[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 ...

Classical mechanics is formulated without reference to conscious experience. Quantum mechanics, in contrast, is, both by design, and in actual practice, a theory of relationships between the actions we choose and the consequences we experience. The theory includes not only laws that define a continuous evolution described in purely physical terms, but also an elaborate theoretical machinery tha...

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 resur...

1. Singular vs. general causation In many people, caffeine causes slight muscle tremors, particularly in their hands. In general, the Caffeine → Muscle Tremors causal connection is a noisy one: someone can drink coffee and experience no hand shaking, and there are many other factors that can lead to muscle tremors. Now suppose that Jane drinks several cups of coffee and then notices that her ha...

Introduction There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. writes that " [m]oral considerations actually figure in the fundamental competencies people use to make sense of the world, " while Pettit and Knobe (...