The Misguided Sociology of Causal Action in Classical Physics

In response to Bertrand Russell’s argument that causation does not appear in physics, Mark Steiner (1986) has claimed that though causation is not found in the laws of physics, it is nonetheless part of the lore of physics.  Where it allegedly enters the lore is in the rejection of certain equations (or of solutions of equations) as “violating our ordinary conception of causality.”  Like Steiner, Mathis Frisch (2005) has claimed that “…physicists themselves appear to be guided by causal considerations in their assessment of [a] theory.”  Since the equations in question do not violate Einstein’s theory of relativity, physicists are sometimes thought to be appealing rather directly to an extra-theoretical constraint having to do with our concept of causality.  To many philosophers of science, these claims of Steiner and Frisch will undoubtedly seem merely sociological considerations that by themselves give us no good reasons to think that there are genuine, well-motivated “causal constraints” on physical theorizing.  In this talk, I will examine what worries physicists with respect to situations that are declared “acausal” by exploring when they make such declarations and when they do not.  In so doing, we shall see that there genuinely are good reasons in certain circumstances to either worry about or even rule out the situation dubbed “acausal.”  But, once we see what those reasons are, it is doubtful that they have much to do with violations of our ordinary conception of causality.  Since these genuine reasons are typically known to physicists, I think that even as a purely sociological matter the claims above do not capture the actual motivating factors.