ABSTRACT: According to a traditional account, understanding why X occurred is equivalent to knowing that X was caused by Y. This paper defends the account against a major objection, viz., knowing-that is not sufficient for understanding-why, for understanding-why requires a kind of grasp while knowledge-that does not. I discuss two accounts of grasp in recent literature and argue that if either is true, then knowing that X was caused by Y entails at least a rudimentary understanding of why X (...) occurred. If my defense is successful, it would cast doubt on an influential account of the epistemic value of understanding. (shrink)

A theory of necessary and sufficient conditions is presented, as well as a theory of necessary and sufficient causes and effects, viewed as a particular case of the former. Ambiguities of the terms 'condition' and 'necessary condition' are explored, and a neutral meaning for 'condition' is favoured. The relation between necessary and sufficient conditions and implicative conditionals (including counterfactuals) is also discussed. Two problems of counterfactual theories of causal explanation are indicated, concerning (i) how to account for (...) causes that are not necessary and (ii) how to interpret the counterfactual from the negation of the effect to the negation of the cause. Application of the theory of necessary and sufficient conditions to Euler’s explanation of the Königsberg bridge problem is discussed. The theory of necessary and sufficient causes and effects is then applied to the flagpole shadow explanation and to two biological explanations, one involving a sufficient but not necessary cause and the other a necessary but not sufficient cause. Causes that are neither sufficient nor necessary are also recognized. Finally, a probabilistic approach to causes that are either not sufficient or not necessary is explored, including its application to examples of such cases. (shrink)

In an important departure from theories of causation, David Owens proposes that coincidences have no causes, and that a cause is something which ensures that its effects are no coincidence. In Causes and Coincidences, he elucidates the idea of a coincidence as an event which can be analysed into constituent events, the nomological antecedents of which are independent of each other. He also suggests that causal facts can be analysed in terms of non-causal facts, including relations of necessity. Thus, (...) causation is defined in terms of coincidence, and coincidence without reference to causation. David Owens challenges the ideas associated with Hume, Davidson and Lewis, constructing a theory which distinguishes nomological necessity and sufficiency from their logical counterparts. He is able to offer novel solutions to the major problems of causation, including the direction of causation, the logical form of causal statements, the distinction betwen causal connections and logical connections, and the relationship between psychological and physical causation. (shrink)

Claims that necessary and sufficient conditions are not converse relations are discussed, as well as the related claim that If A, then B is not equivalent to A only if B . The analysis of alleged counterexamples has shown, among other things, how necessary and sufficient conditions should be understood, especially in the case of causal conditions, and the importance of distinguishing sufficient-cause conditionals from necessary-cause conditionals. It is concluded that necessary and sufficient conditions, (...) adequately interpreted, are converse relations in all cases. (shrink)

There is what might be called a ‘majority position’ in the history of Western philosophy according to which causes are sufficient for or ‘necessitate’ their effects. However, there is also a singificant ‘minority position’ according to which causes are necessary relative to their effects. The second/third century A.D. Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias is an ancient representative of the minority position. He attributes his own view — with some justification, I shall suggest – to Aristotle. This paper has two, somewhat (...) loosely connected purposes. The first is to explore the origin of the conception of ‘causes’ as necessary conditions in Aristotle, particularly in On Generation and Corruption 2.11 and Posterior Analytics 2.12, and the development and use of the conception in Alexander's De fato. The second purpose of the paper is to explore and criticize a sophisticated contemporary version of the conception of causes as ‘necessary in the circumstances,’ that of J.L. Mackie. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the causation of diseases, particularly on the idea of a “genetic cause” taking Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) as an example. We (1) provide some historical information and a synopsis of the current knowledge on the etiology and pathogenesis of AD, (2) analyse some conceptual problems related to the notion of “genetic disease” (3) elaborate on the alleged (genetic) cause of AD, and (4) place the discussion on the cause of AD in a broader philosophical (...) context, paying attention to a constructivist perspective, the notions of causal connection and causal selection, and to some practical and normative consequences of our analysis. We conclude (a) that AD is not a specific disease entity with one specific cause, (b) that the idea of a single (sufficient) cause can still function as a heuristic tool in AD research and practice, and (c) that a “belief” in causation can go together with the notions of multicausality and probability. (shrink)

If one investigates a process that has several causes but assumes that it has only one cause, one risks ruling out important causal factors. Three mechanisms account for this mistake: either the significance of the single cause under test is masked by noise contributed by the unsuspected and uncontrolled factors, or the process appears only when two or more causes interact, or the process appears when there are present any of a number of sufficient causes which are (...) not mutally exclusive. In ecology and evolutionary biology, experiments usually test single factor hypotheses, and many scientists apparently believe that hypotheses incorporating several factors are so much more difficult to test that to do so would not be practical. We discuss several areas in ecology and evolutionary biology in which the presupposition of simple causation has apparently impeded progress. We also examine a more mature field, the study of atherosclerosis, in which single factor studies did significantly delay progress towards understanding what now appears to be a multifactor process. The problem has three solutions: either factorial experiments, dynamic models that make quantitative predictions, response-surface methods, or all three. In choosing a definition for ‘cause’, we make a presupposition that profoundly influences subsequent observations and experimental designs. Alternative definitions of causation should be considered as contributing to potential cures for research problems. (shrink)

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause. This simple demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility yields some of the boldest and most challenging theses in the history of metaphysics and epistemology. In this entry we begin with explaining the Principle, and then turn to the history of the debates around it. A section on recent discussions of the Principle will be added in the near future.

The principle of the common cause claims that if an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause. This is generally taken to mean that positive correlations between non-causally related events should disappear when conditioning on the action of some underlying common cause. The extended interpretation of the principle, by contrast, urges that common causes should be called for in order to explain positive deviations between the estimated correlation of two events and the expected value (...) of their correlation. The aim of this paper is to provide the extended reading of the principle with a general probabilistic model, capturing the simultaneous action of a system of multiple common causes. To this end, two distinct models are elaborated, and the necessary and sufficient conditions for their existence are determined. (shrink)

Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are (...) due to Halpern & Pearl. Yet all of them ignore Pearl’s first strategy, and the second strategy taken by itself is unable to deliver a consensus. This paper offers a way out by going back to the first strategy: it offers six formal definitions of causal sufficiency and two interpretations of necessity. Combining the two gives twelve new definitions of actual causation. Several interesting results about these definitions and their relation to the various Halpern & Pearl definitions are presented. Afterwards the second strategy is evaluated as well. In order to maximize neutrality, the paper relies mostly on the examples and intuitions of Halpern & Pearl. One definition comes out as being superior to all others, and is therefore suggested as a new definition of actual causation. (shrink)

The goal of research in social epidemiology is not simply conceptual clarification or theoretical understanding, but more importantly it is to contribute to, and enhance the health of populations (and so, too, the people who constitute those populations). Undoubtedly, understanding how various individual risk factors such as smoking and obesity affect the health of people does contribute to this goal. However, what is distinctive of much on-going work in social epidemiology is the view that analyses making use of individual-level variables (...) is not enough. In the spirit of Durkheim and Weber, S. Leonard Syme makes this point by writing that just “as bad water and food may be harmful to our health, unhealthful forces in our society may be detrimental to our capacity to make choices and to form opinions” conducive to health and well-being. Advocates of upstream (distal) causes of adverse health outcomes propose to identify the most important of these “unhealthful forces” as the fundamental causes of adverse health outcomes. However, without a clear, theoretically precise and well-grounded understanding of the characteristics of fundamental causes, there is little hope in applying the statistical tools of the health sciences to hypotheses about fundamental causes, their outcomes, and policies intended to enhance the health of populations. This paper begins the process of characterizing the social epidemiological concept of fundamental cause in a theoretically respectable and robust way. (shrink)

The paper defends a version of the view that agency is a causal power, the “causing view.” After sketching the view, and explaining how it differs from its rivals, various challenges are assessed. A family of objections says that causing change is neither necessary nor sufficient for acting. The second challenge centers on an Aristotelian thesis about the relation between an action (A's opening a window) and the corresponding passion (the window's being opened by A). The final objection concerns (...) the dynamic nature of acting: the claim is that a causal view of agency cannot accommodate actions “in progress” or mere activity. I conclude that none of the objections examined presents unsurmountable problems for the causal view of agency which, at least in the version here defended, remains a highly plausible and attractive view. (shrink)

Part–whole causation (PWC) is the thesis that some causes are part of their effects. PWC has been objected to because of its incompatibility with the criterion that causes not be spatially included within their effects and the criterion that causes and effects are ontologically distinct in some sense. This paper serves to undermine the sufficiency of these ways of objecting to PWC by showing that for each criterion either cause-effect relationships need not satisfy it or part–whole relationships can. A (...) case-study of the collapse of Bridge 9340 is employed to facilitate the discussion. (shrink)

It is often natural to compare two events by describing one as ‘more of a cause’ of some effect than the other. But what do such comparisons amount to, exactly? This paper aims to provide a guided tour of the recent literature on ‘degrees of causation’. Section 2 looks at what I call ‘dependence measures’, which arise from thinking of causes as difference‐makers. Section 3 looks at what I call ‘production measures’, which arise from thinking of causes as jointly (...) sufficient for their effects. Finally, section 4 examines the important question of whether there is any sense in which an agent is more responsible for an outcome in virtue of her action being more of a cause of it. I describe a puzzle that emerges from this question, and explore various strategies for resolving it. (shrink)

Mele's study of philosophical and psychological theories of self-deception informatively links the conceptual and dynamic aspects of self-deception and explicates it without positing mutually inconsistent beliefs, such as those occurring in two-person deception. It is argued, however, that he does not do full justice to the dissociation characteristic of self-deception and does not sufficiently distinguish self-deception from self-caused deception.

Corrupt behavior presents major challenges for organizations in a wide range of settings. This article embraces a complexity theoretical perspective to elucidate the causal patterns of factors underlying consumers’ unethical judgments. This study examines how causal conditions of four distinct domains combine into configurational causes of unethical judgments of two frequent forms of corrupt consumer behavior: shoplifting and fare dodging. The findings of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analyses indicate alternative, consistently sufficient “recipes” for the outcomes of interest. This study extends (...) prior work on the topic by offering new insights into the interplay and the interconnected structures of multiple causal factors and by describing configurational causes of consumers’ ethical evaluations of corrupt behaviors. This knowledge may support practitioners and policy makers to develop education and control approaches to thwart corrupt consumer behaviors. (shrink)

Causal overdetermination, the existence of more than one sufficient cause for an effect, is standardly regarded as unacceptable among philosophers of mental causation. Philosophers of mind, both proponents of causal exclusion arguments and defenders of non-reductive physicalism, seem generally displeased with the idea of mental causes merely overdetermining their already physically determined effects. However, as I point out below, overdetermination is widespread in the broadly physical domain. Many of these cases are due to what I call the preservation (...) of causal sufficiency. We need therefore to be precise about what unacceptable overdetermination amounts to in order to evaluate the prospects for a non-reductive account of mental causation. I argue that in order to have a good understanding of unacceptable overdetermination we should appeal to the notion of a minimal sufficient cause. In brief, a sufficient cause is minimal if it is sufficient to bring about the effect, but not more than sufficient. One way a cause could be more than sufficient for an effect is if its existence necessitates the existence of another (simultaneous) cause that is also sufficient for the same effect. In the second half of the paper I use this revised understanding of unacceptable causal overdetermination to show that the validity of the causal exclusion argument depends on strong readings of the principle of the causal self-sufficiency of physics. These strong readings can reasonably be questioned by a believer in non-reductive accounts of mental causation. This puts the burden of argument back on the causal exclusionist. (shrink)

Research on human causal induction has shown that people have general prior assumptions about causal strength and about how causes interact with the background. We propose that these prior assumptions about the parameters of causal systems do not only manifest themselves in estimations of causal strength or the selection of causes but also when deciding between alternative causal structures. In three experiments, we requested subjects to choose which of two observable variables was the cause and which the effect. We (...) found strong evidence that learners have interindividually variable but intraindividually stable priors about causal parameters that express a preference for causal determinism. These priors predict which structure subjects preferentially select. The priors can be manipulated experimentally and appear to be domain-general. Heuristic strategies of structure induction are suggested that can be viewed as simplified implementations of the priors. (shrink)

Many recent gene knockout experiments cause anatomical changes to the jaw region of mice that several investigators claim are evolutionary reversals. Here we evaluate these mutant phenotypes and the assertions of atavism. We argue that following the knockout of Hoxa-2, Dlx-2, MHox, Otx2, and RAR genes, ectopic cartilages arise as secondary consequences of disruptions in normal processes of cell specification, migration, or differentiation. These disruptions cause an excess of mesenchyme to accumulate in a region through which skeletal progenitor (...) cells usually migrate, and at a site of condensation that is normally present in mammals but that is too small to chondrify. We find little evidence that these genes, when disrupted, cause a reversion to any primitive condition and although changes in their expression may have played a role in the evolution of the mammalian jaw, their function during morphogenesis is not sufficiently understood to confirm such hypotheses. BioEssays 20:245–255, 1998.© 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In order to motivate the thesis that there is no single concept of causation that can do justice to all of our core intuitions concerning that concept, Ned Hall has argued that there is a conflict between a counterfactual criterion of causation and the condition of causal locality. In this paper I critically examine Hall's argument within the context of a more general discussion of the role of locality constraints in a causal conception of the world. I present two strategies (...) that defenders of counterfactual accounts of causation can pursue to respond to Hall's challenge—including the adoption of a counterfactual condition that is sufficient for causal action-at-a-distance in place of Hall's ‘process’ condition—and conclude that Hall's argument against counterfactual accounts of causation is unsuccessful. (shrink)

This article examines some aspects of the natural philosophy of Juan Gallego de la Serna, royal physician to the Spanish kings Philip III and Philip IV. In his account of animal generation, Gallego criticizes widely accepted views: (1) the view that animal seeds are animated, and (2) the alternative view that animal seeds, even if not animated, possess active potencies sufficient for the development of animal souls. According to his view, animal seeds are purely material beings. This, of course, (...) raises the question of how living beings can arise from inanimate matter. Gallego is aware that two other thinkers who understood animal seeds as purely material beings, Duns Scotus and the Louvain-based physician Thomas Feyens, did not solve this problem. Gallego’s solution makes use of the notion of incomplete entities developed by the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez. While Suarez applies this notion to soul and body in order to explain why souls have a natural tendency towards organic bodies and organic bodies have a natural tendency towards souls, Gallego applies this notion to the natural tendency of animal seeds towards each other and towards further substances in their respective environment. In his view, this natural tendency of animal seeds to incorporate further substances explains that origin of material structures complex enough to constitute an animal soul. (shrink)

This article argues that, under likely empirical conditions, sufficientarianism leads not to an easily achievable duty to maintain a social minimum but to the onerous duty of maintaining a social maximum at the sufficiency level. This happens because sufficientarians ask us to give no weight at all to small benefits for people above the sufficiency level if the alternative is to relieve the suffering of people below it. If we apply this judgment in a world where there are rare diseases (...) and hard-to-prevent accidents that cause people to fall below the sufficiency threshold, all of our discretionary spending will have to be devoted to bringing harder and harder cases up to sufficiency. Nothing will be left for anyone to consume above the sufficiency level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Causa sive ratio. La raison de la cause, de Suarez à LeibnizSteven NadlerVincent Carraud. Causa sive ratio. La raison de la cause, de Suarez à Leibniz. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Pp. 573. € 42,00.Over the last two decades, there has been a good deal of outstanding work on the problem of causation in early modern philosophy. Some of it has been devoted to first-order (...) questions: for example, on whether this or that thinker allows for real causal activity among finite substances (and which ones). Other studies, by contrast, have focused on second-order questions, especially the proper formulation of the causal principle itself. Vincent Carraud's book is primarily concerned with second-order questions, although it does have something to say with respect to first-order questions as well. But the depth and breadth of this study makes it much more than just another entry in the ongoing discussion over who thought what about causality among the early moderns. Carraud has a large and complex story to tell: the development of the principle of sufficient reason in the seventeenth century. In particular, he wants to know which philosophers can truly be said to have adopted that principle in its most rigorous formulation. It is both a philosophical and a historical story, and it appears in what is surely one of the most important and interesting books in early modern philosophy in recent years.Carraud directs our attention to a particular phrase that originates with Descartes but then seems to reappear (in various forms) throughout the period: causa sive ratio, "cause or reason." Every term in the phrase is subject to interpretation, of course—'cause,' 'reason' and especially 'or'—and the thesis it embodies (and a philosopher's attitude toward it) is a function of how those terms are to be understood. Carraud's interest is in what this phrase can tell us about how a select group of philosophers (primarily Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz) regard the relationship between causality and intelligibility.The story begins with Suarez, the late sixteenth-century Scholastic. Suarez's contribution to the rise of the principle of sufficient reason is modest but crucial. He privileges efficient causation over all of the other Aristotelian varieties. While he still grants some explanatory role for formal, material and final causes, they have lost their status as "true" causes for Suarez; in fact, they qualify as causes only by analogy with efficient causation. As Carraud reads Suarez, the ratio causae belongs properly only to the efficient cause, since it alone can provide the reason for the existence and being of a thing.It is Descartes, however, who occupies the central role—both historically and philosophically—in Carraud's story. For it is he who truly effects the ultimate reduction (or, as Carraud puts it, unicité) of causality. In the Cartesian scheme, all but efficient causes are banished. Moreover, the efficient cause of an effect is now defined as the sufficient cause, one that explains why the effect is as it is. "La primauté et l'absoluité de la cause lui viennent de ce qu'elle rend raison de l'effet... Les causes sont d'abord les raisons (suffisantes) des effets, en quoi elles les expliquent" (199-200). Moreover, with Descartes we find a universal application of the principle of causality to all things, even to those that previously either were not regarded as sufficiently real to need a cause (the objective reality of ideas) or were regarded as standing outside the domain of causality altogether (God). It is not that God is a caused being for Descartes. Rather, the important thing is that God is, like all existing things, subject to the causal question. That is, it is legitimate to ask why God does not need a cause. And, in Carraud's account, this is where ratio comes in to its own. God is not a caused being, but there is a reason (in God's immense power) why God does not require a cause. Moreover, the only analogy we have for thinking of the way in which God's immensity forestalls God needing a cause is in terms of efficient causality itself... (shrink)

When in classical formal logic the notions of deduction, valid inference and logical consequence are defined, causal language plays no role. The founder of western logic, Aristotle, identified ‘non-cause’, or ‘positing as cause what is not a cause’, as a logical fallacy. I argue that a systematic re-examination of Aristotle's analysis of NCF, and the related language of logical causality, in the Sophistical Refutations, Topics, Analytics and Rhetoric, helps us to understand his conception of. It reveals that (...) Aristotle's syllogismhood is non-monotonic, and thus narrower than classical validity as consisting in, or coextensive with, necessary truth-preservation. It also supports the conclusion that a syllogism is a form of relevant consequence: the premisses must be causes of the conclusion in the sense that they are not only sufficient but also necessary for the conclusion to follow. Close analysis of NCF also suggests that syllogistic relevance is not a semantic matter, but a syntactic.. (shrink)

In combination with post-selection, weak measurements can lead to surprising results known as anomalous weak values. These lie outside the bounds of the spectrum of the relevant observable, as in the canonical example of measuring the spin of an electron (along some axis) to be 100. We argue that the disturbance caused by the weak measurement, while small, is sufficient to significantly affect the measurement result, and that this is the most reasonable explanation of anomalous weak values.

In the context of linear causal systems, ‘How to Get Causes from Probabilities’ shows that given correct background information about other causal facts, certain probabilistic relations are both necessary and sufficient for the truth of new causal facts. This is done by showing how simple structural models from econometrics can be read causally if the conditions for identification of the model are met, and a generalized version of Reichenbach's principle of the common cause is assumed.

If determinism is correct, then all that men do is in principle predictable. Further, all that they do is predictable in a certain way, namely on the basis of the causes of their actions, where those causes are sufficient for their actions. That is, according to determinism, the antecedents of human actions, their causes, are such that, given a knowledge of those antecedents, the actions that are their effects can be predicted with certainty because they cannot but occur.

This paper offers two related things. First, a theory of singular causal statements attributing causal responsibility for a particular harm to a particular agent based on the conjunction of a positive condition (necessitation) and a negative condition (avoidability) which captures the notions of sufficiency and necessity in intuitive ideas about agent causation better than traditional conditio sine qua non based theories. Second, a theory of representation of causal issues in the law. The conceptual framework is that of Game Trees and (...) Games in Extensive Form. Causal conditions are defined set-theoretically over Game Trees; causal issues and fundamental distinctions (dependent versus independent intervening causes, foreseeability or not of harm etc.) arising in legal cases are accommodated by the device of a probability distribution over the game-tree representation of cases. (shrink)

Are nonconscious processes sufficient to cause false memories of a nonstudied event? To investigate this issue, we controlled and measured conscious processing in the DRM task, in which studying associates causes false memories of nonstudied associates . During the study phase, subjects studied visually masked associates at extremely rapid rates, followed by immediate recall. After this initial phase, nonstudied test words were rapidly presented for perceptual identification, followed by recognition memory judgments. On the perceptual identification task, we found (...) significant priming of nonstudied associates, relative to control words. We also found significant false recognition of these nonstudied associates, even when subjects did not recall this word at study or identify it at test, indicating that nonconscious processes can cause false recognition. These recognition effects were found immediately after studying each list of associates, but not on a delayed test that occurred after the presentation of several intervening lists. Nonconscious processes are sufficient to cause this memory illusion on immediate tests, but may be insufficient for more vivid and lasting false memories. (shrink)

permits a sound and rigorously definable notion of ‘originating cause’ or causa causans—a type of transition event—of an outcome event. Mackie has famously suggested that causes form a family of ‘inus’ conditions, where an inus condition is ‘an insufficient but non-redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition’. In this essay the needed concepts of BST theory are developed in detail, and it is then proved that the causae causantes of a given outcome event have exactly the structure (...) of a set of Mackie inus conditions. The proof requires the assumption that there is no EPR-like ‘funny business’. This seems enough to constitute a theory of ‘causation’ in at least one of its many senses. Introduction The cement of the universe Preliminaries 3.1 First definitions and postulates 3.2 Ontology: propositions 3.3 Ontology: initial events 3.4 Ontology: outcome events 3.5 Ontology: transition events 3.6 Propositional language applied to events Causae causantes 4.1 Causae causantes are basic primary transition events 4.2 Causae causantes of an outcome chain 4.3 No funny business Causae causantes and inns and inus conditions 5.1 Inns conditions of outcome chains: not quite 5.2 Inns conditions of outcome chains 5.3 Inns conditions of scattered outcome events 5.4 Inus conditions for disjunctive outcome events 5.5 Inns and inus conditions of transition events Counterfactual conditionals Appendix: Tense and modal connectives in BST. (shrink)

The subject of this chapter is the complex and confusing course of the discussion of cause and teleology before and during the period of Mill and Comte, and its aftermath up to the early years of the twentieth century in the thinking of several of the major founding figures of disciplinary social science. The discussion focused on the problem of the sufficiency of causal explanations, and particularly the question of whether some particular fact could be explained without appeal to (...) purpose. In response to such questions, the defenders of the new conception attempted to replace older terminology with new (“function” for “purpose,” for example), sometimes muddling the issues, sometimes turning them into terminological disputes, and sometimes making the different positions difficult to distinguish. The problem of methodological unity in the social sciences is rooted in the discussions of the time. (shrink)

We present five studies investigating the effects of approach and avoidance behaviours when individuals do not enact them but, instead, learn that others have performed them. In Experiment 1, when participants read that a fictitious character (model) had approached a previously unknown product, they ascribed to this model a liking for the object. In contrast, they ascribed to the model a disliking for the avoided product. In Experiment 2, this result emerged, with a smaller effect size, even when it was (...) clear that the behaviours followed specific instructions from a third party. The model had been a mere executor instead of behaving autonomously. Finally, in Experiments 3, 4, and 5, we showed, with direct and indirect measures of attitudes, that reading that the model had approached vs avoided products was sufficient to create preferences in the participant for the approached one, regardless of whether it was explained that the model was a mere executor. This research highlights the largely unexplored effects of vicarious approach/avoidance behaviours. Theoretical and practical implications and possible developments of this line of research are discussed. (shrink)

In VI.ii.3 of The Search After Truth Malebranche offers an argument for the view that only God is a cause. Here I defend an interpretation of the argument according to which Malebranche is supposing (quite rightly) that if there is a necessary connection between a cause and its effect, then if creatures were real causes, God's volitions would not be sufficient to bring about their intended effects. I then consider the argument from constant creation that Malebranche offers (...) in Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion. If Malebranche holds that God is literally creating things in their entirety at each and every moment, it is difficult to understand how his system could make room for finite substances, and it is difficult to understand how he can allow that finite minds are to be held accountable for what they do. Here I defend a weakened version of the doctrine of constant creation according to which God is constantly creating the modifications of things but is not constantly creating things in their entirety. (shrink)

This paper argues against Papineau's claim that causal relations can be reduced to correlations and defends Cartwright's thesis that they can be nevertheless boot-strapped from them, given sufficiently rich causal background knowledge.

Mary Shepherd (1777–1847) was a fierce and brilliant critic of Berkeley and Hume, who moreover offered strikingly original positive views about the nature of reality and our access to it which deserve much more attention (and credit, since she anticipates many prominent views) than they have received thus far. By way of illustration, I focus on Shepherd's 1824 Essay Upon the Relation of Cause and Effect, Controverting the Doctrine of Mr. Hume, Concerning the Nature of that Relation (ERCE). After (...) a brief setup, I canvas certain of her trenchant objections to Hume’s argumentation; I then present the positive core of her response to Hume, which consists in providing novel accounts of how reason alone or reason coupled with experience can justify, first, that every effect must have a cause, and second, that it is necessary that like causes produce like effects. Among other contributions here, Shepherd provides a distinctively metaphysical argument for the claim that nothing can begin to exist 'of itself' (going beyond an appeal to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in particular), and leverages difference-making considerations to make the case that a single 'experimentum crucis' can justify causal belief (anticipating Mill's 'method of difference'). I close by highlighting salient features of Shepherd's metaphysics of causation, whereby causation is singularist and local (anticipating Ducasse and Anscombe) and involves synchronic interactions (anticipating Mill's and certain contemporary accounts), and according to which objects are essentially characterized by their causes and effects (anticipating contemporary causal or dispositional essentialist positions). (shrink)

The author is primarily concerned with the explanation of behavior in regard to (1) the mecanical model, (2) the effects of physical-organic processes on behavior, (3) the lack of understanding between philosophers and psychologists as to sufficient conditions for predicting a behavioral event, (4) conditions leading to expalantions of behavior that could predict behavior exclusive of any antecedent psychological behavior, and (5) variations of the mechanical-model introducing differing sorts of explanation. (staff).

I argue for two principles by combining which we can construct a sound cosmological argument. The first is that for any true proposition p's if 'there is an explanation for p's truth' is consistent then there is an explanation for p's truth. The second is a modified version of the principle that for any class, if there is an explanation for the non-emptiness ofthat class, then there is at least one non-member ofthat class which causes it not to be empty.

A simple molecular system is described consisting of the reciprocal linkage between an autocatalytic cycle and a self-assembling encapsulation process where the molecular constituents for the capsule are products of the autocatalysis. In a molecular environment sufficiently rich in the substrates, capsule growth will also occur with high predictability. Growth to closure will be most probable in the vicinity of the most prolific autocatalysis and will thus tend to spontaneously enclose supportive catalysts within the capsule interior. If subsequently disrupted in (...) the presence of new substrates, the released components will initiate production of additional catalytic and capsule components that will spontaneously re-assemble into one or more autocell replicas, thereby reconstituting and sometimes reproducing the original. In a diverse molecular environment, cycles of disruption and enclosure will cause auto-cells to incidentally encapsulate other molecules as well as reactive substrates. To the extent that any captured molecule can be incorporated into the autocatalytic process by virtue of structural degeneracy of the catalytic binding sites, the altered autocell will incorporate the new type of component into subsequent replications. Such altered autocells will be progenitors of “lineages” with variant characteristics that will differentially propagate with respect to the availability of commonly required substrates. Autocells are susceptible to a limited form of evolution, capable of leading to more efficient, more environmentally fitted, and more complex forms. This provides a simple demonstration of the plausibility of open-ended reproduction and evolvability without self-replicating template molecules or maintenance of persistent nonequilibrium chemistry. This model identifies an intermediate domain between prebiotic and biotic systems and bridges the gap from nonequilibrium thermodynamics to life. (shrink)

This article asks whether a country that suffers from serious environmental problems caused by another country could have a just cause for a defensive war? Danish philosopher Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen has argued that under certain conditions extreme poverty may give a just cause for a country to defensive war, if that poverty is caused by other countries. This raises the question whether the victims of environmental damages could also have a similar right to self-defense. Although the article concerns justice (...) of war, we will concentrate only on the issue of what can be just causes of war, instead of evaluating the entire justification of war. This is to say that we will limit our discussion to the question concerning just cause and leave aside more general questions concerning justness and moral permissibility of war. Our aim is to list the questions that must be made and settled if defensive war in the case of serious environmental problems is said to have (or not to have) a just cause. We will argue that there are three questions that are most important in this context. They are the question concerning liability, the question of collective responsibility, and the question whether environmental harms may create a “sufficient reason” for raising a war. (shrink)

This article examines our ethical responsibility toward artists engaged in harmful behaviors. Specifically, I demonstrate when and why we are morally obligated to withdraw our public and financial support from Artists Who Cause Harm such as Louis C.K., Terry Richardson, and Ryan Adams. Using a moral distinction presented by Philippa Foot and others, I identify this support as enabling harm when the wealth and influence that we support removes typical barriers that protect victims from harm and interposes barriers that (...) prevent victims from avoiding harm. I proceed to demonstrate that our personal support is morally significant, and we have a moral responsibility to make contributions to collective action when the cost is low or the degree of belief that others will contribute is high. Here we have both a strong belief that others will withdraw support and a relatively low cost to ourselves to do so. I acknowledge that enabling current harms is only a sufficient condition to withdrawing support from an artist and should not minimize other reasons for avoiding certain artists and their works. However, when we do believe that our support enables an artist engaged in harmful behaviors, we have an obligation to withdraw that support. (shrink)

Between 1987 and 1997, Thailand experienced a bubble economy. When the bubble economy exploded in 1997, the country suddenly experienced an economic crisis: it was in heavy debt and became financially controlled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The problem was caused by the country’s desire to rapidly change itself from an agricultural country to an industrial one, without considering its own comparative advantage in that its climate and resources are more suitable for agriculture. Thailand also wanted to become a (...) newly industrialized country and a inancial hub of Southeast Asia without considering its readiness. These ideas came to a halt after the bubble economy explosion. However, just after Thailand managed to solve its debt problem with the IMF, thegovernment once again declared its desire to turn the country into the ‘Detroit of Asia’, to develop the capital, Bangkok, into the region’s fashion hub and to launch a substantial number of mega-projects, albeit with the existence of a widening economic gap between the rural and urban areas. This economic trend became known as “Thaksinomics” with reference to the name of the Prime Minister at that time, Thaksin Shinawatra. On the other hand, there has been a great deal of criticism of such a trend, which has been seen as a capitalist move promoting the consumerist behaviour of Thai people. There is, therefore, a call for Thai society to review itself, especially in its social and economic development aspects, and a change to a new kind of development with an emphasis on self-reliance andmoderation. This call is based on a Buddhist belief which is reflected in the old Thai way of life. This kind of economy is called “Self-Sufficiency Economy” as opposed to a capitalist-consumerist economy. It is believed that this new direction will help lay a strong foundation for the Thai economy and provide it with a high level of immunity for progress towards a more stable and sustainable economy. (shrink)

The model of social science established in methodological writings of the 1830s and 1840s formed an ideal that has endured to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Subsequent authors have been obliged to excuse the social sciences for their failure to achieve this ideal model of science, to reinterpret the successes of social science in terms of it, or to construct alternative conceptions of social science in contrast to it. The ideal was worked out in two closely related texts, Auguste (...) Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positiveand John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic. The positive achievement of these texts was to clarify the application of the notion of “law” to the subject matter of social science. Their negative achievement was to eliminate, as much as possible, the role of teleological thinking from the study of the social realm. The subject of this chapter will be the reformulation of the ideas of cause and teleology before and during the period of Mill and Comte, and its aftermath up to the early twentieth century in the thinking of several founding figures of disciplinary social science. The discussion to be examined here focused on the problem of the sufficiency of causal explanations, and particularly on the question of whether some particular fact could be explained without appeal to purpose. In response to such questions, the defenders of the new conception attempted to replace older terms with new ones, replacing “purpose” with “function,” for example. (shrink)

Individualism dominates Western ontologies: atoms and molecules; substances, minds, and agents. Each is said to embody conditions sufficient to establish its nature and existence. Ontologies spawned by Descartes's cogito and Kantian world‐making are, nevertheless, false to all we know of reality and ourselves. This paper suggests an alternative: entities and events are generated by the material circumstances in which they emerge and evolve; nothing at any scale is exempt from the discovery that its existence and character derive from and (...) are sustained by circumstances additional to those it embodies. All are embedded in the context that has been their source. (shrink)

The early modern period was the natural historical habitat of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, i.e., the demand that everything must have a cause, or reason. It is in this period that the principle was explicitly articulated and named, and throughout the period we find numerous formulations and variants of the PSR and its closely related ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ principle, which the early moderns inherited from medieval philosophy. Contemporary discussions of these principles were not restricted to philosophy. (...) “Nothing will come of nothing; speak again” old King Lear tells his daughter Cordelia at the beginning of Shakespeare’s celebrated tragedy, and in early modern science, conservation principles were the order of the day. Within philosophy, Malebranche stipulates that there cannot be an effect without a cause, and Berkeley motivates his idealism by an appeal to ‘ex nihilo nihil fit.’ Were we to try to provide an exhaustive survey the various formulations of the PSR in this period – including the weaker ones – we would be writing an encyclopedia. In fact, one wonders whether any early modern thinker was willing to accept a wholesale rejection of the PSR, i.e., a view which states that no fact requires an explanation. Moreover, the view that many – perhaps most – facts require an explanation seems to be tacitly assumed even by us today, in both our theoretical and colloquial discourse. For these reasons, this chapter will focus on two early modern philosophers who advocated very strong (i.e., virtually exceptionless) versions of the PSR: Benedict de Spinoza and G.W. Leibniz. Following a brief overview of Descartes’s restricted endorsement of the PSR, I will turn to discuss the central features of the PSR in the writings of Spinoza (§2) and those of Leibniz (§3). In the cases of each of these philosophers, we will examine carefully: (i) their main statements of the PSR, (ii) the scope they assign to the principle (i.e., what requires an explanation and what counts as an explanation), (iii) the modal strength they assign to the principle, (iv) the main implications they draw from the principle, (v) exceptions to the principle, and, finally, (vi) the justification of the principle. In §4, we will study a principle, complementing the PSR, namely, the assertion that everything and every fact must have an effect (or as Leibniz would put it: “nothing is sterile”). (shrink)