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Full Idea
If laws of causation are probabilistic then the law does not entail any restrictions upon the proportion of events that follow a cause: ...it can have absolutely any value from zero to one.
Gist of Idea
Probabilist laws are compatible with effects always or never happening
Source
Michael Tooley (Causation and Supervenience [2003], 4.1.3)
Book Ref
'The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics', ed/tr. Loux,M /Zimmerman,D [OUP 2005], p.396
A Reaction
This objection applies to an account of laws of nature, and also to definitions of causes as events which increase probabilities. One needn't be fully committed to natural necessity, but it must form some part of the account.
| 8388 | Causation is either direct realism, Humean reduction, non-Humean reduction or theoretical realism [Tooley] |
| 8389 | Causation distinctions: reductionism/realism; Humean/non-Humean states; observable/non-observable [Tooley] |
| 8390 | Causation is directly observable in pressure on one's body, and in willed action [Tooley] |
| 8391 | In counterfactual worlds there are laws with no instances, so laws aren't supervenient on actuality [Tooley] |
| 8392 | Probabilist laws are compatible with effects always or never happening [Tooley] |
| 8393 | We can only reduce the direction of causation to the direction of time if we are realist about the latter [Tooley] |
| 8394 | Explaining causation in terms of laws can't explain the direction of causation [Tooley] |
| 8398 | Causation is a concept of a relation the same in all worlds, so it can't be a physical process [Tooley] |
| 8399 | The actual cause may not be the most efficacious one [Tooley] |
| 8416 | Reductionists can't explain accidents, uninstantiated laws, probabilities, or the existence of any laws [Tooley] |
| 8418 | Quantum physics suggests that the basic laws of nature are probabilistic [Tooley] |