So we return to last week's subject: why not accept the views of Wesley Salmon? There is an obvious motive in their favor. They exclude much of what we intuitively think of as "magical thinking." If I do X over here and Y happens waaaaay over there: is this enough to dub X the cause of Y? Salmon says emphatically no. It is not even enough to assert that as a coherent hypothesis. One needs spatio-temporal continuity. X was in contact with A which was in contact with B ... which produced event Y way over there. Enough with the magic thinking. Do your homework! Come up with at least a hypothetical continuity! That is what Salmon has to say to us. And it seems useful advice. "Useful," remember, is a word of high praise from a pragmatist. But, gravity remains the great conundrum here. It certain seems that the sun is acting upon the earth across a vacuum, and independent of anything passing from the one location to the other. Einstein tells us to think of this a...
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Yesterday I wrote about cause and effect through the prism of the work of Wesley Salmon, late of the University of Pittsburgh. Many philosophers have disagreed with Salmon, for example with his emphasis on spatio-temporal continuity. Why should we presume to rule out of court the very possibility of action at a distance? One philosopher who seems willing to rule action at a distance back in, for example, is Philip Kitcher. Kitcher places "causation" within the broader term "explanation," and he has a unificationist theory of what explanation means. We generally explain X by placing it in a larger category, unifying it with other phenomena so that X is just an illustration of X(1). Then we explain X(1) in the same fashion, perhaps a generation later with reference to X(2). So, for example, Franklin explained lightning by calling it "electricity," an example of the same shock we get when we walk on a shag rub then touch a metallic doorknob. Some decades l...
Philosophers continue to debate issues of causation. It is no longer so much a matter of "refuting Hume." Nowadays, it may be for many more a matter of "refuting Wesley Salmon." So I will say something today about philosopher of science Wesley Salmon (1925 - 2001), affiliated with the University of Arizona early in his career, and the University of Pittsburgh later. Before Salmon turned his attention to the subject, philosophers of science had coagulated around the proposition that scientists don't actually use any idea of causation. Practicing scientists get along well enough with correlation, the thinking went, so the philosophers who write about what they do, can do likewise. But when Salmon delved into the thinking and writing of scientists, he didn't find that at all. He found causal claims to be ubiquitous, and a great concern with how any phenomenon under study, to use a Salmonesqe expression, "fits into the causal nexus" of the world....
Not long ago, I wrote here about the "process theory" of causality, and attributed it to Wesley Salmon. Today, I'll go a little further, and present a quotation for Salmon's writings on the distinct but closely related question on induction, and the post-Humean debate on induction in the sciences. The idea of a philosopher discussing inductive inference in science is apt to arouse grotesque images in many minds. People are likely to imagine someone earnestly attempting to explain why it is reasonable to conclude that the sun will rise tomorrow morning because it always has done so in the past. There may have been a time when primitive man anticipated the dawn with assurance based only upon the fact that he had seen dawn follow the blackness of night as long as he could remember, but this primitive state of knowledge, if it ever existed, was unquestionably prescientific. This kind of reasoning bears no resemblance to science; in fact, the crude induction exhibit...
I encountered recently the phrase "the process theory of causality." I asked myself, in accord with the lingo of our time, "is that a thing?" So of course I did some googling. The answer is: Yes. It's a thing Here is a pertinent link I discovered via such googling. : https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279739.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199279739-e-0011 The process theory of causality (PTC) holds that causal processes are more fundamental than the events they are often said to link. We say "A caused B." The act of striking the match against a hard surface caused it to light on fire. But what really exists is a single underlying process over time, where both A and B are abstracted parts of that whole. John Venn is said to have gotten the PTC underway, saying: "Substitute for the time honored 'chain of causation' so often introduced into discussions on this subject the phrase 'a rope of causation' a...