I’m off to the Pacific APA in a couple of days. The following week is our spring break. I assume that I’ll have decent internet access while in California, so posting should continue.
I’m commenting on a good paper on causation by Jonathan Matheson. Here’s the abstract (pulled from the Pacific APA website).
| Fragile Events and the Causal Relation by Jonathan Matheson In this paper I defend the claim that maximally-fragile-events are the proper relata of the causal relation. In other words, the things that are causes and effects are maximally-fragile-events alone. Call this thesis the Fragility Thesis. It is standard, though not uncontroversial, to take events as the relata of the causal relation; but it is highly contested that maximally-fragile-events alone play this role. In this paper I show how a counterfactual account of causation coupled with FT can provide a simple conceptual account that avoids the problems that have faced other counterfactual accounts of causation, as well as suggest that the consequences of adopting such an account are not as outrageous as they may seem. |
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