Trumping and contrastive causation

Christopher Hitchcock

pp. 227-240

in: Marc Moffett, Greg Ray (eds), The 37th annual meeting of the society for exact philosophy, Synthese 181 (2), 2011.

Abstract

Jonathan Schaffer introduced a new type of causal structure called ‘trumping’. According to Schaffer, trumping is a species of causal preemption. Both Schaffer and I have argued that causation has a contrastive structure. In this paper, I analyze the structure of trumping cases from the perspective of contrastive causation, and argue that the case is much more complex than it first appears. Nonetheless, there is little reason to regard trumping as a species of causal preemption.

Cited authors

Schaffer Jonathan