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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Both tossing the coin and preventing the toss may backwardly cause Houdini's earlier behavior

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 2 of 2
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    • 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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