Ramsey vs. Lewis on conditionals and causation

Helen Beebee (Manchester) gives a talk at the MCMP/MCTS Workshop on Laws of Nature (17 December, 2012) titled "Ramsey vs. Lewis on conditionals and causation". Abstract: In this paper, I explore the prospects for a (very roughly sketched) broadly Pricean perspectivalist account of causation. The ingredient I add to the mix is the thought, familiar from Lewis and others, that causal claims express conditional relationships – except that here the relevant conditional is to be understood in Ramseyan, non-truth-apt terms rather than in terms of Lewis’s machinery of possible worlds. I argue that this approach is much better able than the standard counterfactual approach to account for the close connection between causation and inference.