display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 8441 | Delaying a fire doesn't cause it, but hastening it might [Bennett] |
| Full Idea: Although you cannot cause a fire by delaying something's burning, you can cause a fire by hastening something's burning. | |
| From: Jonathan Bennett (Event Causation: counterfactual analysis [1987], p.223) | |
| A reaction: A very nice observation which brings out all sorts of problems about identifying causes. Bennett is criticising the counterfactual account. It is part of the problem of pre-emption, where causes are queueing up to produce a given effect. |
| 8436 | Either cause and effect are subsumed under a conditional because of properties, or it is counterfactual [Bennett] |
| Full Idea: We must choose between subsumption and counterfactual analyses of causal statements. The former means that cause and effect have some properties that enables them to be subsumed under a conditional. The latter is just 'if no-c then no-e'. | |
| From: Jonathan Bennett (Event Causation: counterfactual analysis [1987], p.217) | |
| A reaction: I have an immediate preference for the former account, which seems to potentially connect it with physics and features of the world which make one thing lead to another. The counterfactual account seems very thin, and is more like mere semantics. |
| 8435 | Causes are between events ('the explosion') or between facts/states of affairs ('a bomb dropped') [Bennett] |
| Full Idea: Theories of causation are split between event and fact/state of affairs theories. The first have the form 'the explosion caused the fire' (perfect nominals) and the second have the form 'the fire started because a bomb dropped' (sentential clauses). | |
| From: Jonathan Bennett (Event Causation: counterfactual analysis [1987]) | |
| A reaction: Surely events must have priority? The form which uses facts is drifting off into explanation, and is much more likely to involve subjective human elements and interpretations. Events are closer to the physics, and the mechanics of what happens. |
| 8437 | The full counterfactual story asserts a series of events, because counterfactuals are not transitive [Bennett] |
| Full Idea: The refinement of a simple counterfactual analysis is to say that cause and effect depend on a series of events. This must be asserted because counterfactual conditionals are well known not to be transitive. | |
| From: Jonathan Bennett (Event Causation: counterfactual analysis [1987]) | |
| A reaction: This fills out the theory, but offers another target for critics. If the glue that binds the series is not in the counterfactuals, is it just in the mind of the speaker? How do you decide what's in the series? Cf. deciding offside in football (soccer!). |
| 8438 | A counterfactual about an event implies something about the event's essence [Bennett] |
| Full Idea: Any counterfactual about a particular event implies or presupposes something about the event's essence. | |
| From: Jonathan Bennett (Event Causation: counterfactual analysis [1987], p.219) | |
| A reaction: This is where the counterfactual theory suddenly becomes more interesting, instead of just being a rather bare account of the logical structure of causation. (Bennett offers some discussion of possible essential implications). |