1 Causal
نویسنده
چکیده
According to causal idealism, causation is a product of human mental activity in a world lacking a mind-independent causal relation. The view is historically popular. Collingwood (1938) held that causal questions are essentially epistemological rather than ontological. Russell (1913) held that there was no role for causation in fundamental physics. And insofar as Hume famously took causation to be a constant conjunction of events rather than a relation, he, too, counts as a kind of idealist. Causal idealism has fallen out of favor in contemporary metaphysics. The majority of current causation theorists claim to be causal realists. They reject causal idealism in favor of “mixed” theories that accept a mind-independent causal relation whose truth conditions are infected by, but not entirely a creation of, human thought. In recent years, views positing contextualism, contrastivism, and pragmatism about causation have surged in prominence. Such views hold that whether c is a cause of e is subject to a particular context, contrast class, or pragmatic constraints on terminological usage. These views purport to solve a variety of problems for theories of causation, including problems with preemption, causation by omission, and the distinction between causes and background conditions. The central suspicion surrounding these types of views is that they render the causal relation subjective and mind-dependent while claiming to be realist. Metaphysical realists hold that causation is a joint-carving, mind-independent relation: something “in the world” that would exist exactly the way it does regardless of human thoughts or interventions. But views of causation that incorporate human thought and agency are taken to threaten the mind-independence and objectivity of the causal relation. This paper asks the question: why not accept causal idealism in lieu of contextualism, contrastivism, or pragmatism? Accepting idealism is commonly viewed as “giving up” on a mind-independent causal relation—a lazy way out of intractable problems with causal theories that seem solvable by partially incorporating human
منابع مشابه
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