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Actual Causation and Compositionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jonathan Livengood  and
Justin Sytsma
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Abstract

Many theories of actual causation implicitly endorse the claim that if c is an actual cause of e, then either c causes e directly or every intermediary by which c indirectly causes e is itself both an actual cause of e and also an actual effect of c. We think this compositionality constraint is plausible. However, as we show, it is not always satisfied by the causal attributions ordinary people make. We conclude by considering what philosophers working on causation should do when the deliverances of their theories diverge from what ordinary people say.

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Articles
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Philosophy of Science , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 43 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

We would like to thank audience members at Victoria University of Wellington, Iowa State University, and the 2016 Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference, who gave us feedback on earlier stages of this research. And we would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their contributions.

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