Richard Hou, “Historical consistency, causal relevance, and historical token causal ascriptions”
Channel: CEFISES at UCLouvain
Date: 2023-08-08

Talk given at the Mechanisms and Ontic Causation in the Life Sciences conference, the second workshop of the MeCauLife group.

Abstract: According to the usual counterfactual test for causal ascriptions, to see whether an event φ caused another event ψ, we check whether it is the case that if it were not φ, then it would be not ψ. However, because of the peculiarity of history, it's not clear how this test can apply to historical causal ascriptions. The account proposed in this paper combines counterfactual backtracking analysis and interventionist causal modelling to address this peculiarity of historical causal ascriptions. Counterfactual backtracking analysis is employed to illustrate the ascription of historical consistency to a given historical counterfact, that is, the likelihood of its occurrence in the actual course of history. The idea is to backtrack to the precondition of the target counterfact and continue the backtracking process until it reaches a reasonable anchor by which the historical consistency of the counterfact can be explained. Backtracking processes are constituted by a causal blueprint built from relevant theories/generalisations at the type level and historical local checkpoints at the token level. Although history is not manipulable, we can always intervene and manipulate historical data by thought. Causal modelling is employed to delineate two formal conditions of historical consistency: reasonable historical intervention and causal integrity. The adequacy conditions of historical token causal ascriptions are in turn characterised by means of the stringent causal relevance principle formed by historical consistency and causal modelling.