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Causation, physics, and fit

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Abstract

Our ordinary causal concept seems to fit poorly with how our best physics describes the world. We think of causation as a time-asymmetric dependence relation between relatively local events. Yet fundamental physics describes the world in terms of dynamical laws that are, possible small exceptions aside, time symmetric and that relate global time slices. My goal in this paper is to show why we are successful at using local, time-asymmetric models in causal explanations despite this apparent mismatch with fundamental physics. In particular, I will argue that there is an important connection between time asymmetry and locality, namely: understanding the locality of our causal models is the key to understanding why the physical time asymmetries in our universe give rise to time asymmetry in causal explanation. My theory thus provides a unified account of why causation is local and time asymmetric and thereby enables a reply to Russell’s famous attack on causation.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Field (2003), Price and Weslake (2009), Russell (1913), and many of the papers in Price and Corry (2007). I am taking the useful notions of “fit” and “poor fit” from Schaffer (2010).

  2. Eagle (2007), Elga (2007), and Woodward (2007) address why it makes sense for us to conceive of causation as a relation between relatively localized events or variables. Albert (2000), Eckhardt (2006), Field (2003), Hausman (1998), Loewer (2007, 2012), Price (2007), and Price and Weslake (2009) address why it makes sense for us to have a time-asymmetric causal concept. Frisch (2014) and Kutach (2013) discuss both issues but not in a unified fashion.

  3. Hausman (1998, Chaps. 4 and 12) provides the most comprehensive treatment of this question, but he does not address the locality of our causal models. Most of the other authors focus on our agency and give no explicit account of the time asymmetry of causal explanation. Yet the time asymmetry of explanation, at least prima facie, seems more general than just a time asymmetry in our abilities as agents (cf. Hausman 1982, p. 47).

  4. See Hall (2005) and the references therein.

  5. I assume that the laws are deterministic, but the problem does not significantly change if we move to probabilistic laws, as long as these laws have the same probabilistic character in either temporal direction. This is the case if the state of the world at any one time fixes a unique probability distribution over all earlier and later states (Field 2003, p. 437). In this case, systems that differ only in their final condition also differ (at least typically) in what probability distribution the laws assign over the system’s initial condition.

  6. See Woodward (2003, 2007) and Hitchcock and Woodward (2003).

  7. Which circumstances count as likely or typical is a difficult question. There are two ways to go about answering it. First, some philosophers argue that we get a global probability distribution over all macrostates from the foundation of statistical mechanics (Albert 2000, Chap. 5). We could then use this probability distribution to determine which changes in variables are likely or to be expected. Second, some philosophers argue that we should invoke pragmatic factors to determine which values of a variable count as the default and therefore as to be expected (Hitchcock 2007b, pp. 506–507). Either route could be adopted for my present purposes.

  8. See, e.g., Franklin-Hall (2015), Lange (2009), Strevens (2004), and Weslake (2010).

  9. To avoid cumbersome phrases, I will sometimes say of causal models that they are “robust and invariant” when I mean that they specify dependencies that are robust and invariant. I will also sometimes drop the qualification “in typical circumstances”.

  10. Many philosophers have defended Randomness, as well as the fact that it has no analog in the backward direction, as central to the time asymmetry of causation. Randomness is entailed by the “statistical postulate” (Albert 2000, p. 96 and Loewer 2012, p. 124), the “asymmetry of randomness” (Frisch 2014, p. 243), the “asymmetry of independence” (Hausman 1998, Chap. 4), the “initial micro-chaos condition” (Horwich 1987, p. 72), the “asymmetry of bizarre coincidences” (Kutach 2013, p. 175), and the “Principle of the Independence of Incoming Influences” (Price 1996, p. 26). I will say more below about how my account relates to these other accounts.

  11. We sometimes assert “backtracking” counterfactuals, in which we reason from the non-occurrence of an event to the non-occurrence of its past causes and then forward again (Lewis 1986, p. 33). For example, we might reason that if the barometer reading had been different, then the earlier air pressure would have had to be different, and so the storm would also not have occurred. These counterfactuals are different from ones based on time-neutral interventions because they involve changing present facts other than the intervened-on variable. For example, when we backtrack from a difference in the barometer reading to a difference in the earlier air pressure and then reason forward again, we also assume that the air pressure is different at the time of the barometer reading. A time-neutral intervention on the barometer reading, in contrast, changes only the barometer reading and holds all other variables at the time, such as the air pressure, fixed. So time-neutral interventions, but not backtracking, tell us how variables at other times would depend on a difference in just the barometer reading.

  12. Albert (2000) and Loewer (2007, 2012) argue that the macroscopic past, at least in typical circumstances, never counterfactually depends on small macroscopic changes to the future. According to the Albert–Loewer account, a time-neutral intervention on the state of the glass shards and the stone on the floor almost certainly would not make a difference to the earlier macroscopic state of the window, though it would lead to small microscopic differences in the past. This restriction against backward dependence at the macroscopic level is supposed to follow from a lawful constraint on the initial macrostate of the universe, the so-called past-hypothesis, and a probability distribution over possible microstates that could realize this initial macrostate.

    However, it is extremely contentious whether the past-hypothesis can be justified on physical grounds (Earman 2006) as well as whether it really would rule out macroscopic dependence toward the past (see, e.g., Frisch 2007, 2014; Price and Weslake 2009). My account also appeals to the special initial conditions of our universe (viz., that Randomness and Insensitivity have no equivalents in the backward direction) to supply a time asymmetry of causal explanation. However, it puts much less stress on the physics because it grounds a time asymmetry of causal explanation even if our best physics tells us (as I think it does) that the macroscopic past does depend on the macroscopic future.

  13. Amis’s (1991) novel Time’s arrow beautifully illustrates that numerous correlations between distinct systems that we would regard as miraculous were they to occur in the forward direction are common in the backward direction.

  14. See Albert (2000) and Horwich (1987). It is plausible that these physical asymmetries are non-causal and that we have therefore reduced the causal asymmetry to a non-causal physical asymmetry (but see Frisch 2014).

  15. See, e.g., Kutach (2013), Loewer (2012), and Price and Weslake (2009). Frisch (2014) also holds that the time asymmetry of causation is closely related to these physical time asymmetries, though he is skeptical that the former can be reduced to the latter.

  16. Hausman (1998) is an exception in that he offers a worked-out account of the time asymmetry of causal explanation. My account, however, is more general than Hausman’s, which applies only to open systems, even though there may be no truly open systems in our universe (Hausman 1998, p. 67).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Bob Adams, Siegfried Jaag, Matthew Kotzen, Marc Lange, L.A. Paul, and John Roberts for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for this journal.

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Correspondence to Christian Loew.

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This study was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (Grant: FOR 1063).

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Loew, C. Causation, physics, and fit. Synthese 194, 1945–1965 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1029-9

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