After reviewing modal, counterfactual, metaphysical, and logical analyses of explanatory dependence, and taking in lessons from time travel cases, causal dependence emerges as the best model.
causal dependence(Lewis's counterfactual theory of causation)
A counterfactual relation in which an effect depends on a cause such that, had the cause not occurred, the effect would not have occurred.
counterfactual(Modal logic and epistemology)
A conditional statement concerning what would be the case if some antecedent condition were true, evaluated across possible worlds; contraposition does not hold in general for counterfactuals.
metaphysical analysis(contrasted with conceptual analysis)
An explanatory account of a normative property that gives the property's essential nature; arguably not a priori, necessarily true if true at all, and underwrites identity claims
modal analysis(Philosophy of ability and linguistic semantics)
The semantic view that ability ascriptions of the form 'S is able to A' are analyzed as possibility claims quantifying over possible worlds
Swenson (2016) argues that what’s fixed isn’t the past in toto, but so much of the past as isn’t dependent on the future. Rather than modifying the principle of the fixity of the past, Law (2020) advocates junking it altogether and replacing it with the principle of the fixity of the independent. Law (2021) continues the case for replacing the fixity of the past with the fixity of the independent by arguing that the former, insofar as the past is fixed, is derivative from the latter. In two recent papers, Ryan Wasserman stakes out positions that differ from most other defenders of the dependen...