled state is not causal since neither outcome is subject to intervention: but it may still be appealed to in a non-causal explanation of one in terms of the other.

Causal and constitutive explanation compared

This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address events or behaviors, but causal capacities. While there are some interesting relations between building and causal manipulation, causation and constitution are not to be confused. Constitution is a synchronous and asymmetric relation between relata that cannot be conceived as independent existences. However, despite their metaphysical differences, the same key ideas about explanation largely apply to both. Causal and constitutive explanations face similar challenges (such as the problems of relevance and explanatory regress) and both are in the business of mapping networks of counterfactual dependence – i.e. mechanisms – although the relevant counterfactuals are of a different sort. In the final section the issue of developmental explanation is discussed. It is argued that developmental explanations deserve their own place in taxonomy of explanations, although ultimately developmental dependencies can be analyzed as combinations of causal and constitutive dependencies. Hence, causal and constitutive explanation are distinct, but not always completely separate forms of explanation.