Mumford and Anjum on causal necessitarianism and antecedent strengthening

Author(s): E. J. Lowe
Source: Analysis, Vol. 72, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2012), pp. 731-735
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Committee
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 CAUSAL NECESSITARIANISM AND ANTECEDENT STRENGTHENING I 731

References

Armstrong, D.M. 1997. A World of States of Äff airs. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Armstrong, D.M. 2004. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Barker, S. & Smart, B. 2012. The ultimate argument against dispositional monist
accounts of laws. Analysis 72: 714-22.
Bird, A. 2005. The ultimate argument against Armstrong's contingent necessitation view
of laws. Analysis 65: 147-55.
Bird, A. 2007. Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and Properties. Oxford: Oxford University
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Fine, K. 1994. Essence and modality. In Philosophical Perspectives 8: Logic and

Language, ed. J. Tomberlin, 1-16. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Hawthorne, J. 2006. Causal structuralism. In his Metaphysical Essays. 211-27. Oxford:
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Heil, J. and C.B. Martin. 1999. The ontological turn. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23:
34-60.

Jacobs, J. 2011. Powerful qualities, not pure powers. The Monist 94: 81-102.
Mumford, S. and R. Anjum. 2011. Getting Causes from Powers. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Mumford and Anjum on causal necessitarianism

and antecedent strengthening
E. J. Lowe

A major theme in Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum's important new
book Getting Causes front Powers (2011) is their attack on what they call
causal necessitarianism, that is, the doctrine that causes necessitate their
effects. The following passage provides a preliminary indication of the
basis of their hostility to this doctrine:

When you strike a match and it lights, you may be in no doubt that the
striking caused the lighting. But whether the striking necessitated
the lighting is a different matter. Where one thing necessitates a
second, it is a sufficient condition for it. This means that if there is
the first, there has to be the second. If you could have the first thing
without the second, then the second was not necessitated by the first.
Prima facie, causation does not look to be any kind of necessity at all.
Anyone who uses matches knows that, in at least some cases, matches
are struck and fail to light. Something can always go wrong. (47)

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732. I E. J. LOWE

Of course, Mumford and Anjum do not imagine that the foregoing passage
by itself will have much persuasive force for the reader: that is why they
contend, at this point, only that prima facie 'causation does not look to be
any kind of necessity at all'. The passage in question appears at the beginning
of a very long chapter, amounting to almost 40 pages, devoted to attacking
causal necessitarianism, and it would be inappropriate for me to try to sum
marize here every aspect of their case against it. Mumford and Anjum do,
however, gather together an impressive list of examples of well-known phil
osophers who seem to be explicitly committed to causal necessitarianism
(51-2), at least making it a doctrine worthy of their attack. My focus in
this short article will be on only one aspect of that attack, but one which
they themselves identify as being particularly important for their purposes.
Mumford and Anjum think that they have a solid and purely formal
logical argument against causal necessitarianism - an argument which
hinges on the notion of antecedent strengthening. They maintain that 'if
causation involves any kind of necessity, it should survive the test of ante
cedent strengthening' (56). This is how they formally present their 'test':

If A necessitates B, we should have a true conditional of the form if

A and <p, then B, for any value of <p. Hence, we will be using this as
our necessity test:
If A necessitates B, then:

if A plus (p, for any <p, then B. (57)

Their contention then is that causation does not survive the test of antecedent
strengthening, and so cannot involve any kind of necessity, because 'any
causal process can be interfered with or prevented by the introduction of
some additional factor' (56).
What I want to point out in this article is that Mumford and Anjum are
simply mistaken if they think that any reasonable logic of conditionals must
sanction their 'necessity test'. There are in fact various conditional logics
which do not sanction it, including one that was first developed some 30
years ago and which might still be deemed to have many merits (Lowe 1983,
1995). What Mumford and Anjum are claiming is that the following formal
entailment holds, where the arrow signifies material implication, the box
'□' is a necessity operator, and the variable '<p' may be replaced by any
sentential letter, such as 'C:

(1) D(A->-B) I- If A and cp, then B

It must be stressed that Mumford and Anjum cannot be presuming, for the
purpose of their argument, any specific interpretation of the necessity oper
ator in (1). For recall that, in their own words, their contention is that 'if
causation involves any kind of necessity, it should survive the test of ante
cedent strengthening' (56, emphasis added). Thus, they cannot be presuming

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 CAUSAL NECESSITARIANISM AND ANTECEDENT STRENGTHENING I 733

that their opponents take there to be a special kind of necessity - 'causal' or

'physical' or 'natural' necessity - that is distinct from (because somehow
'weaker' than) either logical necessity or metaphysical necessity, nor can
they be presuming that this is not so. They clearly intend their argument to
apply to all versions of causal necessitarianism.
In the logic of conditionals referred to above, any conditional of the form
'If A, then B' is formally analysed as follows (Lowe 1995: 49):

(2) If A, then B = df D(A->B) & (OAvOB)

I should emphasize that the modal operators figuring in (2) need not be
interpreted exclusively as expressing logical modalities: rather, the 'strength'
and 'type' of necessity being represented can be adjusted, if need be, in re
sponse to contextually determined features of the conditional statements to
which the analysis is applied (see Lowe 1995 for further details). Thus, in
particular, ' □ ' may be taken, if appropriate, to express 'causal' or 'natural'
necessity - but equally, if appropriate, it may be taken to express logical
necessity. Since Mumford and Anjum are likewise neutral in this regard,
where their current argument against causal necessitarianism is concerned,
we can set aside for present purposes any potential dispute about the 'proper'
interpretation of the modal operators in (2), just as we can with regard to
the modal operator in (1). All that we need insist upon is that the necessity
operators are to be interpreted in the same way - whatever that may be - in
both (1) and (2), so as to avoid any potential fallacy of ambiguity. As I
mentioned earlier, Mumford and Anjum's argument is supposed to be a
purely formal logical argument, as is my counter-argument, and so for pre
sent purposes we need consider only the formal entailments of the formulae
now under consideration. That, indeed, is why I use the turnstile sign 'b' in
(1), and likewise in (3), (4) and (5) below, denoting formal entailment or
deducibility.
Now, in the logic of conditionals mentioned above - as indeed in many
other logics of conditionals - antecedent strengthening is not valid and con
sequently the following entailment does not hold:

(3) If A, then B h If A and <p, then B

This can be demonstrated formally (see Lowe 1983: 361) but can easily be
seen to be the case by observing that, given definition (2), (3) fails because 'If
A, then B' can be true and 'If A and <p, then B' false when '->0(A and cp)' is
true. Now, it may be wondered whether the failure of (3) for this sort of
reason is germane to Mumford and Anjum's argument against causal neces
sitarianism. However, I would contend that it must be, precisely because
Mumford and Anjum place no restriction whatever on '</?'. They say, to
repeat, that 'If A necessitates B, then: if A plus cp, for any <p, then B' (57,
emphasis added). So, in particular, they cannot be taken to be restricting

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734 I E- J- LOWE

values of V' to ones that are subject to the condition that '0(A and <p)' is
true. It may be, of course, that Mumford and Anjum did not anticipate any
difficulty from this quarter because many well-known systems of conditional
logic, such as David Lewis's logic of counterfactuals, render all conditionals
with 'impossible' antecedents trivially or 'vacuously' true. However, that is
certainly not the case with the logic of conditionals now under consideration
(something which I take to be to its credit). In any case, the important fact to
focus on is that entailment (3) does not hold - antecedent strengthening is not
valid - in the logic of conditionals now under consideration, just as it does
not hold in many other logics of conditionals, including Lewis's logic of
counterfactuals. In this respect, there is nothing particularly unusual about
the logic of conditionals now under consideration and so no special reason to
query it on account of its failure to sustain (3).
The key point now is that, given definition (2), the following entailment
clearly does hold in the logic of conditionals now under consideration:

(4) If A, then B h D(A~>B)

(4) holds in this logic simply because, given (2), 'If A, then B' entails some
thing stronger than 'd(A -» B)\ since (2) supports the following entailment:

(5) If A, then B h D(A-»B) & (OAvDB)

And from this we can immediately see that entailment (1) does not hold in
this logic. For, by the transitivity of entailment, if (4) holds and (1) holds,
then (3) holds. But (3) does not hold in this logic. Hence, given that (4) holds
in this logic, (1) does not.
What this demonstrates is that there is a logic of conditionals which has, it
may be urged, considerable merits but according to which Mumford and
Anjum's 'necessity test' is mistaken. For, in this logic, it can be correct to
say that A necessitates B without having to say, as a consequence of this, that
the conditional 'If A and <p, then B' is true for any value of V'. Now, of
course, one cannot expect every logician and philosopher to agree that the
logic of conditionals in question is the right one, nor would this be an ap
propriate place for me to try to persuade them that it is. At the same time,
I would urge that this logic cannot simply be dismissed out of hand
as indefensible. And, in any case, this logic is not the only one which is
incompatible with Mumford and Anjum's test. Plainly, it would be
question-begging of Mumford and Anjum to reject such logics simply be
cause they are incompatible with their test. They presented their test as
though it is one that any tenable conception of the relationship between
necessitation and conditionals would have to accept. But I think we can
now see clearly that this is just not the case. In fact, those philosophers
who are inclined to resist Mumford and Anjum's rejection of causal necessi
tarianism might be advised to seek comfort in the kind of conditional logic

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 SKORUPSKI ON BEING FOR I 735

that I have been adverting to. On the other hand, it may be that Muxnford
and Anjum can patch up their argument in some way so as to preserve its
intended force against causal necessitarianism: but, clearly, the onus is on
them to do something of this kind if they wish to go on invoking their 'test of
antecedent strengthening' or 'necessity test' against the proponents of causal
necessitarianism.1

Durham University
Durham DH1 3HN, UK
E.J.Lowe@durham.ac.uk

1 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper which
led me to revise it in a number of ways.

References

Mumford, S. and R.L. Anjum. 2011. Getting Causes from Powers. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lowe, E.J. 1983. A simplification of the logic of conditionals. Notre Dame Journal of
Formal Logic 24: 357-66.
Lowe, E.J. 1995. The truth about counterfactuals. The philosophical Quarterly 45:
41-59.

Skorupski on Being For

Mark Schroeder

In his delightfully presumptuous article, 'The Frege-Geach objection to

expressivism: still unanswered', John Skorupski claims that:

Schroeder [in Being For] has given an incorrect account of negation

for normative sentences. Moreover, his account does not distinguish
negations proper from the case where negation occurs internally,
that is, in subordinate scope - it gives an account of the former that
conflates them with the latter. We are right back with the problem of
negation... (Skorupski 2012: 9)

If correct, this would indeed be a worrisome charge, since the account that
I developed in Being For on behalf of metaethical expressivism is motivated

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