Causal Powers

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Metaphysics

Overview

The powers account rejects the assumption shared by regularity and counterfactual analyses: that causation must be reconstructed out of patterns among events. It holds instead that a thing's nature confers dispositions — solubility, elasticity, charge — and that a cause is such a disposition being exercised.

This restores the natural necessity Hume denied was observable, at the price of committing to properties whose existence is argued for rather than seen. It also predicts something the regularity view cannot easily accommodate: powers can be possessed without ever being manifested, and can be blocked when they are.

Position on

• The Nature of Causation

Incompatible positions

• Counterfactual Analysis

  Question scope: The Nature of Causation

• Humean Regularity

  Question scope: The Nature of Causation

References

• Rom Harré and E. H. Madden, Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity (1975)
• Rom Harré and E. H. Madden, Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity (1975), which grounds causation in the powers and natures of particulars rather than in regularity
• Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 1, which rejects the counterfactual analysis along with the regularity analysis on the ground that causation is the exercise of a power rather than a pattern of dependence among events
• Rom Harre and E. H. Madden, Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity (1975), ch. 1, which argues that the regularity account leaves out the natural necessity that powers supply, so the two accounts of what causation consists in cannot both hold