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.