Levi and causation

Many of you have probably seen Levi’s recent remark:

“I think Harman is right to claim that for me causation is not really a problem. It is important to qualify what I mean when I say this. I am not claiming that I have a whizbang solution to the problem of causality that dissolves the issue. Rather, I am saying that I can understand the epistemological problem of causality, but I have a hard time understanding the metaphysical problem of causality. I more or less take causality as an ontological given and then proceed to analyze different types of causality (one-one, one-many, many-one, overdetermination, etc).”

And here’s what I need Levi to explain… He says that he “has a hard time understanding the metaphysical problem of causation,” and yet he is a defender (as I am) of the notion that all relation is translation.

For me, these two notions are one and the same. If it is true that my mental image of a fire is a translation, oversimplification, or distortion of the real tree, then it is equallly true that my causal interactions with the tree are a translation as well.

My worry is that Levi seems to be thinking that there is a direct contact between me and other objects in the causal sense, but that it is somehow a regrettable faulty feature of mental representations that they distort what they represent. If this is what Levi believes (I’ll have to wait and hear more about why he doesn’t accept causation as a problem) then he has left flat ontology in favor of one where causal interaction is unproblematic and translation in fact belongs only to the human sphere: which is precisely what he wants to get away from in the rest of his philosophy.

If all relations are translations, then that really means that all relations are translations. Real object will never meet real object at any point on the map, and relations between real things can only be indirect, mediated through the sensual realm. (And it is for this reason that my ontology is not entirely flat. If there is only one type of object, then the Joliot problem arises directly.)

ADDENDUM: Stated differently, Levi’s model seems to be that first two objects make contact, and then they translate each other. But the whole point, as I see it, is that even the contact only makes contact with translations in the first place. That’s why “vicarious” causation (indirect causation) is needed.