Absences as causes : a defense of negative causation
Abstract
In this dissertation, I confront the issue of negative causation, (i.e., causation by or of absences). I investigate the causal status of absences with regard to particular philosophical concerns and argue that absences are very often causes and effects. On my analysis, it turns out that absences - at least those absences thought to be causally efficacious - are not metaphysical absences. They are perfectly ordinary entities, thus candidates for causal relata. Generally, I argue that the notion of an "absence" has been ill-understood and that this has been aggravated by focusing on sentences of the canonical form, "the absence of x caused y." Such a focus engenders the view that absences are capable of being causally efficacious only if there exists some entity, absence of x. If such a view were correct, then the case for absences as causes is a non-starter; there are no such entities. Instead, I recast the argument for negative causation as a vindication of our intuitive judgments that statements of the canonical and related forms are very often true and express genuine causal relations.
Degree
Ph. D.
Thesis Department
Rights
OpenAccess.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.