Do causes make their effects “necessary” in any useful sense? This is the claim that Hume rejected — the notion that there is any “necessary” connection between cause and effect. Steven Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum take up the issue in Getting Causes from Powers, and they take the view that Hume has raised a …
Social plasticity and ontology
Ruth Groff has created a valuable blog and Facebook page on "Powers, Capacities, Dispositions" aimed at creating a community of scholars interested in the causal powers literature. Both are worth following! In a recent post she offers some thoughtful comments on my post on social powers. Here I will extend my reasons for thinking the powers approach raises some distinctive problems when …
Social powers?
I am one of those people who think that causal claims are the foundation of almost all explanations. When we ask for an explanation of something, we generally want to know why and how it came to be, and this means looking into its causal history. Moreover, I have believed for many years that this …
A causal narrative?
source: Edward Tufte, edwardtufte.com In a recent post I referred to the idea of a causal narrative (link). Here I would like to sketch out what I had in mind there. Essentially the idea is that a causal narrative of a complicated outcome or occurrence is an orderly analysis of the sequence of events and …
Causal narratives, mechanisms, and powers
A million termites move around industriously without supervisors or external coordination. Some months later, a great structure has arisen — a termite cathedral mound. It is a structure that has apparent functionality (figure 2), it is oriented to the sun in a way that optimizes its ability to handle heat and cold, and the design …
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Guest post by Ruth Groff on causal powers
Ruth Groff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Louis University. She specializes in the philosophical underpinnings of Western social and political thought. She is author of Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (2012, with John Greco), Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Ontological Explorations) (2012), and Revitalizing Causality: Realism …
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Mechanisms and powers
source: William Bechtel, Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell Biology The causal-powers approach to the understanding of causation is sometimes presented as an exclusive alternative to both traditional regularity theories and to more recent causal mechanism theories. In an earlier post I discussed Ruth Groff’s contributions to this topic. Here I would like …
Causality and metaphysics
Advocates of the causal powers approach attach a great deal of importance to the metaphysics of causation -- the sorts of properties and relations that we attribute to the kinds of things that we want to postulate. The neo-Aristotelian point of view represented by Ruth Groff and others appears to have metaphysical objections to the …
Causal powers from a metaphysical point of view
A number of scholars who are interested in causation have recently expressed new interest in the concept of causal powers. This makes sense in a very straightforward and commonsensical way. But it also raises some difficult questions about metaphysics: how are we to think about the underlying nature of reality such that things, events, or …
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Social structures and causal powers
The idea of a causal power has been appealing to the realist tradition within the philosophy of science, and especially so for the philosophy of social science. Proponents of this idea include Nancy Cartwright (Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements), Margaret Archer (Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach), and Dave Elder-Vass (The Causal Power of Social …
Understanding Society 