Abstract
In her recent paper, “A Defense of Substance Causation,” Ann Whittle makes a case for substance causation. In this paper, assuming that causation is a generative or productive relation, I argue that Whittle’s argument is not successful. While substances are causally relevant in causal processes owing to outcomes being counterfactually dependent upon their role in such occurrences, the real productive work in causal processes is accomplished by the causal powers of substances.
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Notes
I have numbered the premises to make it easier to keep track of them.
See, for instance, Anjan Chakravartty (2007), Heil (2003) and Heil (2012), Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (2002), George Molnar (2003), C.B. Martin (2008), Stephen Mumford and Anjum (2011), and Neil Williams (2014). There are differences between these authors, but they share enough in common for their general proposals to all count as variants of the same approach to thinking about the metaphysics of causation.
O’Connor and Jacobs (2013) and Michael Brent (forthcoming) defend similar views.
Exceptions I have not discussed would involve substances that have powers that do not require any reciprocal manifestation partners to be manifested. So, for instance, a quantity of strontium-90 is disposed to beta-decay and manifests its disposition absent any manifestation partner.
Thanks to Michael Brent, John Heil, and Neil Williams for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
References
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Buckareff, A.A. A Critique of Substance Causation. Philosophia 45, 1019–1026 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9855-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9855-7