TY - JOUR
T1 - The Question of Iterated Causation
AU - Kovacs, David Mark
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Inc.
PY - 2022/3
Y1 - 2022/3
N2 - This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c1…ck cause effect e, what are the causes of c1…ck’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings-on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings-on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting several versions of dismissivism, I consider the view that QIC, though not illegitimate, is easy to answer: the causal goings-on are apt to be caused but are plainly uncaused (“brutism”). However, I will argue that brutism too has a serious problem: namely, it leads to a highly implausible kind of armchair indeterminism. Next I consider some substantive candidate answers to QIC, none of which, I argue, is particularly promising. The paper’s final conclusion is twofold: QIC is at least as difficult as the more well-known Question of Iterated Grounding; moreover, the largely overlooked regress problem that it raises gives us at least some defeasible reason to avoid causation in theory-building.
AB - This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c1…ck cause effect e, what are the causes of c1…ck’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings-on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings-on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting several versions of dismissivism, I consider the view that QIC, though not illegitimate, is easy to answer: the causal goings-on are apt to be caused but are plainly uncaused (“brutism”). However, I will argue that brutism too has a serious problem: namely, it leads to a highly implausible kind of armchair indeterminism. Next I consider some substantive candidate answers to QIC, none of which, I argue, is particularly promising. The paper’s final conclusion is twofold: QIC is at least as difficult as the more well-known Question of Iterated Grounding; moreover, the largely overlooked regress problem that it raises gives us at least some defeasible reason to avoid causation in theory-building.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104308672&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/phpr.12782
DO - 10.1111/phpr.12782
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AN - SCOPUS:85104308672
SN - 0031-8205
VL - 104
SP - 454
EP - 473
JO - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
JF - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
IS - 2
ER -