Causation and perception: the puzzle unravelled

Erkenntnis, 2007

Sydney Shoemaker has attempted to save mental causation by a new account of realization. As Brian McLaughlin argues convincingly, the account has to face two major problems. First, realization does not guarantee entailment. So even if mental properties are realized by physical properties, they need not be entailed by them. This is the first, rather general metaphysical problem. A second problem, which relates more directly to mental causation is that Shoemaker must appeal to some kind of proportionality as a constraint on causation in order to avoid redundant mental causation. I argue that, in addition, a ''piling problem'' arises, since causal powers seem to be bestowed twice. Then, I try to sketch an alternative view of the relation between causal powers and properties-a reductionist viewwhich fares better on some accounts. But it may have to face another and, perhaps, serious problem, the ''problem of the natural unity of properties''. Finally, I will pose a question about the relation between causal powers and causation.

We commonly have a strong sense of causality as events unfold. We often experience one event as causing another. Both perceptual and cognitive processes have been proposed as the explanation for causal experience. However, neither philosophy nor psychology have been able to provide decisive arguments one way or another. Theorists claiming that the origin of causal representation is the perceptual system argue that " certain physical events give an immediate causal impression, and that one can 'see' an object act on another object, produce in it certain changes, and modify it in one way or another " (Michotte, 1946/1963, p.15). On this view there exists a perceptual mechanism that transforms visual sequences of events into a representation of cause. Michotte hypothesized that causal perception was specific to caused motions of objects. More recently Susanna Siegel (2010) argued visual experiences might represent causal relations of a much larger variety. I argue that only the causation of motion is represented by the perceptual system. The questions this essay aims to answer are (i) is there a perceptual mechanism capable of attributing a causal relation, and (ii) if such a mechanism exists what kind of causal experiences are the result of its operations. My discussion of these questions unfolds as follows. Before confronting the questions of this essay I will explicate a few key terms. Then, I will distinguish two senses of causation and two theses concerning the visual representation of causation. The first thesis is the ​ narrow causal thesis , which holds that caused motion of objects is the only mode of causation represented in visual experience. The ​ broad causal thesis ​ is not specific to what kind of causation is represented in visual experience. Following this, I will lay out the proposals for explaining causal experience from Michotte and Siegel's argument for the broad causal thesis. I then turn to evidence that infants representing ​ launching events ​ involves more than representations of spatiotemporal properties as well as evidence suggesting that computations performed by the perceptual system are responsible for the attribution of causation.

Journal of Consciousness Studies 19, No. 5–6, pp. 12–39 , 2012

This paper has two main goals. First, it asks whether causality is an adequate foundation for those theories of cognition and consciousness that are built upon it. The externalist revolution has reconceived all three dimensions of cognition — the semantic, the epistemological, and the mental — upon a foundation of ‘causal connections of the appropriate type’. Yet these new theories almost completely ignore the long-standing controversies surrounding the very nature of causality, and the very real threat that ‘causality’ may be ill-equipped to do the work required of it. The second goal is to defend a kind of causality, largely ignored, that is grounded in the phenomenally conscious states of cognitive agents. While it is popular to try to reduce consciousness to causality, this is a kind of causality that ultimately reduces to (phenomenal) consciousness.

2011

On one view, an adequate account of causal understanding may focus exclusively on what is involved in mastering general causal concepts (concepts such as ‘x causes y’ or ‘p causally explains q’). An alternative view is that causal understanding is, partly but irreducibly, a matter of grasping what Anscombe called special causal concepts, concepts such as ‘push’, ‘flatten’, or ‘knock over’. We can label these views generalist vs particularist approaches to causal understanding. It is worth emphasizing that the contrast here is not between two kinds of theories of the metaphysics of causation, but two views of the nature and perhaps source of ordinary causal understanding. One aim of this paper is to argue that it would be a mistake to dismiss particularism because of its putative metaphysical commitments. I begin by formulating an intuitively attractive version of particularism due to P.F. Strawson, a central element of which is what I will call naı̈ve realism concerning mechanical t...

Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean-style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice's case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean-style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.'s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense.