Philosophy

Contemporary debates in philosophy of science

Speaker: Alison Fernandes (University of Warwick)

Title: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Causation

Abstract: Causation has an uneasy place science. While higher-level sciences make ample use of causal notions, they don’t appear in how fundamental physical theories are formulated. Moreover, it’s unclear what can explain the pervasive temporal asymmetry of causation, given that candidate fundamental laws are, for the most part, temporally symmetric. I’ll argue that considering evidential relations relevant to time-travelling agents can help address these puzzles. On the negative side, time travel cases provide reasons for thinking we can’t evaluate counterfactuals (from which causal relations might derive) by holding the state of the world outside the antecedent fixed. So statistical mechanical accounts of causation, like Loewer’s, while they make important headway on the issue of explaining temporal asymmetry, should ultimately be rejected. On the positive side, thinking about agents in time travel scenarios suggests other methods for evaluating counterfactuals: hold fixed the states that the relevant deliberating agent has (external) evidence of, and consider what her decisions are further evidence for. This approach makes good sense of the relevance of causal relations for decision-making, and can use resources from evidential decision theory to explain causal asymmetry. It also offers a new diagnosis for what is puzzling about causal loops: they systematically undermine the possibility of rational agents making use of the causal relations of which they’re composed.

Contact

The seminars are organised by the philosophy of science research group. For more information or to find out about future events, please contact Alasdair Richmond.

Alasdair Richmond

Philosophy of science research group

 

Nov 30 2017 -

Contemporary debates in philosophy of science

2017-11-30: Alison Fernandes (University of Warwick)

Room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD