scholarly journals Causes As Difference-Makers For Processes

2017 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Loew
Keyword(s):  
Difference Makers

Making a Difference

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rani Lill Anjum ◽  
Stephen Mumford
Keyword(s):  
Randomized Controlled Trials ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Controlled Trials ◽  
Positive Difference ◽  
Randomized Controlled ◽  
Difference Making ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
Difference Makers ◽  
Trial Intervention

One view of what links a cause to an effect is that causes make a difference to whether or not the effect is produced. This assumption is behind comparative studies, such as the method of randomized controlled trials, aimed at showing whether a trial intervention makes a positive difference to outcomes. Comparative studies are regarded as the gold standard in some areas of research but they are also problematic. There can be causes that make no difference and some difference-makers that are not causes. This indicates that difference-making should be taken as a symptom of causation: a feature that accompanies it in some, though not all, cases. Symptoms can be useful in the discovery of causes but they cannot be definitive of causation.

Plato’s Forms as powers

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Difference Makers

This chapter introduces Plato’s fundamental entities, the Forms. It focuses on his view that the Forms are causal powers, and his innovative stance that the Forms are transcendent entities; it argues that Plato’s Forms are transcendent powers. This raises the (difficult) question of what kind of causal efficacy transcendent entities can have on things in the physical world. By showing that Plato’s Forms are causal powers having constitutional causal efficacy, as difference-makers, like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, the chapter begins to build the case for what I call Plato’s Anaxagoreanism. If the Forms operate like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, by constitutional causal efficacy, except that they are transcendent, how can features of objects in the physical world be constitutionally derived from features of transcendent entities, the Forms? The chapter argues that Plato thinks of the causal efficacy of the Forms on the model of the normativity of mathematics and geometry over the sensible world.

The Fate of Nebuchadnezzar

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Tabb
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Future ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
Fundamental Cause ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Difference Makers

This paper makes a case for the centrality of the passion of curiosity to Hobbes’s account of human nature. Hobbes describes curiosity as one of only a few capacities differentiating human beings from animals, and I argue that it is in fact the fundamental cause of humanity’s uniqueness, generating other important difference-makers such as language, science and politics. I qualify Philip Pettit’s (2008) claim that Hobbes believes language to be the essence of human difference, contending that Pettit grants language too central a place in Hobbes’s psychology. Language is, for Hobbes, a technology adopted on account of curiosity. Further, curiosity is necessary not only for linguistic but also for scientific activity. Only after what he calls original knowledge has been gathered are names employed to generate the conditional propositions that constitute science. Finally, curiosity can resolve another puzzle of Hobbesian psychology that Pettit leaves unanswered: our tendency towards strife. Hobbes believes that insofar as human beings have an implacable hunger for knowledge of the future, we are unable to rest content with present gains and must always aspire to secure the best possible outcome for ourselves.

The Non-Transitivity of Causation

2020 ◽  
pp. 148-174
Author(s):  
Paul Noordhof
Keyword(s):  
Cause And Effect ◽  
Difference Makers ◽  
Clear Cases ◽  
Transitivity Of Causation

There are clear cases in which causation is not transitive and this drops out of the analysis developed in which causation involves a certain kind of chance-raising involved after subtracting competitor processes. Attempts to explain away these cases to secure the transitivity of causation are a mistake. Alternative ways of capturing the non-transitivity of causation involve fixing the competitor processes in order to detect chance-raising dependencies between the target cause and effect. This alternative manoeuvre engenders problems. The non-transitivity of causation is better understood in the terms of my analysis rather than by appealing to the idea that causes are difference-makers (in a specified sense) or, in the kind of cases considered, switchers by interaction with a process.

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