Whether causation is a genuine relation between particular events has been a much disputed matter since David Hume. The post-Humean answers have generally been in the negative, conceiving singular causal statements – like: ‘the striking of the match caused it to ignite’ – in terms of some dependence on more basic truths about laws connecting types (e.g., ‘striking matches causes them to ignite’). Such more basic truths may be cast in terms of mere uniformities of nature or primitive nomic relations between universals, or in terms of counterfactual or probabilistic dependence. Standardly it is some general relation between types of events that is regarded as basic (although the counterfactual theories can be ambiguous on this). Within the past several decades, however, this post-Humean orthodoxy has been challenged by the proposal of singularist theories that regard causation as first and foremost a relation between particular events. Only secondarily (if at all) is it a matter of uniformities, nomic sufficiency, or counterfactual or probabilistic dependence. The new singularist theories, unlike their predecessors, have not been merely negative in their rejection of Hume; nor have they merely pronounced causation to be an ‘unanalyzable primitive.’ Rather, they have proposed various ideas about what the causal relation might be, in terms of energy transfer, causal processes, trope persistence, and the like. The topic to be addressed is the viability of such singularist theories of causation. Contributors are invited either to defend or to criticize such theories, or to propose new alternatives.
Table of Contents:
Michael Moore
Introduction
Stephen Mumford
Passing Powers Around
Phil Dowe
Absences, Possible Causation, and the Problem of Non-Locality
Doug Ehring
Abstracting Away from Preemption
Chris Hitchcock
Problems for the Conserved Quantity Theory: Counterexamples, Circularity, and Redundancy
Bence Nanay
The Properties of Singular Causation
Michael Rota
An Anti-reductionist Account of Singular Causation
Jessica Wilson
Resemblance-based Resources for Reductive Singularism