Causation as transference and responsibility

Abstract

During the last decades there has been a remarkable renewal of interest in theories of causation which is linked to the decline of the orthodoxy of the Logical empiricist school. A number of alternatives to the traditional covering-law account have been proposed. I shall defend a version of an approach that has been undeservedly neglected: the Transference Theory (TT) of causation. Accounts of this type elaborate the intuition that there is a material link between the cause and the effect, consisting of something transmitted between them. I shall start from the following basic thesis (T). (T) Two events c and e are connected by a causal relation if and only if there exists a conserved quantity Q which is exemplified by both c and e and of which a particular amount A is transmitted between c and e. The notion of a conserved quantity (CQ) figures prominently in this version of Transference Theory (TT). It was an important shortcoming in earlier versions of TT that they couldn't provide a justification of the list they proposed of entities transference of which is claimed to be the basis of causation. Their lists of such entities, such as energy, momentum, or force, seemed arbitrary. The idea of transference itself provides the crucial constraint: Only

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