Abstract
Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic paper Causality and Determination claims that causation can be perceived. It also defends causal singularism, the idea that the causal relation is fundamentally between the particular cause and effect, and does not depend on regularities holding elsewhere in the universe. But does the former furnish an argument for the latter? The present paper analyses a special type of causal experience involving emotional reactions to present stimuli; for instance, being frightened by a spider. It argues that such experiences are strongly local, in the sense that they justify belief in a local causal relation independently of our knowledge about events elsewhere in the universe. If this analysis is correct, Humean regularity theories of causation are false; and all other non-singularist theories of causation face a difficult explanatory challenge. This means that the case for causal singularism comes out considerably strengthened.
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Notes
It is not uncommon to say that in such an experience one ‘non-inferentially’ comes to believe that there is a lion there. I don’t think it is possible to make a distinction between beliefs one arrives at inferentially and beliefs one arrives at non-inferentially. But that is not the topic of this paper, and so I will simply avoid the phrase.
This does not make a strongly local causal experience incorrigible; the possibility is left open that it would lose its justificatory role when we learn more about local events. We will briefly return to this at the end of Sect. 5.
I am indebted to an anonymous referee for some of the following examples.
It might be tempting to say that the justificatory role of such experiences cannot be undermined at all. But I do not want to go that far. If there is one thing that analytic philosophers are good at, it is coming up with strange sceptical scenarios. Perhaps it is possible that there is a neuroscientist who manages to give me the exact experience of being frightened by a spider even though no spider, and no spider-like thing, is there at all. I don’t want to take a stance on the possibility of this scenario. But note that it undermines the causal experience in a purely local manner: in this scenario the local events themselves are different from what I supposed them to be: they involve evil neuro-machines rather than spiders. So this in no way undermines the strong locality of the experience.
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This article belongs to the topical collection “Causality and Determination, Powers and Agency: Anscombean Perspectives”, edited by Jesse M. Mulder, Dawa Ometto, Niels van Miltenburg, and Thomas Müller.
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Gijsbers, V. Perceiving causation and causal singularism. Synthese 199, 14881–14895 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03447-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03447-3