La conservación del patrimonio cultural desde la gestión ambiental urbana

continuous processes, which produce, generate or determine the occurrence of their effects, are not necessary for causation and that interventionism is simply able to avoid the problems highlighted for the SP concept. Once again, it is important to emphasise that just as with the first set of examples, although these examples do not strictly prove that spatiotemporally continuous productive

processes are not necessary for causation, they do at least cast doubt on this idea and this is sufficient for the purposes of my argument, since it nonetheless undermines the assumption that causation is identical to sufficient production.

4.3.2 Is Sufficient Production Sufficient for Causation?

In this next section I present some examples which suggest that sufficient production is not sufficient for causation, or more accurately, that providing

sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some effect is not sufficient for causal

explanation. In order to illustrate this, I provide some examples of explanations, which seem to meet the requirements of the SP concept of causal explanation, but which either seem to lack certain features that we expect from successful causal explanation, or which seem to provide deficient causal explanations, in comparison to those explanations that meet the requirements of interventionism. Once again, although these examples will not strictly prove that providing sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some effect is not sufficient for causal explanation, they do cast doubt on this idea and this is sufficient for the purposes of my argument, since it nonetheless undermines the explanatory counterpart of the assumption of SP.

As a first illustration, recall Yablo’s   example  introduced above of the pigeon trained to peck specifically at red objects. In this example we saw that although the fact that the object is scarlet is sufficient to produce, or determine

the pecking behaviour, it fails to capture what is causally relevant about the object that causes the pigeon to peck, namely the fact that it is red. By being overly specific, it both omits vital information (this being that the pigeon would fail to peck in any case in which the object is not red) and includes irrelevant and potentially misleading information (this being that the pigeon would fail to peck in any case in which the object is not scarlet). This example therefore suggests that providing sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some effect is not

sufficient for causal explanation, since the explanation citing the property of scarlet clearly meets the SP conditions for causal explanation and yet appears to be explanatorily deficient in an important respect.

This conclusion is supported further when we see that from an interventionist perspective, although both explanations do technically qualify as causal, the explanation citing the property of scarlet comes out as explanatorily deficient in comparison to the explanation citing redness (in line with our intuition), given that it captures the wrong contrastive focus and given that it is therefore less useful for the purposes of control and manipulation. Note that from the point of view of the SP concept of causation, this potentially useful distinction amongst causal explanations is simply lost.

It is also worth pointing out that on the SP concept of causal explanation, this potential practical benefit of causal explanation is completely lost. This is

because,  as  Yablo’s  example  illustrates,  it  is  simply  not  true  that  by  identifying  

practical information about how we might go about manipulating or controlling

the  effect.  In  fact,  what  Yablo’s  example  illustrates,  is  that  often,  by  identifying  

more precise sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some effect, we actually

acquire information that is less useful for the purposes of control and

manipulation. Although this does not prove that providing sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some effect is not sufficient for causal explanation, it does suggest that something (namely the potential practical benefit of causal explanation) is missing according to this assumption about causal explanation and this goes some way to undermine the explanatory counterpart of the assumption of SP.

One final point that I suggest also undermines the explanatory counterpart of the assumption of SP can be seen by drawing attention to the fairly unintuitive consequences of this assumption. Remember that according to the explanatory counterpart of the assumption of SP, genuine causal explanations cite  ‘full  and   sufficient  conditions’  for  the  occurrence  of  their effects. As a consequence, it is simply not possible for some effect to have more than one causal explanation without running into the problem of overdetermination. It was for this reason that Kim claimed that when presented with a case in which some explanation did not appear to be sufficient for its effect, we should either think of that explanation as

a  ‘part-cause’  or  part-explanation of the effect that somehow adds together with other part-causes to provide a sufficient explanation of the effect, or we should think of the various explanations as somehow competing with one another.32

Recall  Kim’s  example  of  the  highway  crash  introduced  in  Chapter  3:  

32

Or we can assume that the explanations are related via some dependency relation, such as supervenience. As I explained in Chapter 3, this had serious consequences for the prospects of psychological explanation, since Kim argued from the fact that physical explanations are, by

“Thus  a  car  accident  is  explained  by  a  highway  designer  as  having  been  

caused by the incorrect camber of the highway curve, and by a police officer as caused by the inattentive driving of an inexperienced driver. But in a case like this we naturally think of the offered causes as partial causes; they together help make up a full and sufficient cause of the accident.”  (Kim,  1998a:  66)  

Now, according to Kim, in a case like this, we will have failed to explain the car crash until we have identified all of the sufficient conditions that together

‘add   up’   to   provide   what   we   may   call   ‘the’   cause   of   the   crash,   which   is   alone  

sufficient for the occurrence of the effect. However, this does not seem to be in line with the way that we ordinarily think about causal explanation. For example,

it   seems   perfectly   natural   to   appeal   to   the   inattentiveness   of   the   driver   as   ‘the’  

cause of the car crash, even though it is presumably not true that this fact alone was sufficient to produce the effect. Moreover, it seems equally unintuitive and unnatural to think that if the various causes  did  not  somehow  ‘add  up’  to  provide  

sufficient conditions for the occurrence of the effect, they would thereby compete with each other for explanatory status.

Interventionism is able to avoid these fairly unintuitive consequences, since from an interventionist perspective, each of the explanations noted in the example can count as genuinely causal given that they convey information about the outcome of interventionist counterfactuals. From an interventionist definition, sufficient to explain their effects and from the fact that mental properties supervene on physical properties and hence cannot overdetermine their effects by providing sufficient

explanations of their own, that they must inherit all of their explanatory power from their

perspective, it simply does not make sense to think that causal explanations

should   either   ‘add   up’   to   provide   a   sufficient   explanation   of   some   effect,   or  

compete for causal and explanatory status. Once again, although this does not of course prove that providing sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some

effect is not sufficient for causal explanation, it does at least suggest that there is something wrong with this idea and this is sufficient to undermine the explanatory counterpart of the assumption of SP.

In this section, I have presented some examples and arguments which undermine the assumption that causation is identical to sufficient production and which undermine the explanatory counterpart of the assumption of SP, which assumes that causal explanation is simply a matter of providing such sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some effect. Given that in Chapter 3, I argued that Kim crucially depends on this assumption and its explanatory counterpart to generate the exclusion problem, this discussion should have therefore demonstrated that the non-reductive physicalist need not accept   Kim’s   a   priori  

exclusion problem.

4.4 Interventionism versus the SP Concept of Causation: Problems