Causes As Difference‐Makers For Processes

Abstract

It is natural to think of causes as difference‐makers. What exact difference causes make, however, is an open question. In this paper, I argue that the right way of understanding difference‐making is in terms of causal processes: causes make a difference to a causal process that leads to the effect. I will show that this way of understanding difference‐making nicely captures the distinction between causing an outcome and helping determine how the outcome happens and, thus, explains why causation is not transitive. Moreover, the theory handles tricky cases that are problematic for competing accounts of difference‐making.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.