Isa Kooiman
University of Groningen
The idea of retrocausation, the idea that a later event can affect an earlier one, appears to be so absurd that many conceive of it as an inherently incoherent notion. However, it is not trivially clear that the forward temporal direction is essential to the notion of causation. For instance, interventionist approaches to causation do not seem to directly assume this temporal direction. Moreover, adopting retrocausation could potentially explain the much discussed results of Bell’s theorem in quantum mechanics. For these reasons, it is interesting to see whether the idea of retrocausation really is as problematic as it appears to be. In this paper, I shall argue that it is not, by specifying specific conditions under which retrocausation is coherent.
By analysing the arguments from an influential 1950s/60s debate on retrocausation (e.g., Dummett, 1954, 1964; Black, 1956), I shall argue that there are two necessary conditions for retrocausation to be conceptually possible. By specifying specific conditions for the conceptual possibility of retrocausation, this paper puts influential arguments (e.g., Price (1996) and Maudlin (2011)) focussing on the physical possibility of retrocausation – which requires conceptual possibility – in a new perspective.
Just as the possibility of normal, forwardly directed causation requires us not to know what will happen in the future independently of our current intentions, the possibility of retrocausation requires us not to know what has happened in the past independently of our current intentions. This observation leads to the two conditions that (i) it should in principle not be possible to know whether the effect-event has taken place at any time before the cause-event, independently of the intentions of the acting agent, and that (ii) it should not be possible to signal to a time before the cause-event to communicate whether the cause-event has taken place.
Chair: Niklas Parwez
Time: September 11th, 14:50 – 15:20
Location: SR 1.004
SOPhiA 2026 