I'd like to follow up on the comment I made in response to Moti's recent post on Peter Hacker's piece on the nature philosophy. As I noted in my comment, I've long worried that traditional philosophical methods — principally, developing philosophical theories about causation, justice, etc., on the basis of our "considered judgments" about what counts as a cause, justice, etc. — tell us more about our concepts (i.e. how we conceptualize the world) than the world itself.
Now, there are at least two obvious ways to respond this sort of worry. First, one can say that it is of great philosophical interest how we conceptualize the world – that it is in fact of great importance what we classify as a cause, or justice, etc. Second, one can say that investigations of our concepts don't just tell us about our concepts, but about the world itself. Our concepts, after all — well, many of them, at least — "reach out" to the world: they refer to entities and properties within it.
To illustrate: I was having a conversation a while back about these issues with a friend who does analytical metaphysics, her primary focus being causation. I suggested to her that if we base theories of causation on what we judge to be "causes", we're really just developing theories of what we call "causes." She gave something like a standard deflationary reply. Because "X is a cause" is true iff X is a cause, she said, our judgments about the truth of various statements about causation tell us about causation. And, of course, one needn't be a deflationist about truth to make a similar move. One could just as well be a correspondence theorist and hold that statements about "causes" are true because they correspond to things in the world: namely, causes.
In my comment on Moti's post, I mentioned a new paper by David Chalmers, "Verbal Disputes", which just appeared in Phil Review (the link is to a free PDF copy). As I mention in my comment, I think Chalmers' paper represents an important step forward for philosophy, and I'd like to explain why I think this by applying its most central methodological idea to the case I've been discussing: causation.
Chalmers argues that to determine whether a philosophical dispute is "merely verbal" — by which I take him to mean roughly, a dispute about our concepts instead of the world — we should temporarily replace the concept in question with a description of what the concept is being used to refer to. Let's apply this idea to counterfactual analyses of causation.
People who work on counterfactual theories of causation have spent a great deal of time discussing various cases that seem to "pose problems" for such theories. One very well-known case is that of Billy and Suzy, two people who both throw stones at a window. As it turns out, the window's breaking counterfactually depends on both throws. If Billy hadn't thrown his stone, Suzy's would have broken it, and if Suzy hadn't thrown her stone, Billy's would have broken it. But, in the actual world where they both throw their stones, only one of the stones breaks the window, preempting the other one. Finally, there are different variants of the case: "early preemption", "late preemption", etc. People who work on counterfactual theories of causation suppose that if they can come up with a counterfactual analysis that correctly classifies all of these cases — all of the cases we judge to be, and not be, causes — then they will have given a true theory of causation.
Now let's use Chalmers' method for determining whether counterfactual analyses are "merely verbal" (telling us more about how we use the word "cause" than the world itself). Since counterfactual theorists want to understand causation in terms of counterfactual dependence, let's replace the word "causation" in the cases of concern to counterfactual theorists with "counterfactual dependence." So, here's the story: Billy and Suzy both throw stones at a window. The window breaks. The question then is: upon which stone throw does the window's breaking counterfactually depend? The answer, obviously, is: both of them.
Now, of course, counterfactual theorists of causation want to say that only one of the throws genuinely causes the window to break (the other throw is preempted). But, here's the thing, we've just seen that this cannot be accounted for merely in terms of counterfactual dependence. The idea of counterfactual dependence — and facts about counterfactual dependence — by themselves give us no reason to think that one stone caused the window to break over the other. If we want to say that one chain of counterfactual dependence is "causation" whereas another one is not – and of course this is what we want to say (it is what counterfactual theorists take as their starting point for debate) — we cannot explain our wanting to do this merely in terms of counterfactuals. For again, the window's breaking counterfactually depends on both stones.
Here's the rub: the counterfactual theorist has no metaphysical explanation of why we call one counterfactual chain the cause of the window's breaking over the other. They can clearly provide practical reasons for our calling one chain a "cause" over the other — by, for example, saying that we are concerned with some counterfactual chains over others. However, they cannot provide a genuine metaphysical reason for calling one chain a "cause" over the other. For again, in their metaphysics, there is nothing in the world that corresponds to our concept of a "cause" above and beyond counterfactual dependencies, and the window's breaking counterfactually depends on both stones.
There are, it seems to me, only two genuine metaphysical candidates capable of explaining why we call one stone — one chain of counterfactual dependencies — the cause of the window's breaking but not the other. We judge the one throw to cause the window to break because it is the particular chain of counterfactual dependencies because the throw:
- Comprises a chain of constantly connected events leading to the window's breaking (i.e. Humean "regularity theory" of causation), that may also
- Comprises a chain of events that necessitate the window's breaking (i.e. a Kantian necessitation theory of causation).
There's a simpler way to put all of this. If Chalmers' method is correct (and if I have applied it correctly), counterfactual "theories of causation" can't be genuine metaphysical theories of causation. They at most classify certain counterfactual chains as "causes" but not others. They fail to provide any metaphysical explanation of why it is correct to call those things — i.e. one type of causal chain but not others — "causes." In other words, counterfactual theories provide no reason at all to think that our concept of a cause carves nature at its real metaphysical joints. In order to provide a genuine metaphysical theory of causation, one must appeal to something beyond counterfactuals to explain why one type of counterfactual chain are "causes" but others aren't. And for that one needs to appeal to either a Humean regularity theory, a Kantian necessitation theory, or something else entirely.
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