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Causal Dependence and Multiplicity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

David H. Sanford
David H. Sanford
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

Ted Honderich's ‘Causes and If p, even if x, still q’ contains many good points I shall not discuss. My discussion is restricted to some of the points Honderich makes about causal priority in the final two sections of his paper. He considers several proposals, new and old, for accounting for causal priority before he presents a tentativeproposal of his own. He thinks that some of these proposals, besides having difficulties peculiar to themselves, share the deficiency of lacking the proper character. When we look for the difference between causal circumstances and causes, on the one hand, and their effects, on the other, he says,

We are not pursuing any difference between these things. We arepursuing a difference of a certain character. What we are after has to do with what we say: that causes and causal circumstances make their effects happen, and not the other way on, and that causes and causal circumstances explain their effects, and not the other way on.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 60 , Issue 232 , April 1985 , pp. 215 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1985

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References

1 Honderich, Ted, ‘Causes and If p,even if x, still q’, Philosophy 57, No 221 (July 1982), 314.Google Scholar

2 Ibid. 315-316.

3 Ibid. 305.

4 4 Ibid. 295.

5 Other recent accounts of causal priority also emphasize the multiplicity of causal circumstances. See Ehring, Douglas, ‘Causal Asymmetry’, Journal of Philosophy 79, No. 12 (December 1982), and Hausman, Daniel M., ‘Causal Priority’, Nous 18, No. 2 (May 1984).Google Scholar

6 Sanford, David H., ‘The Direction of Causation and the Direction of Conditionship’, Journal of Philosophy 73, No. 8 (22 April 1976).Google Scholar

7 Ibid. 205.

8 Ibid.

9 ‘Causes and if p, even if x, still q’, 312.

10 Ibid. 313. I want to thank Professor Honderich for giving me a chance to respond to this argument when he sent me an earlier version of his paper. I now think I did not make very good use of the opportunity. My response here differs considerably from the one I offered in correspondence, and I am grateful to Honderich for forcing me to sharpen my view of conditionship.

11 Gasking, Douglas, ‘Causation and Recipes’,Mind 64, No. 256 (October 1955).Google Scholar

12 Dray, William, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 168.Google Scholar

13 For further discussion of the connections between theories of causal priority and accounts of explanatory direction, see Hausman, Daniel M., ‘Causal and Explanatory Asymmetry’, PSA 1982 (Proceedings of the 1982 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association), Vol. 1.Google Scholar

14 Op. cit. 314.