Lewis Counterfactual Analysis

During this essay, I will explain why Lewis’s understanding of counterfactuals develops the need for transitivity, and argue that although the notion of causal transitivity is useful to us (and necessary under Lewis’s 1978 account of counterfactual analysis), Lewis himself fails to provide an adequate response to meaningful counterexamples against it. Finally, I will present and evaluate an alternative rebuttal to these counterexamples, concluding that the transitivity of causation is not as unintuitive as it’s opponents would have us think, and that Lewis’s account of counterfactual analyses remains a useful compass for further philosophic investigation, rather than an irrefutable account in itself.

So to begin, let us first understand the …show more content…
He suggests that there might not need to be a link of counterfactual dependance between the first causal event and it’s consequence, rather merely a chain of counterfactual dependencies from the first event to the second, and then the second to the third. This can be continued with as many events as desired, so long as all of them from event one through to the final are distinct events, which are sequentially linked by counterfactual dependance. In our case of the trolley problem for example, we might not believe that there is counterfactual dependance between the pulling of the lever (the first event), and the person on the track dying (the third). However we would surely agree that there is a linking series of counterfactual dependancies. First, had the lever not been pulled, then the train would not have switched onto the bystanders track, and had it not switched onto the bystanders track, the bystander would not have died from the train. This appeal to connecting counterfactual dependancies also has the consequence of making causation necessarily transitive. After all, if in any sequence of counterfactual dependancies chain together, then it must be argued that each one of those dependancies are caused. Thus the same reasoning which connects each counterfactual must similarly apply to causality, showing that each …show more content…
Breckenridge, for example, show’s that despite Lewis’s unsatisfactory resolution, there are counterarguments to be made against “the April rain”. First, he illustrates that in fact there are categories of causation. Causation as identified between events, factual causation (the kind that speaks to the connectivity of truth statements), and general causation - which speaks to conceptual, or even inductive, forms of causal links (such as exercise causing a healthy body). As previously outlined, Lewis’s aim is to form an analysis of the counterfactual dependance of events. Consequently, for a counterexample against the transitivity of causation to be compelling, it must speak only of events, and it must describe an instance in which event P causes event Q, and event, Q causes event R, but event P does not cause event R. In the counterexample of the forest, Breckenridge identifies that the proportion “that in June there remains an unburnt forest [because nothing can light in it after the rain]” seems to be a statement of fact, rather than an event (Breckenridge, 2000). One could reply to this that you would simply need to rephrase this into an event, but Breckenridge argues that this would be an unintuitive use of the counterexample - because few would note the non-burning of a forest, much less argue its casual relation with the rain. The same