Abstract
If a specific event c can properly be called a cause of another specific event e, then c and e must be distinct events. This general principle seems agreed upon by virtually everyone who works on causation. Moreover, it seems generally agreed, or at least assumed, that ‘distinct’ is synonymous with ‘not identical’; indeed, the above principle is often put by saying that no event can be a cause of itself. Recent work1 has suggested, however, that there are various pairs of events (such as ‘Cambridge events’) which are distinct in the sense of not being identical, but which are such that they cannot be causally related. Moreover, these pairs of events appear to be counterexamples to a number of the main approaches to defining causation. In this paper I want to suggest that all of these problematic cases can be dealt with in an intuitively straight-forward and appealing way. The principle that only distinct events can be causally related needs to be understood in a much broader way than the way in which it is usually understood. Specifically, I shall argue that this principle, to be fully adequate, requires a notion of distinctness of events which is broader than the notion of nonidentity. Once this broad notion of distinctness has been outlined, it will be seen that the troublesome cases are excluded by the principle in question.
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Notes
See Jaegwon Kim, Noncausal Connections’, Noiis8 (1974), 41–52.
This approach to the analysis of causation has only recently begun to attract serious attention. Recent formulations of counterfactual analyses of causation can be found in Aardon Lyon, ‘Causality’, British Journal Philosophy of Science 18 (1967), 1–20; David Lewis, `Causation’, Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), 556–567, reprinted in Ernest Sosa (ed.), Causation and Conditionals, Oxford University Press, London, 1975, pp.180–191; and Marshall Swain, `A Counterfactual Analysis of Event Causation’, Philosophical Studies 34 (1978), 1–19. As Lewis points out in his article, there is a hint of a counterfactual analysis in David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford University Press, London, 1975, Section 7, `Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion’, pp. 60–79.
The most detailed version of Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals is in his book Counterfactuals, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1973. See also Lewis’s papers `Completeness and Decidability of Three Logics of Counterfactual Conditionals’, Theoria 37 (1971), 74–85; and `Counterfactuals and Comparative Possibility’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 2 (1973), 418–446. In addition to the works of Lewis, see Robert C. Stalnaker, `A Theory of Conditionals’, American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph Series 2 (1968), 98–112; and Robert C. Stalnaker and R. H. Thomason, ‘A Semantic Analysis of Conditional Logic’, Theoria 36 (1970) 23–42. The former paper is reprinted in Sosa, op. cit., pp. 165–179.
For some of the problems, and a competitor see John L. Pollock, `The “Possible Worlds” Analysis of Counterfactuals’, Philosophical Studies29 (1976), 469–476.
Goldman uses this term on p. 9 of his book Human Action, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1976 (first published 1970, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.). In his discussion, Goldman is concerned with rival theories of action identity. I am taking the liberty of extending his term to the problem of event identity in general (actions, after all, are events). Goldman suggests this himself in a footnote on p. 3 of his book.
Throughout this paper I use expressions such as ‘S’s turning on the light’ as descriptions of events, each of which is associated with an abbreviated name of that event, such as ‘al’; these names are used to refer to the events in the text.
See Goldman, op. cit., esp. Chap. 1. The `coarse-grained’ view has had its most powerful defense in the writings of Donald Davidson; see, for example, `Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, Journal of Philosophy 60(1963), 685–700; `The Logical Form of Action Sentences’, in N. Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1967, pp. 81–96; and `The Individuation of Events’, in N. Rescher et al. (eds.), Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1970, pp. 216-234.
For a very helpful and precise survey of theories of event-identity, and a sophisticated proposal, see Myles Brand, `Identity Conditions for Events’, American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977), 329–337. Definition (D5) is in the spirit of the one proposed by Brand, although his involves several complications, the inclusion of which do not seem necessary for my purposes in this paper.
The second of these modal claims is less clear than the first. Is it logically possible for the event a2 to have occurred without the event al occurring? Obviously, it is possible (logically) for S to have alerted the prowler in some other way. But then, would that not necessarily have been a different (i.e. a2) prowler-alerting? The answer depends upon considerations concerning event constitution that I am not prepared to provide. Fortunately, all we need is the logical possibility of al occurring without a2 to get al # a2, and I think the logical possibility is relatively uncontroversial. Similar considerations will infect many of the examples to be discussed in this paper.
This definition, as well as the definition (D7) of a causal chain, is essentially the same as the view suggested by David Lewis in ‘Causation’, op. cit., and by Swain, op. cit.
Swain, op. cit.
This is emphasized in Brand, op. cit.
This example, and several of those to follow, is suggested by Kim in ‘Causes and Counterfactuals’, Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), 570–572, as a counterexample to Lewis’s counterfactual analysis of causation.
See Goldman, op. cit., pp. 22–25.
See Peter Geach, God and the Soul, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969; and Kim, ‘Noncausal Connections’, op. cit.
See Goldman, op. cit., Chap. 2. Goldman intends his classification to apply to actions. I am taking the liberty of extending his notions to events in general, although it is not clear that each of his kinds of generation has application outside the sphere of action.
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Swain, M. (1980). Causation and Distinct Events. In: Van Inwagen, P. (eds) Time and Cause. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3528-5_9
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