A partir da causalidade em Davidson: uma discussão acerca dos relata e leis da natureza.

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Allan Patrick de Lucena
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFPB
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufpb.br/jspui/handle/tede/5610
• topic: Ontologia; causalidade; lógica; leis da natureza; Ontology; causality; logic; laws of nature; CIENCIAS HUMANAS::FILOSOFIA

This work aims at examining how Donald Davidson conceives the analysis of causation, what is involved in that relation its ontology and, therefore, examine how he understands the laws of nature as universal causal statements and its connection with singular causal statements. These questions are related to the assumption, by Davidson, that events are a fundamental ontological category, and that singular causal statements ought to be instances of causal laws, which form differs little from such singular statements, i.e., laws would be general causal statements that are purely extensional. We will carry out an investigation on possible consequences related to Davidson s strategy, with an argument in favor of the idea that the fundamental physical entities would more properly constitute the causal relata. This investigation will take two directions: in the first one we will raise a brief history of the concept of causality; and in the second one, we will search for a dialogue with Physics. Then, we will show the difficulties in that approach. Taking our first direction, Davidson´s treatment appears to be, from a logical point of view, satisfactory, in a sense that the causal relata are particular and dated events, which are subjected to quantification, selected by descriptions and governed by the rules of extensional logic. On our second direction, an examination on the characteristics of the laws of nature will be carried out, particularly, the laws of Physics, considering the physicalist perspective that we have adopted as a starting point. We defend, contrary to Davidson, that laws are intentional statements, and then, singular causal statements would not be instances of laws, in the sense that such statements could be constructed by substitution of coextensive terms in the law statements. There would be something like a subject change while using laws to make singular causal statements; more precisely, the laws of physics would offer the elements for the construction of such statements.