Reflections on the Asymmetry of Causation
Interface Focus 13: 20220081. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0081.
The most immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of the world is the Q2 Q3 asymmetry of causation. In the last fewdecades, two developments have shed new light on the asymmetry of causation: clarity in the foundations of statistical mechanics, and the development of the interventionist conception of causation. In this paper, we ask what is the status of the causal arrow, assuming a thermodynamic gradient and the interventionist account of causation? We find that there is an objective asymmetry rooted in the thermodynamic gradient that underwrites the causal asymmetry. Along a thermodynamic gradient, interventionist causal pathways—scaffolded intervention-supporting probabilistic relationships between variables—will propagate influence into the future, but not into the past. The reason is that the present macrostate of the world, in the presence of a lowentropy boundary condition, will screen off probabilistic correlations to the past. The asymmetry, however, emerges only under the macroscopic coarse-graining and that raises the question of whether the arrow is simply an artefact of the macroscopic lenses through which we see the world. The question is sharpened and an answer proposed.
Humean Disillusion
In Humean Laws for Humean Agents, edited by Christian Low, Michael Hicks and Sigried Jaag, Oxford University Press.
The great divide in the metaphysics of scientific modality is that between Humean and anti-Humean accounts. Pragmatists tend to like the anti-metaphysical character of Humeanism, but there is a tension at the heart of Humeanism. The tension is that between the Humean account of what laws and chances are and what they do. According to the Humean account, laws and chances are distributed patterns in the Humean mosaic, knowable fully only from a God’s-eye view, i.e. from the perspective of one who sees the full mosaic. But what laws and chances are supposed to do is guide action and belief for situated observers who only have very incomplete knowledge of those patterns, and for whom that knowledge is always limited to the past. Someone who knows what the laws and chances are, on a Humean account, wouldn’t need them to do what the laws and chances do. And someone that needs them to do what the laws and chance do wouldn’t know what the laws and chances are. This chapter argues that the tension can be resolved, but not without giving up the reductive ambitions of Humeanism and the metaphysical commitment to recombination at the level of local matters of particular fact.
Causation: an Overview of our Emerging Understanding
In Time and Causality across the Sciences, edited by Samantha Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press.
Causal Content and Global Laws
In The Experimental Side of Modeling, edited by Isabelle F. Peschard, and Fraassen, Bas C. van, University of Minnesota Press.
There was a time when science was thought of as wholly devoted to the investigation of the causal structure of the world. With the mathematicization of science and the triumph of Newtonian theory, causal vocabulary disappeared from the most fundamental level of physical description. It became the norm to present a fundamental theory as a set of mathematical equations describing global laws of temporal evolution. Since then philosophers of science have struggled to understand how and where causal ideas enter into the description of Nature. The most developed research programs assume that global laws of temporal evolution are the most fundamental nomic generalizations, and try to derive causal facts from these together with initial conditions. This orthodoxy has been challenged by philosophers that dispute the descriptive completeness of fundamental physics. I now think that even fundamentalists about physics should recognize causal structure as more basic than global laws. I will say why, and assess the philosophical impact of this reversal in the order of priority.
An Empiricist's Guide to Objective Modality
In Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, edited by Zanja Yudell and Matthew Slater, Oxford University Press.
How Do Causes Depend On Us? The Many Faces of Perspectivism
Synthese, 193:2.
Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways in which a class of concepts can be said to depend on facts about their users Three importantly different forms of dependence will emerge from the discussion: (1) Pragmatic dependence on us: truth conditions for x-beliefs can be given by a function f0 of more fundamental physical structures making no explicit reference to human agents. But there are any other number of functions (f2…fn) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguish role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. (2) Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context. The context supplies the value of a hidden parameter (’hidden’ in the sense that it is not explicitly represented in the surface syntax) that determines the truth of x-beliefs. (3) Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years.
On Whether the Atemporal Conception of the World is also Amodal
Analytic Philosophy, 56 (2), p. 142-157.
How to be Humean
In A Companion to David Lewis, edited by Barry Loewer and Johnathan Schaffer, Wiley Blackwell, p.188-205, 2015.
David Lewis famously said in the introduction to his second volume of Philosophical Papers that he saw a lot of his career in retrospect as being devoted to the defense of Humean Supervenience. The research program as he conceived it was to provide truth conditions for all contingent truths in terms of what he came to call the Humean mosaic. I have become increasingly confused over the years about what Humean analyses are supposed to achieve. I argue in this paper that if they are supposed to provide content-preserving reductions, they fail for one reason. If, on the other hand, they are supposed to tell us what it is in the realm of Being, according to the Humean, that our beliefs about various things – laws, chances, the value of a dollar bill, or the beauty of a sunset – refer to, they fail for different reasons. I suggest a significant shift in how the Humean research program is conceived. (These are issues that challenge assumptions about the way that content-level structure relates to structures at the level of Being built into practices in analytic metaphysics that are discussed also in “Metaphysics on the Sydney Plan”.)
Metaphysics on the Sydney Plan
In Philosophical Methodology; the Armchair or the Laboratory, edited by Mathew Haug, Routledge, p. 86-103.
The most influential self-proclaimed naturalistic approach in the contemporary philosophical literature is Metaphysics on the Canberra Plan. On the Canberra plan, questions of what the world is like are left to physics. It falls to metaphysics to say what feature of the world described by physics various classes of everyday belief represent. I will contrast this with naturalistic metaphysics on the Sydney Plan. The Sydney Plan is a style of naturalism that brings together different strands of pragmatism increasingly prevalent in the philosophical community.
The Tension in Humeanism
Unpublished.
Closed Causal Loops and the Bilking Argument
Synthese, vol 136, no. 3, p. 305-320.
