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Ideas of S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum, by Text

[, fl. 2011, Professors in Nottingham and Norway.]

2011 Dispositional Modality
1 p.380 17535 Dispositionality has its own distinctive type of modality
2011 Getting Causes from Powers
Pref p.-8 14533 Causation doesn't have two distinct relata; it is a single unfolding process
1.1 p.3 14535 Pandispositionalists say structures are clusters of causal powers
1.1 p.4 14536 We say 'power' and 'disposition' are equivalent, but some say dispositions are manifestable
1.2 p.9 14537 Coincidence is conjunction without causation; smoking causing cancer is the reverse
1.2 p.10 14538 Powers explain properties, causes, modality, events, and perhaps even particulars
1.3 p.12 14539 Nature can be interfered with, so a cause never necessitates its effects
2.3 p.23 14541 Events are essentially changes; property exemplifications are just states of affairs
2.7 p.43 14542 If statue and clay fall and crush someone, the event is not overdetermined
3.10 p.67 14549 Maybe truths are necessitated by the facts which are their truthmakers
3.11 p.71 14550 We assert causes without asserting that they necessitate their effects
3.14 p.82 14551 If causation were necessary, the past would fix the future, and induction would be simple
3.5 p.56 14546 Necessary causation should survive antecedent strengthening, but no cause can always survive that
3.8 p.64 14548 There may be necessitation in the world, but causation does not supply it
4.3 p.92 14553 Weak emergence is just unexpected, and strong emergence is beyond all deduction
4.3c p.99 14555 Powers offer no more explanation of nature than laws do
4.3c p.99 14554 Laws are nothing more than descriptions of the behaviour of powers
4.3d p.101 14556 Strong emergence seems to imply top-down causation, originating in consciousness
4.4 p.103 14557 Powers are not just basic forces, since they combine to make new powers
5.3 p.109 14558 A collision is a process, which involves simultaneous happenings, but not instantaneous ones
5.3 p.113 14559 Does causation need a third tying ingredient, or just two that meet, or might there be a single process?
5.5 p.120 14564 If laws are equations, cause and effect must be simultaneous (or the law would be falsified)!
5.5 1 p.116 14561 Perdurantism imposes no order on temporal parts, so sequences of events are contingent
5.5 1 p.117 14562 A process is unified as an expression of a collection of causal powers
5.5 3 p.119 14563 Causation is the passing around of powers
5.6 p.123 14565 Sugar dissolving is a process taking time, not one event and then another
6.1 p.131 14566 Causation by absence is not real causation, but part of our explanatory practices
6.2 p.132 14567 Privileging one cause is just an epistemic or pragmatic matter, not an ontological one
6.2 p.133 14568 A structure won't give a causal explanation unless we know the powers of the structure
6.5 p.138 14569 It is tempting to think that only entailment provides a full explanation
6.6 p.142 14571 The only full uniformities in nature occur from the essences of fundamental things
6.6 p.142 14570 Nature is not completely uniform, and some regular causes sometimes fail to produce their effects
6.8 p.151 14572 Is a cause because of counterfactual dependence, or is the dependence because there is a cause?
6.8 p.151 14573 Occasionally a cause makes no difference (pre-emption, perhaps) so the counterfactual is false
6.8 p.152 14574 Cases of preventing a prevention may give counterfactual dependence without causation
6.8 p.154 14575 A 'ceteris paribus' clause implies that a conditional only has dispositional force
7.3 p.130 14552 Relations are naturally necessary when they are generated by the essential mechanisms of the world
7.5 p.165 14576 Smoking disposes towards cancer; smokers without cancer do not falsify this claim
7.6 p.171 14577 Causation may not be transitive. Does a fire cause itself to be extinguished by the sprinklers?
8.10 p.191 14584 The simple conditional analysis of dispositions doesn't allow for possible prevention
8.4 p.179 14578 Possibility might be non-contradiction, or recombinations of the actual, or truth in possible worlds
8.5 p.182 14579 Dispositionality is the core modality, with possibility and necessity as its extreme cases
8.5 p.183 14580 Dispositions may suggest modality to us - as what might not have been, and what could have been
8.8 p.186 14582 Might dispositions be reduced to normativity, or to intentionality?
8.9 p.189 14583 Dispositionality is a natural selection function, picking outcomes from the range of possibilities
9.1 p.196 14585 We have more than five senses; balance and proprioception, for example
Concl p.237 14587 We take causation to be primitive, as it is hard to see how it could be further reduced