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How do causes depend on us? The many faces of perspectivalism

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Abstract

Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways in which a class of concepts can be said to depend on facts about their users. Three importantly different forms of dependence will emerge from the discussion: (1) Pragmatic dependence on us: truth conditions for x-beliefs can be given by a function f\(_0\) of more fundamental physical structures making no explicit reference to human agents. But there are any other number of functions (\(\text {f}_2{\ldots } \text {f}_\mathrm{n}\)) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguished role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. (2) Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context; the context supplies the value of a hidden parameter (’hidden’ in the sense that it is not explicitly represented in the surface syntax) that determines the truth of x-beliefs. (3) Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent. I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years.

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Notes

  1. Price (2007, p. 4).

  2. This is not to say that the causal asymmetry is just a temporal asymmetry, only that it is an asymmetric notion that normally aligns with the temporal arrow. The connection between the two arrows is one of the matters to be settled by an account of causation.

  3. See Pearl (2000), Woodward (2005), and Sloman (2009), for an accessible survey of recent developments. Where there are differences, I rely on Woodward. Causation is not an unambiguous term, and there are two largely separate traditions in philosophy dealing with causation. The first is associated with analytic metaphysics. The primary data are intuitions about hypothetical cases, and the goal seems to be to systematize judgments about when it is right to say that A caused B. The second focuses on causal modeling in engineering and the special sciences. Intuitions play almost no role in this literature. The emphasis there is on providing a framework for representing causal relations in science, i.e. a formal apparatus for rendering the deep causal structure of situations, refines intuitions and gives us positive criteria for making assessments in hard cases, provides normative solutions to causal inference and judgment problems. The interventionist account of causal structure grew up in the latter tradition.

  4. See Woodward (2013).

  5. Ibid., emphasis mine.

  6. Kutach (2013) is a book length account of the development.

  7. Price (2007, p. 5).

  8. Ramsey (1978); also Price (1992).

  9. See, for example Giere (2006).

  10. The notion of a context is drawn widely, so that different users, different locations, different times, all count as differences in context. Which contexts make a difference to extension will vary from case to case.

  11. Albert (2000) provides one clear formulation of the asymmetry and its physical basis.

  12. These cases are described in a context in which our own temporal concepts are well-defined so that we can say in our terms that their causal judgments are reversed.

  13. (Price 2007).

  14. The reason that it is not quite so straightforward is that the direction of cause and effect depends on how the intervention counterfactuals are assessed, and it requires a little more work to say how the truth conditions for counterfactuals would come out for such creatures. The standard strategy is to argue that the direction of cause derives from the direction of counterfactual dependence and explain the direction of counterfactual dependence by tracing it to the thermodynamic gradient. For our purposes what matters is that if we reverse the thermodynamic gradient, we reverse the facts that govern counterfactual judgments, and thereby reverse the direction in which causal influence is seen as running.

  15. (Price 2007).

  16. And curiously, early in the paper, Price proposes an intuition pump to prime the imagination, in the form of a situation in which there is no intrinsic asymmetry and we still import temporally asymmetric causal intuitions. His own description of this case suggests that we bring a fixed viewpoint even to a setting in which there isn’t the contextual asymmetry that is supposed to determine the direction of causation.

  17. Woodward (2009, 2014), Menzies and Price (1993) and Price (2007, 2014).

  18. Price cites Perry’s classic discussion of Z-landers in Perry (1986). Reprinted in Perry 1993/2000 for the cognitive and communicative function that perspectival concepts play.

  19. Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality (Russell’s Republic Revisited), Edited by Huw Price and Richard Corry.

  20. Pearl (2000, p. 350).

  21. Ibid., pp. 349–350. See in particular, his discussion of slides 36–38.

  22. Price (2014).

  23. It is worth noting that an agent’s viewpoint in this sense—in a sense that reflects her doxastic and practical relations to events being represented—is not itself fixed over time. It is something that changes along her world-line as she acquires more information and events that were at one time in her power to alter get banked in history. And the changes in her viewpoint get projected onto events which are themselves seen as ‘acquiring a fixity’ with the passage of time. I have argued elsewhere that this change in the fixity of events is itself a frame-dependent matter.

  24. Invariance is always relative to a class of transformations. What remains when we filter out the effects of lenses depends on what we include in the class of transformations. As a general rule, the object of perception and the class of possible views of the same object are co-defined. We get a better idea of the object we are looking at the same time that we form ideas of the different viewpoints from which it can be seen.

  25. One might wonder whether this observation threatens the use of linguistic intuitions in arguments against the semantic thesis. After all, if science can correct common sense about whether simultaneity is frame-dependent, why can’t it correct common sense about whether ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ have a hidden argument place? The difference between the two cases, as I understand it, is that common sense can treat some structure as intrinsic when it is really perspectival, because there is a fact of the matter about whether the structure is intrinsic to the object being represented, that has nothing to do with what speakers believe about it. Semantic facts, by contrast, don’t have that kind of independence of what speakers think. If it is correct to say that some term is semantically contextual, that fact must be reflected in the use of competent speakers. If there is no agreement among recognizably competent speakers about whether the reference shifts in contexts in which the thermodynamic gradient is reversed, then it is not correct to say that the term is semantically contextual. There is a presumption in this way of arguing (one implicit in the fairly standard practice of using linguistic intuitions to establish semantic facts) that semantic facts are only as determinate as linguistic norms recognized by competent speakers. Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection and prompting me acknowledge the presumption.

  26. By cognitive contents, I mean ‘Fregean senses’ individuated by the Frege test: “A” and “B” have the same cognitive content only if “A=B” is not a cognitively significant truth.

  27. In particular, I don’t think there need always be a substantively characterizable invariant content, or that realism about a class of beliefs demands that there be.

  28. Any good account of cognition will see that these come apart, and we simply need a better vocabulary. First, the user of a concept need not have a clear and distinct understanding of its invariant representational content. Communicative purposes require her to know what is invariant under transformations between her viewpoint and those of her interlocutors, but she need not know how the world looks to actual or non-actual creatures she has no occasion to communicate with. Second, beliefs that have the same invariant representational content cannot always play the same cognitive role. This is most obvious in the case of indexicals. The belief that the faculty meeting starts at noon has a different cognitive significance than the belief that the faculty meeting starts now, albeit that they may have the same invariant representational content.

  29. By saying that the reference to the human viewpoint is in the pragmatics rather than the semantics, I mean that the truth conditions for x-beliefs can be given by a function, f, of more fundamental physical structures making no explicit reference to human beings, but that the explanation of the role that f plays in our practical reasoning makes essential reference to the human viewpoint. See Semantics versus Pragmatics, Szabo (2005) and Ezcurdia and Stainton (2013), for some of the contested issues surrounding the semantics/pragmatic distinctions, which I don’t mean to be prejudging in my use.

  30. I’m speaking naively here as though this separation is given, but it is more accurate to think of the intentional object as being defined in part by this separation. The intentional object becomes more determinate as this separation becomes more articulated.

  31. And this is to say nothing of the rich personal histories that we all bring to the table and that colour both the quality and content of our experience.

  32. See Price and Corry (2007).

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Ismael, J. How do causes depend on us? The many faces of perspectivalism. Synthese 193, 245–267 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0757-6

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