Immanent causation

Nous-Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 433-471

  Zimmerman, Dean W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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EID: 17444424007     PISSN: 15208583     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (75)

1. W. E. Johnson, Logic, Part III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), p. 128
2. Lotze, Metaphysic, p. 115
3. Cf. C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925), p. 27
4. Johnson, Logic, Part III, p. xxv
5. Johnson, Logic, Part III, p. 129
6. Broad, Perception, Physics, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), pp. 102-103
7. Perception, Physics, and Reality, pp. 104-105
8. Cf. John Morreall, "Smooth Replicas", Philosophical Studies 38 (1980), pp. 101-103
9. The expression is Chris Swoyer's; cf. Swoyer, "Causation and Identity", Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9, ed. by Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 598
10. Shoemaker, "Identity, Properties, and Causality", reprinted in his Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 234-260
11. and Armstrong, "Identity Through Time", in Time and Cause, ed. by Peter van Inwagen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), pp. 67-78
12. Cf. Armstrong, "Identity Through Time"; and Swoyer, pp. 598-99
13. "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics", Mysticism and Logic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957; first published, 1917), p. 165
14. Russell, Philosophy (a.k.a. An Outline of Philosophy) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1927), p. 119
15. and Unger, Identity, Consciousness and Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
16. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 73
17. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, p. 74
18. For discussion of syntactic criteria for mass terms, cf. Francis Jeffry Pelletier, "Non-Singular Reference: Some Preliminaries", in Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems, ed. Pelletier (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), pp. 1-14
19. and Francis Jeffry Pelletier and Lenhart K. Schubert, "Mass Expressions", in Handbook of Philosophical Logic: Volume IV (Topics in the Philosophy of Language), ed. D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1989), pp. 327-407
20. Burge, "Truth and Mass Terms", Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972), pp. 263-82; cf. esp. p. 263
21. Cf. "The Calculus of Individuals and its Uses", Journal of Symbolic Logic 5 (1940), pp. 44-55
22. The term "atomless gunk" was coined by David Lewis; cf. Parts of Classes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 20
23. The label "Oriental Boxes" is from Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), p. 26
24. Cf. Broad, The Mind and its Place in Nature, pp. 35-37
25. For accounts of the arguments in Kripke's much-discussed but unpublished lectures on identity through time, cf. Sydney Shoemaker, "Identity, Properties, and Causality", reprinted in his Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 234-260, esp. pp. 242-247
26. Harold Noonan, "Substance, Identity and Time" (in symposium with E. J. Lowe), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 62 (1988), pp. 79-100, esp. pp. 94-98
27. and Denis Robinson, "Matter, Motion, and Humean Supervenience", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67 (1989), pp. 394-409
28. and Sydney Shoemaker, "Identity, Properties, and Causality", pp. 242-47
29. "Identity Through Time", p. 76
30. "Identity, Properties, and Causality", p. 255
31. In this section, my indebtedness to Jaegwon Kim goes very deep: Kim himself suggests that mereological determination be construed as a kind of "multiple domain supervenience"; and my argument from supervenience to informative conditions is obviously inspired by his arguments against nonreductive physicalism. Cf. "Supervenience for Multiple Domains" and "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism", both reprinted in his Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
32. Cf. Peter Geach, Reference and Generality, 3d ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 215-218
33. Compare Chisholm, Person and Object, pp. 102-103
34. E. J. Lowe would, I suspect, deny that the existence of informative diachronic criteria of identity follows from these considerations. The grounds he would give (taken, mutatis mutandis, from his example concerning a tomato) are that momentary K-stages are not "individuable" or "identifiable" without presupposing in some way the notion of some persisting K [cf. Lowe, "Substance, Identity and Time", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 62 (1988), pp. 61-78; esp. pp. 67-71. I do not think the friends of temporal parts should be convinced by his arguments for this conclusion, but I will not take up the issue here
35. It seems that a growing number of philosophers are attracted to this view. Cf., for example, George I. Mavrodes, "The Life Everlasting and the Bodily Criterion of Identity", Noûs 11 (1977), pp. 27-39
36. Baruch Brody, Identity and Essence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 49-59
37. P. T. Mackenzie, "Personal Identity and the Imagination", Philosophy 58 (1983), pp. 161-174
38. E. J. Lowe, Kinds of Being (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 121-137
39. David S. Oderberg, The Metaphysics of Identity Over Time (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)
40. and Trenton Merricks, "Fission and Personal Identity Over Time", forthcoming in Philosophical Studies
41. My final analysis is in keeping with Denis Robinson's claim that "our concept of some matter is the concept of a sufficiently large cluster of properties coinstantiated throughout some region, more or less mutually coupled, and sufficiently independent, when propagating in unison, of the nonmembers of that set" ["Re-identifying Matter", Philosophical Review 91 (1982), pp. 317-341; quotation is from p. 334]
42. Kim, "Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event", reprinted in his Supervenience and Mind, pp. 3-21
43. "Events Without Times: An Essay On Ontology", Noûs 24 (1990), pp. 413-428
44. For discussion of the motivations for doing without times, cf. my "Chisholm and the Essences of Events", in The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm (Library of Living Philosophers), ed. by Lewis E. Hahn (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court), forthcoming
45. Cf. "Chisholm and the Essences of Events"
46. Cf. Fred Dretske, "Laws of Nature", Philosophy of Science 44 (1977), pp. 248-68
47. Michael Tooley, "The Nature of Laws", Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1977), pp. 667-698
48. and David M. Armstrong, What Is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
49. For criticism, cf. David Lewis, "New Work for a Theory of Universals", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983), pp. 343-77 (cf. especially pp. 365-66)
50. Cf. Kim, "Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event"; and J. A. Foster, "Psychophysical Causal Relations", American Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1968), pp. 64-70
51. Russell's argument is found at the beginning of "On the Notion of Cause" in his Mysticism and Logic. The argument is revived, but with the same dependence on the assumption I reject, by A. David Kline, "Humean Causation and the Necessity of Temporal Discontinuity", Mind 94 (1985), pp. 550-56
52. Logic Part III, p. 129
53. Johnson, Logic Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), pp. 175-176
54. Johnson, Logic Part III, p. 67. Earlier, Johnson links these assumptions to a semantic thesis about the nature of propositions in which such determinables figure: "The view then that I hold is not merely that what is given is a 'thing' in the widest sense of the term thing, but that what is given is always given as demanding to be characterised in certain definite respects - e.g. colour, size, weight; or cognition, feeling, conation - and that therefore such a proposition as 'The given thing is MP' [where M and P designate determinables] is presupposed in its being given, i.e. in being given, it is given as requiring determination with respect to these definite determinables M and P." [Johnson, Logic Part II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 18.] The peculiar doctrine to which Johnson is led by these considerations, namely that "The given thing is MP" is neither true nor false but a merely "structural" proposition, is quite independent of the metaphysical thesis from which it springs. For criticism of Johnson's views concerning structural propositions, cf. A. N. Prior, "Determinables, Determinates and Determinants", Mind 58 (1949), pp. 1-20 and 178-194; cf. esp. pp. 17-20
55. For details on the distinction between "endurantists" and "perdurantists", cf. my "Persistence and Presentism", Philosophical Papers 25 (1996), pp. 115-126
56. For endurantists who defend a "further fact" view of personal identity along these lines, cf. Chisholm, Person and Object, pp. 104-113
57. and Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Ch. 8
58. For discussion, and use of the terminology of "further facts", cf. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Part 3
59. Erwin Schrödinger, "What is an Elementary Particle?", in Space, Time, and the New Mathematics, ed. by Robert W. Marks (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), pp. 100-115; quotation from p. 107
60. Erwin Schrödinger, "What is an Elementary Particle?", pp. 108-109
61. Cf. Steven French, "Identity and Individuality in Classical and Quantum Physics", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67 (1989), pp. 432-446
62. J. Tershoff and D. Bayer, "Quantum Statistics for Distinguishable Particles", Physical Review Letters 50 (1983), pp. 553-54
63. and Bas C. van Fraassen, "Probabilities and the Problem of Individuation", in Probabilities, Problems, and Paradoxes, ed. by Sidney A. Luckenbach (Encino and Belmont, California: Dickenson, 1972), pp. 121-138
64. Cf. Michael Redhead and Paul Teller, "Particle Labels and the Theory of Indistinguishable Particles in Quantum Mechanics", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (1992), pp. 201-218
65. For discussion of the import of this line of argument, cf. van Fraassen, "Probabilities and the Problem of Individuation"; Jonathan Powers, Philosophy and the New Physics (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 153-58
66. and Richard Swinburne, "Thisness", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995), pp. 389-400, esp. p. 394
67. "The Homogeneous Stuff Objection to the Doctrine of Temporal Parts", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 76 (March 1998)
68. For a description and criticisms of Russellianism about states of motion, cf. Michael Tooley, "In Defense of the Existence of States of Motion", Philosophical Topics 16 (1988), pp. 225-54
69. For some attempts and related criticisms, cf. Chisholm, Person and Object (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1976), p. 127
70. Jaegwon Kim, "Psychophysical Supervenience", Philosophical Studies 41 (1982), pp. 51-70
71. and David Lewis, "Extrinsic Properties", Philosophical Studies 44 (1983), pp. 197-200. In an as-yet-unpublished paper, "Defining Intrinsic", Rae Langton and David Lewis develop an analysis approximately equivalent to mine. Our conclusions were reached independently
72. A proposal in the spirit of this one is considered by David Lewis, in "Extrinsic Properties", and rejected for its failure to cope with disjunctions of this sort
73. and Chisholm, "Properties and States of Affairs Intentionally Considered", reprinted in his On Metaphysics (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 141-149. It is my hope that, on any sensible approach to the problem of determining whether one property is a negation of another, or a conjunction or disjunction of two others, the definitions below which make use of the notion of "Boolean part" will remain adequate
74. Searle (in symposium with Stephan Körner), "Determinables and the Notion of Resemblance", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 33 (1959), pp. 141-158; quotation from p. 145
75. Cf. Eells, Probabilisitic causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Ch. 6