Description
Book SynopsisIn recent decades, the analysis of causal relations has become a topic of central importance in analytic philosophy. More recently, dispositional properties have also become objects of intense study. Both of these phenomena appear to be intimately related to counterfactual conditionals and other modal phenomena such as objective chance, but little work has been done to directly relate them. Dispositions and Causes contains ten essays by scholars working in both metaphysics and in philosophy of science, examining the relation between dispositional and causal concepts.Particular issues discussed include the possibility of reducing dispositions to causes, and vice versa; the possibility of a nominalist theory of causal powers; the attempt to reduce all metaphysical necessity to dispositional properties; the relationship between dispositions, causes, and laws of nature; the role of causal capacities in explaining the success of scientific inquiry; the grounding of dispositions and causes i
Trade Reviewten authors tackle an impressively wide range of topics. * D. H. Mellor, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science *
Table of Contents1. The metaphysics of dispositions and causes ; 2. Dispositions, causes, and reduction ; 3. Causal structuralism, dispositional actualism, and counterfactual conditionals ; 4. Leaving things to take their chances: Cause and disposition grounded in chance ; 5. Causal laws, policy predictions, and the need for genuine powers ; 6. How is scientific analysis possible? ; 7. Agent-causal power ; 8. Structural properties revisited ; 9. Causal nominalism ; 10. Why do the laws explain why? ; References
