[00:00:01.030] - Wesley
You're listening to Journal Entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. 

[00:00:13.230] 
In this episode, Helen Beebee talks about her paper Causing and Nothingness, which was published in the volume, Causation and Counterfactuals, edited by John Collins, Ned Hall and L.A. Paul in 2004. Helen is the Samuell Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. She writes on a wide range of topics in metaphysics, including free will, more responsibility, disagreement and causation, She served as the president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and the Aristotelian Society, as well as the director of the British Philosophical Association.

[00:00:52.040] - Helen
This paper I can sum up in one sentence very straightforwardly. It's defending the view that there's no such thing as causation by absence. The kind of longer version of that, I guess needs me to say something about what causation by absence is.

[00:01:06.470] 
So a lot of the time in our ordinary lives, we talk as though there is such a thing as causation by absence. So you promise to water my plants while I'm on holiday and I get back and the plants have died because you forgot. And I blame you, obviously. And I say your failures water my plants caused them to die. That's a causation by absence claim. I'm saying that you failed to do something and your failure to do it caused something to happen in the world.

[00:01:34.640] 
And we do that quite a lot. I think in our ordinary lives, kind of attribute a causal status to absences. And I basically want to deny that there's such a thing as causation by absence. So to say that all of those claims are false is not a completely absurd thing to say. That's basically what I'm trying to do. So I'm trying to defend the view that there's no such thing as causation by absence. 

[00:01:55.060] 
I wrote this when I was a postdoc at the Australian National University, and David Lewis had got a draft of his paper Void and Objet, which ended up coming out kind of like six years later in the same edited collection as my paper.

[00:02:10.430] 
And because Lewis hung around ANU quite a lot, I got to see a copy of the draft and we had a bit of a fax exchange. He didn't agree with the view that I came up with, which was slightly disconcerting because I kind of tended to think that everything David Lewis thought was true. I'd written my PhD on causation, so this was kind of like a really obvious thing for me to think about. And that's why the paper's called Causing and Nothingness, because Lewis' paper is called Void and Object, which is kind of like a lame pun on Word and Object, the book by Quine. So my paper's called Causing and Nothingness, which is also a lame pun on Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and actually not a completely inappropriate pun on that, because Sartre talks about, you know, it's a book about being and nothingness and he talks about he's got this example of his friend Pierre not being in the café and how his Sartre's awareness of the absence of Peter in the cafe kind of makes the absence of Peter into an event.

[00:03:14.630] 
So it's kind of like Sartre's full on embracing the kind of human dependance of causation here. It's like the fact that he's expecting Pierre and Pierre hasn't shown up is the thing that makes the absence of Pierre a thing in the world. So I kind of like that, but it is really lame pun nonetheless. 

[00:03:32.250] 
So, yeah, the paper starts out from describing a certain kind of view about causation or at least what it is that causation relates, and that's the view I'm trying to defend and I call it the network model.

[00:03:46.980] 
I think I might have got that phrase from a book of Helen Steward's, basically what the network model says, it's not a theory about the nature of causation, but it's a theory about what it is that causation relates. And the idea is simply that causation is a relation between events. So if you think about the world kind of having a causal structure, what that structure is going to look like is that it's got a whole bunch of nodes which are events, things like births and deaths and marriages and fires and the collapsing of bridges and people's stubbing their toes, all of those kinds of things.

[00:04:21.690] 
Those are events. Those are the nodes. And then you kind of like get lots of arrows between the nodes, which are the relations, the causal relations between the various events. So I stub my toe. That causes pain. So we've got two nodes that's stubbing of the toe and the me being in pain. Those are both events. And now we have a causal relation between them. So that's what the network model is. And I kind of like the network model, or at least I did when I wrote the paper 20 years ago.

[00:04:50.940] 
So I'm trying to defend the network model of causation against the view that there's such a thing as causation by absence. And the reason why you have to abandon the network model if you think there is such a thing as causation by absence is that absences aren't events. An event is kind of like an occurrence. It's something that happens in the world.

[00:05:14.850] 
It has a spatial temporal location. You can say when it happened, you can say where it happened. Absences aren't like that. So I go on holiday. You promised to water my plants. I get home. They've died because you failed to water them. When and where did your failure to water them happen? Doesn't look like there's a sensible answer to that question. Did it kind of happened where the plants are? That kind of seems weird because you weren't anywhere near the plants and you seemed to be crucially involved in the failure to water them.

[00:05:44.970] 
Did it happen when you where you were? Well, that kind of seems weird. Like I was on holiday for a fortnight. You were in all kinds of places during that fortnight. It doesn't seem like your failure to water the plants was like that whole fortnight long event of you doing all the various things that you did. So its event that happened partly in your house and partly at your place of work and partly in the pub and partly at the, you know, tennis match that you went to or whatever, that seems wrong.

[00:06:11.280] 
So it looks like absences can't be events because they're just not spatio-temporally locatable in the way that events have to be. So if you think that causations is a relation between events, if you think that the network model is right, you have to deny that there's any such thing as causation by absence.  

[00:06:26.560] 
Here's a really obvious objection to the network model. Look, we do just go around making causation by absence claims all the time. I come home from holiday, my plants have died. I say your failures watered my plants,  look what that did that caused them to die. That's a causation by abscence claim. As a defender of the network model, I have to say that claim is just false. So I seem to be committed to saying that lots of the causal claims we make in our everyday lives are just false. That's a problem for the network model, I think, because I. This is very controversial, but I kind of think that matching up with our ordinary everyday talk and thought is kind of an important feature that a philosophical theory ought to try and do if it possibly can. So that's an objection to my view, right?

[00:07:09.780] 
It makes lots of our ordinary talk and thought just come out false and that's bad. One of the central claims of the paper is, look, okay, that is bad. I grant you. However, if you believe in causation by absence, you're also committed to claiming that a lot of what we ordinarily think can say about the world is false, or at least at first sight you are. Why is that? Well, because there's a kind of overgeneralization problem here, so. Okay. You think that your failure to water my plants was indeed a cause of their death? Well, what about all the very many other people in the world who also fail towards my plants? Everybody in the world felt it was my plants. Bill Gates failed water them. Donald Trump failed to water them. The Queen failed to water them. I could go on and on and on, listing every single person in the world.

[00:07:57.130] 
And there are all kinds of other things such that as it were if they'd happened, my plants wouldn't have died. Right. If a cow had come into my living room and swished its tail against the jug of water that was right next to the plants, the plants would have got some water and then they wouldn't have died. So now why isn't it true that they're not being a cow swishing its tail and just the right kind of way in my living room, the absence of such a cow is a cause of my plants dying.

[00:08:24.700] 
So on the face of it, it looks like you who failed to water the plant stand in just the same kind of relationship with the plants dying as all those other things do.

[00:08:34.980] 
And that's not something that we accept. I don't think in our ordinary talk in thought, if I say did the absence of a cow with a tail swishing a particular way cause my plants to die, I think you'd say no. Probably.

[00:08:50.530] 
So we've got this overgeneralization problem for the believer in causation by absence. It looks as though there's just way more causation by absence than we ordinarily think. Once you think that there is causation by absence.

[00:09:01.510] 
So that's the basic setup. Now, if you do believe in causation by absence, here's a move you might make. Let's kind of distinguish between the nice cases. Those are the cases of causation by absence that we like that we think are true. Your failure to water my plants, caused them to die and kind of like the nasty cases. Donald Trump's failure to water my plants cause them to die. That claim's false. All right. So we've got the nice causation absence claims, the ones that we want to think are true. And then we got the nasty ones, the ones that we want to think of false.

[00:09:29.500] 
Maybe we can figure out some way of discriminating between those cases, so that the defender of causation by absence gets to keep the nice cases, but gets to explain why the nasty cases aren't causation by absence cases at all. And then you've got a view that lines up really nicely with common sense, which is kind of what we want.

[00:09:47.320] 
So how might you do that? Well, one thing you might think is, well, what distinguishes the nice cases from the nasty cases? If you think about the failure to water the plants, what's distinctive about that case? And in particular, your failure to water. Welll, you promised to water them and you didn't. Donald Trump did not promise to water them. Neither did the queen. Neither did Bill Gates, nor did any of those other people.

[00:10:10.390] 
So what's distinctive about your failure to water them? Well, you broke a promise. So you violated a moral norm, right? Your failure to water them constitutes a violation of a moral norm. Nobody else's does. That's why your failure counts as a cause and nobody else's failure does. Or you might think that some cases of causation by absence are not going to involve human beings. So there's not gonna be any obvious moral norm violations. So here I am sitting in a room talking into a microphone. Normally there's a fire alarm test that goes off every day at 11 o'clock, which generally speaking causes me to, you know, stop talking and wait for the fire alarm to stop. Today, the fire alarm didn't go off, but it's eleven o'clock. So I'm here where I am carrying on talking. You might want to say, okay, this is a nice case, right?

[00:11:01.600] 
One of the causes of my talking now is the failure of the fire alarm to go off. Why is that? Well, because you'd normally expect it to go off and it didn't.

[00:11:09.000] 
So that's kind of like a relevant thing. Whereas if it was ten o'clock in the evening and I was sitting here talking, it wouldn't be relevant to cite the failure of the fire alarms go off. Like there's never a fire alarm test at 11 o'clock at night in this building.

[00:11:24.700] 
So that would be kind of a nasty case, right? We don't want to say, oh, if it's 10 o'clock at night, one of the causes of my sitting here talking is the failure of the fire alarm test to happen because that's just not a thing that would normally happen. So then we've got a kind of, we're distinguishing the nice cases from the nasty cases, not on the basis of like violation of moral norms, but on the basis of some considerations about what normally happens and what doesn't normally happen. And the idea is that the abnormal things that get to be the genuine causes, the abnormal absences.

[00:11:55.780] 
So. Move you might make to kind of solve that overgeneralization problem is being committed to causation by absence doesn't require you to be committed to like any absence you can think of counting as a cause of the plants dying or me sitting here talking, even if it's true that had that absence not happened, so if the thing that's absent had happened, I wouldn't be sitting here talking.

[00:12:23.110] 
We can solve the overgeneralization problem by claiming that the nice cases are the cases that involve some kind of either abnormality or violation of some kind of more norm, like a moral norm. And the nasty cases are ones that don't involve any norm violation. So the nasty case that so the causation by absence claim that don't involve norm violation, those claims get to be false. So here's here's me talking. There's a total absence of Justin Bieber running into the room with an axe.

[00:12:57.070] 
He's totally not doing that. Is that a cause of me sitting here talking to the microphone? Well, definitely true that if Justin Bieber ran in with an axe, I would stop talking at this point. I'd certainly stop talking about causation.

[00:13:08.560] 
That's fine. It's not true that Justin Bieber's failure to do that is a cause of me talking. Why's that? Because it's completely normal for Justin Bieber to not run in here with an axe. He consistently fails to do that. Just not the kind of thing that is going to count as a cause of me talking into the microphone. Right. So that's a move you can make that is trying to solve the overgeneralization problem. 

[00:13:31.950] 
And now here's my response to that solution, which when I wrote the paper 20 years ago, seems to me like such an obviously right response that it didn't require much justification.

[00:13:42.620] 
Things have moved on in the last 20 years and I think a lot more work would need to be done to try and make this case. It just doesn't seem right to claim that whether you violate a moral norm or not is going to determine or at least partly determine whether some failure gets to count as a cause of something. The idea is that we should think of causation as kind of an objective relation. It's out there in the world. It's the kind of, if you want to know what the causal structure of the world is, that's something that you should go and ask scientists. You should ask physicists and chemists and zoologists and engineers and so on. If it turns out that's whether some particular absence is a cause of something  requires us to consider whether a moral norm has been violated, turns out you also you can't just go and ask the scientists you need to kind of go away and ask some moral experts. And that kind of seems weird and wrong to me. Like what our moral norms happen to be, which is kind of like a human dependent thing, right. Moral norms, I don't think are kind of like I don't think of them as kinda like out there in the world, completely independent of human beings.

[00:14:50.270] 
So they're not part of it were the objective fabric of reality. So if you think that moral norms partly determine what causes what, then you're violating that constraint that we should think of causation as being an objective feature of the world. The causal structure of the world is something that doesn't get to depend on what human beings think about the world. It's there independently of us. So if you think that's what causes what is partly dependent or more norms, you seems to me like you're kind of committed to thinking that what causes what is partly dependent on what human beings think about the nature of reality and that just seems wrong. Right. So that move against the over generalization worry isn't gonna work. 

[00:15:33.620] 
There's also kind of like a worry about if anybody's ever talked about in this literature, but like what this does to a moral theory, so you think about consequentialism, right? Consequentialism is a view in moral theory, according to which whether an act is good or bad depends on what the effects of that act are. So the reason why behaving in a certain way is bad is because it causes lots of suffering. Overall, it's causing more suffering than pleasure, and that's why the act is bad.

[00:16:00.860] 
So if you wanna be a consequentialist, it looks as though you need to answer questions about the causal status of your act before you can answer questions about what the moral status of that act is. And one thing that's making the causal facts depend on the moral facts is going to do, it looks like is make consequentialism a non-starter for kind of like a quite weird and unexpected reason, right? Which is you can't figure out how much suffering  you act has caused until you've already figure out whether the act was wrong or not. Right. And if you're a consequentialist, you just can't buy that.

[00:16:34.010] 
So that's not a knock down objection. But it's the kind of weird upshot which a consequentialist might be worried about. You might not want your fear of causation to kind of infect your moral theory in quite that way. 

[00:16:50.030] 
So suppose we assume that my argument in the first I know couple of sections of the paper is completely, completely fine. That means we've got to the point where there is no way of solving that overgeneralization problem for the believer in causation by absence.

[00:17:07.760] 
So if you're a believer in causation by absence, you're gonna have to believe in way more of it than we seem to countenance in our everyday lives. Right. The failure of Justin Bieber to come here with an axe is indeed a cause of me carrying on talking. The failure of Donald Trump towards the plant as a cause of death and so on. And so on, and so on.

[00:17:24.590] 
On the flip side, if you don't believe in causation by absence, you also have to claim that a whole bunch of common sense claims are false because we do sometimes make causation by absence claims. Right. Your failure to water plants, I might say, is a cause of their death. On my view, you'd be wrong to say that. So kind of both sides in the disputes need to give a story about why it is that common sense gets things wrong some of the time, right?

[00:17:46.580] 
Because we're both committed to thinking that common sense gets things wrong some of the time. The believer in causation by absence, the story tends to go. Yeah. What's going on here is that sometimes the absence just isn't relevant to the conversation. Right. Here we are talking about why my plans died. It would just be irrelevant to the conversation, to cite Donald Trump's failure to water them as a cause.

[00:18:12.530] 
Why is that? Not because it would be false to say that his failure towards them is a cause, but because it's just not relevant to our conversation purposes. Right. We're having it just basically we're having a discussion about who's to blame. Donald Trump may be to blame for many things, but he's not to blame for my plants dying.

[00:18:27.380] 
So it would just be completely superfluous to bring Donald Trump into the conversation. That would just be a confusing, a bizarre move to make. This is Lewis' thought. It's not that we think that those claims, like Donald Trump's failure to water the plants, cause their death.

[00:18:40.880] 
We don't think these claims are false. It's just that we kind of fail to make those claims because it's quite often not relevant. I'm not sure whether that's really true, I think there's some evidence that we do in fact, deny some of those claims, though actually that kind of move won't work. So I think it's incumbent on someone who thinks there is causation by absence and granted that there's an over generalization problem, I think we do need to tell some kind of story about why it is that we think that some of those claims are false.

[00:19:10.760] 
So now let's think about my view according to which all causation by absence claims are false. It's false that Donald Trump's failure to water them caused their death, It's also false that your failure to water them was their death even though you promised to do it. Those claims are both equally false.

[00:19:23.870] 
That's something I kind of need to explain. I need to explain how it can be that we seem to have all these false beliefs. That seems like a bad, it does seem like a bad thing to attribute to people as they go about their daily lives, a whole bunch of false beliefs. So what's the story?

[00:19:38.570] 
So here's my story. We need to distinguish between causation on the one hand and causal explanation on the other hand. So as I said before, the paper is trying to defend the network model of causation, according to which causation is a relation between events. So again, you think of causal structure of the world, it's got all these nodes in it. Those are the events. And that's kind of like got representing the causal structure. It's got these arrows between the nodes. There's the causal relations between these events. When you say that one thing is a cause of another, what you're basically doing is saying, look, there's this event, there's this other event, we should draw an arrow between them, right? They're causally related. 

[00:20:17.450] 
On the other hand, there's this thing, causal explanation. Explanations are what we give when someone asked us why something happened, right. Why did the plants die? Why did the bridge collapse? Why are you sitting in here talking into a microphone? And we give answers. Oh, my plants die because you failed to water them. I'm sitting here talking into a microphone because I'm recording a podcast. The bridge collapsed because there was too much traffic on it.

[00:20:43.720] 
Whatever it is, when we give a causal explanations and I just wheel out David Lewis' theory of causal explanation. Lewis' theory of causal explanation goes, look, what you're doing when you give a causal explanation is you're giving some information about the causal history of an event. Right. So. If you think of the causal history of an event as kind of like, all of those nodes and the arrows between them that are kind of like upstream of the event, one way of giving information about the causal history of an event is just to cite a whole bunch of those other events that are causally related to this event because they've got arrows between that event and this event. May be going through various other events as well. That's one way of giving information about the causal history. Right. Just list some causes of the event.

[00:21:28.220] 
Here's another way you might give information about causal history. It's not citing a specific event. It's saying something more general about the shape of the causal history. So just to give an example, which is in the paper. When I asked why JFK died. And you say it's because someone shot him. You're giving information about the cause or history of his death. Right. Uncontroversially. Are you thereby committed to thinking that there is some event That is the event of someone shooting JFK? I don't think you are. I think what you're saying is, look, there is some event or other maybe you're kind of unsure about who shot him, but you know that someone did. There's some event or other that was a particular person shooting JFK. Various different events might have happened that were a particular person shooting JFK. Right. Maybe The event was Lee Harvey Oswald shooting JFK. Maybe the event was the guy on the grassy knoll, shooting JFK, Some event or other That satisfies the description shooting of JFK happened. I kind of I don't know which one it is, but in saying someone shot him, I'm telling you quite a lot about the cause or history of the event, even though I'm not citing a specific cause of the event to cite specific cause, I'd have to tell you kind of who it was that shot him.

[00:22:49.100] 
So that's a case where you're giving some information about the cause or history of the event, but you're not citing a particular cause. Right. You were saying something about the how the cause of history went without picking a particular cause. So. The sort of speculative idea in the paper is, well, when you explain why something happens by mentioning someone's failure to do something, for example, you're similarly giving information about the causal history of the event. Right.

[00:23:18.770] 
So when I say why did my plans die? And the answer that question is, well, because you failed to water them. I'm not citing an event in the causal history. Right. Because your failure to water them isn't an event. What am I doing in saying they died because you failed to water them? I'm telling you something about how the causal history of that event went.

[00:23:40.510] 
And in particular, I'm kind of telling you something about how it didn't go. I'm kind of saying, look, also, history was whatever it was, you know, plants die because they don't get enough water and then the cells decompose or whatever it is that happens.

[00:23:54.350] 
If the causal history of the event had had you watering my plants in it, that would have been an event. And then the cause or history would've gone completely differently. And in the and in particular, it wouldn't have ended up with my plants dying. So I'm kind of telling you something about the the modal structure, the causal history, I'm telling you something about how things would have gone if the causal history been different, right? Had there been this particular event in the in the causal structure the world, it never would have turned out that my plants had died.

[00:24:24.360] 
So kind I like phase one of the project here is to say, you can explain why something happens by appealing to the fact that something has failed to happen. That constitutes a distinctively causal explanation, why is that? Because you are giving information about the causal history, even though you're not citing a particular event as a cause, because we've agreed by this point that failures and absences and omissions aren't events. That's phase one.

[00:24:50.850] 
And now phase two of the story is to say when people say, look, we make lots of causation by absence claims. And you, Helen, say that all of those claims are false.

[00:25:02.080] 
I actually think we don't make that many causation by absence claims. I think we we the absences feature in causal explanations are lots, right? Perfectly mundane to say. Oh, my plants die because you failed to water them or I'm upset because my mom failed to call me yesterday and it was my birthday or I'm a bit surprised because the fire alarm hasn't gone off and it usually goes off at this time.

[00:25:25.660] 
Perfectly straightforward. All of that's causal explanation. Nobody's making any mistake when they say any of that stuff. According to me. Right. You're giving information about the cause or history. All fine, no violation of commonsense, according to me, at that point. We only get violations of ordinary commonsense talk and thought when people don't just give causal explanations that involve absences, but actually kind of like cite absences as causes as when you say your failure to water my plants caused their death.

[00:25:52.180] 
Right, there, you're kind of claiming that an absence really did cause something. And I do think that those claims are false, or at least I used to think that they're false. They're false according to the network model. I think those cases aren't nearly as prevalent as you might think, because I think most of the time we're just giving causal explanations. I think when you do make that kind of claim, you are making a mistake. It's not a terrible mistake. What's the mistake you're making? You're kind of conflating causal explanation and causation. You're kind of thinking that you can infer from, my plants die because you failed to water them, to, your failure to water the plants caused their death. Right. You're thinking that you're taking the cause out causal explanation to be a citing of causes when it isn't a citing of causes. It's just giving some information about the causal history. So in lots of cases, that move is completely straightforward. If I say, I left the building because the fire alarm went off. I'm giving a causal explanation. I'm giving you information about the causal of history. 

[00:26:52.630] 
It's an entirely sensible to go from that causal explanation, I left the building because the fire alarm went off, to, the fire alarm's going off was a cause of me leaving the building. Right. That's completely fine. You can do that because it turns out that the information I was giving about the causal history in that particular case was I was just citing a cause. Right. So you can move from one to the other. So no surprise then that sometimes we move from the causal explanation to the causation claim.

[00:27:16.600] 
No surprise that we make that move in general. Just turns out that we go wrong when we make that move. In the case of causation, by absence. if I go from the plants die because you failed to water them to your failure to water them cause my death, I have made a mistake because I've conflated causal explanation with causation.

[00:27:32.320] 
I kind of illicitly assumed that what I was doing perfectly legitimately in giving that information about the cause of history of the event, what you've done is assume erroneously that what I was doing was citing a cause and that wasn't what I was doing.

[00:27:49.420] 
So that's the kind of positive story about why it is that in our ordinary causal talk and thought, we sometimes say things that are false. We're making a move that goes from causal explanation to causation that works most of the time, just doesn't work when you are explaining some events in terms of something that failed to happen or someone's emission or whatever.

[00:28:13.520] 
Yeah, so I wrote that paper 20 years ago, which is a long time in the life of a philosopher. And philosophers do change their views sometimes. I have given talks in the more recent history where I've said things that contradict the claim that there are no such things as causation by absence.

[00:28:29.090] 
Sometimes they'll be someone in the audience. Normally quite a young person putting the hand up, going, but isn't that inconsistent with your view on causation by absence? And I'm like yeah that was 20 years ago.

[00:28:40.640] 
Yeah. Just going back to the overgeneralization problem, I was very quick in the paper to go. Oh, obviously causation. We should think that causation, that objective feature of the world, we shouldn't make it in any way dependent on, you know, human norms or anything like that. One thing that's happened in the debate in the 20 years since I wrote that paper is that that view that causation is dependent on, or at least isn't, ah it's hard to put this, isn't in some sense a fully objective feature of the world. That's become a much more widely accepted view, if I was writing that paper now, I think I feel like it has do a lot more work at that point in the paper.

[00:29:23.440] 
So lots of people have contextualist views about causation now. So whether one thing caused, whether it's true to say that one thing caused another depends on the conversational context within which the claim is kind of being put forward or denied or discussed. And conversational context isn't a kind of objective feature about the world. Right. So one thing to say about that is that's a bit of the paper where I move very quickly. And I and at the time that I think that was it was reasonable. But now it kind of wouldn't be. 

[00:29:51.640] 
But the the other side to that as well is that I mean, causation by absence still does get explicitly discussed as a topic in the literature. Not very much. But I think one thing that happened is that it's been kind of subsumed under general discussions about contextualism. Right. So the idea is, right, so the thing that I was worried about is kind of like what distinguishes your failure to water the plants from Donald Trump's failure to water the plants? You get just the same kind of issue when you talk about positive event causation. Right so never mind about whether the network model's true. Some people think that if you're a kind of what's known as an invariantist about causation, so you think that the truth or falsity of causal claim is not relative to context, you're going to say, look, the big bang is a cause of like everything that happens. Quite often, almost always a completely irrelevant thing to cite when someone asks you what what caused the explosion? Right. You go, oh, yeah, it was the big bang, like, why would you mention that?

[00:30:47.560] 
Nonetheless, it really was a cause of everything that happens if you're a contextualist, your stories can be well, was the big bang a cause of me sitting here? Well, in some context is gonna be true to say that it was, and in other contexts, and it's hard to imagine what contexts they are but, in most contexts, it's just not true that the big bang is a cause of me sitting here.

[00:31:09.730] 
So you get just the same kind of issue coming up when it comes to kind of, as it were, positive event causation as I was interested in the case of absence causation. So now that kind of absence causation issue, which that issue of kind of like how do you distinguish between you and Donald Trump when it comes to the plants? People talk about that issue, but they're not thinking of it as a distinctive problem in that in the absence causation, case of absence causation, but quite general problem when it comes to causation.

[00:31:34.570] 
Whereas when I was writing that paper, I didn't know anyone who thought there was any issue about whether the Big Bang was a cause of everything. Everybody was like, yeah, of course it was. It's just one that you never bothered to mention and that there's been a shift there.

[00:31:49.900] 
So that's that's partly why I think people don't talk about causation by absence that much. It's because the problem that I was talking about is now seen as a much more general phenomenon for contextualists. That's much more general phenomenon than causation by absence. Perhaps it's just one particular case of it, but it isn't. There's nothing kind of distinctively interesting about it as a more general phenomenon.

[00:32:09.160] 
So it's not that I've changed my view because I've sort of stopped thinking about the issue. So it's not like I've wholeheartedly embraced some alternative view, but I feel much less kind of inclined to defend the view that there's no causation by absence now. And I think the main reason for that is I think part of what for me was making the network model seem like such an attractive model was a kind of illicit, sort of unconscious commitment to the idea that fundamentally causation is a matter of like things bashing into other things, billiard balls and kind of identifiable processes that you can trace through. You know, you've got like the electricity running down the wire or you've got the the two things mixing in the test tube.

[00:33:02.480] 
It's kind of like there has to be some kind of like real physical technical term for this, I believe is like umph or biff going on. I think that was kind of what my unconscious model of causation was. And of course, if you believe in causation by absence, then you absolutely can't think that. Right. There's nothing going on with you. And the plants when you fail to water the plants. There's just the plants sitting there dying and then there's you going off and, you know, in the pub forgetting all about the fact you were supposed to be watching them. No connection at all between those two things.

[00:33:34.100] 
So I think the main reason why I kind of just feel not committed to the network model anymore is that I realize that that view about causation, that it's all like umphy biffy stuff bashing into each other is just not a view that kind of like in the grand philosophical scheme of things, one that I should be signing up to. 

[00:33:54.320] 
That kind of biffy view about causation kind of creates loads of problems in all kinds of places, right. So in the mental causation debate, I mean people's views differ on this, but I'm kind of inclined to think that that view about the nature causation is driving some of the people who think that if you're a non-reductive physicalist, you can't make room for mental causation. So Kim, for example, had a very kind of like explicitly sort of biffy view about the nature of causation. And he was a big defender of the exclusion argument.

[00:34:23.540] 
Yeah, when you think about social, any kind of causation, if we're smashing into each other like stuff in a test tube or whatever, just that biff model just kind of starts looking woefully just out of place. This is what happens when you start from Hume, right? Your billard balls turn out to be your kind of paradigmatic causes and effects and and maybe they're just not the paradigm case actually in the grand scheme of things. And there's a worry that Lewis has involved an object, which I dont at all address in that paper, which I think is a serious worry, which is like a lot of the time, you've got an event that's the cause and an event that's the effects. So fine. No causation by absence at that level. But when you think about how it is you get from the course the effect, you may well be going through a whole bunch of absences.

[00:35:06.800] 
Right, when someone, grim example, but when someone dies by strangulation, you know they die because they're not getting oxygen to their brain. Right. That's an absence. So fine. We've got the strangulation event and we've got the death event. What connects those two things? Oh, it's an absence. So just the mere fact that you've got, as it were, an event on each side there doesn't get you off the hook. Right. If you disbelieve in causation by absence, you're gonna have quite a hard time explaining how it is that the cause gets to be a cause of the effect. I guess that's the way the right way to put it. Yeah. So there are there are lots of problems with the kind of network model. 

[00:35:41.110] 
I'm kind of fundamentally Lewisian about causation.I'm kind of a Humean. I think that causation. Is a matter counterfactual dependence and we can cash counterfactual dependents out in, this is all massive hostage fortune, but like this is the grand story, we can cash counter-factual dependence out in some nice reductionist way that doesn't require us to believe in any necessary connections in some nasty Hume violating kind of a way, that's kind of like the grand Lewisean narrative about all of this, which I'm signed up to. Effectively according to that view, causation is just different making, right? It's just, why did this happen? Well, what would have you know, what would have made that not happen? That's just the question. There is no biff or umph in any of that story. 

[00:36:27.490] 
So why should I get so worked up about the idea that there's causation by absence? I haven't really got any reason to get exercised by that really. Maybe I just need to give up the network model, as I say, I haven't kind of like wholeheartedly, kind of got that. I think there are other reasons to like the network model So I think like the ontology of absences is is is still an issue that hasn't really been properly addressed in the literature, so it's not that I kind of completely want to reject it. It's just I think my underlying part of my underlying motivation for endorsing it as wholeheartedly as I did in that paper, I've kind of given up. Yes, I feel a bit more relaxed about the whole thing now.

[00:37:08.740] 
I have lost touch of this debate a bit, but I think that kind of question about the ontological status of absences is one that still kind of like hanging. So you get it in the causal modelling literature. People talk about, oh, you know, we just have these variables and they take various values.

[00:37:24.530] 
It's like yeah but what is the value of a variable? And some of those people say yeah yeah yeah they're just events. But not when the value zero it's not. Right?

[00:37:32.260] 
And that's an issue that's just kind of like it's a question of the kind of like the ontological status of causal relata or even whether we should think of causation as a relation at all has kind of been sidelined, I think, and partly been sidelined just because the kind of mechanics of the causal modelling thing just makes that drop out has not seeming like a very important issue. But fundamentally, the causal modelling thing is like you've some nodes and some arrows, right? What are they supposed to be representing? Well, sometimes they're representing absences. How is that supposed to work? If you do think there's causation by absence, like you still have to like what's going on when you say your failure to do something caused me to, whatever?  It's like. I mean, Lewis kind of grapples a bit with this in Void and Object, but it feels a little bit kind of inconclusive, right? There is no such thing as the absence. The void, there's no such thing as, he'd kind of like, yeah the void is a nothing. There isn't really a void. You're like, what is it? Is it kind of like a fictional entity? Do we just pretend that the void exists even though there's no thing there that exists? Well, if that's what we're doing, then we're kind of making a mistake as well when we talk about the the effects of the void, because we're treating it like an object and it's not an object.

[00:38:34.460] 
So that whole idea that you just get to save all of our causation by absence talk just by kind of like embracing it doesn't seem right to me because it still seems like you're talking as though causation is a relation between events and almost nobody thinks that absences are events. So we're still kind of making a mistake.

[00:39:02.490] - Wesley
That's it for today's episode. Visit our website at Journal entries dot fireside dot fm for more information about Helen Beebee, her work and some of the resources mentioned in this episode. Special thanks to two cheers for creating our theme music and for financial support from the University of Manchester.