Suppose that an extremely reliable cannon is loaded with a rock, and pointed at a window, and the extremely reliable timer on the cannon is set for two minutes. Two minutes later, the cannon shoots out the rock causing the window to break.
The Lewisian counterfactual account of causation accounts for the causation by the counterfactual:
- Were the cannon not to have fired the rock, the window wouldn’t have broken.
But imagine that a risk-taking undersupervised kid was walking by towards the end of the the two minutes, and on a whim considered swapping the rock in the cannon for their steel water bottle. The decision whether to do the swap was an extremely conflicted one, and a single neuron’s made the difference, and resulted in the swap not happening.
We can set up the story in such a way that on Lewis’s way of measuring the closeness of worlds, a world where the kid swapped the rock for the water bottle is closer than any worlds where the timer wasn’t set or where the cannon misfired or where the cannon wasn’t loaded or anything like that. In that case on a Lewisian analysis of counterfactuals:
- Were the cannon not to have fired the rock, the window would still have broken.
But surely whether the kid walks by or not, the cannon’s firing the rock caused the window to break.
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