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4398 | An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first |
Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either). | |||
From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro | |||
A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky. |