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Ironically, as Hitchcock goes on to note, a similar observation may be made about the birth control pills example (2.5.2) originally devised by Salmon to illustrate the failure of the DN model to capture the notion of explanatory relevance. Spatio-temporally continuous causal processes Math software that transmit marks as well as causal interactions are at work when male Mr. Jones ingests birth control pills — the pills dissolve, components enter his bloodstream, are metabolized or processed in some way, and so on. Similarly, spatio-temporally continuous causal processes (albeit different processes) are at work when female Ms. Jones takes birth control pills. However, the pills are irrelevant to Mr. Jones non-pregnancy, and relevant to Ms. Jones' non-pregnancy. Again, Ufology it looks as though the relevance or irrelevance of the birth control pills to Mr. or Ms. Jones' failure to become pregnant cannot be captured just by asking whether the processes leading up to these outcomes are causal processes in Salmon's sense. A similar point holds for the hexed salt example (2.6.3) — there are a spatio-temporally continuous causal processes running from the witch's wand that touches the salt sample to the individual Na and Cl ions formed when the salt dissolves but this is not sufficient for the hexing to be causally (or explanatorily) relevant to the dissolving.
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