Contrastive Causation
نویسندگان
چکیده
[C]ausal statements are commonly made in some context, against a background which includes the assumption of some causal field. A causal statement will be the answer to a causal question, and the question ‘What caused this explosion?’ can be expanded into ‘What made the difference between those times, or those cases, within a certain range, in which no such explosion occurred, and this case in which an explosion did occur?’ Both causes and effects are seen as differences within a field. ... —Mackie (1974, 34–35)
منابع مشابه
Contrastive Causation in the Law
What conception of causation is at work in the law? I argue that the law implicitly relies on a contrastive conception. In a liability case where the defendant’s breach of duty must be shown to have caused the plaintiff’s damages, it is not enough to consider what would have happened if the cause had not occurred—the law instructs us to look to a specific replacement for the cause, which in thi...
متن کاملFact and Law in the Causal Inquiry
This paper takes it as a premise that a distinction between matters of fact and of law is important in the causal inquiry. But it argues that separating factual and legal causation as different elements of liability is not the best way to implement the fact/law distinction. It is partly a legal question what counts as a cause-in-fact; and certain liabilitylimiting doctrines under the umbrella o...
متن کاملReason Claims and Contrastivism about Reasons∗
In this paper I argue for contrastivism about reasons. Just as contrastivism about causation and knowledge hold that ‘cause’ and ‘knows’, respectively, express relations with argument places for sets of alternatives, contrastivism about reasons holds that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. Some consideration might be a reason for an action relative t...
متن کاملThe Effect of Contrastive Analysis on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners of L2 Adjective Knowledge
Contrastive analysis of hypothesis is the comparison of the linguistic system of two or more languages and it is based on the main difficulties in learning a new language that caused by interference from the first language. The present study intended to investigate the effect of contrastive analysis on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ knowledge of L2 adjectives. The questi...
متن کاملThe role of selection in the comprehension of focus alternatives
Successful language comprehension often requires comprehenders to infer contrastive focus alternatives, but the mechanisms used to establish contrastive alternatives are still poorly understood. We propose that comprehenders establish contrastive alternatives by using selection mechanisms that distinguish contrastive from non-contrastive candidates. To examine this proposal, we investigated the...
متن کامل