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Are There Cases of Simultaneous Causation?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

A. David Kline
A. David Kline*
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
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Extract

The problem of the direction of causation has received considerable press. Justifiably so, since it is a major bottleneck in accounts of causation and explanation. But there is another, not unrelated, yet unexamined, temporal issue for those same accounts. Numerous writers have uncritically assumed that there are instances of simultaneous causation. (A necessary condition for e and e', two causally related events, to be in a simultaneous causal relation is that there be no time-difference between e and e' or that e and e' occur at the same time.)

The assumption is not impotent. Alleged instances of simultaneous causation have been used to argue against various views of causation/explanation. For example, Richard Taylor (1966), Douglas Gasking (1955) and Baruch Brody (1972) have used such cases to critique regularity or nomic-subsumption accounts. Myles Brand (1979) in a very recent paper uses simultaneous causation to challenge Wesley Salmon's statistical relevance analysis (1970).

Type
Part X. Time, Causation and Matter
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 292 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

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