Causation: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Stephen Mumford

They approach the problem in the abstract while scientists encounter it in its concrete instances.

causation is regularity: that one thing or event is constantly conjoined with another.

Do causes have to precede their effects?

And in other sciences the most common form of explanation is a causal explanation, and prediction is premised on the known causal laws.

In their place, we should promote the causes of stability, peace, and prosperity.

the good is that which procures the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This ethical theory is called utilitarianism.

causes must always occur before their effects.

To break, upset, wake, and drill are all causal verbs that we use to make specific claims about causation.

Physics sometimes forces us to rethink and revise common sense, which may be perfectly legitimate.

jettison

Hume’s theory was that it is only through observation of regularities that we get any idea at all of causation. Repetition is the key. One type of event is always followed by another and this is what leads us to believe that the first type of event caused the second.

They seem conjoined, but never connected’

But even if nothing but pure chance has made the tiles land where they have, there still can be a discernible pattern.

For A to cause B is for there to be a constant conjunction between A and B (plus a few other conditions, which will be discussed in the next chapter).

The

maths can be fancy, but the basic idea is that the laws of nature are just summaries or systematizations of the regularities that occur in the world.

A singularist is looking for causal connections between individual dated events:

The Humean would have to say, consistently with their theory, that since causation consists just

in regularity, the lucky tie caused each time the winning of the bet.

but the general idea is that we should become more persuaded that causation has occurred the more instances of its conjunction we see, rather than the fewer instances we see.

The idea of the causal

chain is an important one. Causes can line up in a row and follow one after another, creating effects at a much later time and distant place.

That would be like hoping that additions of the number zero would eventually get us to one.

Real necessity, as far as Humeans are concerned, resides only in ‘relations of ideas’; 2 + 2 = 4 is necessary only because its truth is contained

Similarly, we can say that if today is Wednesday, tomorrow has to be Thursday. But the necessity of this truth is entirely in the words. There is no worldly necessity compelling the future.

‘From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows’ (Spinoza 1677, Ethics I, axiom III).

[a cause] is an insufficient but non-redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition [for the effect]: it will be convenient to call this (using the first letters of the italicized words) an inus condition. (Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, 1980: 62)

What we think of as our own instigation of an action is itself just part of a preceding causal chain of events that we could not escape.

It seems that there can be failures of causation, not because something is missing from the causal set-up, but because something else has been added, such as a gust of

The world is regular and predictable, but it is less than perfectly so.

The chain of causes that travels through the machine fails at that point.

subtractive interference,

additive interference.

Well, that depends. There may be nothing at present, but survival after beheading is at least conceivable and it may just be a question of waiting for the development of adequate technology.

causation isn’t found just in the facts—about what actually happens—but in truths about what would have happened if things were different.

What is counterfactual in our world, he says, is factual in some other world. In our world there was an elk on the line and the train was late, but there is another world very similar to ours in which there was no elk on the line.

Your death counterfactually depends on your birth: indeed everything you

ever do subsequently in your life will counterfactually depend on your birth.

Thought about this way, the gap between a necessary condition and a true cause looks to be quite wide.

To be gold is to have atomic number 79, for example, which is to say that gold is the element that has 79 protons in its

nucleus.

corpuscularian philosophy.

corpuscles. We think we now have a better scientific understanding of the world but it is sometimes presented in ways that are structurally similar to the corpuscularian tradition.

conciliatory

reductionism.

Holism

there are certain higher-level phenomena that have to be treated holistically.

proposed theories of causation: that it consists in regularity, counterfactual dependence, or transfer of physical quantities.

guises

Nancy Cartwright