Search Results

“Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion” explores issues arising from taking a realist, or an irrealist, attitude toward explanation and causation. Explanatory realism is the view that when we invoke an event as explaining another event, there must be some objective relation holding for the two events if the explanation is to be correct. In the case of a causal explanation, for example, the explaining event must objectively be a cause of the event explained. Explanatory irrealism denies that such a relation needs to exist as an objective correlate of an explanatory relation. Causal realism is the view that causal relations are objectively real relations in the world, whereas causal irrealists claim that causal relations are in the eye of the beholder, or, in any case, that causal relations are not metaphysically real. The essay concludes with a discussion of how one's stance on these possible views affects the issue of explanatory exclusion, namely the seeming fact that two or more explanations of a single event exclude one another.

This chapter clarifies the notion of an intervention and compares my version of this notion to the characterizations provided by other writers such as Glymour and Pearl. Very roughly, an intervention on a variable X with respect to a second variable Y is a special sort of causal process that changes the value of X in such a way that any change in the value of Y can occur only as a result of the change in Y. The chapter also discusses the relata of the causal relationship, causal realism, agency theories of causation, and the relationship between my account of causation and that of David Lewis.

The chapter considers the specific characteristics of causal relations among social structures, processes, and activities. Against the Humean idea that causal relations are defined by facts about regular succession, the chapter argues that the notion of a causal mechanism is fundamental. Causal realism asserts that causal connections between events and conditions are real and are conveyed by the powers and properties of entities. It is therefore necessary to consider the ontology of a given realm in order to be able to identify how mechanisms work in this realm. In the social realm causal mechanisms are constituted by the purposive actions of agents within constraints. Examples of social mechanisms are considered at several levels of detail, and more extended treatments are offered for transportation, violent crime, epidemiological processes, and system safety as examples of social domains where we can analyse underlying social mechanisms in order to understand the outcomes. The view de‐emphasizes the feasibility of strong predictions in the social sciences; even when we have good reason to expect that a given set of social mechanisms are at work, it is often impossible to aggregate their interactions with confidence.

This chapter offers a critical review of the Speculative Realist movement that emerged in the wake of Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude. It is a movement remarkable for what must strike most observers as a wildly improbable combination of attributes. Thus it is (1) French in origin, (2) decidedly ‘continental’ in orientation, and (3) a full-fledged objectivist realism which forcefully abjures all forms of the so-called ‘correlationist’, i.e., post-Kantian epistemic turn. All the same this uncompromising realism has often gone along, as in the second, more extravagantly ‘speculative’ part of Meillassoux’s book, with some far-fetched and philosophically insupportable ideas which, if taken at anything like their literal force, would totally undermine the realism or show it up as merely a fig-leaf doctrine. I make a case that this liability has resulted from these thinkers’ conspicuous failure to engage with developments in the ‘other’ (analytic) tradition in epistemology and philosophy of science. More specifically, they have ignored the conceptual resources nowadays on offer from those varieties of strong (ontologically grounded) causal realism that have lately mounted a vigorous challenge to correlationist assumptions, and all the more so when conjoined with an historically informed account of inference to the best explanation.

This chapter delves thoroughly into the proof of God proper in the De Ente. It thus opens with an analysis of Aquinas’s causal principle, with which he begins his argument, to the effect that for any property possessed non-essentially there is a cause for such a property. This principle is defended against the charge that there could be non-essential, uncaused properties. Next, the more general issue of Aquinas’s causal realism is addressed and defended, focussing especially on post-Humean and post-Kantian challenges to such causal realism. The chapter ends with an articulation of how Aquinas applies his causal principle to the case of esse, thereby inaugurating a causal regress in terms of causes of esse.

This final chapter undertakes a general survey of views about the meaning of the word ‘cause’. In addition to Hume’s view it considers Elizabeth Anscombe’s version of causal realism, and her view that we have direct experience of causal power or force. It also points up the extremely important sense in which Hume the committed empiricist endorses a form of nativism. His theory relies heavily and essentially on the idea that the human mind has certain deeply fixed innate powers and dispositions.

According to the realist regularity theory of causation, the regularity of the world’s behaviour is a complete and continuous fluke. To hold this view is like supposing that a true random number generator produces the sequence of natural numbers in order for ever by pure chance. This is an untenable view. One must endorse some form of causal realism. One must suppose that there is a reason for the regularity of the world’s behaviour. Given that the world is wholly material, the best candidate for being the reason why the world is regular in the way that it is is simply: the nature of matter.