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    Both tossing the coin and preventing the toss may backwar... — Carmelics
    Home/Modality & Possibility
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Both tossing the coin and preventing the toss may backwardly cause Houdini's earlier behavior

    Causation
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.The preclusion of the coin from being tossed may be a cause of Houdini's earlier response
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    • 2.The toss itself may also be a cause of Houdini's earlier behavior
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    • 3.Both actions can be considered as physical events
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Causation requires a determinate causal relatum: an event's absence or non-occurrence cannot bear genuine causal power (Kim, 1973).
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    • 2.The 'prevention of a toss' is a negative event or omission, and negative events lack the ontological robustness required to be causes.
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    • 3.If both an event and its prevention equally count as causes, causal explanation loses its contrastive and discriminatory function entirely.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Backward causation violates the principle of the fixity of the past: a later event cannot alter what is already causally closed (Dummett notwithstanding).
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    • 2.If both tossing and not-tossing backwardly cause the same prior behavior, the causal history of that behavior becomes overdetermined and explanatorily vacuous.
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    • 3.Counterfactual theories of causation (Lewis, 1973) require asymmetric dependence; symmetric backward causation from contradictory events collapses this asymmetry.
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    Topics

    Modality & PossibilityCausation

    Related

    Backward causation violates the principle of the fixity of the past: a later eve...Both actions can be considered as physical eventsCausation requires a determinate causal relatum: an event's absence or non-occur...Counterfactual theories of causation (Lewis, 1973) require asymmetric dependence...
    +5 moreShow less
    If both an event and its prevention equally count as causes, causal explanation ...If both tossing and not-tossing backwardly cause the same prior behavior, the ca...The 'prevention of a toss' is a negative event or omission, and negative events ...The preclusion of the coin from being tossed may be a cause of Houdini's earlier...The toss itself may also be a cause of Houdini's earlier behavior

    Similar

    The toss itself may also be a cause of Houdini's earlier behavior91%If tossing the coin and preventing the toss are both treated as purely...90%The preclusion of the coin from being tossed may be a cause of Houdini...88%If the coin flip A causes the earlier prediction B, then after B has o...81%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: causation-backwards
    View source passageHide passage
    However, one might suggest that a possible reply to Black’s bilking argument is to say that both tossing the coin and preventing the toss may backwardly cause Houdini’s behavior. That the preclusion of the coin from being tossed may be a cause of Houdini’s response has also been proposed by Brian Garrett (2020). But he argues, in contrast to the scenarios described below, that the lack of flipping the coin may be the direct cause of the Houdini’s earlier prediction (because of backward causal pr
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit