Powers

Abstract

I have two quite distinct themes I would like to bring together here. One concerns the metaphysical status of causality, and one way to get at that is to look closely at the role of causal principles in classical mechanics. The other concerns the role of causal relations in analysing choice under certainty, where the uncertainty may appear to be of two sorts — causal uncertainty, or epistemic uncertainty. The latter sort of problem has attracted a lot of attention and has motivated a variety of notions of utility, of probability, of choice principles, and so on.