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This chapter focuses on the other two temporal relations: temporally before (temporal priority) and temporally after (temporal posteriority), examining the notions in themselves before turning to the related question of 13th century attitudes to the causal theory of time. Thirteenth-century accounts of simultaneous causation undermine the possibility that 13th century thinkers would have accepted that temporal relations could be reduced to more fundamental causal relations, since the existence of simultaneous causation implies that causal orderings and temporal orderings could be uncoupled. The notion of backwards causation is also explored as part of the general investigation of causation and causal sequences.

The interpretations of the memory connection proposed in the literature fall into three categories: the evidential retention theory, the simple retention theory, and the causal retention theory. This chapter weighs up these three accounts and argues for the causal retention theory. The main problem with the evidentialist approach is its commitment to the epistemic theory of memory. The main problem with the simple retention theory is that it appears informative only as long as one refrains from asking what is involved in the process of retaining of a representation. When this question is raised, proponents of this approach must concede that they don't have a positive story to tell. The causal theory of memory states that for a present representation to qualify as a memory it must be suitably causally connected to a corresponding past representation. The causal theory of memory is defended against three objections: the argument from the contingency of causation, the argument from the nomologicality of causation, and the argument from temporal forgetting. There are two things that speak in favor of the causal theory of memory. First, unlike the causal theory, the evidential retention theory and the simple retention theory are afflicted with serious problems. Second, the causal theory of memory can best explain the truth of commonsensical counterfactual statements of the form: if the subject hadn't represented a particular proposition in the past he wouldn't represent it now.

This chapter begins with a broad discussion of the use of names in science and their role in physical theories. The philosophy of names is outlined, covering the ‘Descriptivist’, ‘Non-descriptivist’, and ‘Hybrid’ accounts. The claim that Kripke’s theory of rigidly designating names is tied to classical statistics is critically assessed, and it is argued that a form of the ‘Hybrid’ account can accommodate quantum particles understood as named individuals for which distinguishing descriptions cannot be given. Toraldo di Francia and Dalla Chiara’s theory of quasets is presented as the formal counterpart to this view. This is compared with Krause’s theory of quasi-sets in Chapter 7.

Traditional psychological approaches to causality assume that we acquire causal information by extracting it from our experience of events. One possibility is that we can directly perceive causality (or can use a specialized perceptual module) to detect causal interactions. Another possibility is that we infer causality from correlational evidence—the co-occurrence of particular causes and effects. This chapter argues that these purely bottom-up solutions are unlikely to succeed. It considers a new approach to causal cognition that may alleviate these difficulties which comes from research on Bayes nets in computer science.

This chapter is a basic introduction to the Theory of Causal Significance. It intends to motivate the general approach the theory represents as well as explain its basic concepts. The chapter begins by defining the problem of causation and then explicates the importance and necessity of a theory. It also provides a categorization of conventional approaches to causations and argues why the Theory of Causal Significance falls outside such traditional taxonomy. An introduction to the ideas of effective and receptive properties and how they are conceptually and empirically distinct aspects of causation is also illustrated. Also in this chapter is an analysis of the causal nexus through the definitions, examples and fundamental principles presented by the author.

Though many arguments have been offered for eliminativism, they all have a common structure. They begin with the premise that beliefs, desires, and other commonsense mental states are the posits of a widely shared, largely tacit psychological theory – “folk psychology.” The second premise of the argument, defended in many different ways, is that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory. From these premises, eliminativists draw the conclusion that commonsense mental states do not exist. However, the premises do not entail the conclusion, so some additional premise is necessary. One way to fill the gap is to appeal to a description theory of reference. But the description theory of reference has been challenged by the causal‐historical theory of reference. So in order to determine whether the eliminativist argument is sound, it appears we must determine which theory of reference is the correct one, and to do this, we must say what a theory of reference is supposed to do – what facts it is supposed to capture. Various accounts of what a theory of reference is supposed to do are considered, but none of them, it is argued, will help determine whether the eliminativist conclusion follows from the premises. Other ways of filling the gap are also considered and rejected; the most promising of these invokes the normative naturalism strategy.

This chapter defends the idea that there are analytic entailments among our sentences against two sorts of prominent objections. In response to Quine's rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, it suggests that analytic interrelations may be understood as grounded in (tacit, collective) legislations of the rules of use for our terms. Against objections based on a Kripkean approach to reference, it argues that those inclined to causal theories should accept a hybrid theory of reference in order to overcome both the qua problem and the problem of singular nonexistence claims. This hybrid theory acknowledges that our general and singular nominative terms have determinate reference only to the extent that they are associated with frame-level conceptual content, in the form of application and coapplication conditions that fix the category of entity to be referred to. This minimal conceptual content can underpin the analytic entailments discussed in Chapter 1.

The chapter defends the application, and verdicts of a counterfactual theory of causation, to the question of property causation. In particular, the challenges that non‐reductive physicalism and emergent dualism place upon such an account are evaluated. This involves providing a particular characterization of the difference between non‐reductive physicalism and emergent dualism, considering whether this characterization is defensible under various views about the nature of properties, and distinguishing two types of emergent causation only one type of which involves emergent properties.

This chapter discusses the familiar difficulties originating from Newcomb's problem. Those problems gave rise to “causal decision theory”, which differs from classical decision theory in the manner in which probabilities enter into the definition of expected value. This chapter proposes that one can replace the appeal to causal dependence by appeal to temporal relations and statistical relevance between mixed physical/epistemic probabilities. The basic idea is simply that causes propagate through the world in temporal order. The resulting analysis handles the known counterexamples to classical decision theory in essentially the same way Skymis' theory does, but without appealing to vaguely understood concepts like causal dependence.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to articulate a view of action and its explanation that most closely fits the author's conception. It also dismisses some alternatives to the author's view. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

The conclusion briefly draws together the main conclusions of the book and places them against the background of the questions that dominated action theory for decades after the publication of Davidson's paper ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, namely, whether reasons are causes and whether reason explanations are causal explanations. It is suggested that the questions have often been debated in terms which are muddled due to the lack of nuance in understanding reasons. It is suggested that it would, therefore, be interesting to reassess the questions Davidson put on the table with a clearer grasp of what our reasons for acting are, and a clearer picture of the reasons that explain action and the variety of forms that explanations of action take.

This chapter shows that the intentionalist definition of reference presented in chapter 7 is superior to alternative analyses. It defends the implication that speakers can refer to non-existent objects, arguing for the intentionality of speaker reference and against the wide-spread assumption that it is a relation. It enumerates many defects in the theory that reference is a species of causal relation, and defends the thesis that speaker reference is determined by intention against twin earth arguments.