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Humean Causation and Kim's Theory of Events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Terence Horgan
Terence Horgan*
Affiliation:
Illinois State University and University of Houston
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Extract

In recent years Jaegwon Kim has propounded and elaborated an influential theory of events. He takes an event to be the exemplification of an empirical property (or n-adic attribute) by a concrete object (or several concrete objects) at a time. He also has proposed and endorsed a version of the “Humean” tradition concerning causation: the view that causal relations between concrete events depend upon general "covering laws." But although his explication of the covering-law conception of causation seems quite natural within the framework of his theory, it gives rise to a serious problem: in numerous garden-variety instances of causation, the Humean conditions (as Kim specifies them) are not satisfied. In this paper I shall suggest a way to modify Kim's theory of events in order to reconcile it with his treatment of causality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 663 - 679
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 Kim, Jaegwon “On the Psycho–Physical Identity Theory,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (1966), pp. 227–235;Google Scholar “Events and Their Descriptions: Some Considerations,” Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, ed. Nicholas Rescher et. al. (Reidel, 1969); “Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event” (henceforth CNS), The Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1973), pp. 217-236; “Noncausal Connections” (henceforth NCC), Nous 8 (1974), pp. 41-54; “Events as Property Exemplifications,” (henceforth EPE), Action Theory, ed. Myles Brand and Douglas Walton (Reidel, 1976); “Supervenience and Nomological lncommensurables” (henceforth SNI), American Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1978), pp. 149-156; and “Causality, Identity, and Supervenience in the Mind-Body Problem” (henceforth ClS), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 4 (1979), pp. 31-49.

2 This feature of his theory is often overlooked. It is sometimes thought that he construes events as sets — as ordered triples involving an object, a property, and a time. But he does not; and this construal is implausible, since ordered triples are not normally conceived as spatiotemporally located entities. (For the same reason, Kim's events are not propositions, or abstract states of affairs.)

3 Davidson, Donald “Mental Events,” Experience and Theory, ed. Foster, Lawrence and J. W., Swanson (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).Google Scholar

4 An exception should be noted here: certain regularities employing such predicates may qualify as laws, by virtue of being direct instantiations of more general laws. The following statement, for instance, seems to count as a law in this derivative sense: “The gravitational attraction between two coffee pots is directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance from one another”.

5 Principle (2) leaves open the possibility that some nomologically incongruous properties possess no event-characterizing analogs. Consider the predicate “becomes a widow”, for instance. Suppose it expresses a genuine property — a property exemplified by Xantippe in her home in Athens at the moment when Socrates died in the Athenian prison. (Kim discusses this example in NCC.) We might want to deny that this property has an event-characterizing analog, thereby denying that there is any such event as Xantippe's becoming a widow. After all, there is no causal mechanism leading from Socratees’ death in the prison to the simultaneous onset (in her home) of Xantippe's widowhood — a fact which leads Kim to say that “we can only conclude that this event has no cause.” (NCC, p. 49) Perhaps the proper conclusion is that this putative event does not exist, precisely because it does not fit into the causal nexus. (Of course, this does not imply that the statement “Xantippe became a widow at t” is false.)

6 Does this mean that causal determinism is being built into the theory of events? No. Perhaps the laws which back our causal assertions are precise, nondeterministic, statistical laws — laws of the kind which supposedly prevail in quantum mechanics. Thus determinism could be false even though every event has a cause. Or, if you object to this stochastic approach to Humean causality, we can allow uncaused events to belong to the event network; the constitutive properties of these events would still be subject to precise laws — albeit non-deterministic, statistical laws. Either approach is compatible with my above characterization of nomologically incongruous properties as those properties which are not countenanced explicitly in the exact sciences.

7 Prentice Hall, 1970. (Henceforth THA.)

8 It is possible that some properties are subject to precise Humean regularities without being identical with certain more fundamental properties which themselves form a closed nomological system. For instance, there might be biological laws involving properties which are not identical with (and perhaps not even coextensive with) underlying physico-chemical properties. Thus there could turn out to be several distinct Humean event levels — for instance, a level of biological events over and above the level of basic physico-chemical events. But even if this were so, the elimination of incongruous events would still constitute a significant simplification of the overall structure of the event network.

9 Davidson, Donald “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” The Journal of Philosophy, 60 (1963), pp. 685–700, p. 686.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 There is a well known price for saying this: viz., we must now explain what makes it true that the switch-flipping was done intentionally while the prowler alerting was not. Davidson (ibid.) deals with this problem by relativizing attributions of intention to particular act-descriptions; thus a single act can be intentional under one description and unintentional under another. Similarly, under my approach it would be natural and appropriate to relativize attributions of intention to particular characterizing properties of acts.

11 The argument is presented in “Mental Events,” op. cit. See p. 87 for his definition of anomalous monism.

12 Kim, Jaegwon “Phenomenal Properties, Psychophysical laws, and the Identity Theory,” The Monist, 56 (1972), pp. 178–192,CrossRefGoogle Scholar p. 184.

13 I am assuming here that many mental properties, if not all, have eventcharacterizing analogs. I know of no good reason to deny this assumption. But if we did deny it, we would conclude that there are no mental events at all; this would be “eliminative materialism” rather than anomalous monism.

14 Mackie, J. L. “Causes and Conditions,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1965), pp. 245–264.Google Scholar

15 Kim (“Causes and Events: Mackie on Causation,” The Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971), pp. 426-441) argues that Mackie's treatment of causation is ontologically incoherent, and he reformulates Mackie's proposal in terms of his own theory of events. He takes the relata of the “INUS condition” relation to be concrete events; and under his formulation, an event [x, P, t] is an INUS condition of an event [y, Q, t’) only if P is an INUS property of Q.

16 In conversation with me, Kim has expressed essentially the same view concerning Mackie's proposal.

17 I learned of the problem from him, not vice versa. He discussed it explicitly in an unpublished paper entitled “Nomological lncommensurables,” a predecessor of his SNI and CIS.

18 I discuss a related notion of supervenience in my “Supervenient Bridge Laws,” Philosophy of Science, 45 (1978), pp. 227-249.

19 I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 1978 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I am grateful for the helpful comments of Ray Martin (the commentator), James Hudson, Jaegwon Kim, and Michael Tye.