Comments on Woodward, Making Things Happen

Abstract

I welcome the chance to revisit my review of Making Things Happen and the book itself (Woodward 2003; Strevens 2007) in the light of Woodward’s response to the review (henceforth “Woodward’s reply”). In what follows I hope to provide a surer footing for some of the claims made in the original review, to address the new definition of unrelativized causation proposed in Woodward’s reply, and to expand my own appreciation of the manifold aims of the book, while expressing some doubt as to whether they can be realized by a single system of definitions. I have more to say than I can reasonably fit into this piece; I hope that my silence on some matters will not be interpreted as a concession. (In particular, I am fairly sure that what Woodward has to say about explanation implicitly commits him to what he calls “potentialism”.) 1. Preemption In a preemption scenario, there is an actual cause and a backup cause of the effect of interest; had the actual cause not occurred, the backup cause would have anyway ensured that the effect occurred. My review argued that Woodward’s manipulationist account of singular causal claims, encapsulated in the condition AC (Making Things Happen, p. 77), will run into trouble in some cases where the backup cause is also an actual cause, incorrectly judging like some varieties of the counterfactual account that the actual cause is not in fact a cause. After giving a perhaps overly colorful and underly diagrammable illustration of this assertion, I claimed that similar counterexamples could be 1 constructed from far more austere materials – and more importantly, in the light of Woodward’s worries in §2 of his reply, from material more conducive to the box and arrow representation of causal relations. Let me make good on this promise. You have two variables, X and Y. The first, X, can take two values: 0 or

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