"Thinking about Powers. Some Comments on Stephen Mumford´s Theory of Causation"

ORLANDO, ELEONORA

Instituto de Filosofía, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Buenos Aires

Workshop; Workshop on Truthmakers and Powers Ontology; 2006

Grupo de Acción Filosófica (GAF)

          In his paper “Polygeny and Pleiotropy”, Stephen Mumford focuses on the problem of causation and maintains that in order to understand the concept we need to adopt a revisionary metaphysics. The main point of the proposed revision is the inclusion of powers as part of the furniture of the world: according to this, aside from –to take Lewis’ expression, quoted by Mumford- “local matters of particular fact”, the world must be taken to contain powers. Causation is thus to be understood as the necessary connection between powers and their respective manifestations. In this commentary, I will not question Mumford´s point concerning the need for a new account of causation. I will take it for granted that what he has called “the Humean framing of the problem” –which comprises both Humeanism and Humeanism + necessary connections- presents some problems and agree to Mumford’s methodological point: if we could find a different paradigm we should endorse it as the best explanation of various phenomena, no matter how radical it would be. Moreover, I am sympathetic to Mumford’s realistic leanings. However, there are certain aspects of the proposal that need to be clarified, specially, those concerned with the central notion of power.           First of all, it is not clear to me which one is the scope of the main thesis of the article. On the one hand, it seems that causation, as a necessary connection between powers and their corresponding manifestations is something that should be recognized to exist along with causation as a connection between distinct events. This leaves open the possibility of two different concepts of causation: one concerned with powers and their manifestations and the other exclusively concerned with manifested events. But, on the other hand, the thesis of the existence of causal powers seems to be put forward as a completely general one: as providing us with the best explanation of all cases of causation. Secondly, on the assumption that powers are different from dispositions, what is the relation between them? Is there any difference between the relation that links a power to its manifestation and the one that links the stimulus conditions to the manifested event, characteristically associated with a dispositional property? How are powers to be taken into account in the characterization of a disposition and in the specification of its associated counterfactual conditional? Are there any powers corresponding to categorical properties? These are all questions that should be answered by the theory at stake.