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Omissions and expectations: a new approach to the things we failed to do

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Abstract

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ (and its synonyms) is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions.

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Notes

  1. Negative causation refers to a causal relation between two relata, where at least one relatum is a negative event. Negative events are events that did not take place. There are two sub-classes of negative causation: causation by omission and prevention. In the first class, the cause of an effect is something that did not happen, such as Barry’s not watering your plants. In the second class, the effect is something that did not take place, for instance the plants’ not drying up. In this paper, I will focus on causation by omissions.

  2. The examples just given all contain members of different ontological categories as causal relata. This, however, is not a metaphysical commitment, but rather a reflection of ordinary speech. In the following, I will rely on an event-causalistic approach, saying that only events are causal relata. While it is natural to say that Obama caused my plants death, it is not a metaphysically adequate statement. What it expresses is that Obama was part of an event that caused my plants’ death. I will avoid such ponderous formulations in this paper.

  3. The arguments presented in the following will not be based on any particular counterfactual account, but rather take as its target the common ground that all these counterfactual approaches share.

  4. Not all philosophers believe that counterfactual approaches can account for causation by omissions as well. One striking difference between events and omissions of events is that they work differently in counterfactual claims. If A and B are both events, the counterfactual claim “If A had not happened, B would not have happened” refers to two particular events. If A is, however, an omission, “If A had happened, B would not have happened” refers to what would have happened if an event type had happened. For such an argument see Casati and Varzi (2014) and Varzi (2007).

  5. Many authors have already discussed the shortcomings of Lewis’s original theory due to its simplicity. However, even though many significant contributions have been made that improved Lewis’s account, none of the extensions I am aware of could sufficiently solve the problem of causal selection.

  6. Lewis for instance has suggested that causation by omissions opens up an almost infinite number of possible worlds in which the omission is replaced by a relevant outcome-preventing action. All these possible words are given ontological reality. In order to identify ‘the’ cause of the effect, these possible worlds are than ranked in order of similarity to the actual world.

  7. Jonathan Schaffer provides an intriguing list of cases in which an effect is not caused by the presence of a certain event or entity, but rather by its absence (Schaffer 2012). He argues that radical pessimists do not only commit themselves to rejecting beheadings or suffocations as causes for a person’s death, but since all bodily movements are induced by the absence of previously present inhibitors, no action can ever count as a cause of anything.

  8. In the Davidsonian picture, this causal relation is thought to be a physical relation. Davidson himself thus denies that omissions can be causes right from the beginning. He, however, recognizes that people talk as if omissions could be causes. Yet this, so Davidson argues, is inaccurate. Omissions cannot fit into true causal statements, but they can provide perfectly informative causal explanations.

  9. Compare “Obama non ha annaffiato le piante” and “Barry ha omesso di annaffiare le piante”, where the former indicates that Obama did not water the plants, but was not expected to, and the latter expresses the idea that Barry was expected to water the plants.

  10. Same in French: “Obama n’a pas arosé les plantes” in contrast to “Barry a omis d’arroser les plantes”.

  11. In Polish: Obama nie podlał kwiatów” in contrast to “Obama zaniechał podlania kwiatów”. In addition, it would be fine to say that the soldier omitted to kill (“żołnierz zaniechał zabicia”), and also that Tom omitted to take drugs (“Tomek zaniechał zażywania narkotyków”), for instance if he once tried and then restrained himself from doing so.

  12. Moreover, there is an additional conceptual difference between norms and expectations that will be shown to be relevant to future research. Expectations do not necessarily dependent on norms. We may also form the expectation that Tom will come to our party simply because Tom told us about his intention to come, or because his wife Laura told us. If Tom does not come, however, it still seems sensible to say that Tom’s not coming to the party caused my surprise, my anger, my calling him to check if he is ok. What is required is, of course, empirical research investigating whether expectations that are formed in this way actually have the same effect as expectations based on norms.

  13. McGrath (2005) and Beebee (2004) are only two of the authors discussed on this paper who take intuitions as a starting point for their metaphysical debate. Also Paul and Hall (2013), Chockler and Halpern (2004), Halpern (2005), and Schaffer (2000, 2012), or Craver (2007, 2014) make a strong case for empirically informed metaphysics. As Paul and Hall (2013, p. 41) say: “We think it is important to take intuitions very seriously, and we will do so throughout this book, paying special attention to places where our intuitions are in tension, since we take intuitions to be important guides to what we think we know about ontological structure, and the existence of said tensions indicate the need for further analysis. But intuitions must be used with care”. And, of course, empirically working researchers like Alicke (1992), Henne et al. (2016), Hitchcock and Knobe (2009), Knobe (2009), Livengood and Machery (2007) and Reuter et al. (2014) take intuitions as an important starting point for and touchstone of philosophical argumentation.

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Acknowledgements

For funding the research in this article, I would like to express my appreciation to the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation as well as Research School Plus of Ruhr-University Bochum. For their insightful feedback and support, I am in debt to Adam Bear, Joshua Knobe, Albert Newen, Kevin Reuter, and Alexander Wiegmann. For their sharp and challenging discussions, I am grateful to Peter Brössel, Sabrina Coninx, Jennifer Daigle, Joanna Demaree Cotton, Paul Henne, Jonathan Kominsky, Beate Krickel, Francesco Marchi, Stephan Padel, Karolina Prochownik, Tobias Starzak, Kevin Tobia, Tomasz Wysocki, as well as to the participants of the first conference of the Experimental Philosophy Group Germany.

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    Pascale Willemsen

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Willemsen, P. Omissions and expectations: a new approach to the things we failed to do. Synthese 195, 1587–1614 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1284-9

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