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A causal ontology of objects, causal relations, and various kinds of action

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Abstract

The basic kinds of physical causality that are foundational for other kinds of causality involve objects and the causal relations between them. These interactions do not involve events. If events were ontologically significant entities for causality in general, then they would play a role in simple mechanical interactions. But arguments about simple collisions looked at from different frames of reference show that events cannot play a role in simple mechanical interactions, and neither can the entirely hypothetical causal relations between events. These arguments show that physics, which should be authoritative when it comes to the metaphysics of causality, gives no reasons to believe that events are causal agents. Force relations and some cases of energy-momentum transfer are examples of causal relations, with forces being paradigmatic in the macroscopic world, though it is conceivable that there are other kinds of causal relation. A relation between two objects is a causal relation if and only if when it is instantiated by the two objects there is a possibility that the objects that are the terms of the relation could change. The basic metaphysics of causality is about objects, causal relations, changes in objects, and a causal primitive. The paper also includes a discussion of the metaphysics of forces and a discussion of the metaphysics of energy and momentum exchanges.

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Notes

  1. Norton 2003 expands on Russell’s idea that science is not about causality (see Sect. 4 of this paper). Nevertheless, he thinks better of the theories of Salmon and Dowe (see Sect. 4). Although my distinctions are in a sense a priori, I see what I am doing as an example of basic philosophy of physics, and I also think that the making of distinctions is one of the more important things that philosophy does. Though a priori, I do not think it is armchair philosophy in Norton’s sense.

  2. Event theorists take both causes and effects to be events. There is a tendency for philosophers to think that causes and effects are ontologically the same kind of thing. On the other hand, someone could conceivably take the activity of the sculptor to be the cause and an event and the sculpture to be the effect and an object.

  3. A counterfactual account of causality might regard both developmental action and transitive action as forms of causality. But if it did, that would be of no significance.

  4. Aquinas talks about actio immanens or operatio immanens and actio transiens or operatio transiens, see Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 1 and Summa Theologica, 1a, q. 18, a. 3 ad 1, q. 23, a. 2 ad 1, q. 54, a. 1 ad 3. For Chisholm 1966, transeunt causation refers to an event causing another event; immanent causation refers to an agent causing an event. Dowe 2000, p. 52 ascribes the distinction to Leibniz, who distinguished between intrasubstantial or immanent causation versus intersubstantial or transeunt causation. Spinoza made a distinction between self-causing (causa sui), immanent causing (causa immanens), which has to do with the persistence of one thing, and transitive causing (causa transiens), which involves transference from one thing to another, see Lærke 2010. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, I, def. 1 and prop.8 and Bennett 1984, p. 113.

  5. To take a few examples: Whittle’s 2016 defends joint substance-event causation. She thinks that events are the “the front runner”. Weaver 2019 defends event causation in the context of philosophy of physics. He explains the role of causal relations, but they are a new, hypothetical kind of entity. Menzies 2009 defends events within a linguistic approach to metaphysics. Buckareff 2017 in his critique of Whittle, defends the causal powers of substances as causes. Tropes as causal relata have been defended by Ehring 1999 and 2011 and by Garcia-Encinas 2009, and, earlier, notably by Campbell 1990. Lowe 2008, pp. 54 − 5 & 110 distinguishes between fact causation and event causation. Salmon 1984 and Dowe 2000 take causal processes, which are constructed out of events, to be causally significant. Ehring 2009 is a very long discussion of causal relata.

  6. She makes a number of interesting points about causation to help justify her claims. She believes that causes can be collective, so that a substance and an event can both be among the causes of some effect.

  7. Heil cautions “. . it is important to see that one and the same power is capable of manifesting itself differently with different kinds of reciprocal partner ” (p. 121, cf. p. 133.)

  8. Events theorists have a number of different kinds of event available to them. Kim 1976 defends fine-grained events, see also Bennett 1988, Chap. V, whereas Davidson 1967 defends coarse-grained events, see also Bennett 1988, Chap. IV. Ehring 2009, like Bennett, gives accounts of a number of different kinds of event. Lowe 2002, Chap. 13 is a discussion of the elimination of events. See also Casati & Varzi 2008, pp. 31–54. Fine-grained events can be described in only one way. Two events are the same if and only if they have the same constituents, which are objects, properties, relations, and times. Coarse-grained events can be described in many different ways. Two events are identical if and only they have the same causes and effects. Paul 2000 gives a critique of both fine-grained and coarse grained events.

  9. Heil 2012, Sect. 6.2 talks about the causal nexus, which is the same thing.

  10. There are causally significant boundaries that separate the matter of the object from other matter; there are emergent properties of solid objects, such as the conduction band in metals; and so on, Newman 2013.

  11. It would still be a breaking even if the cracks remained just cracks, but in the case being considered, it is a breaking that starts with cracks and ends with separate pieces.

  12. The events that would be appropriate here may be the coarse grained events of the early Davidson, see fn.8.

  13. In this case, the supposed cause and the effect start together and are simultaneous for a period of time. Cf. “[It] is presumed that it is metaphysically impossible for an effect to precede, or even to be simultaneous with, one of its causes.” Lowe 2002, p. 230. On the other hand, simultaneous causation has been defended by Huemer & Kovitz 2003. They point out that the interaction of billiard balls is continuous, symmetrical, and reciprocal, though they do believe in events.

  14. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, I, III, XV.

  15. See Barbour 1989, Chap. 9.

  16. Cf. “[If] an event, e1, is a cause of another event, e2, then it is not the case that e2 is also a cause of e1.” Lowe 2002, p. 329. This appears to be based on a widespread, fundamental intuition about causality. If the sculptor is a cause of the statue, then the statue is not a cause of the sculptor, however you look at the situation. If the ball’s striking the window is a cause of the window’s breaking, then the window’s breaking is not a cause of the ball’s striking the window. If the first billiard ball’s striking the second billiard ball is a cause of the second billiard’s movement, then the second billiard ball’s movement is not a cause of the first billiard ball’s striking the second billiard ball.

  17. Cf. Dowe 2000, p. 92. Bennett admits that objects do the “pushing and the shoving and the forcing” but denies that causal relations relate objects, Bennett 1984, pp. 22 − 3. But he also believes that events are supervenient entities and that all truths about events are reducible to truths not involving events, ibid., p. 12 & chap. VI. It appears, then, that he thinks that causal relations can only be explained linguistically. Trenton Merricks distinguishes object causation from event causation, and maintains that object causation cannot be eliminated, Merricks 2001, pp. 65 − 6.

  18. Quine 1973, Chap. 2, Aronson 1971, Fair, 1979.

  19. Dowe 2000, pp. 55–59 argues in another way that the energy that is transmitted from one object to another does not possess identity and hence cannot be regarded as a kind of fluid.

  20. If energy does not have identity through time, then an energy trope cannot have identity through time either. It is interesting that when Douglas Ehring, who believes that tropes have identity through time, gives examples of causation involving the transference of tropes that the tropes he considers are charge tropes and structural tropes, which are not obviously subject to this problem, see Ehring 1999, pp. 123-7 and Ehring 2011. Very perceptive perhaps, but in his examples, it is electrons that are exchanged, not charge tropes. See also Ehring 2009 and Campbell 1990, pp. 4, 113, 138 − 42. Paul 2000 says that her aspects correspond to tropes, but her explanation makes them sound like facts, particularly her use of the gerund, and Bennett says that fine-grained events are rather like tropes (Bennett, 1984, p. 90). Their view makes some sense, since, despite the formal differences between events and tropes: if the property that is a component of a fact is a trope, then the trope is the powerful or business end of the fact. Nevertheless, physically it is objects that interact, not their properties however conceived. When objects interact, they do so on account of their properties and very often on account of several of their properties, not just one. When heat energy is absorbed by a body its temperature increases. The effect, namely the increase in temperature, depends on several properties including the amount of heat added, the mass of the body, and the specific heat of the body. Moreover, if a trope of one object exerted a force on a trope of another object, then the tropes belonging to just one object would have to exert forces on each other. But both kinds of interaction are unknown to physics.

  21. Russell 1912, p. 207. Cf. Norton 2003 and fn. 1.

  22. Russell 1912, p. 199.

  23. This paper still exerts it spell, see the collection of papers in Price & Corry 2007.

  24. Russell 1948, pp. 475-7 & 487.

  25. Russell 1948, p. 334.

  26. Russell 1948, p. 477.

  27. Olson 1987 believes that facts are basic, and objects are abstracted out of facts, see pp. 61–64 & 78–81. He ascribes this view to Bradley and Frege.

  28. Salmon 1984, pp. 139 & 144.

  29. A causal process is then one that can transmit a mark, where a mark is transmitted from A to B if the mark is manifested at all points from A to B given no interaction, Salmon 1984, pp. 141-4. Dowe believes Salmon’s view should be that a causal process is one that can transmit a mark and a process that cannot is not a causal process, Dowe 1992, p. 198. For Salmon, the dividing of a causal line or the coming together of two causal lines, in other words, generalized interactions, involve the modification of structure. Salmon focusses on structure, Dowe on conserved quantities.

  30. Cf. Dowe 2000, p. 107, where he uses the language of endurantism. He also talks about events, facts, and states of affairs, and at one stage appears indifferent to which term is used. He settles on facts as the terms of causal relations, where a fact is an object’s possessing a conserved quantity and is an example of what Armstrong calls a state of affairs, Dowe 2000, pp. 168–171. He describes events as thin events. An event in this sense is an object’s possessing certain properties at a certain time, though, at one point, he does also say that an event is a change in a property, ibid., p. 169. His events appear to correspond to Kim’s fine grained events.

  31. See Merricks 2001.

  32. Cf. Quine and the later Davidson’s account of what Bennett calls concrete events, see Bennett 1984, Chap. VII. “Each [event] comprises the content, however heterogeneous, of some portion of space-time, however disconnected and gerrymandered.” from Quine’s Word and Object quoted in Bennett 1984 p. 103. The difficulty with events of this kind is that they are arbitrary, lacking any principle of unity. The unity of an event could perhaps be explained by the unity of the physical object that was its principal component; but the unity of a physical object cannot be explained by the unity of the event that it is supposed to be abstracted from.

  33. The de Broglie wavelength of a billiard ball moving at a reasonable speed is far too small to be measured and decoherence sets in very quickly for objects of this size.

  34. Armstrong has a causal theory of identity through time, see Armstrong 1980.

  35. Bigelow & Pargetter 1990a, Chap. 6.

  36. See fn. 20.

  37. Bigelow et al., 1988, Newman, 1992, Wilson, 2007, and Massin 2009 among others defend the reality of forces. For further references, see Massin 2009. Wilson 2007 and Newman 2013 defend the reality of forces applied to macroscopic objects. Mach 1883, pp. 242-4 tried to eliminate forces from his system of mechanics. But the forces that he got rid of were forces as introduced and understood by dynamics; his method appears to have no bearing on forces as introduced and understood by statics (for the distinction, see Lange 2009). But perhaps he assimilated the forces of statics to the forces of dynamics on account of his view, following Newton, that the parallelogram law for forces is shown to be true in dynamics: displacements obey the parallelogram law, and therefore velocities do, and accelerations do, and therefore the forces that cause the accelerations also obey the parallelogram law (ibid., p. 40). But this is just not true in special relativity, where the acceleration caused by a force is, in general, not in the same direction as the force vector acting on a particle. The force vector, the acceleration vector, and the velocity vector lie in the same plane but differ in direction (see Sect. 8). So perhaps there is something to be said for the priority of the statical conception of forces. In any event, static forces certainly cannot be eliminated.

  38. The third law was Newton’s major innovation according to Sklar 2013, p. 51. Massin 2009, p. 582 thinks that the third law is a metaphysical necessity. Lange 2002, however, does not think that it holds in electromagnetism: “Bodies do not exert forces on fields; bodies alone feel forces.” p. 163”, cf. pp. 114-5. There are three things to consider here: (1) in a dynamic situation, the field that exerts a force on a body undergoes a change in momentum, so that there is action and reaction, (2) in a static situation, the field exerts a force on a body but the field does not itself change so it does not undergo a change of momentum (do roof trusses stop geodesics?), (3) railguns have recoil, where in a railgun the force on the projectile and the force on the gun itself are mediated by an electromagnetic field. Hence, I suspect that the third law is defensible in electromagnetism, but whether locally is not clear.

  39. Newton’s second law is that the resultant force applied to a body is equal to the rate of change of momentum of the body, where both the force and the momentum are vectors. This law, just as it stands, is true both in Newtonian mechanics and special relativity. If f is the force vector, then the four-force is Fα = (γd/dt(E/c), γf), where γ = (1 – v2/c2)−1/2, the Lorentz factor. In terms of four-vectors, Newton’s second law takes the form.

    Fα = dpα/dτ = d(m0vα)/dτ = m0dvα/dτ = d/dτ((m0γc, m0γv), which involves differentiation with respect to proper time.

  40. Cf. the discussion by Massin 2009, pp. 566–572. He points out that if two bodies are at a distance from each other, there is both a dyadic spatial relation with direction only and two spatial vectors with the same direction and opposite sense, and clearly the dyadic relation is real. It could be argued that since forces are not intrinsic, they are not dispositional, though there are those who think that there are dispositional relations.

  41. I believe that the dispute first arose between Cartwright 1980 (and 1983), who believed that only the resultant force was real, and Creary 1981, who believed that only the component forces were real. Newman 1992 and Massin 2009 side with Creary. Wilson 2009 sides with Cartwright. Armstrong 1997, Molnar, 2003, and Bigelow & Pargetter 1990a think forces are monadic, but not Bigelow & Pargetter 1990b.

  42. Lange 2009 has an interesting account of those in the 19th century who had a statical conceptions of forces and tried to derive the parallelogram law from statical considerations, and others, such as Mach, who had a dynamical conception of forces and tried to derive it from dynamical considerations, see fn. 37. Lange did not seem very convinced by these efforts.

  43. It is also true for the force relation between two charged bodies. Bigelow et al., 1988 claim that it is true of a force relation between a particle and a field.

  44. Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz were aware of this paradox. Newton’s first law expresses the inertness of matter, though that law was first formulated by Descartes in The Principles of Philosophy, Part II. In the Second Meditation, Descartes explains the inertness of a body by saying that a body is something that can be moved but not by itself.

  45. In some ways the laws about the generation of forces are brute facts: that is just the way things are; though if laws of dynamics were at root relations between universals, then the appropriate relation between universals would be the explanation.

  46. Characterizations, or elucidations, of this sort can only take us so far. What is meant can then be pinned down by giving examples, which, of course, have already been given. For the notion of elucidation, see Frege 1914, p. 313. Some earlier versions of this work unfortunately use ‘illustrative examples’ to translate ‘erläuterung’. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3.263 and 4.112.

  47. Although it is conceivable that one object could act upon another without being acted upon, we are more likely to think that when two objects interact that each acts upon the other and each is acted upon by the other. Perhaps there is a more general metaphysical principle here of mutuality that at least applies to all finite concrete objects: in whatever way they act, they cannot act without being acted upon. Cf. Le Poidevin 1991, pp. 83 & 88 on the principle of reciprocity. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B106. He thought that a general metaphysical principle lay behind each of Newton’s three laws, in this case the third law.

  48. There is no need for causal relations to be associated with exceptionless laws. Consider a machine that is designed to exert a specified force on certain objects that are manufactured to be the same in every way. Suppose that, in fact, as a rule 90% break and 10% do not. In cases where the object breaks, it is the machine and the force that it exerts that make it break. The machine can break objects of that type, which is realized most of the time, but not always.

  49. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 248 ff.: eternal ball denting the eternal cushion. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. I, Q. 46, A. 2, ad 1 μm, quoting Augustine: eternal foot in the eternal footprint.

  50. It is interesting that Whittle regards causes as collective. She thinks that there is no need to identify just one cause. “It often makes good sense to single out parts of an event as among the causes because they are particularly important to the occurrence of the effect.” Whittle 2016, pp. 8–9. She does not think that there is a problem of overdetermination if the two entities are related as part and whole or something analogous. She appears to be denying that there is a problem of two-levels overdetermination. She cites Shaffer 2003 who makes a distinction between two-levels overdetermination and two rocks over determination. In the case of the breaking of a window by rocks, the determinate changes that would have been caused by one rock with certain properties are not the same determinate changes that would have been caused by two rocks each with the same properties. Hence the problem of overdetermination does not arise.

  51. Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Sect. 4.

  52. The equations are f = dp/dt = d(mu)/dt = mdu/dt + udm/dt = ma + udm/dt = ma + {f.u/c2}u. The last term, which requires some work, shows that generally the force, the acceleration, and the velocity lie in different directions in the same plane.

  53. For classical thermodynamics presented as an autonomous subject, see A. B. Pippard, The Elements Classical Thermodynamics, Cambridge, 1966.

  54. This is also true of that part of special relativity that deals with objects, otherwise known as bodies.

  55. See Holland 1993 on Bohmian mechanics. The clue is in the title of the book: The Quantum Theory of Motion.

  56. For Salmon and Dowe the exchange of a conserved quantity is a necessary condition for a causal interaction: Dowe 2000, p. 90, Salmon 1997, pp. 462 & 468, but not the Salmon of Salmon 1984, see p. 171.

  57. But according to Daniel Dennett: “A fundamental principle of physics is that any change in the trajectory of any physical entity is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy, and [if the change is caused by a mental phenomenon] where is this energy to come from?” Dennett 1991, p. 35.

  58. The discussion in the text concerns the elementary theory of alpha emission according to Schrödinger’s equation applied to a particle in a finite potential well (quantum tunnelling) as given by standard quantum mechanics. Sakurai & Napolitano 2017 is a recent textbook of standard quantum mechanics. Their starting point is the powerful algebra of quantum mechanics and in their discussion of Bell’s inequality they reject hidden variables. It is like special relativity’s rejection of an ether. Bohmian mechanics, which should be regarded as a different theory from standard quantum mechanics (Bricmont, 2016, p. 18), has as its starting point the trajectory of a single particle, which it derives from Schrödinger’s equation. It has the resources to give a causal account of the exit of an alpha particle in terms of hidden variables (Holland, 1993, pp. 198–203, based ultimately on the computer modelling of Christopher Dewdney). It affirms what the standard theory denies. The stochastic interpretation is another distinct theory, but I do not know whether it has resources that parallel those of Bohmian mechanics. Standard quantum theory at least shows that causeless action is possible, which is what is needed for metaphysics: a consistent, extremely successful empirical theory is consistent with causeless action. Hence, it is possible relative to what we know about the world. There may be some conceptual difficulties with the standard theory, but so there are with Bohmian mechanics, see Bricmont 2016, p. 181 and Holland 1993, p. 277-8: multi-dimensional configuration spaces and their contents are regarded as real!

  59. Dowe 2000 mentions radioactive decay on pp. 23, 25, 45, 83, and 93.

  60. Other examples include the flow of heat in a piece of copper due to a temperature gradient and the flow of an electrical in a wire due to a potential difference. From a macroscopic point of view, they are all continuous phenomena and the equations that govern them have the same form. Creary’s 1981 discussion of “laws of causal influence” (a little like laws governing causal relations) was criticized by Cartwright 1983, pp. 62–67 by merely presenting a large number of complex transport phenomena, which, she claimed, his approach could not deal with. He was talking about causal relations; she wanted to confuse matters by talking about transport phenomena.

  61. I am grateful to Jonathan Lowe for drawing my attention to this parallel. Whittle 2016 has a different idea of collective causes, see fn. 50.

  62. A conceivable philosophical view of causality is that causal chains (mechanisms or causal processes) are what causality is and hence the starting point for a theory of causality. Such a theory would face a number of philosophical difficulties. Causal chains will have parts and components, and questions can be raised about how they interact. And questions about how they interact will not always be answered by referring to further causal chains but will at some point come down to interactions between objects. But such a theory cannot account for the interactions between two objects, which are obviously causal but are not chains or causal processes.

  63. An enthusiast for events could suggest that turning the ignition key in the lock was an event and the cause, and the turning of the engine’s crank shaft was an event and the effect. But there really is no need to reify changes as metaphysical entities. Things change all the time and there is no need to suggest that philosophers’ entities come into and out of existence all the time. For one thing it is not even clear what the effect event is. Is it the beginning to turn of the crank shaft, which is a limit point event and problematic ontologically? Is it the temporally extended event during which the crank shaft is undergoing angular acceleration? Or is it the final temporally extended event of the crank shaft having a constant angular velocity, which will be ended by some arbitrary intervention?

  64. Those that remember old-fashioned distributors that had a distributer cap, points, and a rotator arm will find “distribution” easier to understand.

  65. Causal chains like the simple mechanical mechanism found in a rifle are not subject to issues concerning different frames of reference for obvious reasons.

  66. Dowe 2000, pp. 170ff gives a formal account of what he calls causal connections, which are, in effect, natural causal chains. Putnam’s theory of meaning of 1975 could make use of natural causal chains, as could theories of reference to past objects in the philosophy of time. For the philosophy of time, causal chains have the virtue that their end points do not exist at the same time. Theories of reference require a single thread.

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  1. University of Nebraska Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA

    Andrew Newman

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Newman, A. A causal ontology of objects, causal relations, and various kinds of action. Synthese 200, 308 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03752-5

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