Causality
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 mental habit, observing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience.
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.
Since causality is a subtle metaphysical notion, considerable intellectual effort, along with exhibition of evidence, is needed to establish knowledge of it in particular empirical circumstances.
[15] Max Jammer writes "the Einstein postulate ... opens the way to a straightforward construction of the causal topology ... of Minkowski space.
[citation needed] When experimental interventions are infeasible or illegal, 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.
This criterion, called "backdoor", provides a mathematical definition of "confounding" and helps researchers identify accessible sets of variables worthy of measurement.
Algorithms have been developed to systematically determine the skeleton of the underlying graph and, then, orient all arrows whose directionality is dictated by the conditional independencies observed.
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.
They postulate the inherent serialization of such a system of equations may correctly capture causation in all empirical fields, including physics and economics.
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.
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 a real number.
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).
Otherwise, reference coordinate systems could be constructed (using 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).
[47] 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.
Austin Bradford Hill built upon the work of Hume and Popper and suggested in his paper "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?"
[49] Psychologists take an empirical approach to causality, investigating how people and non-human animals detect or infer causation from sensory information, prior experience and innate knowledge.
David Sobel and Alison Gopnik from the Psychology Department of UC Berkeley designed a device known as the blicket detector which would turn on when an object was placed on it.
Thus, the combination of poor harvests, the hardships of the peasants, high taxes, lack of representation of the people, and kingly ineptitude are among the causes of the French Revolution.
[57] John Gaddis has distinguished between exceptional and general causes (following Marc Bloch) and between "routine" and "distinctive links" in causal relationships: "in accounting for what happened at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to the fact that President Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to the decision of the Army Air Force to carry out his orders.
[60] According to law and jurisprudence, legal cause must be demonstrated to hold a defendant liable for a crime or a tort (i.e. a civil wrong such as negligence or trespass).
With a threads and cloth metaphors, three causes are: Monier-Williams also proposed that Aristotle's and the Nyaya's causality are considered conditional aggregates necessary to man's productive work.
[67][68][69][70] The Vaibhashika (c. 500 CE) is an early Buddhist school which favors direct object contact and accepts simultaneous cause and effects.
[80] In line with Aristotelian cosmology, Thomas Aquinas posed a hierarchy prioritizing Aristotle's four causes: "final > efficient > material > formal".
For authors such as Niccolò Machiavelli, in the field of political thinking, and Francis Bacon, concerning science more generally, Aristotle's moving cause was the focus of their interest.
He denied that we can ever perceive cause and effect, except by developing a habit or custom of mind where we come to associate two types of object or event, always contiguous and occurring one after the other.
[11] In Part III, section XV of his book A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume expanded this to a list of eight ways of judging whether two things might be cause and effect.
And then additionally there are three connected criteria which come from our experience and which are "the source of most of our philosophical reasonings": And then two more: In 1949, physicist Max Born distinguished determination from causality.
For him, determination meant that actual events are so linked by laws of nature that certainly reliable predictions and retrodictions can be made from sufficient present data about them.
Nomic causality means that cause and effect are linked by more or less certain or probabilistic general laws covering many possible or potential instances; this can be recognized as a probabilized version of Hume's criterion 3.
An occasion of singular causation is a particular occurrence of a definite complex of events that are physically linked by antecedence and contiguity, which may be recognized as criteria 1 and 2.
