Notions of Cause: Russell’s Thesis Revisited

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (1):45-76 (2007)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

We discuss Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell's application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, and to the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. In showing how to recover an approximation to Russell's conclusion while explaining scientists' continuing appeal to causal ideas (without violating naturalism by philosophically correcting scientists) we illustrate a general naturalist strategy for handling problems around the unification of sciences that assume different levels of naïveté with respect to folk conceptual frameworks. We do this despite rejecting one of the premises of Russell's argument, a version of reductionism that was scientifically plausible in 1913 but is not so now.

Other Versions

No versions found

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
1,144 (#13,372)

6 months
219 (#15,275)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Don Ross
University College, Cork
David Spurrett
University of KwaZulu-Natal

Citations of this work

Satisfaction conditions in anticipatory mechanisms.Marcin Miłkowski - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):709-728.
Physical causation and difference-making.Alyssa Ney - 2009 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (4):737-764.
Physics and Causation.Thomas Blanchard - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (5):256-266.

View all 13 citations / Add more citations