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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Type causal claims cannot be mere generalizations over token causal claims.

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

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 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 for 2 of 2
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    • 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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