Causation as Folk Science

With this catalog of failure, it surely requires a little more than naïve optimism to hope that we still might find some contingent principle of causality that can be demanded of all future sciences. In this regard, the most promising of all present views of causation is the process view of Dowe, Salmon, and others (Dowe 1997). In identifying a causal process as one that transmits a conserved quantity through a continuous spatiotemporal pathway, it seeks to answer most responsibly to the content of our mature sciences. In so far as the theory merely seeks to identify which processes in present science ought to be labeled causal and which are not, it succeeds better than any other account I know. If, however, it is intended to provide a factual basis for a universal principle of causality, then it is an attempt at a priori science, made all the more fragile by its strong content. If the world is causal according to its strictures, then it must rule out a priori the possibility of action at a distance, in contradiction with the standard view of gravitation in science in the nineteenth century and the non-local processes that seem to be emerging from present quantum theory. Similar problems arise in the selection of the conserved quantity. If we restrict the conserved quantity to a few favored ones, such as energy and momentum, we risk refutation by developments in theory. Certain Newtonian systems are already known to violate energy and momentum conservation (Alper et al. 2000), and in general relativity we often cannot define the energy and momentum of an extended system. But if we are permissive in selection of the conserved quantity, we risk trivialization by the construction of artificial conserved quantities specially tailored to make any chosen process come out as causal.