Aspects of Causality

Necessary and Sufficient Causation

Determinists often claim 'everything has a cause' as both a self-evident principle, and as one which has significant philosophical import. However, the truth of the latter depends, as philosophical questions tend to, one what one means by 'cause'. Sufficient cause: If A, then B. A's cannot occur without B's following on. A's are sufficient to cause B's. But something else, A* could also cause B. Necessary Cause: If B, then A. If B has occured, A must have occured. A is necessary for B. Peter D Jones 13/01/02

Causation and Explanation

What caused Smith's death ? According to the coroner, the arsenic he ingested. According to the counsel for the prosecution, his wife. The accounts do not contradict each other, they simply reflect different areas of concern. What causes something is not simply given, it depends on what we are interested in.

Peter D Jones 08/09/05

Trigger And Background Causes

We commonly say that a fire was caused by a dropped match, but that is far from being the one and only cause involved; fires,for instance do not start without oxygen. That sort of consideration is of little interest for many purposes; what is of interest is what isunusual, what is changed, not background conditions that never vary. However, this rule often does not apply to historical or social situations. What is of interest is not so much what triggered a riot, but what led up to it. The assassin of Archduke Ferdinand does not bear the brunt of responsibility for WWI.

Peter D Jones 08/09/05

Causality And Corelation

"Correlation is not causality" is mantra taught to all scientists, sometimes to the point where they cease to believe in causality at all. The problem is that if A is correlated with B it could be that A causes B, B causes A, or both are caused by something else, C. Often the gap is filled in by prejudice. According to the theory of spontaneous generation, decay causes maggots to appear. To the moder understanding, it is the action of organisms that causes decay.

Strict And Probablistic Causation

In the present day we have good reason to think of causation as probablistic, as influenceing without determining completely, as in phrases like 'smoking causes cancer', which means 'smoking makes cancer more likely', not '100% of everybody who smokes will get cancer'. If causality really is probablistic, then it is quite prossible to derive causal laws empirically by noting that repeated correlations of events, that events of type B tend to follow on events of type A, what are called 'empirical laws' in science.

Adherents of the strict version of causality, who believe that for a cause to be a cause it must necessitate its effects, often say that in the case of probablistic causality it is only lack of fine-grained information about the details of a physical situation that causes the appearance of merely probalistic causation. This is not a claim about what probablistic causation means, since probablistic causation is equally well understood by people who don't believe in hidden determining factors. It is not an empirical fact either, since, by definition, hidden determining factors are not apparent. It can hardly be claimed as something that can be argued for logically either, since arguments for strict determinism need to refute non-strict, probabilistic causation, and cannot do that without appealing, in a vicious circle, to the very assumption of underlying determinism in question.

Peter D Jones 13/01/02

Natural And Agentive Causation.

Natural causation seeks to bring all events under a set of universal laws. Agentive causation appeals to the irreducible individuality of agents.

Natural causation works from the past to the future. Agentive causation is puposive and works, concpetually at least towards the future.

Natural causation is factual. Agentive causation is evaluative.

Natural causation is external -- the cause of an event is always outside it. Agentive causation is internal -- agents are self-determining.

Peter D Jones 08/09/05

Occurrent and Metaphysical Causation

(From "A Defense of Emergent Downward Causation" by Teed Rockwell)

"I am going to refer to this common sense concept of causality as occurrent causality, and I want to distinguish it from what I will call metaphysical causality. When I refer to the metaphysical cause of an event, I mean everything in the universe that was responsible for that event taking place, whether anyone knew about it, or was able to have any control of it. A metaphysical cause, unlike a occurrent cause, cannot be described with a single sentence. But it is ontologically more fundamental, because it is less dependent on particular perspectives and projects than is occurrent causality."

Implementational and Higher-Level Causation

In the same way that causally relevant factors sink into the background as far as "occurrent" or "trigger" causation, so there is a class of systems in which the "implementation" or "hardware" sinks into the background compared to a high-level functional description. Computers are one example of such a system; to know what a computer will do under certain cicumstances, you only need to know how it is programmed. There is a sense in which what is going on is really being done by the hardware, and in which the software is a "mere abstract description" of the hardware. However, from the point of view of Occurent Causation, what is of interest is compact descriptions bringing out salient features of the situation, features which are likely to change, and changes in which are likely to make a difference. A "software" or "abstract" or "high level" description is able to fulfil those criteria admirably.

And what of the mind ? Even if (token-token) identity is true, even if mental states have no real existence of their own, they are still suitable to feature in causal explanations. We might think that the total physical state is the "real" cause, but we never actually give explanations in terms of real, metaphysical casuation -- there is just too much of it. Moreover, the apparent falsehood of type-type identity (ie the idea that there is no straightforward relationship between a type of mental state, such as anger, or believing oslo is the capital of Sweden, and a type of brain-state) reinforces the explanatory relevance -- and hence the occurent-causal relevance -- of mental states. We can confidently say that John would have behaved differently if his mental state had been different. We cannot confidently say that he would have behaved differently if his brain-state had been different, because considerations of anti-parochialism impell us to believe that there is more than one way of implementing an "angry" state, and therefore the different brain state might be *another* "angry" state. Peter D Jones 22/11/05