ADV MODERN PHILOSOPHY
CAUSATION: VSI Chs 7, 8, AND 9
STUDY GUIDE
PROFESSOR JULIE YOO
Chapter 7: Pluralism About Causation
Perhaps causation is not just a single relation. Just as the term, ‘part of” can designate a number
of different relations – a constituent of a spatially extended whole, or a subset of a larger set, or a
premise of an argument, or a note in a musical compositions – maybe ‘causation’ refers to a
bunch of different kinds of relations and not just a single type of relation.
1. How can Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘family resemblance’ be applied to expressed pluralism
about causation?
2. How does the notion of a family resemblance go against the notion of a traditional analysis in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions? (See the Philosopher’s Toolkit Section 2.)
3. What is Ned Hall’s pluralism about causation? And which theories of causation does his
pluralism appear to invoke?
4. Aristotle famously proposed four different types of causes. Do you think they are in fact
descriptions of different types of causes or do you think they are better classified as different
types of explanation? Defend your view.
5. The pluralist view faces the problem of imposters (or fake causal relations). To deal with
this problem M&A propose a certain unifying feature.
a. What is that feature?
b. Should it or should this feature not be identified with causation itself?
6. What is the Inferentialist view about causation?
a. How does Inferentialism escape the dilemma for pluralism?1
b. How does Interentialism face a new and different dilemma in escaping the dilemma
for pluralism?
1
A philosophical dilemma is where a position faces one of two possibilities, neither of which are good outcomes,
making the original position weak or implausible.
Chapter 8: Primitivism About Causation
1. What does a Primitivist view of causation amount to?
a. How is a philosophical analysis different from giving a mere dictionary
definition?
b. How is a philosophical analysis reductive?
c. Name another thing that looks “primitive” in the sense intended here (think about
what a successful definition of the taste of chocolate might look like).
d. If you are you saying about the feasibility of a philosophical analysis of causation
if you are a Primitivist?
2. Specify the three main prior analyses of causation:
a. Hume’s Regularity Theory
b. Lewis’s Counterfactual Theory
c. The Process/Energy Transfer Theory
d. Hall’s Pluralist Theory
3. What is a consideration that favors Primitivism about causation?
4. If you are an Empiricist, you believe that all of your ideas about the world come through your
senses. The most direct sensory experiences are indefinable (like the smell of pineapple, the
visual experience of red). As an Empiricist, one might try to defend the indefinability
(Primitivism) about causation by saying that we experience it directly via the experience of
one’s agency.
a. Give illustrations (not necessarily definitions) of this experience.
b. How does Hume deny that causation is primitive, even though he is an
Empiricist?
Chapter 9: Dispositionalism, Causal Powers, and the Retreat to Pre-Humeanism
1. One can be a Primitivist about causation and still say something about it that helps to
distinguish it from other things and relations. One such Primitivist view is Dispositionalism
(or the Causal Power theory of causation). (Read the SEP entry on Dispositions; it is on the
moodle site.) Why can’t Dispositionalism provide a reductive analysis of causation?
2. Fragility, elasticity, solubility, malleability, and electrical conductivity are all tendencies
toward an outcome, given the right starting conditions (fragility = the tendency to break if it
is struck with sufficient force). These are dispositions. Explain the difference between a
dispositional property and a categorical property.
3. Why might dispositions be anathema to Empiricists? (This is a hard question.)
4. How do M&A argue for the idea that a Dispositionalist view of causation is a midpoint
between the two Humean extremes of necessity (there is ALWAYS a connection between
A’s and B’s) and contingency (there is no connection between A’s and Bs)?
5. How does a Dispositionalist account for how effects get manifest?
6. What is a problem for Dispositionalism?