Mental Causation by Dardis Anthony.;

Author:Dardis, Anthony.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000, Philosophy/General, PHI015000, Philosophy/Mind & Body
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2008-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

6.1.7 Solving the Two Problems

Back to the two objections to the idea that when one event causes another, the first event is part of a light-cone-wide array of property instances that is strictly sufficient for the second event. The objections were that these things don’t look like ordinary causes and, trivially, laws connect any two events, as long as one is in the light cone for the other.

I’ve just described how to respond to the second problem. Even though everything in the light cone for an event could interfere, only parts of the light cone positively produce the event (the rest are standing by). Stringing positive producers together yields causal threads. Laws only connect those property instances connected by causal threads. Others property instances are—relative to a given actually occurring event—only bystanders.

What about the first problem? Mill leads us along a path from ordinary causes, to what he calls the “cause, philosophically speaking” (the total cause, whatever is in fact strictly sufficient for the effect), and then finally to the image of the “tissue of connexion” made from the threads of the laws of nature. Many authors have argued that causation has nothing to do with laws of nature at all. In the next section, I will tackle the most radical version of this claim (Anscombe 1971). Whether or not that version is true, it still seems extraordinarily unlikely that laws have much of anything to do with causes. When I bake bread, I want to know what to do in order to make good bread; I don’t care about laws of nature. When scientists try to figure out why bees are dying, they want to know what is causing the bees to die and what we can do about it; they don’t care about laws of nature.

There are two kinds of intertwined issues at work here. One concerns the level at which inquiry takes place. Mill’s picture of the “tissue of connexion” is a picture of nature at its most fundamental level: the level of fundamental physics. Only inquiry in fundamental physics aims at describing that level. Bread baking happens at a different level. Professional bakers use quantitative regularities to guide what they do. But they are regularities about things like flour and water and bread. “Flour,” though, is not a precise concept. Although bakers do have quantitative measures of various kinds of flour (bread flour is typically 12–13 percent gluten, as opposed to all-purpose flour, which is 11–12 percent), results depend as well on where the flour was grown, what exactly is in the water, changes in the ambient temperature and air pressure, and so forth. Sometimes the bread comes out great, sometimes not so good. It’s unlikely that bread science can get much more precise than that, given that its concepts are fitted to the life of the baker, not the physical scientist.

It is perfectly all right to talk about causes and effects and baking. And there are no perfectly strict laws of baking. The problem is

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