The Ontology of Causal Process Theories

There is a widespread belief that the so-called process theories of causation developed by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe have given us an original account of what causation really is. In this paper, I show that this is a misconception. The notion of ??causal process?? does not offer us a new ontological account of causation. I make this argument by explicating the implicit ontological commitments in Salmon and Dowe??s theories. From this, it is clear that Salmon??s Mark Transmission Theory collapses to a counterfactual theory of causation, while the Conserved Quantity Theory collapses to David Fair??s phsyicalist reduction of causation.