Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic paper Causality and Determination claims that causation can be perceived. It also defends causal singularism, the idea that the causal relation is fundamentally between the particular cause and effect, and does not depend on regularities holding elsewhere in the universe. But does the former furnish an argument for the latter? The present paper analyses a special type of causal experience involving emotional reactions to present stimuli; for instance, being frightened by a spider. It argues that such experiences (...) are strongly local, in the sense that they justify belief in a local causal relation independently of our knowledge about events elsewhere in the universe. If this analysis is correct, Humean regularity theories of causation are false; and all other non-singularist theories of causation face a difficult explanatory challenge. This means that the case for causal singularism comes out considerably strengthened. (shrink)

Although scientific images have begun to receive significant attention from philosophers, one type of image has thus far been ignored: moving images. As techniques such as live cell imaging and videomicroscopy are becoming increasingly important in many areas of biology, however, this oversight needs to be corrected. Biologists often claim that there are relevant differences between video and static images. Most interesting is the idea that video images allow us to see causal relationships. By identifying the conditions that would be (...) required for this to be true and showing that they are not satisfied at the micro level, I will show that videomicroscopy does not provide us with special access to causal information. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Singularists about causation often claim that we can have experiences as of causation. This paper argues that regularity theorists need not deny that claim; hence the possibility of causal experience is no objection to regularity theories of causation. The fact that, according to a regularity theorist, causal experience requires background theory does not provide grounds for denying that it is genuine experience. The regularity theorist need not even deny that non-inferential perceptual knowledge of causation is possible, despite the fact that (...) such knowledge would sometimes allow us to make inferences about what happens in far-off places and times. (shrink)

Causation has always been a philosophically controversial subject matter. While David Hume’s empiricist account of causation has been the dominant influence in analytic philosophy and science during modern times, a minority view has instead connected causation essentially to agency and manipulation. A related approach has for the first time gained widespread popularity in recent years, due to new powerful theories of causal inference in science that are based in a technical notion of intervention, and James Woodward’s closely connected interventionist theory (...) of causation in philosophy. This monograph assesses five manipulationist or interventionist theories of causation, viewed as theories that purport to tell us what causation is by providing us with the meaning of causal claims. It is shown that they cannot do this, as the conditions on causation that they impose are too weak, mainly due to ineliminable circularities in their definitions of causal terms. It is then argued that a subset of Woodward’s theory can nevertheless contribute crucially to an explanation of the unique role that manipulation has in our acquisition of causal knowledge. This explanation differs from the common regularist explanation of the epistemic utility of manipulation and experiment, and it is taken to confirm several important manipulationist intuitions. However, the success of the explanation depends on (this subset of) interventionism not itself being understood as a theory of causation, but as a theory of intervention. (shrink)