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Concrete occurrences vs. explanatory facts: Mackie on the extensionality of causal statements

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Notes

  1. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974. All further page references in the text will be to this work.

  2. Among recent writers on causation who have adopted this view are Hanson,Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge University Press, 1958; Scriven, ‘Causation as Explanation’Nous ix (1975), 1–16; and Beadsley, ‘Actions and Events: the Problem of Individuation’,American Philosophical Quarterly 12 (1975). Scriven writes: “a cause is an explanatory factor (of a particular kind). Causation is the relation between explanatory factors (of this kind) and what they explain” (p. 11). I suspect that Scriven is committed to the absence of causal relations in the absence of explanations demanded and offered.

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  3. Davidson, ‘Causal Relations’,Journal of Philosophy,lxxiv (1967), 691–703.

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  1. Syracuse University, Italy

    Alexander Rosenberg

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  1. Alexander Rosenberg
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Rosenberg, A. Concrete occurrences vs. explanatory facts: Mackie on the extensionality of causal statements. Philos Stud 31, 133–140 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01857183

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