naa a22 4500 510789315 CHVBK 20180411083313.0 cr unu---uuuuu 180411e20130901xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s11406-013-9443-4 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s11406-013-9443-4 Elder Crawford Philosophy Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA aut On the Reality and Causal Efficacy of Familiar Objects [Elektronische Daten] [Crawford Elder] What caused the event we report by saying "the window shattered”? Was it the baseball, which crashed into the window? Causal exclusionists say: many, many microparticles collectively caused that event—microparticles located where common sense supposes the baseball was. Unitary large objects such as baseballs cause nothing; indeed, by Alexander's dictum, there are no such objects. This paper argues that the false claim about causal efficacy is instead the one that attributes it to the many microparticles. Causation obtains just where there is an "invariance”, a true generalization to the effect that had things been different with the putative cause, things would have been correspondingly different with the putative effect. But "correspondingly” here requires a rough metric. There must be a fact as to which alternative group events, involving many microparticles, would have departed less from the putative cause of the shattering, and which would have departed more. Surprisingly, there is no such fact. Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2013 Causal exclusion nationallicence Familiar objects nationallicence Invariance nationallicence Alexander's Dictum nationallicence Philosophia Springer Netherlands 41/3(2013-09-01), 737-749 0048-3893 41:3<737 2013 41 11406 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9443-4 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9443-4 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Elder Crawford Philosophy Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Philosophia Springer Netherlands 41/3(2013-09-01), 737-749 0048-3893 41:3<737 2013 41 11406 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer