Causation, Intentionality, and the Case for Occasionalism

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Author: Walter OttWalter Ott
Affiliation: Virginia Tech
Source: Causation 1500-2000, 2008
Keywords: causation, occasionalism , intentionality, Malebranche  [edit]

@inbook{ott2008c,
    author = "Ott, Walter",
    title = {Causation, Intentionality, and the Case for Occasionalism},
    booktitle = "Causation 1500-2000",
    year = "2008"}

Synopsis

Despite their influence on later philosophers such as Hume, Malebranche’s central arguments for occasionalism remain deeply puzzling. In The Search After TruthThe Search After Truth, Malebranche argues that a causal connection between a and b could obtain only if those events were necessarily connected. But if there were such a necessary connection, it would be impossible to conceive of a’s occurring without b. God’s will and its effects aside, we can always conceive of this happening; thus there is no necessary connection, and hence no genuine causal connection, between a and b. The real puzzle about this kind of argument has never been its form or structure but rather who is supposed to be bothered by it. Even if we accept that the connection between two events is not logically necessary, why should anyone believe that it is not a bona fide instance of causation? The ‘no necessary connection’ argument seems to be aimed at a straw man. I argue that Malebranche in fact gets it right: his philosophical opponents, and a key strand of scholasticism in particular, do indeed hold that causation requires logical, not nomological, necessitation.

Solving this problem raises another. Even if the conflation of logical and causal necessity is intelligible in its context, why is Malebranche so quick to deny that finite relata, and bodies in particular, can be causes? Suárez, for example, endorses the logical necessity requirement but also holds that objects can be secondary causes in virtue of their powers. I argue that Malebranche’s dismissal of bodies as causes makes sense only if the requisite tie between cause and effect involves intentionality. The scholastics’ notion of power underwrites the necessary connection between causes and effects. A power is characterized by its ‘esse-ad’ or ‘being-toward,’ its intrinsic directedness toward non-actual states of affairs. Like Descartes, Malebranche rejects the attribution of powers to bodies on the grounds that esse-ad amounts to intentionality, a feature only minds possess. The flip side of this, however, is that Malebranche accepts the need for precisely the kind of connection intentionality alone can provide. What makes a divine volition a suitable causal relatum is the intentional nature that ties it to its effects, since the propositional content of a divine volition just is that volition’s effect. Having taken over key elements of the scholastic conception of causation, Malebranche finds that in the context of mechanism nothing but God’s will can fit this conception.

The intentionality requirement can also help us understand Malebranche’s argument against attributing causal powers to finite minds. If a mind were to cause the motion of, say, one’s arm, it would have to will the temporal antecedents of that event, which include brain events. But we seem to move our arms all the time in the absence of such knowledge; so whatever the cause is, it cannot be our minds. I show how this argument comes into focus if we assume that a cause must include its effect as its intentional object.