The idea that psychiatry contains, in principle, a series of levels of explanation has been criticized not only as empirically false but also, by Campbell, as unintelligible because it presupposes a discredited pre-Humean view of causation. Campbell's criticism is based on an interventionist-inspired denial that mechanisms and rational connections underpin physical and mental causation, respect...

Detecting the causal relations among environmental events is an important facet of learning. Certain variables have been identified which influence both human causal attribution and animal learning: temporal priority, temporal and spatial contiguity, covariation and contingency, and prior experience. Recent research has continued to find distinct commonalities between the influence these variab...

Cartwright in her (2004) paper takes a pluralistic approach to causation. Inspired by Pearl’s (2000) multi-faceted notion of causation and Cartwright’s approach, I suggest a Causal Spectrum, a model in which all the causal models are arranged according to an agent’s amount and more importantly type of knowledge about a causal event. The more efficiently we use our knowledge of causal situations...

Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic paper Causality and Determination claims that causation can be perceived. It also defends causal singularism, the idea relation is fundamentally between particular cause effect, does not depend on regularities holding elsewhere in universe. But former furnish an argument for latter? The present analyses a special type of experience involving emotional reactions to s...

This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding constraints truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply Briggs and Forbes (Philos Stud 174(4):927–943, 2017), who argue certain commitments are incurred by a Humean Growing-Block theory. First, Supervenience does not need endorse standard version of truthmaker ma...

Next, persistence through time. I take the view that nothing endures identically through time. (Except universals, if such there be; their loci would coincide with relations of qualitative match, would indeed constitute these relations, so they would commit no violations of Humean Supervenience.) Persisting particulars consist of temporal parts, united by various kinds of continuity. To the ext...

Three experiments investigated whether children in grades K, 2, and 4 (n = 144) view emotional comprehension as important in solving moral dilemmas. The experiments asked whether a human or an artificially intelligent machine would be best at solving different types of problems, ranging from moral and emotional to nonmoral and pragmatic. In Experiment 1, children in all age groups indicated tha...

The Principal Principle (PP) says that, for any proposition A, given any admissible evidence and the proposition that the chance of A is x%, one’s conditional credence in A should be x%. Humean Supervenience (HS) claims that, among possible worlds like ours, no two differ without differing in the spacetime-point-by-spacetime-point arrangement of local properties. David Lewis (1986b, 1994a) has ...

Consider an infinite series whose items are each explained by their immediate successor. Does such explanation explain the whole or does it leave something to be explained? Hume arguably claimed that fully series. Leibniz, however, designed a very telling objection against this claim, involving of book copies. In paper, I argue Humean claim can, in certain cases, saved from Leibnizian “infinite...

There are at least three core principles that define the chance role: (1) the Principal Principle, (2) the Basic Chance Principle, and (3) the Humean Principle. These principles seem mutually incompatible. At least, no extant account of chance meets more than one of them. I offer an account of chance which meets all three: L*-chance. So the good news is that L*-chance meets (1)–(3). The bad new...