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    Carmelics

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

    It is not the case that The new counterfactual theory of causation does not handle trumping completely satisfactorily

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.The sergeant's command has some degree of influence on the soldiers' advance because if the sergeant had shouted earlier than the major with a different command, the soldiers would have obeyed his order
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    • 2.Lewis must dismiss these counterfactual dependencies as too distant, but no principled metric of distance is provided
      ?

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    • 3.Similar alterations of the major's command are treated as relevant to the major's causal influence, making the asymmetric treatment unprincipled
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Lewis's similarity metric for possible worlds is notoriously world-order-dependent, granting theorists ad hoc flexibility to exclude inconvenient counterfactuals.
      ?

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    • 2.Schaffer's trumping cases show that two events can be equally nomically sufficient yet only one causes the outcome, which no similarity metric can distinguish non-arbitrarily.
      ?

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    • 3.Any metric that systematically privileges the major's command over the sergeant's must smuggle in prior causal knowledge, making the analysis viciously circular.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Interventionist accounts (Woodward 2003) require that causes make a difference under ideal interventions, but in trumping both commands survive identical intervention tests.
      ?

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    • 2.If no well-defined interventionist test distinguishes the major's causal status from the sergeant's, the counterfactual framework lacks the resources to ground the asymmetry it needs.
      ?

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