Two More Join the Fray...

I would just like to take this opportunity to welcome David Faraci and Peter Jaworski to the blog.  David and Peter--philosophy grad students at Bowling Green State University--are preparing to run some interesting studies on folk intuions concerning the "directness of causality."  Compare, for instance, "Bill caused the door to open" and "Bill opened the door."  What sorts of conditions do people rely on in making this distinction?  I, for one, am curious to see what kind of results they get!

Comments

[Mos52]

Hello, I just found your blog and have been enjoying perusing all your links.

This particular post caught my eye. I'd like to understand more why this study fits into philosophy more than linguistics?

It would seem to me that the difference between the two sentences "Bill caused the door to open" and "Bill opened the door" relates merely to definition. I would think that most people define opening the door as turning a handle and pushing. Swapping the verb "opening" with "caused" removew the preconcieved notion of how the door is opened. The linguistic modification, at least in my mind, raises the question, is there another way to open a door?

Like I said, I'm new to your blog, it's got my interest, but I'm not sure I'm completely following everything yet.

In any event, thanks for the interesting content.

[Peter Jaworski]

Good question. The full experiment will be a comparison between this example (opening the door, causing the door to open), and an identical question that involves judgments like "good outcome/bad outcome" like "Bill broke the plate/Bill caused the plate to break" or something involving a tighter connection to a moral judgment like "Bill broke his mother's finger/Bill caused his mother's finger to be broken." (The examples will be identical except for the what happens after the football sails through the window).

The thought is, roughly, as follows: Suppose that, in the studies, people generally say that Bill caused the door to open, but claim that he broke the plate or broke his mother's finger (rather than merely caused the plate to break or his mother's finger to be broken). That might give us insight into how people make certain moral judgments.

And *this* is surely philosophical. We might then use this information to make claims about how ordinary people make certain judgments, or be prescriptive about it and claim that some mistake is being made that needs to be addressed, or some other option.

[Mos52]

Eureka! I thought about this more after my first comment. In conjunction with your reply I think I'm grasping the concept.

And the blog content becomes even more interesting. . .

[Mos52]

By the way, Clevelander here. Mad props to OHIOans.

O-H. . .

[tnadelhoffer]

Peter,

You guys might consider using some scenarios based on real cases from both the criminal and civil law. Consider, for instance, famous cases involving causality such as Palsgraf v. Long Island:

"A passenger carrying a package, while hurrying to catch and board a moving Long Island Rail Road train, appeared to the railroad's (Defendant's) employee to be falling. The employee attempted to help the passenger and caused a package the passenger was holding to fall on the rails. Unbeknownst to the employee, the package contained fireworks, and the employee's effort to help caused the package to explode. The shock reportedly knocked down scales at the other end of the platform (although later accounts suggest that a panicking bystander may have upset the scale), which injured Mrs. Helen Palsgraf (Plaintiff). Palsgraf sued the railroad, claiming her injury resulted from negligent acts of the employee. The trial court found for Palsgraf (Plaintiff) by verdict from a jury, Long Island Rail Road appealed the judgment."

Question: Who caused Mrs. Palsgraf's injuries?

The law--especially tort--is replete with examples involving cause and liability. I am unsure whether any of these cases will get at the issue you're interested in examining, but it's at least worth checking out.

[Kevin Timpe]

...I-O

[David Faraci]

I find this sort of tort case fascinating, and I think it would be excellent for a study on the effect of evaluative considerations on general attributions of causality (it could be paired with a situation in which the same thing happened, but the end result was something neutral/good). However, in this instance, our goal is to study specifically the effect of evaluative considerations on the *directness* of causality. I think some people might say that Mrs. Palsgraf's injuries were caused by the employee, but I doubt any would say that the employee *injured* the woman, since the injury resulted from a fairly long causal chain. In the case of the football sailing through an open window, we are expecting? hoping? to discover that people will attribute more direct cause (Bill broke the plate) when they think that what Bill did had negative consequences than they will when the consequences are neutral (Bill caused the door to open). Of course, I could be wrong, and if it turned out that people think that the employee injured Mrs. Palsgraf, this would be a most intriguing result indeed.