Summary |
Many accounts of causation, i.e. theories that answer to the question when an event e can be said to have been caused by an event c, say that c-type events and e-type events have to be connected by a law of nature: a law that says that all C events are followed by E events. So, for example, saying that throwing this powder into this glass of water caused an explosion is, roughly, true only if it is a natural law that that kind of powder (magnesium, say) explodes when in contact with H2O. A contrary view says that causation is singular, i.e., whether two events are cause and effect, does not depend on the respective event kinds being related by a law.There are other potential relations between laws and causation. On Maudlin’s primitivism, Armstrong’s view, and many dispositional accounts all laws seem to be causal so that they are in need for a theoretical twist on those scientific laws that seem not to be causal in nature, like Pauli’s principle (constraining the possible states which nucleons may take) or conservation and symmetry laws (French, Lange, Massimi). |