Realism Regained: An Exact Theory Of Causation, Teleology, And The Mind

REALISM REGAINED This page intentionally left blank Realism Regained An Exact Theory of Causation, Teleology, and the Mind ROBERT C.KOONS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2000 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford NewYork Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dares Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright©2000 by Robert C.Koons Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koons, RobertC. Realism regained: an exact theory of causation, teleology, and the mind Robert C. Koons p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513567-9 1. Causation. 1. Title. BD541.K66 2000 122—dc21 99-054666 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper In memory of Jon Barwise, friend and mentor This page intentionally left blank Preface Causation, the relation of cause to effect, has long been recognized as one of the most central subjects in philosophy. After a period of relative neglect during the era of logical positivism, the late twentieth century has seen a renaissance of interest in causation, as one philosopher after another provides a "causal theory" of this or that phenomenon: reference and meaning, identity and duration, perception and knowledge, information and representation. At the same time, the development of the formal disciplines, including modal logic (the logic of possibility and necessity), probability theory, mereology (the theory of parts and wholes), defeasible or "nonmonotonic" logics (developed in the field of artificial intelligence to represent commonsense inference), and partial semantics (most prominently, the situation theory of Barwise, Perry, and Etchemendy), has provided the tools needed for an exact and comprehensive theory of causation. Up to this point, formal accounts of causation have followed the empiricist strictures laid down by David Hume. These accounts of causation force the concept into the periphery (making the concept of causation dependent on our prior understanding of such theoretical machinery as spatiotemporal location, subjunctive conditionals, experience, and empirical knowledge) and consequently do not mesh with the causal theories that have become so popular in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, which, by contrast, require causation to play a central and non-derivative role. In this book, I construct a non-Humean or realist theory of causation (employing the technical tools mentioned in the preceding paragraph), and I show how this account sheds light on existing causal theories and their outstanding problems. In the process, I sketch a metaphysical theory that employs relatively few primitive elements and comprises a well-understood mathematical theory of these elements and a precise account, in terms of these elements, of a wide variety of phenomena, drawn