Elusive Causation

1. Elusive Causation • Some Details: • Contextualism about Singular Causal Claims: • This is the view that statements of the form “event c is a cause of event e” and “event c is not a cause of event e” depend for their meaning and truth conditions on the context in which they occur. • “Event c is a cause of event e” is true in context C iff had c not happened but c* had happened instead, then e would not have happened but e*would have happened instead (where c* is a salient contrast to c in context C, and e*is a salient contrast to e in context C). • More generally (with sets of contrast events): • “Event c is a cause of event e” is true in context C iff for every c*i in {c*i} there is an e*i in {e*i} such that if c*i had happened then e*i would have happened (where {c*i} is a salient set of contrasts to c in context C, and {e*i} is a salient set of contrasts to e in context C). • Putnam’s (less ambitious) Contextualism about Causation: • “Imagine that Venusians land on Earth and observe a forest fire. One of them says, ‘I know what caused that – the atmosphere of the darned planet is saturated with oxygen.’ What this vignette illustrates is that one man’s (or extraterrestrial’s) ‘background condition’ can easily be another man’s ‘cause’.” • Assume Nonreductive Materialism (i.e., materialism is true and mental properties are not reducible to physical properties) • Are there contexts in which Epiphenomenalism is true? (i.e., are there contexts in which all positive claims of mental causation are false?) • Impoverished contexts? • (A) A desire for chocolate was a cause of her action. • (B) The firing of neuron535 was a cause of her action. • p.t.o. Outline: A contextualist view of causation Examples: Potatoes are bad for you Almond Crescents The Exploding gas tank [Field] Impoverished contexts? [Carroll] Mechanisms of Relevance Two Rules of Attention A Rule of Probability A Default Contrasts Rule Subject vs. Attributor Factors Other Issues Do you have to be a mind-reader? (No) Do you have to know what you’re talking about? (No) Some Conclusions Cei Maslen, Victoria University of Wellington, cei.maslen@vuw.ac.nz 19.7.2006

2. Some potential contrasts with my desire for a chocolate flake: • (1) Replacement mental event: desire for a snickers bar. • (2) Replacement brain event: neuron536 firing (instead of neuron535) • (3) Zombie event: event physically identical to c, but lacking all mental properties • (4) Ghost event: event mentally identical to c, but lacking all physical properties • (5) Twin-Earth replacement event: desire for a shmocolate flake. • (6) Range of Contrasts: set of contrasts including all of the above. • (7) Zombie-world contrast: contrast-world which is physically identical to the actual world but lacking any mental properties. • (8) Ghost-world contrast: contrast-world which is mentally identical to the actual world but lacking any physical properties. • (9) Neuron-in-petrie-dish contrast: event physically identical to c but placed in a very different extrinsic physical background. • Some mechanisms for establishing relevant contrasts for contextualism about causation: • Two Rules of Attention • (1) Seriously supposing that “c is a relevant way for the cause to be absent” ensures that c is a relevant contrast. • (2) Seriously supposing that “c is not a relevant way for the cause to be absent” (e.g. c is not of interest) ensures that c is not a relevant contrast. • A Rule of Probability • (3) A contrast that is very improbable, or below a threshold that is salient in the context, is not relevant. • A Default Contrasts Rule • (4) The unspecific contrast, the nonoccurrence of the cause, is relevant as a default. • A quote from Kim: “[T]he very same network of causal relations would obtain in Davidson’s world if you were to redistribute mental properties over its events any way you like; you would not disturb a single causal relation if you randomly and arbitrarily reassigned mental properties to events, or even removed mentality entirely from the world.” • Some Conclusions: • - There are (attributor-sensitive) salience rules in place for fixing contrast events in causal contexts that are similar to the Rule of Attention often given for contextualism about knowledge. • - There are also (subject-sensitive) objective mechanisms for fixing contrast events in causal contexts, but these are trumped by the salience rules. • - Making salient certain possibilities (such as the possibility of a zombie world) can establish a context in which epiphenomenalism is true. • - Neither knowledge nor causation literally disappear due to shifts in context but there are contexts in which it’s harder to make true causal claims about mental causation, just as there are contexts in which it’s harder to make true knowledge attributions. • - You don’t have to know what you’re talking about in order to make true causal claims.