Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 9, 2023

 

Disposition: The Concept of Causation Reconstructed

(Abstract)

 

Fei Duoyi

 

Mainstream theories of causation appeal to conditional relations between events or states of affairs, so that causal judgments become binary “yes” or “no” answers based on the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of conditional relations. However, attempts to break down or refine the conditions have hit a bottleneck: conditional relations assume that causality is determined by listing a set of factors, but in real situations the cause may not satisfy any of the conditions or combinations thereof. Dispositionalism takes a new approach: it refuses to reduce causality to dependence between discrete things. Causes tend to lead to their effects, and disposition presents a continuum rather than an all-or-nothing state. As an intrinsic capacity, the mystery of disposition producing outcomes can be revealed through a mechanism that manifests itself in an initial trigger that initiates the causal process, a continuous amplification of reciprocal manifestations, and a steady progression from the beginning to the end. In this model, the search for causation is expressed as a dynamic process that takes into account not only the object itself and deals with the causality of the variable at a single point in time, but also takes into account the pattern of change in the variable’s nearest spatial and temporal neighborhood. This explains why outcomes do not necessarily occur even when specific conditions are fulfilled, and why a factor may be the cause of an outcome even in the absence of a constant conjunction.