Browsing by Subject "Causation"

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Argument structure and the typology of causatives in Kinyarwanda : explaining the causative-instrumental syncretism
(2013-12) Jerro, Kyle Joseph; Beavers, John T.
In the Bantu language Kinyarwanda, the morpheme –ish can be used to mark both causation and the instrumental applicative. This report pro- poses an explanation for this causative-instrumental syncretism, arguing that both causation and the introduction of an instrument are—at their core—two outgrowths of the same semantic notion. Fitting with other morphological causatives in Bantu, the causative use of –ish patterns as a lexical causative marker. The analysis presented here captures the lex- ical nature of the causative use of the morpheme by arguing that the new causal link is added sub-lexically, situating Kinyarwanda into a cross- linguistic typology of morphological causatives.
Building nothing out of something
(2011-05) Wright, Briggs Marvin; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark); Koons, Robert C.; Pautz, Adam; Tye, Michael; Varzi, Achille; Zimmerman, Dean
The notion of absence is pervasive throughout and central to human language and thought. Such thought and talk is often taken quite seriously. Much has been done to motivate treating absences as genuine entities, things as real as the tables and chairs we encounter in everyday life. Unfortunately, not nearly as much attention has been paid to the question of what kinds of things absences could be if indeed there were such things. In this dissertation, I take up the metaphysical question involving the nature of absences, and I also carefully consider the ontological question of whether any kind of case can be made for reifying absences. Along the way, I develop a novel metaphysical account of absences, and examine various considerations from the realms of causation, perception, and truthmaking that putatively support treating absences as bona fide entities.
"Cause" and affect : evaluative and emotive parameters of meaning among the periphrastic causative verb in English
(2016-08) Childers, Zachary Witter; Beavers, John T.; Wechsler, Stephen; Beaver, David I; Erk, Katrin E; Kamp, Johan A
This dissertation investigates the so-called periphrastic causative verbs in English – verbs such as cause, make, have, force, and let – and distinguishes them with respect to their selectional behavior and inferential properties. I suggest that these verbs are primarily differentiated in terms of the evaluative and affective dispositions of participants in the speech act and the caused eventuality. The empirical basis for this claim incorporates corpora as well as experimental elicitation and judgment tasks. Based on these findings, it is proposed that the selection of periphrastic causative verb in the expression of a directive causative event is governed by the evaluative stance of the patient of the causative verb. I argue that the English verb cause in particular is less general than has previously been assumed, that it has at least two different senses, and that its primary sense is restricted to cases of negative speaker sentiment.
Finding Free Will: Causation in an Indeterministic World
(2020-05) Hebner, Thomas
Free will is an oft disputed topic in popular culture, religion, and philosophy, yet much of its refutations are built upon theories of determinism and necessitation, whose conclusions are untenable. Any discussion of free will is necessarily a discussion of cause and effect, so any claims made about freedom must first establish what it is to be a free agent. This thesis challenges deterministic causation, showing that even classical Newtonian mechanics gives us indeterminate solutions. In doing this, we show that causation itself is a fundamental truth, built from an ontology of causal powers, the implications of which we explore in detail. From this metaphysical framework we explore a plausible route by which free will may emerge: the theory of Agent Causation, which argues that at the core of every free action is an irreducible causal relation between a person and some appropriate mental or internal event that triggers later elements of the action. Agent Causation will be shown to be a theory of causal powers implied by our ontology, with responsibility and agency thereby emerging.
Is physicalism "really" true?: an empirical argument against the universal construal of physicalism
(2009-12) Smith, Paul H., 1952-; Bonevac, Daniel A., 1955-; Juhl, Cory; Kane, Robert; Puthoff, Harold E.; Sosa, David; Utts, Jessica
Physicalism as universally construed is the thesis that everything in the world is either physical or a consequence of physical facts. Certain consequences of physicalism for free will, religion, and so on make it unpalatable to some. Physicalism should not be dismissed merely on its unpalatability. Nonetheless, we should be very sure it is true before accepting it uncritically (as much of science and philosophy now do). Physicalism is a contingent thesis, taken as true on the basis of strong inductive evidence and an inference-to-the-best-explanation that specifies it as the best theory over any of its competitors to provide an ontological account of the universe. So long as there is no contrary evidence to the claims of physicalism, then it stands relatively uncontested. I argue that there is a body of well-attested empirical evidence that falsifies universally-construed physicalism by violating an essential assumption of the theory – causal closure of the physical domain. I present a detailed account of this closure-violating evidence. So that those who are unfamiliar with the body of evidence on offer may judge its validity, I include brief summations of experimental designs, findings, and analyses, plus some controversies pertaining to the data and their resolutions. I then argue why this body of empirical evidence should count against universal physicalism, argue for the evidence’s scientific legitimacy, and discuss criticisms which have been lodged against it, then explain why these criticisms lack force. I conclude that the evidence I present is sufficient to falsify the universal construal of physicalism as supported by today’s and by foreseeable future understandings of the physical world. I acknowledge, though, that nothing can be guaranteed against an indefinite “wait-and-see” argument for some implausible “fully-realized” physics that may be able to reconcile the evidence I propose with such a fully-completed formulation of physicalism. I suggest that if this is the best physicalists can come up with, then their position is weak and the inference-to-the-best-explanation that until now supported universal physicalism should be turned around to tell against the theory.
MECHANISM, PURPOSE AND AGENCY: the metaphysics of mental causation and free will
(2005) Judisch, Neal Damian; Kane, Robert; Koons, Robert C.
Libertarianism is a thesis according to which free will is incompatible with determinism and human agents possess free will to some degree. Three formidable objections have been raised against this thesis by its opponents: (i) Libertarianism requires the falsity of philosophical naturalism or materialist theories of mind; (ii) Indeterminism threatens freedom by undermining the rational, volitional control of agents; (iii) If indeterminism does not threaten our freedom, then neither does it enhance our freedom or add to human agency anything of appreciable value. I address these challenges in novel ways by assessing recent work on mental causation and consciousness and applying that work to the problems at hand, arguing that progress may be made in the free will debate by reorienting it toward an examination of those conditions which are essential to agency simpliciter. In response to (i) I argue that a coherent account of libertarian agency requires no greater an ontological inventory than naturalism allows provided that there is a naturalistic solution to the problem of mental causation, one that (i*) secures the causal efficacy of mentality, (ii*) coheres with the characteristic purposiveness of intentional behavior, and (iii*) illuminates what it is for an agent to produce or bring about an action. I show that (ii) is unfounded on a causal construal of action, since the most promising sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for purposive behavior are adeterministic, and therefore do not require the obtaining of deterministic causal connections between intentions and matching behavior. Since agents exercise the relevant capacities of control just in case they act purposively, it follows that indeterminacy does not in itself vitiate agential control. I analyze the claim expressed in (iii) as a special case of the conceptual gap between the first-person and the third-person perspectives, arguing that the conceptual irreducibility of agential production (iii*), which results from the deployment of phenomenal concepts in our thinking about agency generally, is what lies at the root of the present objection, but that such conceptual irreducibility does not entail that the exercise of genuine free will cannot consist in suitably related indeterministic event causes.
Normativism and mental causation
(2007-05) Tiehen, Justin Thomas, 1977-; Sosa, David, 1966-
This dissertation defends a certain view of the mind/body relation, according to which although there is a sense in which everything is physical, there is also a sense in which mental phenomena are irreducible to physical phenomena. The reason for this irreducibility, according to the position defended in this work, is that the mental has a certain normative character which the physical lacks. The central thesis defended in the first part of the work is the claim, advanced by Donald Davidson among others, that the mental realm is governed by constitutive principles of rationality. I both attempt to explain what this means precisely and provide arguments as to why we should think that it is true. Having defended the thesis, I then turn to show that it entails that certain mental phenomena are normative. If the normative is generally irreducible to the non-normative -- as I argue there is good reason to hold -- it then follows as a special case that the mental phenomena in question are irreducible to any (non-normative) physical phenomena. Is this form of antireductionism scientifically respectable? In the second part of the dissertation I attempt to establish that it is by showing that the view can be reconciled with a physicalistically acceptable account of mental causation. Focusing on the causal exclusion problem advanced by Jaegwon Kim among others, I critically discuss both reductive and certain nonreductive solutions to the problem that have been advanced by various philosophers. I then propose my own nonreductive solution to the problem, and attempt to draw out some of the consequences of this solution both for physicalism and for the nature of normativity.
Refraining, agents, and causation
(2013-05) Harrington, Chelsea-Anne Linzee; Dancy, Jonathan
I consider two versions of an argument against (so-called) negative action, both of which take it that causation is a defining feature of actions. The first asserts that when an agent refrains, her mental states do not cause the absence of an event; as such, the refraining does not qualify as an action. The second asserts that when an agent refrains, she does not cause the apparent results of her refraining, and so again, the refraining does not qualify as an action. The idea motivating the second argument appears to improve on the first, insofar as it allows for the agent to play a role in her actions. I argue that both accounts rely on a narrow conception of causation, framed in terms of a physical connection between cause and effect. This narrow conception does not appear to be justified, and the focus on physical connection causation leads both accounts to misconceive agency. Fortunately, there is available a broader conception of causation, which is both intuitively plausible and better able to capture the phenomenon.
Resolving the causal paradox
(2016-05) Davis, Richard Lawton; Koons, Robert C.; Bonevac, Daniel A
This report begins with a paradox which proceeds from roughly the following premises: (i) that every fact has a cause, (ii) that there is a fact which includes all facts, (iii) that whatever causes a given fact must cause whatever facts that fact includes, and yet (iv) that no fact can cause itself. These premises seem to entail a contradiction, since whatever causes the fact which includes all facts is itself one of the facts which the fact so caused includes, meaning that it must cause itself. Each of the four premises which generate this paradox is intuitively correct. This report resolves the paradox by describing a positive causal model on which all of the four premises have plausible and well-motivated interpretations, at least one such interpretation apiece, which are all consistently true. Much of the discussion is devoted to examining the root logical properties of causation and metaphysical explanation in order to discern which versions of these premises are in fact plausible and well-motivated. The positive model on which these interpretations are reconciled involves an infinite regress of efficient causal facts in which each subsequent fact is embedded as a remainderless proper conjunct of the fact that precedes it.
The syntax and semantics of resultative constructions in Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS) and American Sign Language (ASL)
(2017-08-09) Loos, Cornelia; Meier, Richard P.; Beavers, John T; Boas, Hans C; Quinto-Pozos, David; Wechsler, Stephen M
Complex cause-result events such as wiping a table off can be encoded linguistically with a single verb (clean), a resultative (wipe the table clean), or a multiclausal construction (wipe the table until it’s clean). Languages differ markedly in the kinds of events that can be described in a single clause; hence the present work explores whether Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS) and American Sign Language (ASL) can encode both manner of causation and result state within a single clause. Since an investigation of clause-level constructions presupposes a thorough understanding of clause boundaries, this dissertation starts by reviewing and adding to the existing clausehood diagnostics in spoken and signed languages. Using these diagnostics in combination with video elicitation tasks and grammaticality judgments, I show that DGS has two monoclausal resultative constructions that differ in the order of the causing and result predicates. The constructions both allow Control and ECM resultatives and may take a stative or change-of-state secondary predicate. Their semantics differ in that resultatives with [Result Cause] word order exhibit event-to-scale homomorphy while those with [Cause Result] word order do not. ASL has a single monoclausal resultative construction that encodes at least Control resultatives but, in contrast to English, does not exhibit homomorphic mappings. ASL shares a different aspect of resultative semantics with English: directness of causation. The present work presents the first empirical investigation of directness of causation and its effect on the acceptability of resultatives in English and ASL. It finds that both English and ASL resultatives are significantly less acceptable as descriptors of causative scenarios in which there is a temporal delay between causing and result events. This study further shows a significant decrease in acceptability of English and ASL resultatives when an intermediate causer intervenes between ultimate causer and result. Through controlled experiments on resultatives in both languages, I show that temporal delays and intervening causers decrease directness independently and to significantly different degrees. Lastly, this study identifies subtle differences in the semantics of ASL resultatives and their English counterparts. While the degree of indirectness of an intervening causer is attenuated by the ultimate causer’s intentionality in English, no such effect is found for ASL. In summary, the present work demonstrates that sign languages like DGS and ASL have syntactic resources for packaging event-structural information densely. These resources exhibit different constraints on usage than their German and English counterparts and are well-integrated into the grammars of DGS and ASL.