Causation and Counterfactuals

edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, and L. A. Paul

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
6 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical
means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in
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bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Causation and counterfactuals / edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, and L. A. Paul.
p. cm. — (Representation and mind)
‘‘A Bradford book.’’
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-03317-8 (hc. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-262-53256-5 (pb. : alk. paper)
1. Causation. 2. Counterfactuals (Logic). I. Collins, John David. II. Hall, Edward J.
(Edward Jonathan), 1966– . III. Paul, L. A. (Laurie Ann), 1966– . IV. Series.
BD541.C192 2004
122—dc22 2003060612

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of David Lewis
10 Void and Object

David Lewis

1 The Deadly Void

The void is deadly. If you were cast into a void, it would cause you to die in just a
few minutes. It would suck the air from your lungs. It would boil your blood. It
would drain the warmth from your body. And it would inflate enclosures in your
body until they burst.1
What I’ve said is literally true, yet it may be misleading. When the void sucks
away the air, it does not exert an attractive force on the air. It is not like a magnet
sucking up iron filings. Rather, the air molecules collide and exert repulsive forces
on one another; these forces constitute a pressure that, if unresisted, causes the air to
expand and disperse; the void exerts no force to resist the pressure; and that is why
the air departs from the lungs.
Likewise, when the void boils the blood, there is no flow of energy from the void
into the blood. It isn’t like a stove boiling a kettle of water. The blood is already
warm enough to boil, if its vapor pressure is unresisted; the void exerts no counter-
pressure; and so the boiling goes unprevented.
Likewise, when the void drains your warmth, what happens is that your thermal
energy, left to itself, tends to dissipate; and the void provides no influx of energy to
replace the departing heat.
And when the void inflates enclosures, again what happens is that the enclosed
fluids exert pressure and the void exerts no counterpressure. So nothing prevents the
outward pressure from doing damage.
In short, you are kept alive by forces and flows of energy that come from the ob-
jects that surround you. If, instead of objects, you were surrounded by a void, these
life-sustaining forces and flows would cease. Without them, you would soon die.
That is how the void causes death. It is deadly not because it exerts forces and sup-
plies energy, but because it doesn’t.

2 Void and Vacuum

The deadly e¤ects of a void would be just like those of a commonplace vacuum.
Nevertheless, I distinguish the two. The more we learn about the vacuum, the more
we find out that it is full of causally active objects: force fields, photons, and ‘‘vir-
tual’’ particles. Spacetime itself, if curved, can serve as a repository of energy. And
perhaps that is not the end. The void, on the other hand, is entirely empty. Thus, if
there is a vacuum within these four walls, there may be quite a lot of objects between
278 D. Lewis

the walls that are capable of exerting forces and supplying energy. Whereas if there is
a void within these walls, then (even though the walls are some distance apart) there
is nothing at all between the walls. What?—Not even any spacetime? Not even any
flat, causally inert spacetime?—No, not even any spacetime. Nothing at all.
The void is what we used to think the vacuum was. It is what the vacuum is ac-
cording to a relational theory of spacetime, according to which particles are sur-
rounded by nothing at all, and are separated not in virtue of substantival spacetime
between them but rather by direct external distance relations from one particle to
another.
Whether or not any such relational theory is true, I take it to be, in some good
sense, a genuine possibility for the world. Nothing rules it out a priori. It is a
‘‘broadly logical’’ or ‘‘conceptual’’ possibility. But conceptual possibility is governed
by a combinatorial principle that says that we can generate new possibilities by
patching together (copies of ) parts of other possibilities.2 So if a relationist world
is possible, and a world full of substantival spacetime is likewise possible, then by
patching together parts of these two worlds, we get a world that consists of sub-
stantival spacetime interrupted by occasional voids. The walls and the spacetime
within them are distinct existences; ergo it is possible for either one to exist without
the other. If the walls exist without the spacetime (and without any other objects be-
tween the walls) then there is a void between the walls.
A void is conceptually possible. But probably it is impossible in another sense: It
violates the laws of nature. Nothing you or nature can do will make a void, but only
a vacuum. Our horrific counterfactuals about what would happen if you were cast
into a void are contrary not only to fact but to law.
Yet they are none the worse for that. It is no mistake to conflate the deadly void
and the deadly vacuum in our counterfactual reasoning, because the di¤erence be-
tween the two makes very little di¤erence to the lethal e¤ects. If you were cast into
the vacuum of outer space, high-energy photons would be the least of your problems.
It is the absences that would do you in. And when it comes to absences, the void is
like the vacuum, only more so. Therefore, although presumably we may not enter-
tain the supposition that you are cast into a void under laws that are exactly those of
the actual world, we know very well which features of actuality to hold fixed in sup-
posing there to be a void.

3 Menzies on Causation as Intrinsic

Peter Menzies has identified a source of dissatisfaction with our most popular ap-
proaches to the analysis of causation.3 We would prefer, he says, to think of the
Void and Object 279

causal relation as an intrinsic relation between cause and e¤ect: a relation that is
instantiated by a pair of events just in virtue of the (natural) properties and relations
of that pair itself, and so supervenes just on the (natural) properties and relations of
the pair; a relation that is independent of the (natural) properties and relations of all
things that are entirely distinct from that pair; and hence a relation that would be
instantiated equally by any other pair of events that shared exactly those (natural)
properties and relations. It would be instantiated equally by any such duplicate pair
regardless of whether the duplicate pair was actual or merely possible; regardless of
whether the duplicate pair was all alone in its universe or whether it was accom-
panied by contingent objects distinct from itself; and regardless of what pattern was
constituted by the accompanying objects, if there were any.4
Two events c and e stand in a relation of constant conjunction i¤, throughout the
universe, there are many events of the same kind as c, and every one of them is
accompanied by an event of the same kind as e. An analysis that identifies cau-
sation with constant conjunction is subject to many di‰culties and admits of many
improvements, but one di‰culty remains: constant conjunction is not an intrinsic
relation, and neither is any of its improved descendants.
Two events c and e stand in a relation of counterfactual dependence i¤, if c had
not occurred, e would not have occurred either.5 A counterfactual analysis of causa-
tion is again in need of improvement. We need to consider a pattern of counter-
factuals that goes well beyond the simple counterfactual dependence of e on c.6
Whatever this pattern may be, it obtains in virtue of whatever makes single counter-
factuals true or false. And in this, a large part is played by the laws of nature. (That
is so even when we entertain counterlegal suppositions. We may have to bend the
laws, but we do not give them away altogether.) And laws, whatever else they may
be, are at least exceptionless regularities throughout the universe (or some large part
of the universe). So counterfactual dependence is not an intrinsic relation, and nei-
ther is any of its improved descendants.
If we thought that causation ought to be analyzed as an intrinsic relation between
events, then constant-conjunction analyses and counterfactual analyses would both
be in trouble. The trouble would go deep. It would persist no matter how well we
succeeded in the game of counterexamples and improvements.

4 Menzies on Causal Functionalism

What sort of analysis of causation would portray the causal relation as intrinsic?
Menzies o¤ers a plausible recipe: he applies the ‘‘Canberra plan’’ to causation.7 We
start with a platitudinous folk theory of the causal relation. This theory says that the
280 D. Lewis

causal relation does so-and-so and such-and-such. Thereby it specifies a functional

role that the causal relation is said to occupy. We stipulate that the causal relation is
the relation, if there is one, that does in fact occupy the specified role.
(At least, that is the ideal case. But if there is no unique relation that perfectly
occupies the role, we might resort to semantic satisficing. We might grant that an
imperfect occupant of the role is an imperfect, but good enough, deserver of the
name ‘‘causal relation,’’ if it comes near enough and there is no better candidate to
be had. Or if several candidates were tied for best, so that they deserved the name
equally, we might grant them equal claim by treating the name as ambiguous or in-
determinate in reference.)8
Menzies lists three ‘‘crucial platitudes.’’ First, the causal relation is a relation be-
tween wholly distinct events. Second, it is a relation that is intrinsic to the event-pairs
that instantiate it. Third, it is typically, though perhaps not invariably, associated
with a probabilistic version of counterfactual dependence. In most cases in which it
relates an event c to an event e, though perhaps not in a minority of atypical cases,
the actual objective single-case probability of event e is substantially higher than it
would have been if c had not occurred. (For instance, in the most extreme case, the
actual probability of e is exactly 1, without even an infinitesimal chance of not-e;
whereas without c, the probability of e would have been exactly 0, without even an
infinitesimal chance of e, so that e would definitely not have occurred.)
By building the intrinsic character of the causal relation into the definitive func-
tional role as a crucial platitude, Menzies makes sure that the occupant of the role, if
there is one (and if it is a perfect occupant) must be an intrinsic relation. Does this
strategy satisfy Menzies’s desideratum?
Not entirely. In this case, as in others, the functionalist strategy creates an ambi-
guity. We have the functional role; we have the relation that is the actual occupant of
that role. But presumably it is a contingent matter what relation occupies the role. In
a di¤erent possible world, perhaps with di¤erent laws of nature, some di¤erent rela-
tion may occupy the role. Now let c and e be two events that both occur in some
possible world w. Shall we say that c causes e i¤ c stands to e in the relation that
occupies the role in actuality? Or i¤ c stands to e in the relation that occupies the
role in world w? If we make the former decision, then indeed (at least if the actual
occupation of the role is perfect) causation is an intrinsic relation. But if we make the
latter decision, then causation—by which I mean the relation such that, for any
events c and e in any world w, c bears it to e in w i¤ c causes e in w—will be a dis-
junctive a¤air. It will not be the same as any of the various role-occupants in the
various worlds.9 So even if all these role-occupants are intrinsic relations, it will not
follow that causation itself is an intrinsic relation.
Void and Object 281

The folk well might have left this subtle ambiguity unresolved. Indeed, they might
never have noticed it. After all, they are mostly interested in causation as it takes
place here in our actual world (or in worlds similar enough to ours that they could be
expected to have the same role-occupant). What mostly matters is that the actual
occupant of the role is an intrinsic relation. So I think that if Menzies’s strategy is
otherwise successful, then it satisfies his intuitive desideratum quite well enough. But
we cannot say unequivocally that he has analyzed causation as an intrinsic relation.

5 Causal Functionalism and the Void

Menzies’s strategy is not otherwise successful. What purports to be a general anal-

ysis of causation turns out to apply only to one kind of causation. Causation by the
void, and causation by absences more generally, have no place in Menzies’s account.
Omission is omitted.
Menzies’s topic is the causal relation. A relation requires relata. The void a¤ords
no causal relata: There’s nothing there at all, so there’s nothing for events to happen
to, so the void is devoid of events. And even if we allow causal relata to belong to
other categories, still there would be none of them in the void—because there’s
nothing at all in the void. A vacuum, or an almost-void that still contains flat, inert
spacetime, is almost as bad. It has parts; and it may contain events in some tolerant
sense of that word. But it contains nothing that could plausibly be said to bear a
causal relation to the death of a victim. The victim dies, as I said before, not because
of what is there, but because of what isn’t. Indeed, whenever any e¤ect is caused by
an absence of anything, we have the problem of the missing relatum. (And likewise
whenever anything causes an absence.) A void, being the absence of any objects at
all, is just the most extreme case of an absence.
Faced with the problem of the missing relatum, we have four possible lines of
response.
(1) We could deny, in the face of compelling examples to the contrary, that ab-
sences ever cause anything. We could deny, for instance, that the void is deadly.
(Likewise, we could deny that anything ever causes an absence. In other words, we
could deny that there is any such thing as prevention.) Simply to state this response is
to complete the reductio against it.
(2) We could reify absences nonreductively. A void, so we might say, is a sui gen-
eris entity, but it is none the worse for that. It is eligible to serve as a causal rela-
tum. It springs up automatically and necessarily whenever, and only whenever, all
else goes away; it is conceptually impossible not to have a void between the walls and
not to have anything else there either. So much the worse, says the reifier, for the
282 D. Lewis

combinatorial principle, which claims that existential statements about distinct things
are independent.10
(3) We could reify absences reductively. We could identify absences with compar-
atively uncontroversial objects that, as others would say, are somehow associated
with those absences. For instance, we could identify a hole with the hole-lining that,
as we’d normally say, immediately surrounds the hole. (Strange to say, some holes
are made of cheese and some of limestone! Strange to say, no holes are exactly where
we would have thought they were!) Or we could identify an absence with a bit of
unoccupied spacetime, if we were not such uncompromising combinatorialists as to
countenance an absence of spacetime itself. One way or another, we can cook up
ersatz absences to serve as relata of the causal relation—though surely they will seem
to be the wrong relata, since we don’t really think of these ersatz absences as hav-
ing the same e¤ects (or causes) as the absences they stand in for.11 We might, for
instance, imitate the identification of holes and hole-linings on a grander scale. Take
the most inclusive void of all; and take the mereological fusion of all objects of what-
ever kind. On the principle of identifying hole with hole-lining, and void with sur-
rounding objects, we might identify this greatest void with the greatest object.12
(4) The best response is to concede that a void is nothing at all, and that a lesser
absence is nothing relevant at all and therefore cannot furnish causal relata. Yet
absences can be causes and e¤ects. So I insist, contra Menzies, that causation cannot
always be the bearing of a causal relation. No theory of the causal relation, neither
Menzies’s theory nor any other, can be the whole story of causation.
The intrinsic character of causation is not our present problem. I do indeed fear
that the intrinsic character of causation is more a hasty generalization than an a
priori desideratum.13 But even if we struck the intrinsic character of causation o¤
our list of folk platitudes, we’d still be trying to characterize the causal relation, so
we’d still be in trouble. Any relation needs relata, whether it is intrinsic or not. So the
problem of missing relata hits any relational analysis of causation.14
But does any analysis escape the problem of missing relata?—Yes; a counterfactual
analysis escapes. We do not have to reify the void in order to ask what would have
happened if the void had not been there. The void causes death to one who is cast
into it because if, instead, he had been surrounded by suitable objects, he would not
have died. (Here we must assume that if the victim had not been surrounded by the
void, he would instead have been surrounded by the life-sustaining objects that nor-
mally surround us—not by liquid nitrogen, or clouds of nerve gas, or a hail of bul-
lets.) Likewise for lesser absences. If the cause is an absence, then to suppose away
the cause counterfactually is not to attend to some remarkable entity and suppose
Void and Object 283

that it does not exist. Rather, we need only suppose that some unremarkable entity
does exist. Absences are spooky things, and we’d do best not to take them seriously.
But absences of absences are no problem.
Note well that in defending a counterfactual analysis, I am not claiming that
all causation consists in a relation of counterfactual dependence between (distinct)
events. That theory would not escape the problem of missing relata. A relation of
counterfactual dependence is still a relation, a relation still needs relata, and absences
still fail to provide the needed relata. The counterfactual analysis escapes the prob-
lem because, when the relata go missing, it can do without any causal relation at all.

6 Menzies’s Analysis Retargeted

So far, I have been arguing that Menzies is not entirely right. But in fact I think that
a large part of what he says is right, can be separated from the parts that are wrong,
and can be accepted even by one who favors a counterfactual analysis. That will be
our business for the rest of this essay. Menzies has not given us a fully general anal-
ysis of causation, but he has given us something. I think he has given us the right
analysis of the wrong analysandum. Let us introduce a name for that which Men-
zies’s functionalist analysis succeeds in analyzing. Let us call it bi¤. That word enjoys
some uno‰cial currency among those who conceive of causation much as Menzies
does; so let it be our word for the kind of causation that fits their conception, even if
we accept as we should that this is not the only kind of causation.
A theory built around Menzies’s three ‘‘crucial platitudes’’ specifies a functional
role for a relation: an intrinsic relation between distinct events that is typically, but
perhaps not invariably, associated with a probabilistic version of counterfactual de-
pendence. Bi¤ is defined to be the occupant of this functional role, if such there be.
There is the actual occupant of the bi¤-role, unless we are badly wrong about the
ways of our world. Other possible worlds, some of them, might have di¤erent rela-
tions occupying the bi¤-role. In case of imperfect or nonunique occupation of the
bi¤-role, we might resort to semantic satisficing in the ways already considered.
What sort of relation might bi¤ be? We can echo much of what Menzies says,
overlooking that he says it not about bi¤ but about causation.15 Bi¤—the actual
occupant—might, or it might not, be some relation well known to physics. It
might, for instance, be force. (More precisely, it might be the relation of exerting a
force upon.) Or, taking up David Fair’s suggestion about the actual nature of
causation,16 it might be a relation of transfer of energy or momentum. It might
be a Humean-supervenient relation. Or it might be a relation posited by some
284 D. Lewis

anti-Humean metaphysic of nomological necessity.17 It might be a perfectly natural

relation, or it might be more or less disjunctive. Myself, I’d like to think that the
actual occupant of the bi¤-role is Humean-supervenient, physical, and at least fairly
natural; but nothing else I shall say here is premised on that hope.
Bi¤ might have been one of the relations posited by bygone physical theories that
have turned out to be false in our actual world, but are true in various other worlds.
Some worlds obey Aristotelian dynamics; the occupant of the bi¤-role in such a world
might be a kind of ‘‘force,’’ if we may call it that, which is proportional to velocity
rather than acceleration. Or the occupant of the bi¤-role might have been a relation
of transfer of impetus, where impetus is rather like inertia except that it fades away
spontaneously, like the heat in a red-hot poker.18 Or bi¤ might have been some
otherworldly physical relation unlike anything that has ever crossed our minds.
Or bi¤ might have been something even stranger. Consider a possible world where
occasionalism is true: God is a third party to every causal relationship between events
in nature. Then the best available candidate to occupy the bi¤-role would be an im-
perfect occupant of the role and an imperfect deserver of the name. It would be
a relation between events that did not require accompaniment by anything else in
nature but did require accompaniment by God; so it would not be, strictly speaking,
an intrinsic relation. Yet we could reasonably judge that this imperfect candidate
deserved the name quite well enough.

7 Varieties of Causation

Causation by absence is not an instance of bi¤. Nevertheless it can be described in

terms of bi¤. If you were cast into the deadly void, the absences that would kill
you would be absences of bi¤; because, if instead you were surrounded by suitable
objects, events involving those objects would stand in the bi¤-relation to the events
that would constitute your continuing life. Equivalently: Events involving those ob-
jects would prevent the event of your death by standing in the bi¤-relation to events
incompatible with it.
Beginning with bi¤ itself, we can define several varieties of causation.

(1) Event c directly causes event e i¤ c stands to e in the relation that occupies the
bi¤-role. For short: i¤ c bi¤s e.

(2) The absence of any event of kind C directly causes event e i¤, had there been
an event c of kind C, c would or might have bi¤ed some event d incompatible with
event e.
Void and Object 285

(3) Event c directly causes the absence of any event of kind E i¤ c bi¤s some event
d incompatible with any event of kind E.
(4) The absence of any event of kind C directly causes the absence of any event of
kind E i¤, had there been an event c of kind C, c would or might have bi¤ed some
event e of kind E.19

But there are also cases of indirect causation: An event (or absence) c causes an
event (or absence) that then causes another event (or absence) e. Or c may cause both
an event and an absence, which then jointly cause e. Or there may be a chain with
three steps, or four, or any number. Cases of indirect causation need not reduce to
direct causation. Take, for example, a case of causation by double prevention: Event
c causes the absence of any event of kind D, which absence in turn causes event e.20
It does not follow, and it may be false, that c bi¤s e. Even if bi¤ itself is intrinsic, the
causal relation of c to e in cases of double prevention is sometimes extrinsic.21
So the functional analysis of bi¤ a¤ords a basis for defining many varieties of
causation. All the varieties there could possibly be? We have no assurance of that.
Maybe some possible worlds have no occupant at all of the bi¤-role, not even an
imperfect occupant; and maybe in some such worlds the actual occupant of the bi¤-
role also is nowhere to be found. And when we depart counterfactually from such
a bi¿ess world, taking care to avoid gratuitous di¤erences from our starting point,
presumably the counterfactual situations we reach will be equally bi¿ess. Yet might
there not be some sort of causation in a bi¿ess world? Maybe all the causal relations
of events in such a world are thoroughly extrinsic, far more so than in the case of the
occasionalist world we imagined before. The ‘‘intuition’’ of the intrinsic character of
causation may indeed be right for one basic variety of causation in the actual world,
but it is by no means given a priori.

8 Ambiguity? Disjunction?

What shall we conclude from this proliferation of di¤erent varieties of causation?

Has it turned out that we have not one concept of causation but many, so that many
di¤erent analyses are required to capture the many di¤erent senses of the word
‘‘cause’’? Or is it rather that our one concept of causation is a radically disjunctive
concept, so that a correct analysis must consist in a long list of alternative cases?
We’re in trouble either way.
If causation in a bi¿ess world is possible, that is a problem equally for both
hypotheses. On the many-concepts hypothesis, the problem is that one concept of
286 D. Lewis

causation (at least) will never be reached by our chain of definitions starting with the
functional definition of bi¤. On the disjunctive-concept hypothesis, the problem is
that one disjunct (at least) will never be reached. To complete an inventory of senses,
or to complete the disjunctive analysis of the single sense, it seems that we must find
some di¤erent starting point.
Another problem for the many-concept hypothesis is that it requires distinctions in
our thinking that sometimes we do not make, need not make, and are in no position
to make. If one event directly causes another, for instance, that is causation in one
sense; whereas if one event causes another indirectly, in a case of double prevention
(or in some still more indirect case) that is causation in a di¤erent sense. But when we
neither know nor care whether the causation we have in mind is direct or indirect,
what concept of causation are we employing then?
(Example: The frightened passenger pulls the cord, knowing that this will cause the
train to stop. Being moderately well informed, he knows that pulling the cord opens
a valve connecting a reservoir to the outside air. The changed pressure in the reser-
voir changes the balance of forces on the brake shoes, thereby applying the brakes
and stopping the train. But the passenger doesn’t know whether this train is fitted
with air brakes or vacuum brakes. If air brakes, then the air in the reservoir is nor-
mally above atmospheric pressure; so opening the valve lowers the pressure and
removes a force, and so the stopping of the train is a case of double prevention. If
vacuum brakes, then the air in the reservoir is normally below atmospheric pressure;
so opening the valve raises the pressure and applies a force, and so the stopping of
the train is a case of direct causation. But so long as he can cause the train to stop,
it’s all the same to the passenger what kind of causation it is.)
The disjunctive-concept hypothesis now seems better. But it faces an urgent, if not
absolutely compulsory, question. Why do we disjoin exactly these disjuncts? Why is
the disjunction of just this long list of alternatives anything more than a miscellane-
ous gerrymander? What makes it a natural kind?
It is as if we came upon some people who had a peculiar taxonomy for birds. They
group together a kind that includes swans, but not ducks or geese; eagles and hawks,
but not vultures; magpies and crows, but not ravens or currawongs or mudlarks, and
indeed no other birds at all. We would be entitled to ask why just these birds are
included, and it would not be good enough just to say that all classes are equally
classes, and that these people happen to have picked out this class.
The many-concepts hypothesis and the disjunctive-concept hypothesis are both un-
satisfactory. Yet if we analyze causation by starting with the functional analysis of
bi¤, and going on to define other varieties of causation one by one in terms of bi¤,
that is the choice we come to.
Void and Object 287

9 Conclusion

I think we are aiming our answers at the wrong question. Menzies went wrong
when he took the functional definition of bi¤ to be the whole of a conceptual analy-
sis of causation. We still go wrong if we take it to be even a first step toward con-
ceptual analysis. We should look elsewhere for a conceptual analysis. And we should
look elsewhere for a question to which the invocation of bi¤ a¤ords a satisfactory
answer.
What is causation? As a matter of analytic necessity, across all possible worlds,
what is the unified necessary and su‰cient condition for causation?—It is somehow
a matter of counterfactual dependence of events (or absences) on other events (or
absences).
What is causation? As a matter of contingent fact, what is the feature of this
world, and of other possible worlds su‰ciently like it, on which the truth values of
causal ascriptions supervene?—It is bi¤: the pattern of relatedness of events to one
another by the relation that is the actual occupant of the bi¤-role. Bi¤ is literally the
basic kind of causation, in this world anyway: the basis on which other varieties of
causation supervene.
Two di¤erent answers to two di¤erent questions. They are not in competition. I
conjecture that both are right.
If bi¤ is o¤ered not as conceptual analysis but as a basis for supervenience, then it
matters little if the varieties of causation, when described in terms of bi¤, are many
and diverse. Unifying the miscellany is a job for conceptual analysis. And if bi¤ is
o¤ered as a supervenience basis for causation as it takes place here in our world, then
the possibility that some other variety of causation takes place in bi¿ess worlds re-
mote from actuality is no cause for alarm.
Let me say more fully what I have in mind. Doubtless all will agree that the visual
qualities of dot-matrix pictures—say, the quality of looking cluttered—supervene on
the arrangement of light and dark pixels, at least if we restrict our attention to black
and white pictures with maximum contrast. This means that no two possible pictures,
at least no two that both fall within our restricted class, di¤er in their visual qualities
without also di¤ering in their arrangement of pixels. If one looks cluttered and the
other doesn’t, they cannot be alike pixel for pixel. Likewise, the thesis under consid-
eration says that no two possible worlds, or at least no two that fall within a certain
restricted class, di¤er in respect of the truth values of causal ascriptions without also
di¤ering in their bi¤-relations. At least one bi¤-related pair of events in one world
must fail to correspond to any bi¤-related pair in the other world, and that is what
makes the causal di¤erence.
288 D. Lewis

The narrower is the restricted class of worlds within which all causation is said to
supervene on bi¤, the weaker and safer and less interesting our thesis will be. How
shall we strike the balance between safety and interest? Since we are especially inter-
ested in causation as it takes place in our actual world, the actual world had better
fall within the restricted class. But our supervenience thesis, if restricted to one single
world, would be utterly trivial; and besides, our interest extends at least to worlds
that only narrowly escape being actual. I propose that the restricted class should
consist of exactly those worlds that satisfy two conditions. (1) They are worlds where
the relation that occupies the bi¤-role is the same relation that occupies that role in
actuality. And (2) they are worlds where the laws of nature are the same as the actual
laws of nature.
Condition (2) is not motivated just by caution. Remember our starting point: when
the void, or some lesser absence, causes an e¤ect, that is because of the absence of
what it takes to prevent that e¤ect (nothing counteracts the vapor pressure that
would cause warm blood to boil, and so on). At any rate, that is how causation by
absences works under the actual laws of nature, or so we think. But might it not be
otherwise under di¤erent laws? Suppose there were a fundamental law that said that
a certain spell would turn a prince into a frog i¤ that prince was within a mile of the
edge of a void. Under such a law, a void could cause a transmogrification in a way
that had nothing to do with absence of bi¤. There could be such a law—why not?
But it is irrelevant to capturing our opinions about how causation works in actuality.
So we unabashedly bar the monster: We stipulate that a world with such a law falls
outside the range to which our actuality-centered supervenience thesis is meant to
apply. And for good measure, but perhaps with needless caution, we likewise stipu-
late that all worlds that depart from the laws of actuality fall outside the range.
It is because our supervenience thesis is restricted, and because the restriction
makes reference to actuality, that our thesis is contingent. Had we started from some
di¤erent possible world, and restricted according to the same two conditions, we
would have restricted the thesis to a di¤erent class of worlds. The thesis restricted to
worlds that satisfy our conditions relative to this world may be true, but the thesis
restricted to worlds that satisfy the same conditions relative to some other world may
be false. Or, if we are unlucky, vice versa.
We saw how causation by absences, at least as it takes place in our actual world,
could be defined piecemeal using various counterfactuals about bi¤. So if all causa-
tion is to supervene on bi¤, these counterfactuals about bi¤ must supervene on bi¤.
That is plausible enough. For when we depart counterfactually from a given world,
we make no gratuitous changes. Except insofar as the supposition we are making
requires di¤erences, the character of the given world carries over into the counter-
Void and Object 289

factual situation. In particular, the laws governing bi¤ tend to carry over.22 Return,
one last time, to the victim cast into the void (or into something as much like a void
as the actual laws allow). If instead he were surrounded by suitable objects, those
objects would conform to the laws that actually govern bi¤. If not, that would be a
gratuitous di¤erence between the counterfactual situation and the actual world.

Notes

1. Here I follow the lead of Martin (1996): ‘‘it seems that the void has . . . terrible causal powers’’ (p. 62).
Martin later says that voids are ‘‘causally relevant but not causally operative’’ (p. 64), but I do not know
what he means by this.
2. On combinatorial principles see my (1986e), pp. 86–92; and Armstrong (1989).
3. Menzies (1996) and (1999). Menzies might better have suggested not that causation is an intrinsic rela-
tion, but rather that being a causal chain is an intrinsic property. For present purposes, we may leave this
correction unmentioned.
4. Here I have combined definitions of intrinsic relations taken from my (1983b), n. 16; and from Langton
and Lewis (1998). These definitions di¤er, but can be expected to pick out the same class of relations.
5. See my (1973a) and (1986b).
6. See my ‘‘Causation as Influence,’’ chapter 3 in this volume.
7. Menzies (1996). The Canberra plan is modeled on analytic functionalism in the philosophy of mind, and
on Carnap’s proposal for defining analyticity in a theoretical language. See Carnap (1963).
8. See Bedard (1993).
9. It will be what I called a ‘‘diagonalized sense’’ in my (1970).
10. Casati and Varzi (1994) defend nonreductive reification of holes: Holes are immaterial bodies that
depend for their existence on the arrangement of matter. Martin, in his (1996), is probably best classed as a
nonreductive reifier, despite his emphatic warnings that absences are not things. (His conflicting suggestion
that they are ‘‘localized states of the universe’’ would seem to be retracted by his denial that they are nat-
ural properties of things [p. 58]. The universe would seem to be a thing, states would seem to be properties,
and properties of local emptiness would seem to be not unnatural.)
11. Lewis and Lewis (1970) is, for the most part, a dialogue between a reductive and a nonreductive reifier.
Neither one notices the option of paraphrasing hole-statements in terms of quantification over ersatz holes
without also claiming that holes are identical to ersatz holes. Frank Jackson calls attention to that option
in his (1977), p. 132.
12. Or, since the greatest object has the property of totality—of being all there is—we might identify the
greatest void with the having by that object of the property of totality. This ersatz void is as wrong as it
can be in its e¤ects (and causes): It causes what objects cause, not what the void unassisted by objects
causes. And it is as wrong as it can be in its location, being exactly where the void isn’t. It violates a com-
binatorial principle, since it cannot possibly coexist with any extra object. For that very reason it is of
doubtful ontological status, being a having of a merely extrinsic property.
D. M. Armstrong uses havings of totality as truthmakers for negative existential statements, inter alia in
his (1997), chapter 13. But he never asks these totality states of a¤airs to serve as ersatz absences.
13. See ‘‘Causation as Influence,’’ chapter 3 in this volume.
14. How about an analysis in terms of a relation between propositions, where, in the case of causation by
or of an absence, one of the related propositions is a negative existential?—Not problematic; but not what
I’d call a relational analysis of causation. We don’t want to say that a cause- or e¤ect-describing proposi-
tion is itself the cause or e¤ect.
290 D. Lewis

15. Menzies (1999).

16. Fair (1979).
17. It might for instance be the relation of instantiating a law, where a law is taken to be at once a state of
a¤airs involving universals and a universal in its own right. See Heathcote and Armstrong (1991).
18. See Butterfield (1957), pp. 8–13.
19. The definitions of cases (2)–(4) resemble, but di¤er from, the definitions given in Fair (1979), p. 247,
and also the somewhat di¤erent definitions given in the final section of Dowe (1999). Note that these
counterfactual definitions are not the same as the counterfactuals about events and absences that would
appear in a counterfactual analysis of causation.
20. See Ned Hall, ‘‘Two Concepts of Causation,’’ chapter 9 in this volume; and McDermott (1995a).
21. As is noted in McDermott (1995a) in connection with his example of Nixon, Haig, and Joe Blow’s
breakfast. See also the billiard-ball example in ‘‘Causation as Influence,’’ p. 84 of this volume.
22. Unless violating a law yields the least departure overall. See Lewis (1979a).