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General Causation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

John W. Carroll
John W. Carroll*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

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Philosophers of science, e.g. Cartwright (1979) and Skyrms (1980), have given accounts of general causation in probabilistic terms; not surprising since we often accept general causal sentences as true despite being aware of apparent counterinstances. Consider:

(E1) Smoking is a cause of heart attacks.

We accept (E1) as true though aware of smokers who never have a heart attack. Here I quickly review familiar problems in two existing probabilistic accounts, offer a new objection, and suggest the beginnings of an alternative account.

The traditional model of general causation maintains that causes, and only causes, raise the probability of the effect That is:

(TM) F is a cause of G if and only if .

Despite some intuitive appeal, the traditional model faces at least three basic objections. First, consider cases of epiphenomena in which there are properties F, G, and H such that F is a cause of G, F is a cause of H, but G is not a cause of H and H is not a cause of G.

Type
Part X. Causation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 310 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

Footnotes

1

Thanks to John Pollock, Roy Sorensen, Mark Johnston, and David LeWine for helpful discussions on causation and probability.

References

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