Woodward Meets Russell: Does Causation Fit into the World of Physics?

Abstract

In the previous chapters, objections to Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation consisted in arguing that interventions are troubled because they are either dispensable for the semantic project with respect to causation, or they lead to an inappropriate evaluation of interventionist counterfactuals, at least if the antecedent of such a conditional involves an existential claim about merely logically possible interventions (see Chapter 4). The results of Chapter 4 lead to a follow-up problem for interventionists: the invariance account of laws in the special sciences — which interventionists endorse — cannot be maintained because this account uses the notion of a possible intervention (see Chapter 5). An alternative explication of laws in the special sciences was offered that does not suffer from dependence on possible interventions. This chapter will present another objection to the use of the notion of an intervention. Interventionists argue, as will be shown, that the notion of an intervention is of great value because it allows us to explain why causation has certain features, such as being asymmetric and time-asymmetric. The interventionists’ positive argument for the theoretical indispensability and value of interventions is what I term the ‘open-systems argument’. This argument, which is crucially built on the notion of an intervention, is supposed to explain why causation has certain features.