Keeping Track of the Time: Emending the Counterfactual Analysis of Causation

Abstract

I will focus on the most well developed analysis, David Lewis's (1973, 1986a) version, although the emendation that I suggest can be modified and applied to other counterfactual analyses.' The analysis for deterministic causation states that for any two actual, distinct events c and e, e depends counterfactually on c iff, had c not occurred, e would not have occurred.2 Causation is the ancestral of counterfactual dependence: c causes e iff there is a chain of counterfactual dependencies running from c to e. The probabilistic version of the analysis (1986a: 175-84) states that e depends probabilistically on c iff, given c, there is a chance x of e's occurring, and if c were not to occur, there would be a chance y of e's occurring, where x is much greater than y. Causation is again taken as the ancestral, this time of probabilistic dependence, so c causes e iff there is a chain of probabilistic dependencies running from c to e. The chance of the effect's occurring is assessed immediately after the cause occurs, and the truth value of the counterfactual at each step is evaluated based upon that chance.