News must not travel like molasses By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari Contextual-unanimity

 “My heavens and My earth cannot contain Me, but the heart of My believing servant contains Me. Al-Sakhāwī and al-Suyūt

Paid to find sinister

·         Journalists are not cynical. They are paid to find    something sinister underlying noble so that news does not like travel like molasses.

Bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses. Tracy Morgan

 

Supplement to Probabilistic Causation

Contextual-unanimity and Dupré's Critique

Dupré (1984) raises the following counterexample to the contextual unanimity (consensus) requirement. Suppose that there is a very rare gene that has the following effect: those that possess the gene have their chances of contracting lung cancer lowered when they smoke. In this scenario, there would be a background context in which smoking lowers the probability of lung cancer: thus smoking would not be a cause of lung cancer according to the context-unanimity requirement. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that the discovery of such a gene would lead us to abandon the claim that smoking causes lung cancer. Dupré's account surely comes closer to capturing our ordinary use of causal language. On the other hand, Eells' population-relative formulation allows us to make more precise causal claims: in the population as a whole, smoking is a mixed cause of lung cancer; in the sub-population of individuals who lack the gene, smoking is a positive cause of lung cancer; in the sub-population consisting of individuals who possess the gene, smoking is a negative cause of lung cancer.

In any event, this debate does not really seem to be about the metaphysics of causation. Causal relevance is really the basic metaphysical concept. The dispute between Dupré and Eells is really a debate about how best to use the word ‘cause’ to pick out a particular species of causal relevance. Dupré's proposed usage will count as (positive) causes many things that will be mixed causes in Eells' proposed usage. But there does not seem to be any underlying disagreement about which factors are causally relevant. (For defence of a similar position, see Twardy and Korb (2004).)