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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Type causal claims cannot be mere generalizations over to... — Carmelics
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    Home/Causation
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Type causal claims cannot be mere generalizations over token causal claims.

    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.Drinking a quart of plutonium causes death is a true type causal claim.
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    • 2.No particular person has ever drunk a quart of plutonium, so no token causal claim of that type exists.
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    • 3.A generalization over token causal claims requires at least one token instance to generalize from.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Type causal claims can be understood as expressing nomic necessities or dispositional laws grounded in causal powers, not generalizations over token events.
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    • 2.On a powers-based ontology (Molnar, Mumford), 'plutonium causes death' expresses a real disposition of plutonium that holds even without manifestation instances.
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    • 3.A generalization requiring token instances conflates the epistemological basis for knowing a causal law with the ontological basis of the law itself.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Probabilistic causal models (Suppes, Cartwright) analyze type causation via conditional probability distributions over variable types, requiring no enumeration of token cases.
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    • 2.The plutonium example presupposes a counterfactual reading of 'no tokens exist,' but in structural equation frameworks, the type claim is defined by the functional relationships between variables, not by actual token frequencies.
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    Causation

    Related

    A generalization over token causal claims requires at least one token instance t...A generalization requiring token instances conflates the epistemological basis f...Drinking a quart of plutonium causes death is a true type causal claim.No particular person has ever drunk a quart of plutonium, so no token causal cla...
    +4 moreShow less
    On a powers-based ontology (Molnar, Mumford), 'plutonium causes death' expresses...Probabilistic causal models (Suppes, Cartwright) analyze type causation via cond...The plutonium example presupposes a counterfactual reading of 'no tokens exist,'...Type causal claims can be understood as expressing nomic necessities or disposit...

    Similar

    A generalization over token causal claims requires at least one token ...92%The objection that singular causal judgments are made without belief i...81%Davidson holds that while we may not believe in the universal generali...81%Davidson rejects Hume's analysis that singular causal statements can b...80%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: causation-metaphysics
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    A third position, defended by Ellery Eells (1991), is that neither token nor type causal relations are more fundamental than the other. Eells gives two probabilistic analyses of causation: one for type causation, and another for token causation. Eells thinks that type causal claims cannot just be generalizations about token causal claims because of examples like this: drinking a quart of plutonium causes death, even though nobody has ever drank a quart of plutonium, and so no particular persons’
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

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