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

    It is not the case that The purple flame case is not a genuine counterexample to the transitivity of causation, because the contrast situations at each end of the two causal statements do not match.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Lewis's own counterfactual analysis treats causation as a binary relation between events, not a quaternary contrastive relation.
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    • 2.Introducing contrastivism as a repair to transitivity failures is an ad hoc modification that abandons the original reductive ambitions of the counterfactual theory.
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    • 3.If the contrastivist move is accepted, it generates a revisionary causal ontology where ordinary singular causal claims become systematically indeterminate without further specification of contrasts.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Hall's distinction between production and dependence identifies transitivity failures as revealing a genuine conceptual bifurcation in our causal concept, not a linguistic mismatch.
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    • 2.The purple flame case tracks the production relation: there is a continuous causal process from the salt to the ignition, yet the dependence relation fails because ignition would have occurred via other means.
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    • 3.Explaining away the counterexample via contrastive semantics masks the metaphysically significant fact that causation is not a single unified relation, thereby sacrificing theoretical insight for formal tidiness.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Causal statements are contrastive: they assert that one event rather than a contrast event caused another event rather than a contrast event.
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    • 2.The first causal statement contrasts Jones putting potassium salts in the fire versus not doing so, causing the flame to turn purple rather than yellow.
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    • 3.The second causal statement contrasts the purple fire occurring versus not occurring, causing the flammable material to ignite versus not ignite.
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