It is now common to hold that causes do not always (and perhaps never) determine their effects, and indeed theories of "probabilistic causation" abound. The basic idea of these theories is that C causes E just in case C and E both occur, and the chance of E would have been lower than it is had C not occurred. The problems with these accounts are that (i) the notion of chance remains primitive, and (ii) this account of causation does not coincide with the intuitive notion of causation as ontological support. Turning things around, I offer an analysis of chance in terms of causation, called the causal theory of chance. The chance of an event E is the degree to which it is determined by its causes. Thus chance events have full causal pedigrees, just like determined events; they are not "events from nowhere". I hold that, for stochastic as well as for deterministic processes, the actual history of a system is caused by its dynamical properties (represented by the lagrangian) and the boundary condition. A system is stochastic if (a description of) the actual history is not fully determined by maximal knowledge of these causes, i.e. it is not logically entailed by them. If chance involves partial determination, and determination is logical entailment, then there must be such a thing as partial entailment, or logical probability. To make the notion of logical probability plausible, in the face of current opposition to it, I offer a new account of logical probability which meets objections levelled at the previous accounts of Keynes and Carnap. The causal theory of chance, unlike its competitors, satisfies all of the following criteria: (i) Chance is defined for single events. (ii) Chance supervenes on the physical properties of the system in question. (iii) Chance is a probability function, i.e. a normalised measure. (iv) Knowledge of the chance of an event warrants a numerically equal degree of belief, i.e. Miller's Principle can be derived within the theory. (v) Chance is empirically accessible, within any given range of error, by measuring relative frequencies. (vi) With an additional assumption, the theory entails Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle (CCP). (vii) The theory enables us to make sense of probabilities in quantum mechanics. The assumption used to prove the CCP is that the state of a system represents complete information, so that the state of a composite system "factorises" into a logical conjunction of states for the sub-systems. To make sense of quantum mechanics, particularly the EPR experiment, we drop this assumption. In this case, the EPR criterion of reality is false. It states that if an event E is predictable, and locally caused, then it is locally predictable. This fails when maximal information about a pair of systems does not factorise, leading to a non-locality of knowledge. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

The dissertation offers a dispositional theory of causation. When a stone is thrown at a vase causing it to shatter, the stone acts as stimulus to the vase’s fragility. The analysis developed from this basic identity of cause and stimulus is defended against counterexamples and problem cases from the causation literature. Grounding causation in what is immanent in interacting objects is shown to yield a more satisfactory theory of causation than prevalent deflationary accounts that appeal to possible worlds, pattern-conformation, or statistical regularities. Most recent work on causation focuses exclusively on physics and metaphysics; the dissertation explores the ramifications for ethics following from a dispositional theory of causation. Consider so-called “causation by omission”: the vase, teetering on a shelf, falls to the ground and shatters; you could have caught it, but you didn’t. Was it your failure to catch the vase that caused it to shatter? The dispositional theory identifies the impact, and not your omission to catch it, as the cause or stimulus. Regardless of whether one’s act is the cause of the breakage, one may still be held responsible for failing to act in a given away. Why is this so and what does it tell us about causation?

Natural science tells us that the world is fundamentally physical - everything is ultimately constituted by physical properties and governed by physical laws. How do we square this picture of the world with the apparent fact that there are genuine causal relations at levels that aren’t described by physics? The problem of mental causation is at the heart of this issue. There are probably two reasons for this. Firstly, if there are any non-physical properties at all, surely mental properties are among them. And secondly, the reality of mental causation is arguably more important to us than the reality of any other kind of causation. Without it, it would be hard for us to make sense of ourselves as agents with free will and moral responsibility. The main purpose of this thesis is to defend a view that accepts a scientific worldview and still allows for mental properties to exist, be non-physical, and be genuine causes of actions and behaviour. Some philosophers are pessimistic that all these goals can be achieved. They think that the only way for mental properties to fit into the causal structure of the world is if these mental properties are really physical properties. I do not find the argument for this view compelling. As I will show, it relies on an implausibly strong constraint on causes that must be amended. Once amended, a new position emerges, the so-called Subset view, which is actually motivated by the very premises that initially pushed us towards a reductive view of mental properties.

The commonsense practice of explaining and predicting behavior by reference to propositional attitude states such as beliefs and desires has recently come under attack. It is said that such belief/desire psychology is a folk theory, vulnerable to being shown false, and replaceable by a neuroscientific or computational theory. I argue herein that this eliminativist attack on commonsense propositional attitude psychology (CPA psychology) is poorly motivated, and I present positive arguments to the effect that CPA psychology constitutes an independently legitimate descriptive and explanatory practice or theory. I argue that even if CPA psychology and its embedded propositional attitude notions should prove irreducible to anything stateable in the language of physical or computational theory, this is not by itself any reason for thinking that CPA psychology is illegitimate or ought to be eliminated. In addition to arguing against eliminativism, I explicate and evaluate two non-reductionist alternatives to eliminativism: the "intentional stance" theory of Daniel C. Dennett, and the property dualism of Donald Davidson and Stephen Schiffer. I argue that the latter gives a better account than the former of how propositional attitude states can enter into true causal explanations of action. Taking mental properties to supervene upon physically-realized computational properties of organisms, I argue, secures a non-superfluous explanatory role for mental properties. One problem for such a supervenience thesis is the "wide" individuation of propositional content properties. I discuss this problem and conclude that it presents no insurmountable obstacle to taking content to play a role in causal explanation. The upshot of the dissertation is that propositional attitudes as explanatory notions can neither be reduced nor eliminated; we must count propositional attitude states as legitimate explanatory constructs despite the "open texture" of propositional attitude properties. I close the dissertation with a discussion of Hilary Putnam's arguments for conclusions remarkably similar to my own.

It is argued that an analysis of causation using counterfactual conditionals can be given. Causes and effects are considered to be propositional entities, and a semantics for counterfactuals employing possible worlds is presupposed. The analysis stems from an attempt to handle cases proving problematic for other counterfactual analyses. Preempted causes, which would have been causes had they not been preempted by causes, are distinguished from causes by requiring that a causal chain connecting cause and effect exist. The condition is strengthened to require that the causal chain still would have existed even had the preempted causes been false. Causal chains are analyzed as sequences of true propositions satisfying two conditions: any member after the first would not have been true had its immediate predecessor alone been false, and the truth of any member of the sequence is sufficient for the truth of any subsequent member. The analysis is weakened slightly to permit many causes to overdetermine an effect. The analysis is then amended to exclude certain noncausal connections. Though it is true that had Socrates not died, Xanthippe would not have become a widow, his dying did not cause her to become a widow. To yield this result, an analysis is offered of the relation that logically simple propositions bear to the more complex propositions that they make true. It is then proposed that the sets of simple propositions making the cause and effect true not entail the effect and the cause, respectively. Finally, an attempt is made to distinguish between cause and effect. It is argued that cases of backward causation are possible, and thus no analysis should require causes to be temporally prior to effects. It is proposed that only when there is symmetry with respect to the subjunctive conditions of the analysis should temporal considerations be employed to discriminate cause and effect.

Abstract not available

Ever since Hempel and Oppenheim's development of the Deductive Nomological model of scientific explanation in 1948, a great deal of philosophical energy has been dedicated to constructing a viable model of explanation that concurs both with our intuitions and with the general project of science. Here I critically examine the developments in this field of study over the last half century, and conclude that Humphreys' aleatory model is superior to its competitors. There are, however, some problems with Humphreys' account of the relative quality of an explanation, so in the end I develop and defend a modified version of the aleatory account.

Univ., Diss.--Poitiers, 2005.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Jaegwon Kim. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-166).