July 20, 2004

For All Your Causal Counterfactual Needs

Posted by Kieran

New from MIT Press comes Causation and Counterfactuals, an anthology edited by John Collins, Ned Hall and L.A. Paul. At the Pacific APA meetings, the latter was recently identified, much to her disgust, as “Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber’s wife.” Causation and Counterfactuals presents the best recent work on the counterfactual analysis of causation, which helps us understand the metaphysical underpinnings of sentences like “If you don’t buy it you’ll be sorry,” “If I hadn’t blogged so much my own book would be finished by now,” and “If everyone on CT posted a shameless plug simultaneously, who’d be responsible?” The book is also perhaps the only place to read the full, gripping saga of Billy and Suzy, a tale of passion, overdetermination, war, double prevention and appalling violence.

Posted on July 20, 2004 03:12 AM UTC
Comments

Due to my poor reading skills (or some freudian story we’ll not go in to) I thought at first the book offered a story of Double perversion. I thought “I am there!” Now that I see it’s just some boring story relating semantics and metaphysics, you can forget it.

Posted by Matt · July 20, 2004 05:14 AM

I take what I said just now about forgetting it all back. I’ve just seen from the Amazon page that people who bought this book also bought books by, “Vogue Knitting Magazine Editors”, so obviously it can’t be all bad.

Posted by Matt · July 20, 2004 05:18 AM

I’m hard at work on an analysis of the Billy-Suzy crisis, which I plan to release to a stunned world sometime soon. I guess I can identify myself as LA Paul’s husband’s coblogger.

Posted by John Quiggin · July 20, 2004 05:28 AM

Posting from a different PC I couldn’t get the trackback to work so her is my, no doubt naive, speculations on one aspect of this question.

http://ibanda.blogs.com/panchromatica/2004/07/causation_and_c.html

Anyone who knows more than me about this (ie everyone) please do tell me if I’ve completely missed the point won’t you?

Posted by Ian · July 20, 2004 11:33 AM

Technical nit-pick: as is very uncharacteristic of web apps, MT Did The Right Thing with your google link, and since you had pre-compensated for its expected breakage, stuff got encoded twice, and the link is broken.

Posted by Aidan Kehoe · July 20, 2004 02:07 PM

Oo, great. Off to Amazon for me!

Posted by Timothy Burke · July 20, 2004 03:21 PM

Technical nit-pick

If thats me I didn’t do nuffin! all I did was cut and paste the link.

Posted by ian · July 20, 2004 04:55 PM

Okay so that’s my causal counterfactual needs taken care of but now what about my casual counterfactual needs eh? What about them then eh?

Posted by Ophelia Benson · July 20, 2004 06:24 PM

At the Pacific APA meetings, the latter was recently identified, much to her disgust, as “Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber’s wife.”
Oh dear. Not by me, I hope.

Posted by Matt Weiner · July 20, 2004 08:21 PM

Does Doc Edgerton get credit for that cover photo?

Posted by VJ · July 21, 2004 10:23 AM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.