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123-467: Causality is usually understood as a relation between two events where the earlier event is responsible for bringing about or necessitating the later event. Hume's account of causality has been influential. His first question is how to categorize causal relations. On his view, they belong either to relations of ideas or matters of fact . This distinction is referred to as Hume's fork . Relations of ideas involve necessary connections that are knowable

246-442: A n c e r | s m o k i n g ) {\displaystyle P(cancer|smoking)} , and interventional probabilities , as in P ( c a n c e r | d o ( s m o k i n g ) ) {\displaystyle P(cancer|do(smoking))} . The former reads: "the probability of finding cancer in a person known to smoke, having started, unforced by

369-536: A philosophy of nature based on the writings of late modern philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , is interpreted to be a form of ontological realism. According to Michael Resnik , Gottlob Frege 's work after 1891 can be interpreted as a contribution to realism. In contemporary analytic philosophy , Bertrand Russell , Ludwig Wittgenstein , J. L. Austin , Karl Popper , and Gustav Bergmann espoused metaphysical realism. Hilary Putnam initially espoused metaphysical realism, but he later embraced

492-506: A progression of events following one after the other as cause and effect. Incompatibilism holds that determinism is incompatible with free will, so if determinism is true, " free will " does not exist. Compatibilism , on the other hand, holds that determinism is compatible with, or even necessary for, free will. Causes may sometimes be distinguished into two types: necessary and sufficient. A third type of causation, which requires neither necessity nor sufficiency, but which contributes to

615-448: A semantic conclusion: that the words "mind" or "self" cannot mean substance of mental states but must mean bundle of perceptions . This is the case because, according to Hume, words are associated with ideas and ideas are based on impressions. So without impressions of a mental substance, we lack the corresponding idea. Hume's theory is often interpreted as involving an ontological claim about what selves actually are, which goes beyond

738-512: A 'why' question". Aristotle categorized the four types of answers as material, formal, efficient, and final "causes". In this case, the "cause" is the explanans for the explanandum , and failure to recognize that different kinds of "cause" are being considered can lead to futile debate. Of Aristotle's four explanatory modes, the one nearest to the concerns of the present article is the "efficient" one. David Hume , as part of his opposition to rationalism , argued that pure reason alone cannot prove

861-511: A causal ordering. The system of equations must have certain properties, most importantly, if some values are chosen arbitrarily, the remaining values will be determined uniquely through a path of serial discovery that is perfectly causal. They postulate the inherent serialization of such a system of equations may correctly capture causation in all empirical fields, including physics and economics. Some theorists have equated causality with manipulability. Under these theories, x causes y only in

984-506: A cause and its effect can be of different kinds of entity. For example, in Aristotle's efficient causal explanation, an action can be a cause while an enduring object is its effect. For example, the generative actions of his parents can be regarded as the efficient cause, with Socrates being the effect, Socrates being regarded as an enduring object, in philosophical tradition called a 'substance', as distinct from an action. Since causality

1107-429: A cause is incorrectly identified. Counterfactual theories define causation in terms of a counterfactual relation, and can often be seen as "floating" their account of causality on top of an account of the logic of counterfactual conditionals . Counterfactual theories reduce facts about causation to facts about what would have been true under counterfactual circumstances. The idea is that causal relations can be framed in

1230-435: A cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future . Some writers have held that causality is metaphysically prior to notions of time and space . Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses. As such it is a basic concept; it is more apt to be an explanation of other concepts of progression than something to be explained by other more fundamental concepts. The concept

1353-586: A definite time. Such a process can be regarded as a cause. Causality is not inherently implied in equations of motion , but postulated as an additional constraint that needs to be satisfied (i.e. a cause always precedes its effect). This constraint has mathematical implications such as the Kramers-Kronig relations . Causality is one of the most fundamental and essential notions of physics. Causal efficacy cannot 'propagate' faster than light. Otherwise, reference coordinate systems could be constructed (using

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1476-443: A frequent source of error in the history of philosophy. Based on this distinction, interpreters have often attributed various related philosophical theses to Hume in relation to contemporary debates in metaethics. One of these theses concerns the dispute between cognitivism and non-cognitivism . Cognitivists assert that ought-statements are truth-apt , i.e. are either true or false. They resemble is-statements in this sense, which

1599-408: A known causal effect or to test a causal model than to generate causal hypotheses. For nonexperimental data, causal direction can often be inferred if information about time is available. This is because (according to many, though not all, theories) causes must precede their effects temporally. This can be determined by statistical time series models, for instance, or with a statistical test based on

1722-403: A mathematical definition of "confounding" and helps researchers identify accessible sets of variables worthy of measurement. While derivations in causal calculus rely on the structure of the causal graph, parts of the causal structure can, under certain assumptions, be learned from statistical data. The basic idea goes back to Sewall Wright 's 1921 work on path analysis . A "recovery" algorithm

1845-443: A metaphysical account of what it is for there to be a causal relation between some pair of events. If correct, the analysis has the power to explain certain features of causation. Knowing that causation is a matter of counterfactual dependence, we may reflect on the nature of counterfactual dependence to account for the nature of causation. For example, in his paper "Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow," Lewis sought to account for

1968-555: A number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge , thought , or understanding . This can apply to items such as the physical world , the past and future , other minds , and the self , though may also apply less directly to things such as universals , mathematical truths , moral truths , and thought itself. However, realism may also include various positions which instead reject metaphysical treatments of reality entirely. Realism can also be

2091-427: A position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters – is the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world itself) has mind-independent existence , i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder. This includes

2214-508: A priori independently of experience. Matters of fact , on the other hand, concern contingent propositions about the world knowable only a posteriori through perception and memory. Causal relations fall under the category of matters of facts, according to Hume, since it is conceivable that they do not obtain, which would not be the case if they were necessary. For Hume's empiricist outlook , this means that causal relations should be studied by attending to sensory experience. The problem with this

2337-411: A process and a pseudo-process . As an example, a ball moving through the air (a process) is contrasted with the motion of a shadow (a pseudo-process). The former is causal in nature while the latter is not. Salmon (1984) claims that causal processes can be identified by their ability to transmit an alteration over space and time. An alteration of the ball (a mark by a pen, perhaps) is carried with it as

2460-418: A real number. One has to be careful in the use of the word cause in physics. Properly speaking, the hypothesized cause and the hypothesized effect are each temporally transient processes. For example, force is a useful concept for the explanation of acceleration, but force is not by itself a cause. More is needed. For example, a temporally transient process might be characterized by a definite change of force at

2583-434: A robust sense since this would involve one event necessitating another event, the possibility of which is denied by Hume's dictum. Hume's dictum has been employed in various arguments in contemporary metaphysics . It can be used, for example, as an argument against nomological necessitarianism , the view that the laws of nature are necessary, i.e. are the same in all possible worlds . To see how this might work, consider

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2706-482: A skepticism that called religion and the evidence of the senses equally into question. The common sense realists found skepticism to be absurd and so contrary to common experience that it had to be rejected. They taught that ordinary experiences provide intuitively certain assurance of the existence of the self, of real objects that could be seen and felt and of certain "first principles" upon which sound morality and religious beliefs could be established. Its basic principle

2829-402: A triangle. Nonetheless, even when interpreted counterfactually, the first statement is true. An early version of Aristotle's "four cause" theory is described as recognizing "essential cause". In this version of the theory, that the closed polygon has three sides is said to be the "essential cause" of its being a triangle. This use of the word 'cause' is of course now far obsolete. Nevertheless, it

2952-446: A view about the properties of reality in general, holding that reality exists independent of the mind , as opposed to non-realist views (like some forms of skepticism and solipsism ) which question the certainty of anything beyond one's own mind. Philosophers who profess realism often claim that truth consists in a correspondence between cognitive representations and reality. Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now

3075-461: A wave packet travels at the phase velocity; since phase is not causal, the phase velocity of a wave packet can be faster than light. Causal notions are important in general relativity to the extent that the existence of an arrow of time demands that the universe's semi- Riemannian manifold be orientable, so that "future" and "past" are globally definable quantities. Philosophical realism Philosophical realism – usually not treated as

3198-404: A window and it breaks. If Alice hadn't thrown the brick, then it still would have broken, suggesting that Alice wasn't a cause; however, intuitively, Alice did cause the window to break. The Halpern-Pearl definitions of causality take account of examples like these. The first and third Halpern-Pearl conditions are easiest to understand: AC1 requires that Alice threw the brick and the window broke in

3321-481: Is a philosophy of mind rooted in a common sense theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. Direct Realism Perceptual realism is the common sense view that tables, chairs and cups of coffee exist independently of perceivers. Direct realists also claim that it is with such objects that we directly engage. The objects of perception include such familiar items as paper clips, suns and olive oil tins. It

3444-417: Is a form of error, not only when judged from an external perspective, but even from the agent's own perspective: the agent cannot plead that he does not care since he already has a desire for the corresponding end. On the other hand, contemporary Humeanism about practical reason includes the assertion that only our desires determine which initial reasons we have. So having a desire to swim at the beach provides

3567-439: Is a process that is varied from occasion to occasion. The occurrence or non-occurrence of subsequent bubonic plague is recorded. To establish causality, the experiment must fulfill certain criteria, only one example of which is mentioned here. For example, instances of the hypothesized cause must be set up to occur at a time when the hypothesized effect is relatively unlikely in the absence of the hypothesized cause; such unlikelihood

3690-462: Is a smoker") probabilistically causes B ("The person has now or will have cancer at some time in the future"), if the information that A occurred increases the likelihood of B s occurrence. Formally, P{ B | A }≥ P{ B } where P{ B | A } is the conditional probability that B will occur given the information that A occurred, and P{ B } is the probability that B will occur having no knowledge whether A did or did not occur. This intuitive condition

3813-505: Is a subtle metaphysical notion, considerable intellectual effort, along with exhibition of evidence, is needed to establish knowledge of it in particular empirical circumstances. According to David Hume , the human mind is unable to perceive causal relations directly. On this ground, the scholar distinguished between the regularity view of causality and the counterfactual notion. According to the counterfactual view , X causes Y if and only if, without X, Y would not exist. Hume interpreted

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3936-399: Is about how to achieve something but it does not concern itself with what should be achieved. What should be achieved is determined by the agent's intrinsic desires. This may vary a lot from person to person since different people want very different things. In contemporary philosophy, Hume's theory of practical reason is often understood in terms of norms of rationality . On the one hand, it

4059-534: Is also called Platonic idealism . This should not be confused with "idealistic" in the ordinary sense of "optimistic" or with other types of philosophical idealism , as presented by philosophers such as George Berkeley . As Platonic abstractions are not spatial, temporal, or subjectively mental, they are arguably not compatible with the emphasis of Berkeley's idealism grounded in mental existence. Plato's Forms include numbers and geometrical figures, making his theory also include mathematical realism ; they also include

4182-536: Is an influence by which one event , process , state, or object ( a cause ) contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an effect ) where the cause is at least partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is at least partly dependent on the cause. The cause of something may also be described as the reason for the event or process. In general, a process can have multiple causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past . An effect can in turn be

4305-460: Is like those of agency and efficacy . For this reason, a leap of intuition may be needed to grasp it. Accordingly, causality is implicit in the 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

4428-459: Is more basic than causal interaction. But describing manipulations in non-causal terms has provided a substantial difficulty. The second criticism centers around concerns of anthropocentrism . It seems to many people that causality is some existing relationship in the world that we can harness for our desires. If causality is identified with our manipulation, then this intuition is lost. In this sense, it makes humans overly central to interactions in

4551-409: Is not adequate as a definition for probabilistic causation because of its being too general and thus not meeting our intuitive notion of cause and effect. For example, if A denotes the event "The person is a smoker," B denotes the event "The person now has or will have cancer at some time in the future" and C denotes the event "The person now has or will have emphysema some time in the future," then

4674-481: Is not the case. Hume infers from this that " acts of the will " are not a necessary requirement for actions. The most prominent philosopher of action in the Humean tradition is Donald Davidson . Following Hume in defining actions without reference to an agent, he holds that actions are bodily movements that are caused by intentions. The intentions themselves are explained in terms of beliefs and desires . For example,

4797-437: Is often combined with an externalist view of rationality: that reasons are given not from the agent's psychological states but from objective facts about the world, for example, from what would be objectively best. This is reflected, for example, in the view that some desires are bad or irrational and can be criticized on these grounds. On this position, psychological states like desires may be motivational reasons , which move

4920-416: Is only an approximation of reality but that the accuracy and fullness of understanding can be improved. In some contexts, realism is contrasted with idealism . Today it is more often contrasted with anti-realism , for example in the philosophy of science . The oldest use of the term "realism" appeared in medieval scholastic interpretations and adaptations of ancient Greek philosophy . The position

5043-423: Is rejected by non-cognitivists. Some non-cognitivists deny that ought-statements have meaning at all, although the more common approach is to account for their meaning in other ways. Prescriptivists treat ought-statements as prescriptions or commands, which are meaningful without having a truth-value. Emotivists , on the other hand, hold that ought-statements merely express the speaker's emotional attitudes in

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5166-744: Is specifically characteristic of quantal phenomena that observations defined by incompatible variables always involve important intervention by the experimenter, as described quantitatively by the observer effect . In classical thermodynamics , processes are initiated by interventions called thermodynamic operations . In other branches of science, for example astronomy , the experimenter can often observe with negligible intervention. The theory of "causal calculus" (also known as do-calculus, Judea Pearl 's Causal Calculus, Calculus of Actions) permits one to infer interventional probabilities from conditional probabilities in causal Bayesian networks with unmeasured variables. One very practical result of this theory

5289-510: Is that objects have properties, such as texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived absolutely correctly. We perceive them as they really are. Immanent realism is the ontological understanding which holds that universals are immanently real within particulars themselves, not in a separate realm, and not mere names. Most often associated with Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. Scientific realism is, at

5412-406: Is that cause and effect are of one and the same kind of entity, causality being an asymmetric relation between them. That is to say, it would make good sense grammatically to say either " A is the cause and B the effect" or " B is the cause and A the effect", though only one of those two can be actually true. In this view, one opinion, proposed as a metaphysical principle in process philosophy ,

5535-426: Is that every cause and every effect is respectively some process, event, becoming, or happening. An example is 'his tripping over the step was the cause, and his breaking his ankle the effect'. Another view is that causes and effects are 'states of affairs', with the exact natures of those entities being more loosely defined than in process philosophy. Another viewpoint on this question is the more classical one, that

5658-399: Is that the causal relation itself is never given directly in perception. Through visual perception, for example, we can know that a stone was first thrown in the direction of a window and that subsequently, the window broke, but we do not directly see that the throwing caused the breaking. This leads to Hume's skeptical conclusion: that, strictly speaking, we do not know that a causal relation

5781-509: Is that while experience presents us with certain ideas of various objects, it might as well have presented us with very different ideas. So when I perceive a bird on a tree, I might as well have perceived a bird without a tree or a tree without a bird. This is so because their essences do not depend upon one another. Followers and interpreters of Hume have sometimes used Hume's dictum as the metaphysical foundation of Hume's theory of causation . On this view, there cannot be any causal relation in

5904-451: Is the is-ought distinction . It is guided by the idea that there is an important difference between is-statements , which concern facts about the natural world, and ought-statements , which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. The key aspect of this difference is that is-statements do not imply ought-statements . This is important, according to Hume, because this type of mistaken inference has been

6027-718: Is the characterization of confounding variables , namely, a sufficient set of variables that, if adjusted for, would yield the correct causal effect between variables of interest. It can be shown that a sufficient set for estimating the causal effect of X {\displaystyle X} on Y {\displaystyle Y} is any set of non-descendants of X {\displaystyle X} that d {\displaystyle d} -separate X {\displaystyle X} from Y {\displaystyle Y} after removing all arrows emanating from X {\displaystyle X} . This criterion, called "backdoor", provides

6150-449: Is the thesis that we should be motivated to employ the means necessary for the ends we have. Failing to do so would be irrational. Expressed in terms of practical reasons, it states that if an agent has a reason to realize an end, this reason is transmitted from the end to the means, i.e. the agent also has a derivative reason to employ the means. This thesis is seldom contested since it seems quite intuitive. Failing to follow this requirement

6273-500: Is these things themselves that we see, smell, touch, taste and listen to. There are, however, two versions of direct realism: naïve direct realism and scientific direct realism. They differ in the properties they claim the objects of perception possess when they are not being perceived. Naïve realism claims that such objects continue to have all the properties that we usually perceive them to have, properties such as yellowness, warmth, and mass. Scientific realism, however, claims that some of

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6396-500: Is to be established by empirical evidence. A mere observation of a correlation is not nearly adequate to establish causality. In nearly all cases, establishment of causality relies on repetition of experiments and probabilistic reasoning. Hardly ever is causality established more firmly than as more or less probable. It is most convenient for establishment of causality if the contrasting material states of affairs are precisely matched, except for only one variable factor, perhaps measured by

6519-458: Is to draw a clear distinction between rationality and morality. If rationality is concerned with what should be done according to the agent's own perspective then it may well be rational to act immorally in cases when the agent lacks moral desires. Such actions are then rationally justified but immoral nonetheless. But it is a contested issue whether there really is such a gap between rationality and morality. Central to Hume's position in metaethics

6642-490: Is unity among the different mental states had by the same subject. A substance, unlike a simple collection, can explain either type of unity. This is why bundles are not equated with mere collections, the difference being that the bundled elements are linked to each other by a relation often referred to as "compresence", "co-personality" or "co-consciousness". Hume tried to understand this relation in terms of resemblance and causality . On this account, two perceptions belong to

6765-426: Is usually interpreted as an anti-realist. But interpreters of Hume have raised various doubts both for labeling him as an anti-realist and as a non-cognitivist. In philosophy of mind, Hume is well known for his development of the bundle theory of the self. In his analyses, he uses the terms "self", "mind" and "person" interchangeably. He denies the traditional conception, usually associated with René Descartes , that

6888-497: Is within the scope of ordinary language to say that it is essential to a triangle that it has three sides. A full grasp of the concept of conditionals is important to understanding the literature on causality. In everyday language, loose conditional statements are often enough made, and need to be interpreted carefully. Fallacies of questionable cause, also known as causal fallacies, non-causa pro causa (Latin for "non-cause for cause"), or false cause, are informal fallacies where

7011-526: The Form of the Good , making it additionally include ethical realism . In Aristotle's more modest view, the existence of universals (like "blueness") is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them (like a particular "blue bird", "blue piece of paper", "blue robe", etc.), and those particulars exist independent of any minds: classic metaphysical realism . There were many ancient Indian realist schools, such as

7134-463: The Lorentz transform of special relativity ) in which an observer would see an effect precede its cause (i.e. the postulate of causality would be violated). Causal notions appear in the context of the flow of mass-energy. Any actual process has causal efficacy that can propagate no faster than light. In contrast, an abstraction has no causal efficacy. Its mathematical expression does not propagate in

7257-449: The counterfactual conditional , has a stronger connection with causality, yet even counterfactual statements are not all examples of causality. Consider the following two statements: In the first case, it would be incorrect to say that A's being a triangle caused it to have three sides, since the relationship between triangularity and three-sidedness is that of definition. The property of having three sides actually determines A's state as

7380-436: The means for realizing pre-given ends . Important for this issue is the distinction between means and ends . Ends are based on intrinsic desires , which are about things that are wanted for their own sake or are valuable in themselves . Means , on the other hand, are based on instrumental desires which want something for the sake of something else and thereby depend on other desires. So on this view, practical reason

7503-415: The skeletons (the graphs stripped of arrows) of these three triplets are identical, the directionality of the arrows is partially identifiable. The same distinction applies when X {\displaystyle X} and Z {\displaystyle Z} have common ancestors, except that one must first condition on those ancestors. Algorithms have been developed to systematically determine

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7626-437: The "New Hume tradition", reject the reductive aspect by holding that Hume was, despite his skeptical outlook, a robust realist about causation. Theories of action try to determine what actions are, specifically their essential features. One important feature of actions , which sets them apart from mere behavior , is that they are intentional or guided "under an idea". On this issue, Hume's analysis of action emphasizes

7749-436: The "simple regularity theory of causation". A closely related metaphysical thesis is known as Hume's dictum : "[t]here is no object, which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves". Jessica Wilson provides the following contemporary formulation: "[t]here are no metaphysically necessary connections between wholly distinct, intrinsically typed, entities". Hume's intuition motivating this thesis

7872-512: The (mentioned above) regularity, probabilistic , counterfactual, mechanistic , and manipulationist views. The five approaches can be shown to be reductive, i.e., define causality in terms of relations of other types. According to this reading, they define causality in terms of, respectively, empirical regularities (constant conjunctions of events), changes in conditional probabilities , counterfactual conditions, mechanisms underlying causal relations, and invariance under intervention. Causality has

7995-477: The 18th century Scottish Enlightenment and flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Scotland and America. The roots of Scottish Common Sense Realism can be found in responses to such philosophers as John Locke , George Berkeley , and David Hume . The approach was a response to the "ideal system" that began with Descartes' concept of the limitations of sense experience and led Locke and Hume to

8118-809: The Mimamsa, Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, Nyaya, Yoga, Samkhya, Sauntrantika, Jain, Vaisesika, and others. They argued for their realist positions, and heavily criticized idealism, like that of the Yogachara , and composed refutations of the Yogacara position. Medieval realism developed out of debates over the problem of universals . Universals are terms or properties that can be applied to many things, such as "red", "beauty", "five", or "dog". Realism (also known as exaggerated realism ) in this context, contrasted with conceptualism and nominalism , holds that such universals really exist, independently and somehow prior to

8241-404: The absence of firefighters. Together these are unnecessary but sufficient to the house's burning down (since many other collections of events certainly could have led to the house burning down, for example shooting the house with a flamethrower in the presence of oxygen and so forth). Within this collection, the short circuit is an insufficient (since the short circuit by itself would not have caused

8364-400: The action of flipping a light switch rests, on the one hand, on the agent's belief that this bodily movement would turn on the light and, on the other hand, on the desire to have light. According to Davidson, it is not just the bodily behavior that counts as the action but also the consequences that follow from it. So the movement of the finger flipping the switch is part of the action as well as

8487-473: The actual work. AC3 requires that Alice throwing the brick is a minimal cause (cf. blowing a kiss and throwing a brick). Taking the "updated" version of AC2(a), the basic idea is that we have to find a set of variables and settings thereof such that preventing Alice from throwing a brick also stops the window from breaking. One way to do this is to stop Bob from throwing the brick. Finally, for AC2(b), we have to hold things as per AC2(a) and show that Alice throwing

8610-440: The agent with a reason to do so, which in turn provides him with a reason to travel to the beach. On this view, whether the agent has this desire is not a matter of being rational or not. Rationality just requires that an agent who wants to swim at the beach should be motivated to travel there. This thesis has proved most controversial. Some have argued that desires do not provide reasons at all, or only in special cases. This position

8733-586: The agent, but not normative reasons , which determine what should be done. Others allow that desires provide reasons in the relevant sense but deny that this role is played only by desires. So there may be other psychological states or processes , like evaluative beliefs or deliberation, that also determine what we should do. This can be combined with the thesis that practical reason has something to say about which ends we should follow, for example, by having an impact either on these other states or on desires directly. A common dispute between Humeans and Anti-Humeans in

8856-472: The antecedent to precede or coincide with the consequent in time, whereas conditional statements do not require this temporal order. Confusion commonly arises since many different statements in English may be presented using "If ..., then ..." form (and, arguably, because this form is far more commonly used to make a statement of causality). The two types of statements are distinct, however. For example, all of

8979-477: The arts ) is the view that there are mind-independent aesthetic facts. In ancient Greek philosophy , realist doctrines about universals were proposed by Plato and Aristotle . Platonic realism is a radical form of realism regarding the existence of abstract objects , including universals , which are often translated from Plato's works as "Forms". Since Plato frames Forms as ideas that are literally real (existing even outside of human minds), this stance

9102-479: The assumption that reality consists on the most fundamental level of nothing but a spatio-temporal distribution of local natural properties, this thesis is known as " Humean supervenience ". It states that laws of nature and causal relations merely supervene on this distribution of local natural properties. An even wider application is to use Hume's dictum as the foundational principle determining which propositions or worlds are possible and which are impossible based on

9225-478: The asymmetry of the causal relation is unrelated to the asymmetry of any mode of implication that contraposes. Rather, a causal relation is not a relation between values of variables, but a function of one variable (the cause) on to another (the effect). So, given a system of equations, and a set of variables appearing in these equations, we can introduce an asymmetric relation among individual equations and variables that corresponds perfectly to our commonsense notion of

9348-419: The ball goes through the air. On the other hand, an alteration of the shadow (insofar as it is possible) will not be transmitted by the shadow as it moves along. These theorists claim that the important concept for understanding causality is not causal relationships or causal interactions, but rather identifying causal processes. The former notions can then be defined in terms of causal processes. A subgroup of

9471-434: The brick breaks the window. (The full definition is a little more involved, involving checking all subsets of variables.) Interpreting causation as a deterministic relation means that if A causes B , then A must always be followed by B . In this sense, war does not cause deaths, nor does smoking cause cancer or emphysema . As a result, many turn to a notion of probabilistic causation. Informally, A ("The person

9594-679: The case of salt being thrown into a cup of water and subsequently dissolving. This can be described as a series of two events, a throwing-event and a dissolving-event. Necessitarians hold that all possible worlds with the throwing-event also contain a subsequent dissolving-event. But the two events are distinct entities, so according to Hume's dictum, it is possible to have one event without the other. David Lewis follows this line of thought in formulating his principle of recombination : "anything can coexist with anything else, at least provided they occupy distinct spatiotemporal positions. Likewise, anything can fail to coexist with anything else". Combined with

9717-503: The case that one can change x in order to change y . This coincides with commonsense notions of causations, since often we ask causal questions in order to change some feature of the world. For instance, we are interested in knowing the causes of crime so that we might find ways of reducing it. These theories have been criticized on two primary grounds. First, theorists complain that these accounts are circular . Attempting to reduce causal claims to manipulation requires that manipulation

9840-405: The central role assigned to causation in defining action as bodily behavior caused by intention. The problem has been referred to as wayward or deviant causal chains. A causal chain is wayward if the intention caused its goal to realize but in a very unusual way that was not intended, e.g. because the skills of the agent are not exercised in the way planned. For example, a rock climber forms

9963-442: The conceptual frame of the scientific method , an investigator sets up several distinct and contrasting temporally transient material processes that have the structure of experiments , and records candidate material responses, normally intending to determine causality in the physical world. For instance, one may want to know whether a high intake of carrots causes humans to develop the bubonic plague . The quantity of carrot intake

10086-428: The derivation of a cause-and-effect relationship from observational studies must rest on some qualitative theoretical assumptions, for example, that symptoms do not cause diseases, usually expressed in the form of missing arrows in causal graphs such as Bayesian networks or path diagrams . The theory underlying these derivations relies on the distinction between conditional probabilities , as in P ( c

10209-434: The effect, is called a "contributory cause". J. L. Mackie argues that usual talk of "cause" in fact refers to INUS conditions ( i nsufficient but n on-redundant parts of a condition which is itself u nnecessary but s ufficient for the occurrence of the effect). An example is a short circuit as a cause for a house burning down. Consider the collection of events: the short circuit, the proximity of flammable material, and

10332-472: The electrons moving through the wire and the light bulb turning on. Some consequences are included in the action even though the agent did not intend them to happen. It is sufficient that what the agent does "can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional". So, for example, if flipping the light switch alerts the burglar then alerting the burglar is part of the agent's actions. One important objection to Davidson's and similar Humean theories focuses on

10455-455: The experimenter, to do so at an unspecified time in the past", while the latter reads: "the probability of finding cancer in a person forced by the experimenter to smoke at a specified time in the past". The former is a statistical notion that can be estimated by observation with negligible intervention by the experimenter, while the latter is a causal notion which is estimated in an experiment with an important controlled randomized intervention. It

10578-470: The field of practical reason concerns the status of morality . Anti-Humeans often assert that everyone has a reason to be moral. But this seems to be incompatible with the Humean position, according to which reasons depend on desires and not everyone has a desire to be moral. This poses the following threat: it may lead to cases where an agent simply justifies his immoral actions by pointing out that he had no desire to be moral. One way to respond to this problem

10701-423: The fire) but non-redundant (because the fire would not have happened without it, everything else being equal) part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect. So, the short circuit is an INUS condition for the occurrence of the house burning down. Conditional statements are not statements of causality. An important distinction is that statements of causality require

10824-509: The following definition of the notion of causal dependence : Causation is then analyzed in terms of counterfactual dependence. That is, C causes E if and only if there exists a sequence of events C, D 1 , D 2 , ... D k , E such that each event in the sequence counterfactually depends on the previous. This chain of causal dependence may be called a mechanism . Note that the analysis does not purport to explain how we make causal judgements or how we reason about causation, but rather to give

10947-417: The following statements are true when interpreting "If ..., then ..." as the material conditional: 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 somewhat more structure than

11070-410: The following three relationships hold: P{ B | A } ≥ P{ B }, P{ C | A } ≥ P{ C } and P{ B | C } ≥ P{ B }. The last relationship states that knowing that the person has emphysema increases the likelihood that he will have cancer. The reason for this is that having the information that the person has emphysema increases the likelihood that the person is a smoker, thus indirectly increasing the likelihood that

11193-494: The form of "Had C not occurred, E would not have occurred." This approach can be traced back to David Hume 's definition of the causal relation as that "where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed." More full-fledged analysis of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals only came in the 20th century after development of the possible world semantics for the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals. In his 1973 paper "Causation," David Lewis proposed

11316-426: The form of approval or disapproval. The debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism concerns the semantic level about the meaning and truth-value of statements. It is reflected on the metaphysical level as the dispute about whether normative facts about what should be the case are part of reality, as realists claim, or not, as anti-realists contend. Based on Hume's denial that ought-statements are about facts, he

11439-498: The idea of Granger causality , or by direct experimental manipulation. The use of temporal data can permit statistical tests of a pre-existing theory of causal direction. For instance, our degree of confidence in the direction and nature of causality is much greater when supported by cross-correlations , ARIMA models, or cross-spectral analysis using vector time series data than by cross-sectional data . Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon and philosopher Nicholas Rescher claim that

11562-432: The intention to kill the climber below him by letting go of the rope. A wayward causal chain would be that, instead of opening the holding hand intentionally, the intention makes the first climber so nervous that the rope slips through his hand and thus leads to the other climber's death. Davidson addresses this issue by excluding cases of wayward causation from his account since they are not examples of intentional behavior in

11685-548: The latter as an ontological view, i.e., as a description of the nature of causality but, given the limitations of the human mind, advised using the former (stating, roughly, that X causes Y if and only if the two events are spatiotemporally conjoined, and X precedes Y ) as an epistemic definition of causality. We need an epistemic concept of causality in order to distinguish between causal and noncausal relations. The contemporary philosophical literature on causality can be divided into five big approaches to causality. These include

11808-410: The material conditional. For instance, although the first is the closest, neither of the preceding two statements seems true as an ordinary indicative reading. But the sentence: intuitively seems to be true, even though there is no straightforward causal relation in this hypothetical situation between Shakespeare's not writing Macbeth and someone else's actually writing it. Another sort of conditional,

11931-400: The mind is constituted by a substance or an immaterial soul that acts as the bearer of all its mental states. The key to Hume's critique of this conception comes from his empirical outlook : that such a substance is never given as part of our experience. Instead, introspection only shows a manifold of mental states, referred to by Hume as "perceptions". For Hume, this epistemic finding implies

12054-561: The most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science , it is often framed as an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories . Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make reliable claims about unobservables (viz., that they have

12177-430: The notion of causality is metaphysically prior to the notions of time and space. In practical terms, this is because use of the relation of causality is necessary for the interpretation of empirical experiments. Interpretation of experiments is needed to establish the physical and geometrical notions of time and space. The deterministic world-view holds that the history of the universe can be exhaustively represented as

12300-462: The notion of recombination. Not all interpreters agree that the reductive metaphysical outlook on causation of the Humean tradition presented in the last paragraphs actually reflects Hume's own position. Some argue against the metaphysical aspect , instead claiming that Hume's view concerning causality remained within the field of epistemology as a skeptical position on the possibility of knowing about causal relations. Others, sometimes referred to as

12423-426: The ordinary sense of the word, though it may refer to virtual or nominal 'velocities' with magnitudes greater than that of light. For example, wave packets are mathematical objects that have group velocity and phase velocity . The energy of a wave packet travels at the group velocity (under normal circumstances); since energy has causal efficacy, the group velocity cannot be faster than the speed of light. The phase of

12546-415: The person will have cancer. However, we would not want to conclude that having emphysema causes cancer. Thus, we need additional conditions such as temporal relationship of A to B and a rational explanation as to the mechanism of action. It is hard to quantify this last requirement and thus different authors prefer somewhat different definitions. When experimental interventions are infeasible or illegal,

12669-441: The process theories is the mechanistic view on causality. It states that causal relations supervene on mechanisms. While the notion of mechanism is understood differently, the definition put forward by the group of philosophers referred to as the 'New Mechanists' dominate the literature. For the scientific investigation of efficient causality, the cause and effect are each best conceived of as temporally transient processes. Within

12792-648: The properties an object is perceived as having are dependent on the perceiver, and that unperceived objects should not be conceived as retaining them. Such a stance has a long history: By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour; in reality atoms and void. [Democritus, c. 460-370 BCE, quoted by Sextus Empiricus in Barnes, 1987, pp. 252-253.] In contrast, some forms of idealism assert that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of skepticism say we cannot trust our senses. The naive realist view

12915-478: The properties of antecedence and contiguity. These are topological, and are ingredients for space-time geometry. As developed by Alfred Robb , these properties allow the derivation of the notions of time and space. Max Jammer writes "the Einstein postulate ... opens the way to a straightforward construction of the causal topology ... of Minkowski space." Causal efficacy propagates no faster than light. Thus,

13038-419: The reality of efficient causality; instead, he appealed to custom and mental habit, observing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience . The topic of causality remains a staple in contemporary philosophy . 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

13161-417: The results of a possible measurement do not pre-exist the act of measurement, that does not require that they are the creation of the observer (contrary to the " consciousness causes collapse " interpretation of quantum mechanics ). That interpretation of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, states that the wave function is already the full description of reality. The different possible realities described by

13284-438: The role of psychological faculties and states, like reasoning, sensation, memory, and passion. It is characteristic of his outlook that it manages to define action without reference to an agent . Agency arises instead from psychological states and processes like beliefs, desires and deliberation. Some actions are initiated upon concluding an explicit deliberation on which course of action to take. But for many other actions, this

13407-413: The same ontological status) as observables. Analytic philosophers generally have a commitment to scientific realism, in the sense of regarding the scientific method as a reliable guide to the nature of reality. The main alternative to scientific realism is instrumentalism . Realism in physics (especially quantum mechanics ) is the claim that the world is in some sense mind-independent: that even if

13530-444: The same mind if they resemble each other and/or stand in the right causal relations to each other. Hume's particular version of this approach is usually rejected, but there are various other proposals on how to solve this problem compatible with the bundle theory. They include accounting for the unity in terms of psychological continuity or seeing it as a primitive aspect of the compresence-relation . Causality Causality

13653-532: The semantic claim about what the word "self" means. But others contend that this constitutes a misinterpretation of Hume since he restricts his claims to the epistemic and semantic level. One problem for the bundle theory of the self is how to account for the unity of the self. This is usually understood in terms of diachronic unity , i.e. how the mind is unified with itself at different times or how it persists through time. But it can also be understood in terms of synchronic unity, i.e. how at one specific time, there

13776-664: The skeleton of the underlying graph and, then, orient all arrows whose directionality is dictated by the conditional independencies observed. Alternative methods of structure learning search through the many possible causal structures among the variables, and remove ones which are strongly incompatible with the observed correlations . In general this leaves a set of possible causal relations, which should then be tested by analyzing time series data or, preferably, designing appropriately controlled experiments . In contrast with Bayesian Networks, path analysis (and its generalization, structural equation modeling ), serve better to estimate

13899-423: The strict sense. So bodily behavior only constitutes an action if it was caused by intentions in the right way . But this response has been criticized because of its vagueness since spelling out what "right way" means has proved rather difficult. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It expresses the idea that it is the function of practical reason to find

14022-428: The time-directedness of counterfactual dependence in terms of the semantics of the counterfactual conditional. If correct, this theory can serve to explain a fundamental part of our experience, which is that we can causally affect the future but not the past. One challenge for the counterfactual account is overdetermination , whereby an effect has multiple causes. For instance, suppose Alice and Bob both throw bricks at

14145-434: The wave function are equally true. The observer collapses the wave function into their own reality. One's reality can be mind-dependent under this interpretation of quantum mechanics. Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world. Aesthetic realism (not to be confused with Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy developed by Eli Siegel , or "realism" in

14268-480: The world, and he also recognized the priority of causality. But he did not have the understanding that came with 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. 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 viewpoint on this question

14391-455: The world. Some attempts to defend manipulability theories are recent accounts that do not claim to reduce causality to manipulation. These accounts use manipulation as a sign or feature in causation without claiming that manipulation is more fundamental than causation. Some theorists are interested in distinguishing between causal processes and non-causal processes (Russell 1948; Salmon 1984). These theorists often want to distinguish between

14514-550: The world. Moderate realism holds that they exist, but only insofar as they are instantiated in specific things; they do not exist separately from the specific thing. Conceptualism holds that they exist, but only in the mind, while nominalism holds that universals do not "exist" at all but are no more than words ( flatus vocis ) that describe specific objects. Proponents of moderate realism included Thomas Aquinas , Bonaventure , and Duns Scotus (cf. Scotist realism ). In early modern philosophy , Scottish Common Sense Realism

14637-530: Was a school of philosophy which sought to defend naive realism against philosophical paradox and scepticism , arguing that matters of common sense are within the reach of common understanding and that common-sense beliefs even govern the lives and thoughts of those who hold non-commonsensical beliefs. It originated in the ideas of the most prominent members of the Scottish School of Common Sense, Thomas Reid , Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart , during

14760-548: Was also held among many ancient Indian philosophies. The term comes from Late Latin realis "real" and was first used in the abstract metaphysical sense by Immanuel Kant in 1781 ( CPR A 369). Metaphysical realism maintains that "whatever exists does so, and has the properties and relations it does, independently of deriving its existence or nature from being thought of or experienced." In other words, an objective reality exists (not merely one or more subjective realities). Naive realism , also known as direct realism,

14883-712: Was developed by Rebane and Pearl (1987) which rests on Wright's distinction between the three possible types of causal substructures allowed in a directed acyclic graph (DAG): Type 1 and type 2 represent the same statistical dependencies (i.e., X {\displaystyle X} and Z {\displaystyle Z} are independent given Y {\displaystyle Y} ) and are, therefore, indistinguishable within purely cross-sectional data . Type 3, however, can be uniquely identified, since X {\displaystyle X} and Z {\displaystyle Z} are marginally independent and all other pairs are dependent. Thus, while

15006-470: Was enunciated by its founder and greatest figure, Thomas Reid: In late modern philosophy , a notable school of thought advocating metaphysical realism was Austrian realism . Its members included Franz Brentano , Alexius Meinong , Vittorio Benussi , Ernst Mally , and early Edmund Husserl . These thinkers stressed the objectivity of truth and its independence of the nature of those who judge it. (See also Graz School .) Dialectical materialism ,

15129-409: Was involved. Instead, we just assume it based on earlier experiences that had very similar chains of events as their contents. This results in a habit of expecting the later event given the impression of the earlier one. On the metaphysical level, this conclusion has often been interpreted as the thesis that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events. This is sometimes termed

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