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170 RÖHL
5. Conclusion
The conflict between event causation and continous time evolution is often ignored, but if we
take causation ontologically serious we should take the conflict seriously and investigate
options how to resolve it. Dispositionalists should not tie their accounts to event causation if
they want their conceptions to be applicable to fundamental physics. I argued that both the
conception of causation in terms of discrete events classified as cause and effect and the
viewpoint of mathematical physics that seems to avoid causal concepts in favor of the
mathematically described continuous evolution of states of physical systems can be
accommodated by a model of causation in terms of manifestation processes of dispositional
properties exhibited by the material things that interact with each other. Both approaches
have to be revised slightly for this purpose. The causal link between events is not taken to be
fundamental, but itself based on a more complex relation of dispositions, their manifestation
conditions and their manifestations. The state space approach was shown to implicitly use
causal concepts, both to isolate a closed system and to identify the relevant internal factors
for the mathematical descriptions. These factors are dispositional properties of the system’s
components both in fundamental physics and elsewhere. An ontology with dispositions as
relevant causal factors allows a unified conception of causation for both continuous processes
and links of discrete events.
Johannes Röhl
Institut für Philosophie
Universität Rostock
18051 Rostock
johannes.roehl@uni-rostock.de
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