But what science by its very nature cannot explain is why there are any states of affairs at all. John Norton is a non-fundamentalist who appears to be endorsing the former view, arguing that while causal fundamentalism is false "in appropriately restricted circumstances our science entails that nature will conform to one or other form of our causal expectations" (Norton 2003: 13). Yet Norton also seems to have some sympathies for causal eliminativism, since he likens causal concepts to the concept of caloric-a concept that no longer is accepted as playing a legitimate role in science. The winner was the one who reached the chosen point in the minimum number of strokes. Rejecting free choice amounts to accepting superdeterminism, according to which measurement settings cannot be freely chosen. The fit with physics question seems unavoidable for the metaphysical project more generally: if a certain metaphysical account could be shown to be incompatible with the fundamental physical theories we accept, then this would constitute a reason for rejecting the account, since compatibility with physics arguably is a condition of adequacy for any metaphysical account of causation. " and I’m thinking of, first I was thinking of an avalanche from a snow storm, where this moves, then that gets that part moving, that gets that part moving.

He then suggests that these various clues, although they just might have other explanations, are not in general to be expected unless John had robbed the safe. Traditionally philosophers have tended to conceive of this project as having as its core aim to provide conceptual analyses of our everyday concept or concepts of cause. The aim of the metaphysical project is to uncover the metaphysical grounds or truth-makers for causal claims. There are three options: (i) either the truth-makers of causal claims are physical features of the world, (ii) or they supervene on physical features of the world, (iii) or they are non-physical features of the world that do not supervene on physical features of the world. The consequences are there for all but the blinkered to see. As we will see below, prominent arguments denying that causal notions fit with physics are most plausibly understood as engaging in this version of a descriptive project. In taking existing concepts of causation as its starting point the functional project concerning causation engages primarily in what David Chalmers calls "re-engineering" rather than "de novo engineering" (Chalmers 2018, see Other Internet Resources). Alternatively, a descriptive project may take physicists’ own widespread use of causal notions, both in research articles and in physics textbooks, as its starting point and proposes an analysis of the underlying causal concepts.

Alternatively, we can take the practices of physical theorizing and model-building as starting points and examine whether we can "engineer" causal concepts that fulfil certain cognitive functions within these contexts. Thus, the usefulness of deterministic causal reasoning might be restricted to some contexts-contexts that may include some theoretical contexts in physics-while there may also be domains in physics in which deterministic causal notions are not applicable. Several of the most widely-discussed arguments aimed at establishing that there is no legitimate place for causal notions in physics can be traced to the writings of Ernst Mach (1900, 1905) and to Bertrand Russell’s extremely influential article "On the Notion of Cause" (1912). Russell’s target is the notion of cause in general, even though some of his arguments appeal to purported features of physical theorizing. For example, we might ask to what extent Lewis’s notion of causal dependence analyzed in terms of time-asymmetric counterfactual dependence plays a role in reasoning in physics. Turning to the environment, in scientific terms neoclassical economics is a "closed system", consumers consume, firms produce and money circulates to oil the wheels.

But there are many other sorts of economics in which human and planetary justice matter. Mach’s arguments focus more directly on physics, arguing that there is something distinct about physics that makes it especially inhospitable to causal notions. In response to the dominant cause challenge one can argue that (either descriptively or functionally) we ought to distinguish between more strongly pragmatic causal notions and an objective-or at least less context-dependent-core concept of causation. First, knowledge of causal structures allows us to identify relationships amenable to manipulation and control; and second, What are billiard balls made of common cause reasoning enables us to draw inferences from one time to another even when we possess only incomplete knowledge of the state of a system on an initial or final value surface. So they can be in one sense familiar with the horror and in another sense it’s a totally different person they know nothing about. Ben-Menahem (2018) is one of very few philosophers who take this approach to the functional project.