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Today I came across Alexander's dictum in my reading. It states: that for something to be real it must have causal powers. It was coined by Samuel Alexander (1920) and seems to pertain to strong emergence.

My question is: what is the status of this dictum in philosophy? Is it important in ontology? Or is it more a prinicple in the sense of Occam's Razor?

Are there even things that are real but have no causal powers?

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    It's more like a heuristic principle like Occam's Razor replacing simplicity with causality, especially for Platonists who would argue that abstract objects are considered real but are often said to lack causal powers since they exist in a non-physical, non-causal sense, and for causal skeptics such as Russell who would argue that causation is a construct of human understanding, not a fundamental feature of the world at large...
    – Double Knot
    Commented Dec 1 at 8:47
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    In this naive formulation, Alexander's dictum has some highly implausible consequences and is close to incoherent. On it, tables and trees are not real because only particles they are made of have causal powers. And causal powers themselves are not real unless they have causal powers and causal powers of causal powers, and so on ad infinitum. Numbers and beauty are not real too. In modern philosophy, causal powers are typically used to distinguish concrete from abstract rather than real from non-real, see SEP, Abstract Objects.
    – Conifold
    Commented Dec 1 at 10:18
  • @Conifold I am confused. Where does it say that only particles have causal powers? And if the idea of 'causal powers' has no causal powers then how did you respond?
    – Philomath
    Commented Dec 1 at 10:45
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    @Conifold I don't know if this is the right place, but why don't you write an answer? Other people will read your comments and then may refrain from writing an answer which results in questions with no answers. Other people don't read the comments and then miss insightful information. I really don't think this is helpful.
    – Philomath
    Commented Dec 1 at 12:15
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    @Conifold Samuel Alexander admitted the reality of tables and floors, so it seems he did not take this interpretation. He did not take the "causal exclusion arguments" you link as valid and was not concerned about your interpretation of "overdetermination." It is a perfectly legitimate position to say that a wave is real, and causes other waves, and the water molecules in the wave are real, and also cause the other waves. Causation forms a directed acyclic graph in which each node has many parents and many ancestors.
    – causative ♦
    Commented Dec 1 at 13:34

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for something to be real it must have causal powers.

That is an idea but then you have to define causal power without relying back on the notion of real. Yet you will probably want to say something along the line that causal powers are, well, real. If something has causal powers which are not real, I'm not sure we want to say that it is real.

It seems much better to take our notion of real as (psychologically) fundamental. After all, if we don't somehow understand the idea of real, no definition will ever make us understand.

I also don't believe that anyone could survive very long without being able to make the distinction between what is real and what is not.

Reality is by definition all there is, so there is nothing outside reality, and therefore nothing we could explain reality with. So, we cannot explain reality, so we cannot explain what it is. We can only say the obvious that it is what it is.

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    Um, yes, I want causal powers to be real. Therefore, causal powers must have causal powers. Having causal powers is a property that self evidently has causal power. Does that work?
    – Philomath
    Commented Dec 1 at 16:51
  • A principle is different from a definition and does not imply the necessity of a definition.
    – Olivier5
    Commented Dec 2 at 11:45
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Per Conifold, we should separate "real" from "concrete".

There are concrete things in the world, and indeed these are seen as concrete by virtue of their ability to participate in causal chains - they are valid links in a casual chain.

K(x) := "x is concrete" and C(x) := "x can participate in causal chains"

Then we have the equivalence

∀x K(x) ⇔ C(x)

However, we have to somehow deal with supervenient objects like laws, emotions, thought, math. Most of these can be relegated to "abstract" category but things the constitute conscious experiences are a puzzle right now.

On one hand, physicalist theory would state that the "real" part of an emotion like fear is the neural state of the brain. However, we know (non-rationally/directly) that those brain states are associated with a very real experience of fear (qualitative/subjective reality).

We know the feeling of fear exists because we experience it, we know the neural correlates exist because we observe them in others. This means that we have non-concrete things that are nonetheless palpably real - not just real in some abstract sense.

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It's a good principle, and it's not about defining what is real, but about excluding the possibility of, well, magic thinking about real stuff that would have no causal power. The principle rules out the possibility of real yet non causal things.

IOW, it puts epiphenomenalism to rest, as an absurd creed.

Note that if something had no causal power, nobody would know anything about it, and there would be no way for anyone to assert its reality or existence. So this principle is self-evident. Personally, I've been using it for years without knowing anything about Samuel Alexander.

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Ontological encounters of the third kind.

It seems to me obvious that only three kinds of things exist outside your own mind:

  1. Objects (mass/energy)
  2. Mathematics
  3. Other people's opinions

This question is pure opinion, and it's opinion about the definition of a word, "real."

It may not be true of ethics, but the only legitimate concern of epistemology and ontology are the first two types of questions.

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    What in my question is opinion? It is a question!? I came across this dictum, is that an opinion? I give one fact and then ask questions. Where is the opinion?? If you think it is pure opinion, you should vote to close it.
    – Philomath
    Commented Dec 1 at 14:09
  • I guess the lesson is something like, "Don't believe every dictum you come across"?
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Dec 1 at 22:56

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