Marshall Swain

BonJour's Coherence Theory of Justification*

Laurence BonJour’s book, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, is among the most detailed and resourceful efforts to present a coherence theory of empirical justification produced thus far. Although my own account of justification is different in kind from BonJour’s, there is much that I admire in his work. Some of what I admire is solidly substantive, including specific examples, arguments, and instances of philosophical theorizing. I also find admirable the refreshing candor with which BonJour approaches epistemology. There is no pretense here of having found all the answers, nor even all the questions for which answers may be required. There is instead a healthy sense of speculation and a willingness to admit that the solutions to certain problems are out of reach at the present time.

Causation and Distinct Events

If a specific event c can properly be called a cause of another specific event e, then c and e must be distinct events. This general principle seems agreed upon by virtually everyone who works on causation. Moreover, it seems generally agreed, or at least assumed, that ‘distinct’ is synonymous with ‘not identical’; indeed, the above principle is often put by saying that no event can be a cause of itself. Recent work1 has suggested, however, that there are various pairs of events (such as ‘Cambridge events’) which are distinct in the sense of not being identical, but which are such that they cannot be causally related. Moreover, these pairs of events appear to be counterexamples to a number of the main approaches to defining causation. In this paper I want to suggest that all of these problematic cases can be dealt with in an intuitively straight-forward and appealing way. The principle that only distinct events can be causally related needs to be understood in a much broader way than the way in which it is usually understood. Specifically, I shall argue that this principle, to be fully adequate, requires a notion of distinctness of events which is broader than the notion of nonidentity. Once this broad notion of distinctness has been outlined, it will be seen that the troublesome cases are excluded by the principle in question.