The Question of Iterated Causation

Abstract

This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c 1 …c k cause effect e, what are the causes of c 1 …c k 's causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the "causal goings-on"?A natural response (which I call "dismissivism") is that this is a bad question because causal goings-on aren't apt to be caused. After rebutting several versions of dismissivism, I consider the view that QIC, though not illegitimate, is easy to answer: the causal goings-on are apt to be caused but are plainly uncaused ("brutism"). However, I will argue that brutism too has a serious problem: namely, it leads to a highly implausible kind of armchair indeterminism. Next I consider some substantive candidate answers to QIC, none of which, I argue, is particularly promising. The paper's final conclusion is twofold: QIC is at least as difficult as the more well-known Question of Iterated Grounding; moreover, the largely overlooked regress problem that it raises gives us at least some defeasible reason to avoid causation in theory-building.

Janus-Faced Grounding

“…. If causation is genuine explanatory relation, then it falls to the same requirement, so there cannot be an infinite regress of causing of causation, contra DavidKovacs (2022). But if causation is instead just a loose abstraction from the more joint-carving nomic facts involving fundamental laws, then it may not fall under the same requirement.…”