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Causation, Transparency, and Emphasis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Peter Achinstein
Peter Achinstein*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

It is often said that singular causal statements express a relationship between one event and another or between a fact and an event. This is a very strong view, which has the following simple corollary: singular causal statements whose cause-term purports to refer to an event (or a fact) and whose effect-term purports to refer to an event express a relationship between an event (or a fact) and an event.

Thus, both Davidson and Kim would claim that the singular causal Statement

(1) Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk caused his death expresses a relationship between two events, referred to, respectively, by the expressions “Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk” and “his death.” For Kim, but not for Davidson, an event is analyzable as a thing's having a property at or during a time. The event of Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk consists of Socrates’ at a certain time having the property of drinking hemlock at dusk. I shall not here try to choose between their respective theories of events but will only note that both theorists would say that (1) expresses a relationship between events however the latter are to be construed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , September 1975 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

1 Davidson, Donald “Causal Relations,” Journal of Philosophy LXIV (1967), 691–703CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kim, Jaegwon “Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event”, Journal of Philosophy LXX (1973), 217–236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Vendler, Zeno Linguistics in Philosophy (Ithaca, 1967), Ch. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Causal Relations,” Journal of Philosophy LXIV (1967), 704-713.

3 Cf. Vendler, “Causal Relations,” p. 710.Google Scholar

4 The subject of emphasis, which is important for a number of philosophical issues, has been discussed in a pioneering article, “Contrastive Statements,” by Dretske, Fred (Philosophical Review LXXXI (1972), 411–437)Google Scholar. Later I shall relate my own discussion to Dretske's.

5 This is an assertion that would be made by Davidson, but not by Kim. According to Kim, since the property of dying ≠ the property of dying at dusk, the events are not identical.

6 A word or phrase can be understood as being emphasized even if it does not appear in italics. In the context it may be perfectly clear where the emphasis should go. Usually (4) would be understood as (6) rather than (5), so underlining “drinking hemlock” may be redundant. But if there are no contextual clues about where the emphasis goes then (4) is ambiguous.

Dretske, who uses the term “contrast” rather than” emphasis,” speaks of the “contrastive focus” of a statement as being something a statement may have even if it is not signalled by underlining, italics, higher pitch, etc. The context may indicate contrastive focus. Using the emphasis-terminology, it can be the case that words in a statement are being emphasized even if they are not underlined. Alternatively, we might distinguish explicit and implicit emphasis and say that words in a statement are being explicitly emphasized only if this is indicated by underlining, etc. Suppose a speaker makes the statement “Socrates drank hemlock” (without explicit emphasis) in a context in which he is denying the statement “Plato drank hemlock.” We might then say that in such a context the statements “Socrates drank hemlock” and “Socrates drank hemlock” are emphatically equivalent. We can then say that if in a context statement S without explicit emphasis is emphatically equivalent to statement S with explicit emphasis, then S is being made with implicit emphasis. A statement is being made with emphasis if and only if it is being made with explicit or implicit emphasis.

7 Dretske, op. cit., p. 412, note 2Google Scholar.

8 Dretske calls the differences between statements like (1), (13), and (14) pragmatic rather than semantical. He claims that such statements have the same meaning. See below, section VIII and footnote 19.

9 Otherwise we could imagine contexts in which “the winning of the race by the Man in the blue shirt” and “the winning of the race by the man in blue shirt” would not be co-referring expressions.

10 If there are other semantical uses of emphasis, then assumption B will need further modification to exclude them. In what follows I shall suppose that there are not and that the two modifications suffice.

11 Here and in what follows special-sense emphases are excluded; but in (2) it is not easy to imagine what these would be.

12 Davidson, Donald “The Individuation of Events,” Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, ed. Rescher, N. (Dordrecht, 1969), 216–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 In my “The Identity of Properties,” American Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1974), 257-75, section VIII, such a principle is among those proposed for property identity. Because of problems of emphasis I would no longer advocate this principle or the view, suggested in this article, that identical property designators with different emphases designate different properties.

14 One might want to respond to this by claiming that (3) has a truth-value because it is elliptical for a disjunction of statements each disjunct of which is like (3) except that one or more words are emphasized. That is, (3) is elliptical for

(a) Either Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk caused his death, or

Socrates’ drinking hemlock caused his death, or, etc.

Since (a) is true, we may suppose, so is (3). The problem with this response is that if (3) is elliptical for (a) then, contrary to the present proposal, “Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk” in (3) (and (2)) does not refer to an event.

15 Davidson would accept this assumption but not Kim. For Kim (5) could be replaced by: Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk = Socrates’ drinking hemlock at sundown.

16 “F” is an a-feature term in a statement if that statement without any emphasis in “F” is ambiguous and its ambiguity can be removed by adding emphasis in “F”.

17 The parenthesized items may be absent in statements of these forms, e.g., “Socrates’ dying caused Xantippe to cry,” “the fact that Socrates died caused Xantippe to cry.“

18 Kim, it might be noted, does hold a version of this view, since he holds that any event is a thing's having a property at a time (or, more generally, an ordered ntuple of things examplifying an n-adic property at or during a time).

19 Dretske uses” pragmatic” in the sense of Charles Morris and Rudolf Carnap “as concerned with the relationships that exist between the use of signs and the various states, both psychological and otherwise, of the speaker and audience.“ Op. cit., p. 425.

20 The main point of the previous section is readily generalizable to non-causal contexts. As can be seen from Dretske's article, there is a set of emphasis- capturing words that includes not only “cause” but “explain,” “reason”, “evidence,” “mistake,” “advise” “order,” “know,” “important,” and many others. Such words can capture emphasized words in statements in which they appear, and the truth-value of such statements can change with a change in emphasis. If such words appear preceded or followed by event or fact referring expressions of the form “x's A-ingy B-ly” or “the fact that x A-ed y B-ly” they will induce referential opacity.

21 I am indebted to Stephen Barker, Robert Cummins, Dale Gottlieb, and George Wilson for valuable discussions of these issues. This work was supported by the N.S.F.