Causality (philosophy)

Causality is the "necessary relationship between cause and effect. We can talk about that relationship between events, processes, regularity of phenomena and the production of something.

There is no single commonly accepted definition of the term "cause". In its broadest meaning, something is said to be the cause of an effect, when the latter depends on the first both logically and chronologically; or, in other words, the cause is that which makes the effect what it is. This can happen in many different ways and, therefore, it is not strange that a multitude of causes correspond to an effect.

Two necessary but not sufficient conditions for A to be the cause of B are:

• Have A precede B in time.
• That A and B are relatively close in space and time.

In general, a process has many causes, which are also said to be causal factors of it, and all are found in its past. In turn, an effect can be the cause or causal factor of many other effects, all of them located in its future. Some authors have argued that causality is metaphysically prior to notions of space-time.

Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses. As a basic concept, it is more suitable as an explanation of other concepts of progression than as something to be explained by other more basic ones. The concept is like those of agency and effectiveness. For this reason, it may take a leap of intuition to grasp it. Consequently, causality is implicit in the logic and structure of ordinary language, as well as explicit in the language of scientific causal notation.

In English studies of Aristotelian philosophy, the word "cause" is used as a specialized technical term, the translation of Aristotle's term αἰτία, by which Aristotle meant "explanation" or "answer to a 'why' question. Aristotle categorized the four types of responses as "causes" material, formal, efficient and final. In this case, the "cause" is the explanans of the explanandum, and not recognizing that different types of "cause" It can lead to a useless debate. Of Aristotle's four explanatory modes, the one closest to the concerns of the present article is the "efficient".

David Hume, as part of his opposition to rationalism, argued that pure reason alone cannot prove the reality of efficient causality; Instead, he appealed to custom and habit of mind, observing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience.

The theme of causality remains a basic theme in contemporary philosophy.

History

The notion of causality has sparked debate since the beginning of philosophy. Aristotle concludes the book of the Second Analytics with the way in which the human mind comes to know the basic truths or primary premises or first principles, which are not innate, since it is possible to ignore them for a large part of our life. They also cannot be deduced from any prior knowledge, or they would not be first principles. He claims that first principles are derived by induction, from sensory perception, which implants true universals in the human mind. From this idea comes the scholastic maxim "there is nothing in the intellect that has not previously been in the senses" (Nihil est in intellectu, quod prius non fuerit in sensu). By maintaining that "to know the nature of a thing is to know why it is?" and that "we possess scientific knowledge of a thing only when we know its cause." Aristotle distinguished four types of causes:

• Material cause
• Formal cause
• Efficient cause
• Final cause

The notion of causality suffered harsh criticism from David Hume. For Hume, the fact that one phenomenon appears constantly related to another would not always imply that the first is a cause. The necessary connection between two phenomena that frequently appear together would be difficult to demonstrate, and is often a consequence of inductive reasoning that does not have to be logically valid.

In Kant, whose disagreement with Hume's thought is cited as a motivation for writing a philosophical theory, causality is one of the a priori categories of understanding, and so does not come from custom (as Hume said) but has a necessary and universal character. This allows science to rely on the principle of causality while remaining necessary and universal.

Concept

Metaphysics

The nature of cause and effect is a concern of the subject known as metaphysics. Kant thought that time and space were notions prior to human understanding of the progress or evolution of the world, and he also recognized the priority of causality. But he did not have the understanding that he came with the knowledge of Minkowski Geometry and the Special Theory of Relativity, that the notion of causality can be used as a prior foundation from which to construct notions of time and space.

Ontology

A general metaphysical question about cause and effect is: "what kind of entity can be a cause and what kind of entity can be an effect?".

One point of view on this issue is that the cause and the effect are of the same type of entity, with causality being an asymmetric relationship between them. That is, grammatically it would make sense to say either "A is the cause and B is the effect" or 'B is the cause and A the effect', although only one of those two can be really true. From this point of view, one opinion, proposed as a metaphysical principle in process philosophy, is that every cause and every effect are respectively some process, event, becoming or happening. An example is "his trip on the step was the cause, and his ankle fracture the effect. Another view is that causes and effects are 'states of affairs', and that the exact nature of those entities is defined less restrictively than in process philosophy.

Another point of view on the issue is the most classic, according to which a cause and its effect can be of different entity. For example, in Aristotle's efficient causal account, an action can be a cause while an enduring object is its effect. For example, the generative actions of his parents can be considered the efficient cause, with Socrates being the effect, considering Socrates as an enduring object, in the philosophical tradition called "substance", distinct from an action..

Epistemology

Since causality is a subtle metaphysical notion, it takes considerable intellectual effort, along with evidence, to establish knowledge of it in particular empirical circumstances. According to David Hume, the human mind is incapable of directly perceiving causal relationships. On this basis, the scholar distinguished between the regularity view of causation and the counterfactual notion. According to the counterfactual view, X causes Y if and only if, without X, Y would not exist. Hume interpreted the latter as an ontological point of view, that is, as a description of the nature of causality, but, given the limitations of the human mind, he advised using the former (stating, roughly, that X causes Y if and only if the two events are spatio-temporally linked, and X precedes Y) as an epistemic definition of causality. Having an epistemic concept of causality is necessary to distinguish between causal and non-causal relationships. Contemporary philosophical literature on causality can be divided into five major approaches to causality. These include the (mentioned above) regularity, probabilistic, counterfactual, mechanistic, and manipulationist views. All five approaches can be shown to be reductive, that is, they define causality in terms of relationships of other kinds. On this reading, they define causality in terms of, respectively, empirical regularities (constant conjunctions of events), changes in probabilities conditionals, counterfactual conditions, mechanisms underlying causal relationships and invariance under intervention.

Geometric meaning

Causality has the properties of antecedent and contiguity. These are topological, and are ingredients of the geometry of space-time. As developed by Alfred Robb, these properties allow the derivation of the notions of time and space. Max Jammer writes "Einstein's postulate... opens the way to a direct construction of the causal topology... of Minkowski space". Causal efficacy does not propagate faster than light..

Thus, the notion of causality is metaphysically prior to the notions of time and space. In practical terms, this is because the use of causality is necessary for the interpretation of empirical experiments. The interpretation of the experiments is necessary to establish the physical and geometric notions of time and space.

Volition

The deterministic worldview holds that the history of the universe can be exhaustively represented as a progression of events occurring as cause and effect. The incompatibilist version of this holds that there is no such thing as "free will". Compatibilism, on the other hand, maintains that determinism is compatible with, or even necessary for, free will.

Necessary and sufficient causes

Causes can sometimes be distinguished into two types: necessary and sufficient. A third type of causality, which requires neither necessity nor sufficiency in itself, but which contributes to the effect, is called "contributing cause" 3. 4;.

Ÿ Necessary causes: If x is a necessary cause of y, then the presence of y necessarily implies the prior occurrence of x. The presence of x, however, does not imply that y will occur. Ÿ Sufficient causes: If x is a sufficient cause of y, then the presence of x necessarily implies the subsequent occurrence of y i>. However, another cause z can alternatively cause y. Thus, the presence of y does not imply the previous occurrence of x. Ÿ Contributory causes: For a specific effect, in a singular case, a factor that is a contributing cause is one of several co-occurring causes. It is implicit that all of them are taxpayers. For the specific effect, in general, there is no implication that a contributing cause is necessary, although it may be. In general, a factor that is a contributing cause is not sufficient, because by definition it is accompanied by other causes, which would not count as causes if it were sufficient. For the specific effect, a factor that is on some occasions a contributing cause might on some other occasions be sufficient, but on those other occasions it would not be merely a contributing cause.

J. L. Mackie argues that habitually talking about "cause" refers in fact to INUS conditions (insufficient but non-redundant parts of a condition that is itself unecessary but s'sufficient for the occurrence of the effect). An example is a short circuit as a cause of a house catching fire. Let's consider the set of events: the short circuit, the proximity of flammable material and the absence of firefighters. Together they are unnecessary but sufficient for the house to catch fire (since many other sets of events could have caused the fire, e.g. shooting at the house with a flamethrower in the presence of oxygen, etc.). Within this set, the short circuit is an insufficient (since the short circuit alone would not have caused the fire) but not redundant (because the fire would not have occurred without it, other things being equal) of a condition that is in itself unnecessary but sufficient for the effect to occur. Thus, the short circuit is an INUS condition for the house fire to occur.

In contrast to conditionals

Conditional statements are not statements of causality. An important distinction is that causal statements require that the antecedent precede or coincide with the consequent in time, while conditional statements do not require this temporal order. Confusion often arises because many different statements can be presented in English using the form "If..., then..." (and possibly because this form is used much more to make a causal statement). However, the two types of statements are different.

For example, all of the following statements are true when interpreting "If..., then..." as the material conditional:

1. If Barack Obama is president of the United States in 2011, then Germany is in Europe.
2. If George Washington is president of the United States in 2011, then arbitrary statement .

The first is true since both the antecedent and the consequent are true. The second is true in sentential logic and indeterminate in natural language, regardless of the consequent statement that follows, because the antecedent is false.

The ordinary indicative conditional has a little more structure than the material conditional. For example, although the first is the closest, neither of the two statements above seems true as an ordinary indicative reading. But the phrase:

• If Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare didn't write Macbeth, then someone else did..

seems intuitively true, even though there is no direct causal relationship in this hypothetical situation between the fact that Shakespeare did not write Macbeth and the fact that someone else actually wrote it.

Another type of conditional, the counterfactual conditional, has a stronger connection with causality, although even counterfactual statements are not all examples of causality. Consider the following two statements:

1. If A was a triangle, then A would have three sides.
2. If the S switch was powered, then the B bulb would turn on..

In the first case, it would not be correct to say that the fact that A is a triangle "makes" that has three sides, since the relationship between triangularity and triangularity is one of definition. The property of having three sides actually determines the status of A as a triangle. However, even interpreted counterfactually, the first statement is true. An early version of the "four causes" of Aristotle is described as the recognition of the "essential cause". In this version of the theory, the fact that the closed polygon has three sides is said to be the "essential cause" of it being a triangle. This use of the word "cause" is, of course, now very obsolete. However, it is within the scope of ordinary language to say that it is essential for a triangle to have three sides.

Understanding the concept of conditional is important to understanding the literature on causality. In everyday language, imprecise conditional statements are often made, which must be interpreted carefully.

Questionable cause

Fallacias of questionable cause, also known as causal fallacies, no causa pro causa (Latin, "not cause for cause"), or false cause, are informal fallacies in which a cause is incorrectly identified.

Principle of causality

The principle of causality is a classic principle of philosophy and science, which states that every event has a cause, the event itself being one of the effects of said cause. According to this principle, things do not occur in isolation, but rather some are linked to others in a process of interaction and interdependence. Some things happen to others, and often always in the same order. We call the first events in a relationship causes, and the second effects.
The principle of causality should not be confused with the principle of sufficient reason.
The principle of causality is a fundamental principle of scientific research, assuming that the best way to understand and explain is to know the causes, because on the one hand we can prevent and on the other control the effects, in short dominating natural events, at least to macroscopic level. At the microscopic level, and especially in the domain of quantum physics, the notion of cause is frequently problematic.

Causality in science

The notion of causality is an integral part of many sciences:

• In natural sciences different from physics and in processes in which we cannot reduce the occurrence of events to a simple physical mechanism, the idea of cause appears in complex processes between which we have observed a causal relationship. Thus after empirical equations there is supposed to be a causal physical process that leads to a necessary connection between certain events.
  • In classical physics, in the newtonian and mechanical relativistic mechanics it is also admitted that the cause always precedes the effect.
  • In quantum physics there has been a discussion of the principle of classical causality, since the theory seems to contain purely probabilistic and non-deterministic aspects, which could remain outside the traditional causal notion.
• In statistics where it is analyzed by inferential statistics.
• In social sciences it usually appears linked to a statistical analysis of observed variables.