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Causation: Philosophy of Science • CAUSATION: PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Reinhardt. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, causation was one of the fundamental concepts that ren­ 1993. dered the empirical world comprehensible to humans. By McDermott, Michael. "Redundant Causation." British Journal the beginning of the twenty-first century, psychology was for the Philosophy of Science 40 (1995): 523-544. Mellor, D. H. The Facts of Causation. London: Routledge, 1995. beginning to show just how pervasive human reasoning Mellor, D. H. "Fixed Past, Unfixed Future." In Contributions to concerning cause and effect is. Even young children seem Philosophy: Michael Dummett, edited by Barry Taylor, to naturally organize their knowledge of the world 166-186. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1986. according to relations of cause and effect. Menzies, Peter. "Probabilistic Causation and Causal Processes: A Critique of Lewis." Philosophy of Science 56 (1989): It is hardly surprising, then, that causation has been 642-663. a topic of great interest in philosophy, and that many Ramachandran, Murali. "A Counterfactual Analysis of philosophers have attempted to analyze the relationship Causation." Mind 106 (1997): 263-277. between cause and effect. Among the more prominent Reichenbach, Hans. The Direction of Time. Berkeley and Los proposals are the following: Causation consists in the Angeles: University of California Press, 1956. instantiation of exceptionless regularities (Hume 1975, Salmon, Wesley C. "Probabilistic Causality." Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980): 50-74. 1999; Mill1856; Hempel1965; Mackie 1974); causation is Salmon, Wesley C. Scientific Explanation and the Causal to be understood in terms of relations of probabilistic Structure of the World. Princeton, NT: Princeton University dependence (Reichenbach 1956, Suppes 1970, Cartwright Press, 1984. 1983, Eells 1991); causation is the relation that holds Schaffer, Jonathan. "Trumping Preemption." Journal of between means and ends (Gasking 1955, von Wright Philosophy 97 (4) (2000): 165-181. Sosa, Ernest, and Michael Tooley, eds. Causation. Oxford: 1975, Woodward 2003); causes are events but for which Oxford University Press, 1993. their effects would not have happened (Lewis 1986); Stalnaker, Robert C. "A Theory of Conditionals." In Studies in causes and effects are connected by physical processes Logical Theory, American Philosophical Quarterly, that are capable of transmitting certain types of proper­ Monograph 2, edited by Nicholas Rescher, 98-112. Oxford: ties (Salmon 1984, Dowe 2000). Blackwell, 1968. Strawson, Galen. The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, It often happens, however, that advances in science and David Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. force people to abandon aspects of their common sense Suppes, Patrick. A Probabilistic Theory of Causality. picture of the world. For example, Einstein's theories of Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1970. relativity have forced people to rethink their conceptions Tooley, Michael. Causation: A Realist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. of time, space, matter, and energy. What lessons does sci­ Tooley, Michael. "The Nature of Causation: A Singularist ence teach about the concept of causation? Account:' Canadian Philosophers, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Suppl. 16 (1990): 271-322. RUSSELL'S CHALLENGE Tooley, Michael. "Probability and Causation." In Cause and Chance, edited by Phil Dowe and Paul Noordhof. London In 1912, the eminent British philosopher Bertrand Rus­ and New York: Routledge, 2004. sell delivered his paper "On the Notion of Cause" before Tooley, Michael. "The Stalnaker-Lewis Approach to the Aristotelian Society. In this paper, he claimed that the Counterfactuals:' Journal of Philosophy 100 (7) (2003): notion of cause had no place in a scientific worldview: 321-327. Tooley, Michael. Time, Tense, and Causation. Oxford: Oxford All philosophers, of every school, imagine that University Press, 1997. causation is one of the fundamental axioms or Von Bretzel, Philip. "Concerning a Probabilistic Theory of postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in Causation Adequate for the Causal Theory of Time." advanced sciences such as gravitational astron­ Synthese 35 (1977): 173-190. omy, the word "cause" never appears ... To me, Von Wright, Georg Henrik. Explanation and Understanding. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971. it seems that . the reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are Michael Tooley (1996, 2005) no such things. The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philoso­ phers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like CAUSATION: PHILOSOPHY the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (p. 1) OF SCIENCE Russell was not alone in this view. Other writers of In The Critique of Pure Reason (first published in 1781), the period, such as Ernst Mach (the German physicist and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant maintained that philosopher of science), Karl Pearson (the father of mod- ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY 2nd edition • 103 CAUSATION; PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ern statistics), and Pierre Duhem (French physicist, as electric and magnetic fields, Schrodinger's equation gov­ well as historian and philosopher of science), also argued erning the evolution of quantum systems, and Einstein's that causation did not belong in the world of science. field equations relating the distribution of mass-energy in This view was shared by the logical positivists, a group of the universe with the structure of space and time-make philosophers working primarily in Austria and Germany no mention of causation. All of these principles take the between the World Wars whose ideas shaped much of form of mathematical equations and act as constraints on philosophy of science in the twentieth century. A general possible states of physical systems (under suitable mathe­ suspicion of causal notions also pervaded a number of matical characterizations). A given sequence of states may fields outside of philosophy, such as statistics and psy­ be compatible with, for example, Newton's laws of chology. motion, but nothing in those laws explicitly says that cer­ tain states (or aspects of those states) cause others. This CAUSATION IN SCIENCE suggests that the causal relation is not part of the consti­ tution of the world at the deepest metaphysical level, a Despite Russell's remark, it is simply false that the word view that the historian and philosopher of science John "cause" (and its cognates) does not appear in the Norton labels "anti-fundamentalism" (Norton 2003). advanced sciences. Russell's claim can be readily refuted Indeed, the world described by fundamental physics is in by perusing any leading science journal. Admittedly, many ways at odds with the ordinary picture of a world some uses of the word "cause" and its cognates have spe­ regimented by cause and effect relationships. cific technical meanings-such as talk of "causal struc­ ture" in connection with the general theory of relativity-but frequently enough these words are used in ASYMMETRY their ordinary English sense. To cite just one example, an People normally think of causation as both asymmetric issue of Physical Review Letters from 2003 contains an and temporally biased. It is asymmetric in the sense that if article titled "Specific-Heat Anomaly Caused by Cis a cause of E, then (always? typically?) E is not a cause Ferroelectric Nanoregions in Pb(Mg[sub 1/3]Nb[sub of C. This claim must be stated with some care. It may be, 2/3])0[sub 3] and Pb(Mg[sub 1/3]Ta[sub 2/3])0[sub 3] for instance, that anxiety is a cause of insomnia, which is Relaxors." Moreover, it has become common in physics to in turn a cause of anxiety. But it is one's anxiety on Mon­ classify a variety of phenomena as "effects": there is the day evening that causes insomnia on Monday night, "Hall effect;' the "Kondo effect;' the "Lamb-shift effect;' which in turn causes anxiety on Tuesday morning. Mon­ the "Zeeman effect," and so on. But surely "cause and day night's insomnia is not both the cause and the effect effect" are an inseparable pair: where there are causes, of one and the same episode of anxiety. Causation is tem­ there are effects that are caused by them, and where there porally biased in the sense that causes (always? typically?) are effects, there are causes that cause them. occur before their effects in time. The person on the street is more likely to encounter By contrast, the fundamental laws of physics men­ causal claims from the medical sciences, such as: "Choles­ tioned above are all time-reversal invariant. That is, if a terol in the bloodstream causes hardened arteries, which particular sequence of states of a physical system is con­ in turn causes heart attacks." While the medical sciences sistent with the laws of physics, then the temporally may not be as advanced as Russell's example of gravita­ reversed sequence is also consistent with those laws. The tional astronomy, it· is implausible to think that these laws of physics do not discriminate between the past and causal claims are the result of conceptual confusion, or the future in the way that causation does;with two possi­ are otherwise scientifically disreputable. ble exceptions. The first exception involves the statistical Despite the falsehood of its most provocative claim, laws governing the decay of certain mesons. While these however, Russell's paper does succeed in highlighting a laws exhibit a slight temporal asymmetry, the phenomena number of important and interesting problems about the in question seem too esoteric to be of much help in role of causation in science. understanding the asymmetry of causation. The second exception is the second law of thermody­ ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM namics, which states that the entropy of a closed system Although the advanced sciences have hardly eschewed can increase but never decrease. Thus a closed system talk of causation, it is true that the deepest physical prin­ whose entropy is increasing is consistent with the second ciples-such as Newton's three laws of motion, his law of law, while the temporal reverse of this system is not.
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