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A Difference-Making Account of Causation1

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A Difference-Making Account of Causation1 A difference-making account of causation1 Wolfgang Pietsch2, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technische Universität München, Arcisstr. 21, 80333 München, Germany A difference-making account of causality is proposed that is based on a counterfactual definition, but differs from traditional counterfactual approaches to causation in a number of crucial respects: (i) it introduces a notion of causal irrelevance; (ii) it evaluates the truth-value of counterfactual statements in terms of difference-making; (iii) it renders causal statements background-dependent. On the basis of the fundamental notions ‘causal relevance’ and ‘causal irrelevance’, further causal concepts are defined including causal factors, alternative causes, and importantly inus-conditions. Problems and advantages of the proposed account are discussed. Finally, it is shown how the account can shed new light on three classic problems in epistemology, the problem of induction, the logic of analogy, and the framing of eliminative induction. 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 2 2. The difference-making account ........................................................................................................................... 3 2a. Causal relevance and causal irrelevance ....................................................................................................... 4 2b. A difference-making account of causal counterfactuals ............................................................................... 9 2c. Remarks on the asymmetry of causation .................................................................................................... 14 3. A causal calculus ............................................................................................................................................... 16 3a. Causal factors and alternative causes.......................................................................................................... 16 3b. Effect factors and alternative effects .......................................................................................................... 20 3c. Causal hierarchies and transitivity .............................................................................................................. 21 3d. Functional dependencies ............................................................................................................................ 27 4. Objections and criticism .................................................................................................................................... 29 4a. Objections to Mill’s method of difference .................................................................................................. 29 4b. Objections against counterfactual accounts ................................................................................................ 30 4c. Mechanisms and interventions ................................................................................................................... 32 4d. Objections specific to the difference-making account ................................................................................ 35 5. A fresh look on old problems in epistemology ................................................................................................. 38 5a. Mill’s methods revisited ............................................................................................................................. 38 5b. Hume’s problem of induction ..................................................................................................................... 40 5c. The new riddle of induction ........................................................................................................................ 43 5d. The logic of analogy ................................................................................................................................... 46 6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................ 49 Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................................. 49 References ............................................................................................................................................................. 49 1 Draft, I am grateful for comments and criticism. 2 [email protected] 1. Introduction It is a stunning fact about scientific methodology that some of the most fundamental concepts seem also the least understood and the most controversial. Causation is a case in point. At times, it has been strongly criticized, both in philosophy and in the sciences. For example, Bertrand Russell notoriously proclaimed: “The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” (Russell, 1913, p. 1) Karl Pearson, one of the founders of modern statistics, concurred: “Beyond such discarded fundamentals as ‘matter’ and ‘force’ lies still another fetish amidst the inscrutable arcana of modern science, namely, the category of cause and effect.” (Pearson, 1911, p. iv) By contrast, other not less prominent figures have argued for the exact opposite of such views, for example David Hume: “these [Resemblance, Contiguity, and Causation] are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them.” (cited in Mackie 1980, p. v; my italics) At least in part, the controversy results from the continuing lack of an adequate conceptual analysis of causation. It seems fair to say that all major philosophical accounts suffer from serious shortcomings. Naïve regularity approaches cannot ground the distinction between correlation and causation, contemporary counterfactual accounts rely on the dubious idea of similarity between possible worlds, manipulability and interventionist accounts are implausible when working with observational data, and mechanistic or process theories have failed to convincingly explicate the notion of a causal mechanism such that cases like causation by omission can be covered. In a way it seems that all the essential elements are on the table, but thus far a coherent picture has not been arranged from these pieces of the conceptual puzzle. In the present essay, I will suggest a somewhat novel difference-making account that is chiefly based on the counterfactual idea, but exhibits some crucial differences with respect to other approaches in that tradition. In Section 2, the basic ingredients of the difference-making account are introduced. First, counterfactual definitions for the fundamental notions of causal relevance and causal irrelevance are given. Then a difference-making account of counterfactuals is proposed, according to which the truth or falsity of a counterfactual statement can be determined by showing that it belongs to a class of statements with the same truth-value, of which at least one is realized in the actual world. The main advantage of this account with respect to other prominent approaches—in particular the semantic approach based on possible worlds due to Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis and the metalinguistic view due chiefly to Nelson Goodman—is that less vagueness enters into the evaluation of counterfactuals, thereby rendering causation more objective. In its deflationist spirit, the difference-making account of causation, as outlined in this essay, is quite similar to Federica Russo’s ‘invariance across changes’ account (2014), which tries to extend basic interventionist ideas to situations where manipulations play no obvious role. The proposed account also bears considerable resemblance to sophisticated regularity theories like those of Mill (1886), Mackie (1980), or Baumgartner and Graßhoff (2004). With all of them, it shares the focus on eliminative induction and like Mackie, it emphasizes the importance of background dependence and of counterfactual reasoning. At the end of the section, causal ordering and the direction of causation are briefly discussed. In Section 3, further causal concepts, in particular causal factors and alternative causes, are defined on the basis of the two fundamental notions, i.e. causal relevance and causal irrelevance. A link to the inus-logic of causal conditions is established. It is also shown that the difference-making approach can account for some crucial features of the pragmatics of causation, most importantly that causal relations can be formulated at various levels of coarse- graining and that they fulfill some basic intuitions about transitivity. Finally, I discuss how functional relationships can be grounded in the logic of relevant and irrelevant conditions, mitigating one of the classic objections against inus-accounts of causation that these can allegedly only deal with discrete relationships concerning the absence and presence of factors. In Section 4, a number of conceivable objections are rehearsed. Also, the role of mechanisms and interventions for the difference-making account is briefly addressed. In summary, I argue that the proposed account manages fairly well to establish an objective approach
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