Counterfactual Theories of Causation

The basic idea of counterfactual theories of causation is that the meaning of causal claims can be explained in terms of counterfactual conditionals of the form “If A had not occurred, C would not have occurred”. Most counterfactual analyses have focused on claims of the form “event c caused event e”, describing ‘singular’ or ‘token’ or ‘actual’ causation. Such analyses have become popular since the development in the 1970s of possible world semantics for counterfactuals. The best-known counterfactual analysis of causation is David Lewis’s (1973b) theory. However, intense discussion over forty years has cast doubt on the adequacy of any simple analysis of singular causation in terms of counterfactuals. Recent years have seen a proliferation of different refinements of the basic idea; the ‘structural equations’ or ‘causal modelling’ framework is currently the most popular way of cashing out the relationship between causation and counterfactuals.

The guiding idea behind counterfactual analyses of causation is the thought that – as David Lewis puts it – “We think of a cause as something that makes a difference, and the difference it makes must be a difference from what would have happened without it. Had it been absent, its effects – some of them, at least, and usually all – would have been absent as well” (1973b, 161).

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