The Worldly Infrastructure of Causation

Abstract

This paper describes an alternative to currently dominant philosophical approaches to the metaphysics of causation. It is motivated by the gap that currently exists between metaphysical accounts and recent epistemological research on causal reasoning and methods for discovering causal relationships.Our approach aims at characterizing structural features of the actual world that support, and are exploited by, successful strategies for causal reasoning and discovery. We call these features the "worldly infrastructure" of causation.We identify several elements of this worldly infrastructure, sketch an account of their physical bases, and explain how they contribute to the possibility of successful causal reasoning.