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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on February 13, 2007
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2007 58(1):45-76; doi:10.1093/bjps/axl027
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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science.

Notions of Cause: Russell's thesis revisited*

Don Ross

Department of Philosophy and Department of Finance, Economics and Quantitative Methods, University of Alabama at Birmingham, School of Economics, University of Cape Town, 900 13th St. So., Birmingham, AL, USA 35294

David Spurrett

School of Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 4041, South Africa

dross{at}commerce.uct.ac.za

dross1{at}uab.edu

spurrett{at}ukzn.ac.za


  Abstract

We discuss Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell's application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, and to the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. In showing how to recover an approximation to Russell's conclusion while explaining scientists' continuing appeal to causal ideas (without violating naturalism by philosophically correcting scientists) we illustrate a general naturalist strategy for handling problems around the unification of sciences that assume different levels of naïveté with respect to folk conceptual frameworks. We do this despite rejecting one of the premises of Russell's argument, a version of reductionism that was scientifically plausible in 1913 but is not so now.

1 Russell's Naturalistic Rejection of Causation
2 Psychology, Folk Notions and Intuitions
3 Causes in Science
4 Letting Science Hold Trumps

* We thank John Collier, Harold Kincaid, James Ladyman, Adriano Palma, David Papineau, and an anonymous referee for this journal for comments and criticism of earlier versions of this article.


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