Is There an Independent Principle of Causality in Physics? A Comment on Matthias Frisch, “Causal Reasoning in Physics.”

www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton Matthias Frisch has argued that the requirement that electromagnetic dispersion processes are causal adds empirical content not found in electrodynamic theory. I urge that this attempt to reconstitute a local principle of causality in physics fails. An independent principle is not needed to recover the results of dispersion theory. The use of “causality conditions ” prove to be either an exercise in relabeling an already presumed fact; or, if one seeks a broader, independently formulated grounding for the conditions, that grounding either fails or dissolves into vagueness and ambiguity, as has traditionally been the fate of candidate principles of causality. 1