Causal Dependence and Laws

Abstract

In this paper I want to explore how laws, or statements which have some of the characteristics which we associate with laws, can be employed to capture the notion of causal dependence, and also how this latter concept can accommodate a process account of causation. David Lewis (1986 [1973]) proposed that we take causal dependence as the basic notion, with causal connection being defined in terms of it. However Lewis equates causal dependence with counterfactual dependence, and there are objections from an empiricist perspective to the semantics of counterfactual conditionals. An account of causal dependence which invokes the regularities that we discover in nature, and does not presuppose counterfactuals, is proposed in Clendinnen (1992).1 This makes it possible to retain the advantages of a dependence account of causation while avoiding the metaphysical commitments of Lewis’s theory. This paper explores the conceptual grounding of such a theory and how it relates to Wesley Salmon’ s account of causal process. In particular it considers those processes which include irreducibly probabilistic steps.