Recent Books on Causation II, Douglas Kutach, Causation

Douglas Kutach, Causation, Polity Press, 2014

This, too, is an introductory book, but a good one.  The author mixes in historical sources with a wide ranging, and generally accurate and informative exposition of contemporary (i.e, since 1946) accounts of the metaphysics of causation. It has some sensible questions for readers. I would use it as a textbook, with some apologies to the students. What apologies?

1.     Like most other discussions of the metaphysics of causality, Kutach appeals to what we think we know for motivation, examples and counterexamples, but there is not the least hint of how causes can be, and are, discovered.

2.     While the book is less mathophobic than most philosophy texts, it is not always mathematically competent, doesn’t use what it does develop well, and presents mathematical examples that will be unenlightening or worse to most students.

a.     Early on “linearity” is discussed a propos of causal relations, but the author clearly doesn’t mean linearity. It is not clear what he means. Monotonicity perhaps, or non-interaction.

b.     Having introduced conditioning and independence and the common cause principle, there is a rather opaque discussion of Reichenbach’s attempt to define the direction of time by open versus closed “conjunctive forks” but the author fails to note that closed forks become open when common causes are conditioned on.  One question asks students to describe a graphical causal model with a specific probability feature, which would have been straightforward if the reader had been given an illustration of how graphical causal models are parameterized to yield probability relations, but that did not happen.

c.      As an example of uncertain extensions of familiar cases, students are referred to transfinite arithmetic.  Some help.

3.     Some the exposition could be more attractive, notably the explanations of token versus type, singular versus general. Distinctions (never mind notation) from formal logic are suppressed everywhere, even when they would help. The presentation of determinism is unclear and inadequate.

4.     Metaphysical discussions of causality inevitably make claims about what people would say without any consideration of what people do say. The extensive psychological literature on causal judgement, some of which has interesting theories, is entirely ignored.

5.     And sometimes the author says exactly the opposite of what he means—slip of the keyboard?

Ok, nothing is perfect, there could be better textbooks, but this one is usable, which is to say, given the alternatives, outstanding.