Causalism

Abstract: L'A. cherche a savoir si, comme Hobart et d'autres l'affirment, un agent a d'autant moins de controle sur son action ou ses decisions qu'il est moins determine par des causes exterieures

Abstract: Omissions are puzzling, so puzzling that people tend to say puzzling things about them and give up otherwise attractive philosophical theories in order to accommodate them.1 In this paper I suggest that omissions make trouble—serious trouble, and trouble of a new, sui generis kind—for “causalism,” the standard view or family of views of agency. In particular, I am interested in causalism as an attempt to explain what it is for an agent to behave intentionally. I will argue that causalism cannot accommodate intentional omissions—or, at least, it cannot account for them in the same way it accounts for (positive) actions. As a result, causalism is incomplete—or, at best, highly disjunctive—as a theory of what it is to behave intentionally. I will bypass the question whether omissions can be, properly speaking, actions—“negative actions” or “active nondoings,” as they have been called (see, e.g., Kleinig 1976). For some people (notably, Thomson 1977), actions are a subclass of events, where events are particulars with specific spatiotemporal locations, intrinsic properties, etc. On this kind of view, it’s hard to count omissions as actions, for omissions don’t appear to have specific spatiotemporal locations, intrinsic properties, etc. Nevertheless, even if omissions aren’t actions, it seems that agents can still fail to do things intentionally, and it makes sense to ask under what conditions an agent’s not doing something is intentional (see, e.g., Ginet 2004). Thus, even if omissions aren’t actions, a theory of what it is to behave intentionally should be able to accommodate omissions. (Note that, if omissions aren’t actions, a theory of what it is to behave intentionally is not the same thing as a theory of what it is to perform an intentional action, and it might not even be the same thing as a theory of what it is to act intentionally.)2

Abstract: Philosophers of memory have approached the relationship between memory and imagination from two very different perspectives. Advocates of the causal theory of memory, on the one hand, have motivated their preferred theory by appealing to the intuitive contrast between successfully remembering an event and merely imagining it. Advocates of the simulation theory, on the other hand, have motivated their preferred theory by appealing to empirical evidence for important similarities between remembering the past and imagining the future. Recently, causalists have argued that simulationism is unable to accommodate the difference between successful remembering and forms of unsuccessful remembering or mere imagining such as confabulating. This paper argues that, while these arguments fail, simulationism, in its current form, is indeed unable to provide a fully adequate account of unsuccessful remembering. Rather than suggesting a return to causalism, the paper proposes a new form of simulationism, a virtue theory of memory modelled not on the process reliabilist epistemology that has so far served as the inspiration for the simulation theory but instead on virtue reliabilist epistemology, and shows that this new theory grounds a more adequate account of unsuccessful remembering.

Abstract: In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting.