The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Bram Vaassen, "Against contextualized proportionality".
Most of our causal talk concerns mid-sized dry goods, such as slippery roads, heartburn, and good looks. Even scientific explanations rarely venture into the most fundamental physical level. They focus on viruses, economic stagnation, and genetic mutations instead. The fundamental physical level threatens to make all this causal talk frivolous and redundant: it contains sufficient causes for any effect we purport to explain, without any reference to the mid-sized dry goods we use to explain them. Proportionality requirements on causation are designed to block this threat by demanding that causes contain the exact right amount of detail to explain their effects. As physically sufficient events are riddled with irrelevant details, they cannot be proportional, and thus not be causes either.
However, causal explanations in terms of mid-sized dry goods contain plenty of irrelevancies of their own, with some glaring holes of information to boot. Proponents of proportionality thus quickly realized that their demand for ‘the exact right amount of detail’ needs to be contextualized if it is to save our causal explanations (Yablo 1992, Touborg 2022, Fang 2024). I argue that even contextualized proportionality requirements will not do. They repeat the mistake that underlies the apparent threat from fundamental physics by ignoring how causal explanations at different levels gladly co-exist. I also deliver a more precise picture of the interaction between context and level of detail in explanations, and demonstrate how it aligns with previous work on causation, explanation and reliable manipulation.
All interested are welcome to participate in this seminar.
This seminar is intended primarily for presentations of PhD work and other research in philosophy conducted at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. Guest lectures sometimes take place in the seminar as well. The seminars are given in English and all interested are welcome to attend these events.
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