Pragmatic Causation

Two arguments due to Russell are examined, and found to show that the notion of causation as full determination doesn’t mesh easily with deterministic global physics and the distinction between effective and ineffective strategies. But a local notion of causation as involving a certain kind of counterfactual dependence is, I argue, compatible with Russell’s conclusions. I defend it from a resurgent form of Russell’s microphysical determinism argument by deploying a pragmatic account of the nature and function of scientific theories. 1. Russell’s Arguments The law of causality. . . like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (Russell, 1913 [1963], 132) Russell (1913 [1963]) takes the relation of causation to be a relation of determination: c causes e just when c determines e to occur. This relation is asymmetric and plausibly transitive. The fundamental law of causality is supposed to be that every event has a sufficient cause, one that is guaranteed to bring that event about and in fact did so. This intuition about the deterministic nature of causation is not a Russellian idiosyncrasy: it originates in Hume’s ‘constant conjunction’ regularity analysis (if c and e are constantly conjoined, the appearance of c should ∗Thanks to audiences at Princeton and at the Causal Republicanism conference, Centre for Time, University of Sydney. Particular thanks go to Huw Price, Chris Hitchcock, Helen Beebee, Daniel Nolan, Gil Harman, Charles Twardy, Karen Bennett, Mathias Frisch, Jason Grossman, Gill Russell, Paul Benacerraf, Mark Schroeder, Graham McDonald, Brett Sherman, and Adam Elga. Special thanks to Toby Handfield and Jeff Speaks. †Philosophy Department, Princeton University. [email protected]