Abstract
Causal pluralists hold that that there is not just one determinate kind of causation. Some causal pluralists hold that ‘cause’ is ambiguous among these different kinds. For example, Hall argues that ‘cause’ is ambiguous between two causal relations, which he labels dependence and production. The view that ‘cause’ is ambiguous, however, wrongly predicts zeugmatic conjunction reduction, and wrongly predicts the behaviour of ellipsis in causal discourse. So ‘cause’ is not ambiguous. If we are to disentangle causal pluralism from the ambiguity claim, we need to consider what other linguistic approaches are available to the causal pluralist. I consider and reject proposals that ‘cause’ is a general term, that the term is an indexical, and that the term conveys different kinds of causation through implicature or presupposition. Finally, I argue that causal pluralism is better handled by treating ‘cause’ as a univocal term within a dynamic interpretation framework.
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Notes
See Phys. 195a4, 29, Meta. 983a26, 1013b4, 1052b48, De An. 415b9. My name-dropping here is not intended as scholarship. But we will return to Aristotle’s association of causal pluralism and questions. Readers interested in the scholarly issues around Aristotle’s application of homonymy to causation might begin with Stein (2011).
Hall’s specific version of determinate causal pluralism has received considerable attention. Some have embraced the distinction between production and dependence: see, for example, Illari and Russo (2014), and McDonnell (2018). Others have responded with unitary analyses of causation that nonetheless employ the distinction: for example, Beckers and Vennekens (2018) argue that dependence is an unnecessary but sufficient condition for causation, and production is an insufficient but necessary condition; and Andreas and Günther (2020) offer an analysis of causation by complementing production with a weak condition of difference-making. Hall’s pluralism has also received its share of criticism. Some criticize the sufficiency of production and dependence for causation: for example, Schaffer (2001, 2016) describes cases where an event causes an effect but neither does the cause produce the effect nor does the effect depend on the cause. Others criticize the necessity of the distinction: for example, Strevens (2013) argues that a single causal relation suffices to explain Hall’s double prevention cases.
The theses that causation is univocal or multivocal could be seen as conceptual positions, and not linguistic claims. For example, Hitchcock (2001) associates causal pluralism with the rejection of the thesis that causation is univocal, and it is unclear whether this association is with a conceptual or a linguistic thesis. But Hitchcock (2007) explicitly endorses the linguistic ambiguity claim, and Hall and Hitchcock both confirm in personal correspondence that a linguistic ambiguity claim was their original intention. Other authors who contrast pluralism with an explicitly linguistic univocality thesis include De Vreese (2006, 2009), Love (2012) and Schaffer (2016). Authors who contrast pluralism with a conceptual univocality thesis include Longworth (2006, 2010) and Reiss (2009).
For these two tests, I’m drawing largely on Zwicky and Sadock (1975). For a recent survey of ambiguity from a philosophical perspective, see Sennet (2016). And for a recent use of such tests within metaphysics, see Shaheen (2017a), who argues that ‘because’ is ambiguous between causation and grounding from alleged zeugmatic conjunction reduction.
I indirectly owe my appreciation of this point to Schaffer’s (2012) discussion of pragmatic mechanisms for conveying contextually variant causal contrasts.
For discussion of this controversy, see for example Lewis (2017). The application of one approach or another to a specific issue of philosophical interest also generates controversy. See for example, Gillies (2007) and Moss (2012) on handling reverse Sobel sequences with either a dynamic semantics or dynamic pragmatics, and the implications for counterfactuals.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Christopher Hitchcock, Michael Hymers, Tom Vinci and the auditors of talks given at Dalhousie University and the APA Central. Thanks especially to Ned Hall for magnanimous comments. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from SSHRC Insight Development Grant #430-2020-00713.
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Corkum, P. Is ‘cause’ ambiguous?. Philos Stud 179, 2945–2971 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01809-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01809-2