The Emergence of Causation.

Abstract

Many contemporary philosophers are drawn to a doctrine of causal fundamentalism. This doctrine has its epistemic and its metaphysical tenets. The epistemic tenet holds that causation is to be investigated primarily by looking to the ground-floor level of reality. According to the causal fundamentalist, causation is emphatically not to be investigated through what has come to be known as 'conceptual analysis'. The metaphysical tenet of causal fundamentalism maintains that, once the causal structure of the fundamental level of reality is settled, all of the world's causal structure is settled.

The first part of the dissertation disputes both tenets of causal fundamentalism. Chapter 1 argues against the methodology of attempting to locate causation within the theories of fundamental physics without engaging in conceptual analysis. Chapter 2 argues that the world comes equipped with novel and irreducible causal structure at higher levels of description. Settling the world's fundamental causal structure does not suffice to settle all of the world's causal structure. Importantly, accepting this thesis does not commit us to the view that there are irreducible higher-level laws, or irreducible higher-level properties; it is entirely consistent with the view that all facts reduce to fundamental physical facts.

The second part of the dissertation takes up the task of constructing an anti-fundamentalist theory of causation. On this theory, the causal relata are the events of certain parts of the world acquiring or retaining certain properties. In order for two events to be causally related, one must counterfactually depend upon the other, or else there must be a certain kind of chain of counterfactual dependence leading from the one to the other. This theory is broadly in the spirit of Lewis's 1973 counterfactual account of causation. Yet it is able to escape the numerous counterexamples which led even Lewis to eventually abandon that theory.