OMISSIONS, CAUSATION, AND MODALITY

Abstract

In The Neverending Story (1984), “the nothing” was spreading throughout Fantasia. This is terrifying not just because of the nature of the west-German fantasy film but also because nothing—non-being—was represented as something that existed. Nothing can’t be—or so it seems. In this dissertation, I ask: what do ordinary statements about omissions and absences mean if they are not about things that exist? And then I ask: how can an answer to this question help us understand omissive causation? I present various normative accounts of omissive language and omissive causal models. I end by considering some reasons to doubt such models.