Ontologically Serious Genuinism

ABSTRACT. The most general criticism of negative causation - causation by or of absences - is that it requires negative properties or entities as an ontological addition. If that were the case, then negative causation would be a spurious phenomenon. I argue that negative causation, properly understood, requires no such addition. I develop an account that vindicates negative causation from within the framework of David Armstrong's account of singular causation. His account is among the least amenable to the possibility of negative causation, and success from within the constraints of his theory generalizes to vindicate negative causation given other accounts of causation. On Armstrong's view, the problem for negative causation is that absences can only be causes if there are negative states of affairs. However, I argue that certain negative truths can have as their truthmakers merely positive states of affairs. Since such states of affairs are those that are capable of entering into causal relations with other states of affairs, such negative truths are negative causal truths.Keywords: causation; absences; negative causation; D. M. Armstrong; genuinism; truthmakersOur intuitions about particular cases suggest that absences can be, and very often are, genuine causes. However, major theories of causation render negative causation - causation by or of absences - incoherent. Causation is typically taken to be a relation, and relations must relate something to something else. The trouble is that absences do not seem to be anything at all. This has motivated some philosophers to reject the relational view of causation (Mellor, 2004; Lewis, 2000; Clark, 2012). Nevertheless, the view that that causation relates causes to their effects is nearly philosophical orthodoxy. That causation is essentially non-relational is an interesting suggestion, but in this essay I investigate whether the relational view of causation must preclude negative causation. I think that it does not. To argue that negative causation is consistent with the relational view of causation, I reconstruct the account of causation that I take to be among the least amenable to negative causation, David Armstrong's account of singular causation. I argue that the strict actualist requirements of his account permit a wide range of true negative causal claims.In this paper, I show that negative causation is consistent with Armstrong's view of causation and, a fortiori, our pretheoretical causal realism. I sketch the basic features of Armstrong's account and reconstruct his arguments against negative causation. With this in place, I proceed to show that a certain class of important negative causal claims is consistent with Armstrong's account. This class of causal claims satisfies his theoretical requirements and avoids his argument against the possibility of negative causation. On the strongest reading of Armstrong's view, my account provides a counterexample to his argument against negative causation. On a weaker reading, my account provides an amendment to Armstrong's account, allowing it to recognize negative causation as genuine causation. On either reading, I preserve both the possibility of negative causation and the relational nature of causation.The strategy that I employ in the context of Armstrong's view of causation is instructive for how we should regard negative causation, generally. The upshot is that true negative causal claims have as their truthmakers actual states of affairs. The lesson is that causally efficacious absences are not ontologically spurious non-entities; they perfectly ordinary entities capable of bearing relations to other things. This general lesson is applicable well-beyond the confines of Armstrong's account. Any relational account of causation can recognize the causal status of absences of the sort I describe. Such absences are not metaphysical absences and they require no ontological addition. Thus, my account of genuinism - the view that absences are genuine causes - is ontologically serious genuinism. …