Powers, causation, and modality

A complex theory concerning powers, natures, and causal necessity has emerged from the writings of P. H. Hare, E. H. Madden, and R. Harré. In the course of rebutting objections that other critics have raised to the power account of causation, I correct three of its genuine difficulties: its attempt to analyze power attributions in terms of conditional statements; its characterization of the relation between something's powers and its nature; and its doctrines concerning conceptual necessity. The resulting interpretation of causal modalities is then subsumed under a more general power account of modality, related at a number of points to considerations concerning powers, and further illustrating their philosophical importance.     

How emotion shapes behavior: feedback, anticipation, and reflection, rather than direct causation.

Fear causes fleeing and thereby saves lives: this exemplifies a popular and common sense but increasingly untenable view that the direct causation of behavior is the primary function of emotion. Instead, the authors develop a theory of emotion as a feedback system whose influence on behavior is typically indirect. By providing feedback and stimulating retrospective appraisal of actions, conscious emotional states can promote learning and alter guidelines for future behavior. Behavior may also be chosen to pursue (or avoid) anticipated emotional outcomes. Rapid, automatic affective responses, in contrast to the full-blown conscious emotions, may inform cognition and behavioral choice and thereby help guide current behavior. The automatic affective responses may also remind the person of past emotional outcomes and provide useful guides as to what emotional outcomes may be anticipated in the present. To justify replacing the direct causation model with the feedback model, the authors review a large body of empirical findings.     

Agency, properties and causation

The paper argues against the very commonly held view that whenever a substance may be said to be the cause of something, a fuller and metaphysically more accurate understanding of the situation can always be obtained by looking to the properties in virtue of which that substance was able to bring about the effect in question. Paul Humphreys’ argument that when a substance is said to have produced an effect, it always turns out to be an aspect or property of that substance which brought about the effect in question is examined and criticized; it is argued that it is based on an illegitimate application of Mill’s Methods of Difference and Agreement to the case. Mill’s methods, it is suggested, are methods of empirical, not of ontological enquiry. The paper then turns to examine an argument by Mele which appears to depend on a structurally rather similar assumption that if there is nothing about a subject which could explain why she does one thing rather than another, it cannot really be up to that subject which thing occurs. It is suggested that, too, the inference is faulty, and that once it is rejected, one common objection to libertarianism—the argument from luck—might be more readily met.     

Correlation,partial correlation,and causation

Philosophers and scientists have maintained that causation, correlation, and “partial correlation” are essentially related. These views give rise to various rules of causal inference. This essay considers the claims of several philosophers and social scientists for causal systems with dichotomous variables. In section 2 important commonalities and differences are explicated among four major conceptions of correlation. In section 3 it is argued that whether correlation can serve as a measure of A's causal influence on B depends upon the conception of causation being used and upon certain background assumptions. In section 4 five major kinds of “partial correlation” are explicated, and some of the important relations are established among two conceptions of “partial correlation”, the conception of “screening off”, the conception of “partitioning”, and the measures of causal influence which have been suggested by advocates of path analysis or structural equation methods. In section 5 it is argued that whether any of these five conceptions of “partial correlation” can serve as a measure of causal influence depends upon the conception of causation being used and upon certain background assumptions. The important conclusion is that each of the approaches (considered here) to causal inference for causal systems with dichotomous variables stands in need of important qualifications and revisions if they are to be justified.     

Language,duration estimation,and causation

Burt (2002) raises several interesting points in his commentary on our paper. However, the most important difference between his and our studies, the design, was not addressed. We argue that our experimental approach makes more realistic assumptions for causal interpretation. The other points that he raises—the relationship between practical and statistical significance, the verbs used by our participants, and definitions of memory—are all discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contingency, causation, and adaptive inference

In contingency judgment tasks involving 2 event types, individuals weight the a and b cells of a 2 x 2 contingency table more than the c and d cells. Some theorists have argued that they can provide normative justifications for this weighting and that the weighting reflects simple heuristics that are adaptive in the real world. The authors show that, to avoid error, individual judgments about real contingencies should be more subtle than these supposedly adaptive heuristics allow.     

Determination,realization and mental causation

How can mental properties bring about physical effects, as they seem to do, given that the physical realizers of the mental goings-on are already sufficient to cause these effects? This question gives rise to the problem of mental causation (MC) and its associated threats of causal overdetermination, mental causal exclusion, and mental causal irrelevance. Some (e.g., Cynthia and Graham Macdonald, and Stephen Yablo) have suggested that understanding mental-physical realization in terms of the determinable/determinate relation (henceforth, ‘determination’) provides the key to solving the problem of MC: if mental properties are determinables of their physical realizers, then (since determinables and determinates are distinct, yet don’t causally compete) all three threats may be avoided. Not everyone agrees that determination can do this good work, however. Some (e.g., Douglas Ehring, Eric Funkhauser, and Sven Walter) object that mental-physical realization can’t be determination, since such realization lacks one or other characteristic feature of determination. I argue that on a proper understanding of the features of determination key to solving the problem of MC these arguments can be resisted.     

Mental causation,compatibilism and counterfactuals

According to proponents of the causal exclusion problem, there cannot be a sufficient physical cause and a distinct mental cause of the same piece of behaviour. Increasingly, the causal exclusion problem is circumvented via this compatibilist reasoning: a sufficient physical cause of the behavioural effect necessitates the mental cause of the behavioural effect, so the effect has a sufficient physical cause and a mental cause as well. In this paper, I argue that this compatibilist reply fails to resolve the causal exclusion problem.     

Incidence of suicidal ideation and behavior in the United States, 1994.

Completed suicides reflect only a portion of the impact of suicidal behavior; sublethal behaviors cause morbidity and can signal treatable problems such as depression. There is no national quantification of nonlethal suicidal behaviors. The present study used a random-digit-dialed telephone survey to estimate the 12-month incidence of suicidal ideation, planning, and attempts among U.S. adults. Of 5,238 respondents, 5.6% (representing about 10.5 million persons) reported suicidal ideation, 2.7% (about 2.7 million) made a specific suicide plan, and 0.7% (about 700,000) made a suicide attempt (estimate = 1.1 million attempts). Hence, suicidal behaviors are not uncommon and occur along a continuum ranging from ideation to completed suicides. Preventing nonlethal precursor behaviors may prevent deaths.     

Causal foundationalism, physical causation, and difference-making

An influential tradition in the philosophy of causation has it that all token causal facts are, or are reducible to, facts about difference-making. Challenges to this tradition have typically focused on pre-emption cases, in which a cause apparently fails to make a difference to its effect. However, a novel challenge to the difference-making approach has recently been issued by Alyssa Ney. Ney defends causal foundationalism, which she characterizes as the thesis that facts about difference-making depend upon facts about physical causation. She takes this to imply that causation is not fundamentally a matter of difference-making. In this paper, I defend the difference-making approach against Ney’s argument. I also offer some positive reasons for thinking, pace Ney, that causation is fundamentally a matter of difference-making.