Abstract
Causal eliminativists maintain that all causal talk is false. The prospects for such a view seem to be stymied by an indispensability argument, charging that any agent must distinguish between effective and ineffective strategies, and that such a distinction must commit that agent to causal notions. However, this argument has been under-explored. The contributions of this paper are twofold: first, I provide a thorough explication of the indispensability argument and the various ways it might be defended. Second, I point to an important limitation in the argument and suggest that it does not give us sufficient reason to reject eliminativism. In support of this last claim, I show that the distinction between effective and ineffective strategies could perfectly well be grounded in a counterfactual rather than a causal decision theory and argue that there are fully adequate explanations of how we could come to make the requisite counterfactual judgments that need not invoke causal concepts.
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Notes
I take it that causal generalizations—“smoking causes cancer”—will also be false if singular causal claims are false, but throughout my focus will only be on singular causation.
For an exposition of these ideas see (Russell, 1913, pp. 16–18) and (Field, 2003, pp. 438–440). J. S. Mill offers a famous argument against causal selection—(Mill, 1846, pp. 197–201). Mill’s verdict is endorsed in Lewis (1986b), see also (Schaffer, 2016, Sect. 2.3). Lewis (2000) might appear to have the resources to avoid this argument. There he appeals to a notion of influence, roughly counterfactual covariation. c then causes e iff c stands in the ancestral of the influence relation to e. We might think that background conditions do not exert a sufficient influence on downstream events to count as causes on this picture. Yet Lewis’sproposal does not avoid the present argument because even if some background factors do not exercise a great influence over the effect, there are innumerably many absences that do seem to exert a significant influence.
For a defense of Aristotelianism see Armstrong (1978).
See Wagner (1982) for real world instances of Simpson’s paradox.
(Paul & Hall, 2013, pp. 74–143) give a comprehensive account of “redundant causation” in counterfactual analyses.
If I choose to swing because I want my swing to be the one that strikes the ball, then my action is not a (causal) means to the end, but the end in itself.
Lewis’s theory does allow for the occurrence a minor miracle preceding the condition described by the antecedent to feature in our evaluation of counterfactuals (Lewis, 1986c). The important point, though, is that the influence of this miracle should be screened-off by the antecedent.
There are rival proposals, but since the Lewis–Stalnaker view is the most influential I will assume that “
” in CDT\(_{\text {O}}\) is to be understood as interpreted by the Lewis–Stalnaker theory.“Decision” is understood to be a localized microstate of a person’s brain, which is correlated with external bodily motion. These assumptions seem permissible given the context. The first is important in avoiding backtracking (Loewer, 2007, pp. 316–317).
An anonymous referee pointed out that this feature of \(Pr_{SM}\) seems to rule out non-trivial deliberation about the past, for instance in cases of time-travel. The point is well taken. Since, however, judgments about retro-effectiveness do not feature centrally in our practice of strategy evaluation, eliminativists can arguably set them aside in answering the indispensability objection.
As observed above, to defend CFDT eliminativists only need to define “
” for a limited range of antecedents. In this section, though, I assume that counterfactual defined by the entropy theory can hold more generally, since if there is to be a viable ineliminativist objection here it shouldn’t rely on the assumption that the relevant kind of counterfactual dependence is only defined in relation to agential decisions.Since the counterfactual conditions of an event need not determine that event, counterfactual theorists of causation may want to resist this characterization—although arguably to do so would be a mistake preventing them capturing our causal concept in full (cf. Kment, 2010, p. 82).
(Edgington, 2011, pp. 84–86). I will depart a little from Edgington’s formalism: where she relies on conditional probabilities, I prefer to use conditional credences in causal propositions.
(Egan, 2007, pp. 111–113) discusses and rejects several variants of ratificationism.
” in CDT
” for a limited range of antecedents. In this section, though, I assume that counterfactual defined by the entropy theory can hold more generally, since if there is to be a viable ineliminativist objection here it shouldn’t rely on the assumption that the relevant kind of counterfactual dependence is only defined in relation to agential decisions.References
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Adam Elga, Mark Johnston, Boris Kment, Harvey Lederman, Gideon Rosen, and Eyal Tal for their help. I also want to thank the Princeton Dissertation Seminar, who read and commented on a draft of this paper, and to extend especial thanks to Haley Brennan for her commentary. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to three anonymous referees for their suggestions and recommendations. Regrettably, constraints of space prevent me doing full justice to the many objections, insights, and proposals I received from these sources.
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van’t Hoff, A. In defense of causal eliminativism. Synthese 200, 393 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03875-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03875-9