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Lavoisier's Slow Burn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Michael E. Levin  and
Margarita R. Levin
Michael E. Levin
Affiliation:
City College of New York
Margarita R. Levin
Affiliation:
City College of New York
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Extract

Limitations of space dictate that we confine ourselves to Miss Stern's most salient comments. First, a preliminary point. Miss Stern says “Levin offers no argument” for why “e happened because of c” implicitly contains an explanatory description, while “c caused e” does not. But surely the remark ([1], 273) that we often know that c caused e without knowing why c caused e is just such an argument. Our linguistic intuition suggests that we use the first locution in this case; Miss Stern's evidently does not. Cases of non-diagnostic causal ascriptions do exist, and even ordinary language must provide for them; how it does so is a verbal dispute about English.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , December 1978 , pp. 626 - 629
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1978

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References

[1] Levin, M. “The Extensionality of Causation and Causal-explanatory Contexts.” Philosophy of Science 43 (1976): 266–277.10.1086/288680CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[2] Stern, C. “Discussion: On the Alleged Extensionality of Causal Explanatory Contexts.” Philosophy of Science 45 (1978): 614–625.10.1086/288839CrossRefGoogle Scholar