Position
Counterfactual Theory of Causation
Causation consists in counterfactual dependence: one event causes another just in case the second depends counterfactually on the first, or is joined to it by a chain of such dependences — had the first not occurred, the next would not have, and so on to the effect.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Metaphysics
Overview
The counterfactual account takes seriously that causal talk is talk about what would otherwise have happened. It therefore looks not at how often two kinds of event have been paired, but at a single comparison: the nearest situation in which the candidate cause is absent.
That is what lets it separate a cause from a mere accompaniment, which regularity alone cannot do. Lewis does not stop at direct dependence: causation is the ancestral of it, a chain of steps each depending on the one before, and the chain is what handles early pre-emption, where a backup cause is cut off before it can act and the effect still depends step by step on the actual cause. Late pre-emption remains the recognised difficulty: a backup that is only pre-empted after the effect has occurred leaves no intermediate step to depend on, so the counterfactual comes out false even though the causing plainly happened.
Position on
Rival positions
- Causal Powers
Question scope: The Nature of Causation
References
- David Lewis, 'Causation', Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973)
- David Lewis, 'Causation', Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), which analyses causation as a chain of counterfactual dependence between distinct events