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But Norton’s dilemma that a causal constraint either has to place a constraint on all sciences-that is, is a universal constraint-or would amount to a mere honorific is perhaps most easily resisted within the functional project. That is, (a) we need to specify the initial state in the relevant region completely and in whatever detail the laws at issue require; and (b) the relevant region comprising the initial value surface may be quite large. Alternatively, a descriptive project may take physicists’ own widespread use of causal notions, both in research articles and in physics textbooks, as its starting point and proposes an analysis of the underlying causal concepts. Alternatively, we can take the practices of physical theorizing and model-building as starting points and examine whether we can "engineer" causal concepts that fulfil certain cognitive functions within these contexts. But even considered on its own the association between determinism and causation can be marshalled in support of an anti-causal argument. It is not enough for defenders of causation simply to give up the principle "same cause, same effect". In his seminal article (1912), Russell uses similar considerations to argue that the causal law "same cause, same effect" is either trivial or false: if the cause of an event E is taken to include less than a complete specification of all the putatively causal factors relevant to the E’s occurrence, then the law is false, since then the occurrence of E could then still be disrupted by some external influence not captured within the specification of the set of E’s causes.

What is important is that nothing less than a complete specification of the state on the initial value surface will allow E to be derived from the laws-the laws are silent on how a system with incompletely specified initial conditions may evolve. While actual explanations may fall short of providing us with the complete information contained in the ideal explanatory text, they are explanatory, according to the hidden structure strategy, in virtue of providing us with some information about the text. John Norton is a non-fundamentalist who appears to be endorsing the former view, arguing that while causal fundamentalism is false "in appropriately restricted circumstances our science entails that nature will conform to one or other form of our causal expectations" (Norton 2003: 13). Yet Norton also seems to have some sympathies for causal eliminativism, since he likens causal concepts to the concept of caloric-a concept that no longer is accepted as playing a legitimate role in science. Mach’s arguments focus more directly on physics, arguing that there is something distinct about physics that makes it especially inhospitable to causal notions. Indeed, philosophical discussions examining the fit of causal notions with physics can benefit from distinguishing carefully-and perhaps more carefully than it is often done-among the different projects within which the discussions take place.

Woodward (2014) distinguishes "how does causation fit with physics" as a separate philosophical project on a par with the metaphysical, descriptive, and functional projects. Within the descriptive project the claim is that it is part of our commonsense notion of causation that events only have a small number of causes. Here the challenge may be part of more general empiricist scruples about rich causal notions of production or "bringing about" along the lines of what has traditionally been taken to be Hume’s criticism of causation. Consider the following example of how the vagueness challenge for counterfactual claims may arise in combination with the time-asymmetry challenge: imagine a fully elastic collision between two billiard balls on a frictionless plane. For one, we may examine whether certain causal concepts that play useful cognitive roles in everyday contexts or in the special sciences also afford a legitimate role to causal reasoning in physics. Common-cause reasoning not only is a core function of causal representations in commonsense contexts but also is a central and ineliminable inference pattern in physics.

Unlike the descriptive project, the functional project possesses a methodological or normative dimension, 6 hole billiard table price evaluating the usefulness of causal concepts and of types of causal reasoning. Some non-fundamentalists allow that non-fundamental causal concepts can be a legitimate part of at least some domains of physics. Woodward (2007) takes this approach to the functional project and explores to what extent interventionist causal concepts that play an essential role in how we navigate the world fit with theorizing in physics. The fit with physics question seems unavoidable for the metaphysical project more generally: if a certain metaphysical account could be shown to be incompatible with the fundamental physical theories we accept, then this would constitute a reason for rejecting the account, since compatibility with physics arguably is a condition of adequacy for any metaphysical account of causation. Yet the question concerning the fit with physics is best thought of as a question to be addressed within each of the three projects.