Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Recent Books on Causation III: Carolina Sartorio, Causation and Free Will, Oxford, 2016



 Carolina Sartorio, Causation and Free Will, Oxford, 2016

The styles of philosophy change. Spinoza gave us axioms, from which it was patent his “theorems” did not follow. Hobbes, and Locke and Hume gave as long essays. Berkeley and Hume, dialogues.  Nowadays, philosophical style is more often like a video game with unspoken rules: the reader is told the author has a goal, followed by example, counterexample, perplex after perplex, which the author dispatches one after another, like so many arcade mopes, with occasional reverses to revive the dead and kill them again. Double tap. And, then, finally, the reader reaches The Theory. Or not.  Ellery Ells’ endlessly annoying Probabilistic Causality is like that, and so, less endlessly—hers is a short, dense book--is Carolina Sartorio’s Causation and Free Will. You can’t say Ells didn’t think hard about his topic, he did, and so evidently has Sartorio, but you can say that both of them, and a lot of other philosophers, could have made reading and understanding a lot easier by laying cards on the table to begin with. At least her syntax is not contrived to hide banality beneath bafflement.

Shelled and peeled, the story is this: an action is done freely by a person if (and I suppose only if) the person caused the action via a sequence of events that included, as actual causes, rational (given the person’s desires and beliefs) reasons for the act and absences of reasons not to do it, absences, again, as actual causes in “a normal, non-deviant way.” (p. 135).

How can absences of reasons be causes, you ask. Easy, you ate ice cream because you did not have a reason not to of the kind “I am allergic to ice cream” because you are not allergic to ice cream and you know it. So the absence of that reason was a cause of your eating ice cream. In the vernacular, we allow absences as causes all the time: my tomato plants died because I didn’t water them.  Of course, if metaphysicians take the vernacular literally and allow absences as causes then they  will have an infinity of them in every case: my plants died because Barack Obama did not water them, and so on.  Sartorio is content with that, and presumably content with an infinity of such ghost causes accompanying every cause that actually happens. Essentially, every ceteris paribus clause becomes an infinity of actual but non-actual (because absent) causes.

Absences as causes might seem gratuitous in her story. They are there because she wants to distinguish, on the one hand, between courses of action in which the agent would be sensitive to reasons against the action were the reasons real (the absent causes) and, on the other hand, courses of reasoning in which the agent would not be sensitive to similar reasons were they real (the absent non-causes).  Philosophy is in some places Humpty-Dumptyish, and metaphysicians are legally free to talk as they want, including saying that if in deciding to do something you would be sensitive to a reason, were you to have it, a reason that you do not in fact have, then the absence of that reason is a cause of what you do.  I don’t think such talk helps anything, and in science, where absences are ceteris paribus clauses or shorthands for unknown (or boring) positive details, it’s silly. 

Absences as causes necessitate recourse to “a normal and non-deviant way,” she argues, because the absence of a reason could be a cause of an effect because, were the reason to be present, that would cause some external process  (Sartorio likes examples with miraculous neuroscientists standing ready to intervene) to prevent the effect, and so the agent would be “sensitive” to the absence of the reason. 

Ever since it became abundantly clear that we are biological and physical machines, not just our bodies, as Descartes allowed, but the whole of us, as Helmholtz allowed, philosophers doing “moral psychology” have tried to reconcile us to the loss of the Thomistic/Cartesian fancy.  The plain fact seems to be that we do not have anything of the kind that Aquinas and Descartes claimed for us. So live with it.  Daniel Dennett (Elbow Room) assures us that we should be content, even happy with our state; it gives us everything we could want. He is wrong. We could want not to be like that, and most of us do. The that is a machine whose workings are determined—or at least caused—by forces that antedated us. The that is a person who has as a zygote or neonate been implanted with a device that determines her subsequent responses to her environment. We do not want to be like that even if nature did the implanting. To be in human bondage, and know it, is one of the metaphysical agonies.

One compatibilist response to the metaphysical agony is that it pines for an incoherence, that there could not thinkably be a system of the kind Descartes and Aquinas claimed us to be. But of course there could. We have perfectly clear mathematical theories of non-deterministic automata, whose transitions between states (Hilary Putnam once thought of them as mental states) are neither determined nor probabilistic.  The other compatibilist response is Orwellian, meaning changing the language. I think Sartorio’s response is of the Orwellian kind, but tempered. She says she has the intuition that if the human machine is formed by nature, well, its actions can be free. She doesn’t offer a survey of others’ opinions. Bless her, she elaborates only on the condition that her intuition is correct.

There remains the serious scientific project of how consciousness, and deliberation happen, and how they came about, and the sociological, anthropological project of understanding the conditions under which various communities claim free agency and when they do not, and how those conditions (which have evidently changed) come about as a social process, and perhaps the moral project of consoling those who agonize for the loss of free will, but there doesn’t remain anything metaphysical to do about freedom of the will.  Nothing, at least, of value.


Monday, August 15, 2016

Recent Books on Causation II, Douglas Kutach, Causation


Douglas Kutach, Causation, Polity Press, 2014

This, too, is an introductory book, but a good one.  The author mixes in historical sources with a wide ranging, and generally accurate and informative exposition of contemporary (i.e, since 1946) accounts of the metaphysics of causation. It has some sensible questions for readers. I would use it as a textbook, with some apologies to the students. What apologies?

1.     Like most other discussions of the metaphysics of causality, Kutach appeals to what we think we know for motivation, examples and counterexamples, but there is not the least hint of how causes can be, and are, discovered.
2.     While the book is less mathophobic than most philosophy texts, it is not always mathematically competent, doesn’t use what it does develop well, and presents mathematical examples that will be unenlightening or worse to most students.
a.     Early on “linearity” is discussed a propos of causal relations, but the author clearly doesn’t mean linearity. It is not clear what he means. Monotonicity perhaps, or non-interaction.
b.     Having introduced conditioning and independence and the common cause principle, there is a rather opaque discussion of Reichenbach’s attempt to define the direction of time by open versus closed “conjunctive forks” but the author fails to note that closed forks become open when common causes are conditioned on.  One question asks students to describe a graphical causal model with a specific probability feature, which would have been straightforward if the reader had been given an illustration of how graphical causal models are parameterized to yield probability relations, but that did not happen.
c.      As an example of uncertain extensions of familiar cases, students are referred to transfinite arithmetic.  Some help.
3.     Some the exposition could be more attractive, notably the explanations of token versus type, singular versus general. Distinctions (never mind notation) from formal logic are suppressed everywhere, even when they would help. The presentation of determinism is unclear and inadequate.
4.     Metaphysical discussions of causality inevitably make claims about what people would say without any consideration of what people do say. The extensive psychological literature on causal judgement, some of which has interesting theories, is entirely ignored.
5.     And sometimes the author says exactly the opposite of what he means—slip of the keyboard?

Ok, nothing is perfect, there could be better textbooks, but this one is usable, which is to say, given the alternatives, outstanding.

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Recent Books on Causation, from the Really, Horribly Bad to the So-So to the Pretty Good


There is a bunch of books on causation recently. I expect to review them all here in due time. At least one is so bad that it does not deserve reviewing, let alone having been published, but at least there should be a warning somewhere. So here.

 

I. The Worst: Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Causation, A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2013

  Causation is meant to be a quick introductory text surveying contemporary and historical views of causation. For an astute reader, it would be very quick, stopping at, say, page 12. Should in misplaced charity that reader venture on, she would find chapters badly organized, missing their targets (e.g, "finding causes" is reduced to an uninformative mention of randomized, controlled trials), historically uninformed, and terribly referenced. But, as I say, any reader on cortical alert would throw the book away around page 12. There, the authors address Russell's early argument that causes cannot be fundamental because causes are asymmetrical and the fundamental laws of physics are symmetrical equations.

Russell is wrong they say, because "equations have at least some directionality." Here is their argument:

"We say that 2 + 2 = 4, for instance, which is to say that each side is of equal sum. But is is less obvious that 4 = 2 + 2 insofar as 4 can also be the sum of 1 + 3. The point is that 2 +2 can equal only one sum 4, whereas 4 can be the sum of several combinations (2 and 2,  1 and 3, 10 minus 6, and so on). And in this respect there is at least some asymmetry." (pp 12-13)

Somewhere, in Norway or Nottingham, the transitivity of equality, and Russell's point, was missed. 

Then, in nice condescension, the authors write that 

"Second, Russell's account was based on his understanding of the physics of 1913. There have been a number of attempts by physicists to put asymmetry back into physical theory. One such notion is entropy, which an irreversible thermodynamic property."

The  last clause of the last sentence is a bit of nonsense, --it's not the property that is irreversible, it's changes in it, but more importantly the idea of entropy, and the word, had been in physics for about 50 years when Russell wrote.   In 1913, Russell didn't understand the physics of 1913, and neither, apparently, did the authors in 2013.