Difference-Making Causation
Artist: Dario Veruar
Difference-Making Causation
Günther, M & Andreas, H 2021, ‘Difference-Making Causation’, The Journal of Philosophy.
Lewis thinks of causes as difference makers. Whether or not a cause occurs makes a difference as to whether or not its effect occurs. He thus aimed to analyse causation in terms of counterfactual dependence. An event e counterfactually depends on another event c if and only if, had c not occurred, e would not have occurred. On Lewis’s analysis, an occurring event c is a cause of a distinct occurring event e if e counterfactually depends on c. Among the accounts in the tradition of Lewis, counterfactual dependence between distinct occurring events is taken to be sufficient for causation. The strategy of counterfactual accounts is thus to ask ‘what would happen if the putative cause had been absent?’ Under this counterfactual assumption they claim causation if the presumed effect is absent as well. An event is a cause in virtue of making this difference.In this paper, we put forth a counterfactual analysis of causation. Here is the gist: an event c is a cause of another event e just in case both events occur, and – after taking out the information whether or not c and e occur – e would not occur if c were not to occur. We will show that the analysis successfully captures a wide range of causal scenarios, including switches, preemption, and two scenarios of double prevention. To date, there is no other counterfactual account that can solve this set of scenarios.
See the paper here.