Causality

Lately, there have been a number of attempts to show that there is more to causality than regular succession by positing a physical mechanism that links cause and effect. In his Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (1984), Wesley Salmon (1925–2001) advanced a mechanistic approach, roughly that an event c causes an event e if and only if there is a causal process that connects c and e. Borrowing an idea of Hans Reichenbach's (1956), Salmon characterized "causal" those processes that are capable of transmitting a mark, where a mark is a modification of the structure of a process. Later on, Salmon (1997) and Phil Dowe (2000) took causality to consist in the exchange or transfer of some conserved quantity, such as energy-momentum or charge. Such accounts may be called transference models because they claim that causality consists in the transfer of something (some physical quantity) between the cause and its effect. They claim that causality need not involve regularities or laws. Rather, it consists in a local physical tie between cause and effect. But there is a drawback. Even if it is granted that these models offer neat accounts of causality at the level of physical events or processes, they can be generalized as accounts of causality simpliciter only if they are married to strong reductionistic views that all worldly phenomena (be they social or psychological or biological) are, ultimately, reducible to physical phenomena. We saw earlier that Descartes, too, advanced a transference model of causality and that he stumbled on the issue of mental causality: how can the mental cause anything physical to happen, as it manifestly does? The irony is that the very same hurdle might have to be jumped by the advocates of the modern transference models.