Abstract
This paper combines the ancient idea that causes necessitate their effects with Angelika Kratzer’s semantics of modality. On the resulting view, causal claims quantify over restricted domains of possible worlds determined by two contextually determined parameters. I argue that this view can explain a number of otherwise puzzling features of the way we use and evaluate causal language, including the difference between causing an effect and being a cause of it, the sensitivity of causal judgements to normative facts, and the semantics of causal disagreements.
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Notes
[A]n entire cause, is the aggregate of all the accidents both of the agents how many soever they be, and of the patient, put together; which when they are all supposed to be present, it cannot be understood but that the effect is produced at the same instant (Hobbes 1655, pp. 121–2; my emphasis).
A true cause as I understand it is one such that the mind perceives a necessary connection between it and its effect. Now the mind perceives a necessary connection only between the will of an infinitely perfect being and its effects. Therefore, it is only God who is the true cause and who truly has the power to move bodies (Malebranche 1674, p. 450).
For example: “There are sequences, as uniform in past experience as any others whatever, which yet we do not regard as cases of causation, but as conjunctions in some sort accidental. Such, to an accurate thinker, is that of day and night. […] We may define, therefore, the cause of a phenomenon, to be the antecedent, or the concurrence of antecedents, on which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent” (Mill 1843, p. 377).
Davidson (1980, p. 208) calls this the “Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality”.
Note that (CL) is just a necessary condition on causation. Those seeking an analysis have typically combined (CL) with other necessary conditions. According to Hume, for example, a cause must also occur prior to, and spatially contiguous with, its effect (Hume 1738, pp. 75–6).
For example, see Mackie (1974, pp. 40–3). I won’t address the issue of indeterministic laws here. It’s worth pointing out, however, that both of our two best candidates for a fundamental physical theory, general relativity and quantum mechanics, are perfectly deterministic. Proponents of the so-called ‘GRW theory’ have responded to perceived conceptual difficulties with quantum mechanics by postulating an additional indeterministic dynamical process, called ‘collapse’; but there are other deterministic alternatives (e.g. De-Broglie-Bohm theory) as well as interpretations of unitary quantum mechanics that take it seriously on its own terms (e.g. the Everett or ‘many worlds’ interpretation).
This example is adapted from one in Mackie (1965).
I’m assuming here that MAX≤O ∩B is always non-empty. This is called the limit assumption, and it’s endorsed by Stalnaker (1981) and rejected by Lewis (1973) and Kratzer. If the limit assumption is false we need to massage the definitions above to avoid trivial results (see Kratzer 1981). I’ll ignore these complications from now on for simplicity.
In particular, it cannot by itself explain why some modals have preferred readings (e.g. ‘might’ likes to be epistemic, ‘can’ likes to be circumstantial), as well as various phenomena involving the interaction of modality with tense and aspect (Hacquard 2009).
Some think that utterances of sentences like ‘Karin should be in jail’ don’t express anything truth-evaluable, but rather express (in a different sense of ‘express’) something like the utterer’s disapproval of Karin’s actions (Horgan and Timmons 2006). Others think that sentences like ‘Karin should be in jail’ express the same proposition in every context of use, but these propositions are themselves true or false only relative to a context of assessment (MacFarlane 2005). Yet others distinguish what is said by an utterance from what is semantically expressed by it, and argue that indefinitely many propositions are said by an utterance of ‘Karin should be in jail’, even though only a single proposition is semantically expressed by it (Cappelen and Lepore 2005). I mention these alternatives merely to set them aside, but it’s worth thinking about how my view could be adapted to fit these various approaches.
The only exception I’m aware of is Szabó and Knobe (2013), who seek to explain certain patterns of empirical data by assuming that participants evaluate target statements by replacing them with “modal proxies”. My view is in the spirit of Szabó and Knobe’s project, although it goes further in that it actually incorporates Kratzer’s framework into the semantics of causal claims, and applies the resulting theory to a much broader range of phenomena.
When I say that Jaya and Fatima lifted the table together, I don’t mean that what lifted the table was the set containing Jaya and Fatima, or the mereological fusion of Jaya and Fatima, or indeed any other single thing. In other words, I believe that there is such a thing as irreducibly plural predication. See McKay (2006).
Unger (1977) argues that overdetermination in this sense is incoherent, since he thinks that the distributive readings of sentences like (2) are contradictory. I don’t endorse that view, though Unger mounts a convincing case.
An anonymous referee points out that one can felicitously say things like ‘The short circuit caused the fire, but of course it didn’t cause it alone’. One might conclude from this that ‘X caused Y’ and ‘X was a cause of Y’ are synonymous, although the former carries a cancellable presupposition that X was the only cause of Y. But another explanation is that the context changes mid-sentence: The first clause is evaluated relative to a restricted set of possibilities and the ‘but of course’ indicates a change in context to a wider set of possibilities, relative to which the short circuit wasn’t the only cause. One finds similar effects in modal claims: On the natural reading of ‘John must pay his debts, but of course he can’t’, the first clause is evaluated relative to one set of possibilities and the second clause relative to a different set of possibilities.
See the results of Clarke et al.’s (2015) ‘First experiment’.
Clarke et al. re-ran their experiment with four different target statements and four different experimental primes, each specifically designed to urge the participants to respect the counterfactual symmetry of the case in their causal assessments. “No matter how plain we made it…that what Greta did made a difference to whether the outcome occurred, participants tended to take Rachel but not Greta to be one of the causes” (Clarke et al. 2015, p. 283). See also Hitchcock and Knobe (2009), Knobe (2010), and references therein.
“[F]ocusing participants’ attention in a certain way—emphasizing the physics of a situation—can increase the frequency with which they give egalitarian responses” (Clarke et al. 2015, p. 289). This was the only experimental prime that had any significant effect on responses.
[1970] SC 20 (HL).
Ibid., p. 25.
Jones v. Boyce [1816] Stark 1, p. 493.
Ibid. pp. 495–6, emphasis added.
[1869] LR 4 CP 739, p. 741, emphasis added.
All this raises a pressing question: If the proposition expressed by a sentence like ‘The defendant’s negligence caused the plaintiff’s harm’ depends on the modal base and ordering source, what are the right modal base and ordering source to use for the purposes of determining an agent’s (degree of) responsibility or liability for a harm? I explore this question more fully elsewhere (see my ‘Contextualism and the Normative Connections Problem’).
For a good introduction to this debate, see Stegmann (2012).
This is plausibly what Sterelny and Kitcher have in mind when they describe genes as sufficient for many biological phenomena “relative to any standard environment” (Sterelny and Kitcher 1988, p. 349; my emphasis).
According to Lewis, for example, the worker and the manager “disagree only about which part of the causal history is most salient for the purposes of some particular inquiry” (Lewis 1986b, p. 215).
Does this view imply that the causal facts would have been different if the moral facts had been different (and isn’t that absurd)? No, at least on a natural reading of this counterfactual. Compare with gradable adjectives again. Suppose I’m in a context where ‘Kim is tall’ expresses the false proposition that Kim is tall for a person. Now consider the sentence ‘Had everyone else been shorter, Kim would have been tall’. There’s a true de dicto reading of this counterfactual: In the relevant counterfactual worlds, Kim is tall compared to other people in those worlds. But the natural reading is the false de re reading: In the relevant worlds, Kim is tall compared to actual people (this latter reading is false, since Kim’s height wouldn’t have been any different if everyone else had been shorter). In this case, then, it’s natural to interpret the standard of comparison as outside the scope of the modal operator. Similarly for causal claims. Suppose we’re in a context where ‘The pay-rise caused the bankruptcy’ expresses the proposition that the pay-rise caused the bankruptcy morally speaking, and suppose that this proposition is false. Then the natural reading of ‘If the moral facts had been different, the pay-rise would have caused the bankruptcy’ is the false de re reading: In the relevant counterfactual worlds, the pay-rise caused the bankruptcy relative to the actual moral ordering source. This reading is false, since the counterfactual structure of the case wouldn’t have been any different if the moral facts had been different. Thanks to Jake McNulty and Caleb Perl here.
‘Roughly speaking’, because this simple counterfactual analysis runs into problems in familiar cases involving redundant causation. These problems won’t be relevant in what follows.
Hoffmann (2011, p. 4) goes as far as to claim that “no judge in fact adopts” Stapleton’s recommendations, despite their influence in philosophical circles. Similarly, having acknowledged that “[t]he causal parity thesis derives its initial plausibility from the contemplation of the enormous causal complexity of the processes that constitute life at the molecular level”, Weber notes that it is “somewhat ironic” that “we would know close to nothing about this complexity if it wasn’t for gene-centered research” (Weber forthcoming).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to John Hawthorne, Ofra Magidor, Delia Graff Fara, Laurie Paul, Boris Kment and an anonymous referee for comments on previous drafts of this paper. Thanks also to audiences in Austin, New York, Princeton and Stockholm for helpful questions.
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Kaiserman, A. Necessary Connections in Context. Erkenn 82, 45–64 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9805-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9805-y