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Sensitive and Insensitive Causation

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00318108-115-1-1

1558-1470

James Woodward,

Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics

Dependence and SensitivityConsider a paradigmatic causal transaction.Suzy stands in front of a fragile glass bottle with a large rock in her hand.No other possible causes of the bottle's breaking -no backup or preemptive throwers, no earthquakes and so on -are waiting in the wings.Suzy throws; the rock strikes the bottle squarely, and it shatters.The impact of the rock caused the bottle to shatter.In discussing such examples, philosophers who are sympathetic to counterfactual theories of causation have tended to focus on the counterfactual dependence of the effect on its cause.The simplest such treatment, which forms the basis for David Lewis's early (1986) account of causation, takes as its point of departure the counterfactual dependence of the occurrence of the effect on the occurrence of its cause.Thus, in the case under discussion, whether or not the shattering occurs counterfactually depends on Suzy's throw, and one might take this fact to underlie our judgment that the throw causes the shattering.More recently, Lewis (2000) has drawn our attention to other patterns of counterfactual dependence having to do with what he calls "influence" -these Earlier versions of this essay were delivered as talks at a conference on explanation in the natural and social sciences held in Ghent, Belgium, in 2002, at Stanford University, and at the 2003 Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science meetings in Oviedo, Spain.I am grateful to the audiences at these locations and especially to Johan von Benthem, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and Elliott Sober for very helpful comments and discussion.