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Causal exclusion and the limits of proportionality

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Abstract

Causal exclusion arguments are taken to threaten the autonomy of the special sciences, and the causal efficacy of mental properties. A recent line of response to these arguments has appealed to “independently plausible” and “well grounded” theories of causation to rebut key premises. In this paper I consider two papers which proceed in this vein and show that they share a common feature: they both require causes to be proportional (in Yablo’s sense) to their effects. I argue that this feature is a bug, and one that generalises: any attempt to rescue the autonomy of the special sciences, or the efficacy of the mental, from exclusion worries had better not look to proportionality for help.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Yablo (1992).

  2. See for example: Hitchcock (2012), Raatikainen (2010), Shapiro (2012), Woodward (2015).

  3. I will not go over the exclusion argument in detail here for brevity. Interested readers should consult the original List and Menzies and Zhong papers for the details and the caveats that I omit here.

  4. The connection with Woodward is subtle in List and Menzies (2009), but explicit in Menzies and List (2010, pp. 108–109).

  5. Once again, I will not rehearse the details here. Interested readers are directed to their argument for this change in List and Menzies (2009, pp. 483–484).

  6. It is important to note that Yablo’s analysis of this principle appealed to the determinate/determinable relation. In discussing this principle, I will mean only the claims about specificity of causes in respect of their effects, not Yablo’s particular analysis of that principle.

  7. See also Zhong (2011).

  8. I have substituted (i) for (I) and (ii) for (II) for clarity of reference.

  9. Zhong argues for this in his (2011) and (2014) but I don’t discuss the details here since whether he is correct or not about the exclusion literature does not impact what I have to say.

  10. See Zhong (2014, p. 344), and Woodward (2003, p. 98) for details.

  11. I have exchanged Zhong’s X and Y for F and G respectively to help draw out the similarity with List and Menzies’ proposal.

  12. As Woodward (2015) says: “it is standard to assume, that it is possible to intervene on every variable represented in a graph and to set each such variable to each of its values independently of the values to which other variables are set.” (p. 312, fn9).

  13. I thank an anonymous referee for bringing this to my attention.

  14. See List and Menzies (2009, p. 483–487). The reasons given for adopting weak centering are, on the face of it at least, independent from a desire to get the proportionality result.

  15. Again, I am referring to the proportionality constraint as a principle, not to Yablo’s determinate/determinable analysis of that principle.

  16. Woodward does later (2010) consider how one might pick from among the causal connections, which are proportional, in the service of providing a special sort of causal explanation. This is a different topic, however, and Woodward’s proposal is convincingly criticized by Franklin-Hall (2016).

  17. I owe this observation, and the subsequent example, to an anonymous referee.

  18. Woodward has argued that his original (2003) definition of an intervention should only apply in what he calls “standard” models (2015, p. 318)—i.e. models in which the variables are suitably independent of one another. In non-standard models (such as those where the variables are logically related) a new definition of an intervention is required (“IV*”), one which allows for the fixing of certain off-path variables (p. 334). Woodward seems to treat this as a clarification of the original theory rather than an amendment, but as it allows holding fixed off-path variables, it may be the sort of treatment that Zhong has in mind. This is not discussed in Zhong (2014) however, and the viability of Woodward’s revised/refined (2015) proposal deserves fresh consideration.

  19. As noted by an anonymous referee, interventionism as an approach to causation is independent of the commitment to proportionality (or any other specific commitment of Woodward’s). My claim here is only about the gap between Woodward’s (2003) version of interventionism, and those theories from List and Menzies, and Zhong, which claim that version’s respectability.

  20. Such as advocated in Dowe (2000), and Salmon (1984).

  21. See in particular Lewis (1973).

  22. Though, for important criticism of the project, see Hall (2007), and Strevens (2007).

  23. Similar worries are raised in Bontly (2005).

  24. For example, see Bernstein (2014), Weslake (2013), and Woodward (2008).

  25. Elsewhere, Shapiro and Sober (2012) pick out two readings of proportionality as pragmatic and semantic respectively. Since those causal claims which violate the ‘pragmatic’ reading are clearly assertable, I find it more perspicacious to use the weak/strong labelling instead.

  26. For the full details, see Lewis (1973) and the subsequent “Postscripts” (1986).

  27. See Lewis (1986), and Schaffer (2000), for the standard statements of late and trumping varieties respectively.

  28. Notice that, if correct, this would represent a striking result. It would, at a stroke, resolve all cases of pre-emption! On this view, we should have said all along that Suzy’s throw was not a cause of the window breaking, but that a child’s throw was. This would turn 40 years of the literature on its head. But it is precisely that this is not a plausible treatment of pre-emption cases that means it has not been adopted.

  29. An anonymous referee offers a friendly suggestion for the defender of proportionality: mimicking Lewis, take causation not to be identical with proportional counterfactual dependence, but instead chains thereof. I think this is an interesting suggestion, one I have pursued independently (McDonnell, Transitivity and Proportion in Causation, manuscript), however as it allows that causes and their effects at either end of a proportional chain can be out of proportion with each other, it will only help the defender of a weak proportionality constraint, not any of my targets in this paper.

  30. An anonymous referee points out that List and Menzies may also be able to give something like this response by insisting that the right counterfactual in these cases is one with a complex antecedent: if Suzy hadn’t thrown and Billy still didn’t throw, then… Such a proposal would need to be clearly laid out before it could be assessed, but the argument I give here against Zhong still applies: what justifies the different treatment of EP and the Sophie case?

  31. See, for example, Hitchcock (2001), and McDermott, (1995).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Umut Baysan, John Donaldson, Stephan Leuenberger, Peter Menzies, James Woodward, Stephen Yablo, and also to the audience of the Grounding and Emergence conference in Glasgow, 2016, for valuable feedback and advice. The research for this paper was conducted jointly at the University of Glasgow as part of the Glasgow Emergence Project (funded by John Templeton Foundation Grant 40485) and at Universität Hamburg, as part of the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group Ontology After Quine (WO-1896/1-1). I am thankful for the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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  1. Philosophisches Seminar, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 6, 10. Stock, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

    Neil McDonnell

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McDonnell, N. Causal exclusion and the limits of proportionality. Philos Stud 174, 1459–1474 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0767-3

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