Cause.

The Great Idea for tonight's presentation is "Cause."

The presentation will be in four parts.

In PART I we will cover some of the nuances behind the question "Why?" Also we will cover the two meanings of "cause," based on legal considerations.

In PART II we will cover Aristotle's theory of the four causes. We will discuss the impact of this theory on later philosophers.

In PART III we will cover the mechanical explanation of causality. We will discuss the notion of a first cause.

In PART IV we will describe the effect of causation on creation and providence. Finally, we will discuss the difference between experimental science and philosophical science.

Tell me why the stars do shine.

Tell me why the ivies twine.

Tell me why the sky's so blue.

Tell me, my darling, just why I love you.

"The impulse to seek causes," says Tolstoy, "is innate in the soul of man."

The question "Why?" remains after all other questions are answered.

It is sometimes the only unanswerable question-unanswerable either in the very nature of the case or because there are secrets that men cannot fathom.

"Why?" is the one question which it has been deemed the better part of wisdom not to ask; yet it has also been thought the one question which holds the key to wisdom.

As Virgil writes, in one of his most famous lines, Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (Happy the man who has been able to know the causes of things.)

The question "Why?" takes many forms and can be answered in many ways.

Other knowledge may prove useful in providing the answers.

A definition, for example, which tells us what a thing is, may explain why it behaves as it does or why it has certain properties.

A narrative, which tells us how something happened by describing a succession of events may also be part of the total explanation of some event in question.

In other circumstances, a demonstration or a statement of grounds or reasons may be explanatory.

"How do you know?" is often a concealed form of the "Why" question.

To answer it we may have to give our reasons for thinking that something or other is the case; or perhaps give the genesis of our opinion.

Things as different as a logical explanation and a piece of autobiography seem to be relevant in accounting for our convictions; as, in accounting for our behavior, we may refer to our purposes and to our past.

The Greek word for cause, from which our English word "aetiology" is derived, came into the vocabulary of science and philosophy from the language of the law courts.

In its legal sense it was used to point out where the responsibility lay.

A suit at law is based upon a cause of action; he who demands redress for an injury suffered is expected to place the blame.

The charge of responsibility for wrongdoing-the blame or fault which is the cause for legal redress or punishment-naturally calls for excuses, which may include a man's motives.

In the context of these legal considerations, two different meanings of cause begin to appear.

One man's act is the cause of injury to another, in the sense of being responsible for its occurrence. ("immediate cause")

If the act was intentional, it probably had a cause in the purpose which motivated it. ("real cause")

These two types of cause appear in the explanation of the historians as well as in the trials at law.

Herodotus and Thucydides, trying to account for the Persian or Peloponnesian war, enumerate the incidents which led up to the outbreak in hostilities.

They cite certain past events as the causes of war-the factors which predisposed the parties toward conflict and even precipitated it.

The historians do not think they can fully explain why the particular events become the occasions for war except by considering the hopes and ambitions, or, as Thucydides suggests, the fears of the contestants.

For the ancient historians at least, finding the causes includes a search for the motives which underlie other causes and help to explain how other factors got their causal efficacy.

Thucydides explicitly distinguishes these two kinds of causes in the first chapter of his history.

After noting that the "immediate cause" of the war was the breaking of a treaty, he adds that the "real cause" was one "which was formally most kept out of sight," namely the "growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon."

It is sometimes supposed that Thucydides owes his conception of causes to the early medical tradition.

That might very well be the case, for Hippocrates constantly seeks the "natural causes" of disease; and in his analysis of the various factors in any particular disease, he tries to distinguish between the "predisposing" and the "exciting" causes.

But the classification of causes was not completed in the Athenian law courts, in the Greek interpretation of history, or in early practice of medicine.

Causes were also the preoccupation of the Socratic physicists.

Their study of nature was largely devoted to an analysis of the principles, elements, and cause of change.

Concerned with the problem of change in general, not merely with human action, or particular phenomena such as crime, war, or disease, Greek scientists or philosophers, from Thales and Anaxagoras to Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle, tried to discover the causes involved in change.

In PART II we will cover Aristotle's theory of four causes. We will discuss the impact of this theory on later philosophers.

The explanation of a thing, according to Aristotle, must answer all of the queries "comprehended under the question 'why.' "

This question can be answered, he thinks, in at least four different ways, and these four ways of saying why something is the case constitute his famous theory of four causes.

"In one sense," he writes, "that out of which a thing comes to be and persists is called 'cause' "-the material cause.

"In another sense, the form or the archetype" is the cause-the formal cause.

"Again the primary source of the change or coming to rest" is a cause-the efficient cause.

"Again the end or 'that for the sake of which' a thing is done" is a cause-the final cause.

"This," he concludes, "perhaps exhausts the number of ways in which the term 'cause' is used."

The production of works of art, to which Aristotle himself frequently turns for examples most readily illustrates these four different kinds of causes.

In making a shoe, the material cause is that out of which the shoe is made-the leather or hide.

The efficient cause is the shoemaker, or more precisely the shoemaker's acts which transform the raw material into the finished product.

The formal cause is the pattern which directs the work; it is, in a sense, the definition or type of the thing to be made, which, beginning as a plan in the artist's mind, appears at the end of the work in the transformed material as its own intrinsic form.

The protection of the foot is the final cause or end-that for the sake of the shoe was made.

Two of the four causes seem to be less discernible in nature than in art.

The material and efficient causes remain evident enough.

The material cause can usually be identified as that which undergoes the change-the thing which grows, alters in color, or moves from place to place.

The efficient cause is always that by which the change is produced.

It is the moving cause working on that which is susceptible to change, e.g. the fire heating the water, the rolling stone setting another stone in motion.

But the formal cause is not as apparent in nature as in art.

Whereas in art it can be identified by reference to a plan in the maker's mind, it must be discovered in nature in the change itself, as that which completes the process.

For example, the redness which the apple takes on in ripening is the formal cause of its alteration in color.

The trouble with the final cause is that it often tends to be inseparable from the formal cause;

For unless some extrinsic purpose can be found for the natural change-some end beyond which the change serves-the final cause or that for the sake of which the change took place, is no other than the quality or form which the matter assumes as a result of its transformation.

Bacon divides natural philosophy into two parts, of which one part, "physics inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysics, handleth the formal and final causes"

Bacon claims that the study of final causes is inappropriate in physics.

"This misplacing," Bacon comments, "hath caused a deficiency, or at least a great improficiency in the sciences themselves."

"For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physcial causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery."

On this score, he charges Plato, Aristotle, and Galen with the impeding the development of science, not because "final causes are not true and worthy to be inquired, being kept with their own province;"

"but because their excursions into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vastness and solitude in that tract."

"Nature has no end before herself," Spinoza claims, and "all final causes are nothing but human fictions."

Furthermore, he insists, "this doctrine concerning an end altogether overturns nature. For that which is in truth the cause it conseders as the effect and vice versa."

He deplores those who "will not cease from asking the causes of causes, until at last you fly to the will of God, the refuge of ignorance."

Though Descartes replies to Pierre Gassendi's "on behalf of final causality," by saying that they should "be referred to as the efficient cause," his position more closely resembles that of Bacon than Spinoza.

When we behold "the uses of the various parts in plants and animals," we may be led to admire "the God who brings these into existence," but "that does not imply," he adds, "that we can divine the purpose for which He made each thing."

"And although in Ethics, where it is often allowable to employ conjecture, it is at times pious to consider the end which we may conjecture God set before Himself in ruling the universe, certainly in Physics, where everything should rest upon the securest arguments, it is futile to do so."

The elimination of final causes from natural sciences led Descartes to formulate Harvey's discoveries concerning the motion of the heart and blood in purely mechanical terms.

But Harvey himself, as Boyle points out in his Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural Things, interprets organic structures in terms of their functional utility;

and Boyle defends the soundness of Harvey's method-employing final causes-against Descartes.

Guided as it is by the principle of utility or function, Harvey's reasoning about the ciriculation of the blood-especially its venal and arterial flow in relation to the action of the lungs-appeals to final causes.

He remarks upon the need or arguing from the final causes in his work on animal generation.

"It appears advisable to me," he writes, "to look back from the perfect animal, and to inquire by what process it has arisen and grown to maturity, to retrace our steps, as it were, from the goal to the starting place."

Kant generalizes this type of argument in his Critique of Teleological Judgment.

"No one has ever questioned," he says, "the correctness of the principle that when judging certain things in nature, namely organisms and their possibility, we must look at the conception of final causes."

"Such a principle is admittedly necessary even where we require no more than a guiding thread for the purpose of becoming acquainted with the character of these things by means of observation."

Kant criticizes a mechanism which totally excludes the principle of finality-whether it is based on the doctrine of "blind chance" of Democritus and Epicurus or the "system of finality," he attributes to Spinoza.

Physical science, he thinks, can be extended by the principle of final causes, "without interfering with the principle of the mechanism of physical causality."

In PART III we will cover the mechanical explanation of causality. We will discuss the notion of first cause.

The tendency to dispense with final causes seems to prevail in the science of mechanics and especially in the domain of inanimate nature.

Huygens, for example defines light as "motion of some sort of matter."

He explicitly insists that conceiving natural things in this way is the only way proper to what he calls the "true Philosophy, in which one conceives the causes of all natural effects in terms of mechanical motions."

Mechanical explanation is distinguished by the fact that it appeals to no principles except matter and motion.

The material and the moving (or efficient) causes suffice.

The philosophical thought of the 17th century, influenced by the century's brilliant accomplishments in mechanics, tends to be mechanistic in its theory of causation.

Yet, being also influenced by the model and method of mathematics, thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza retain the formal cause as a principle of demonstration, if not explanation.

Spinoza, in fact, claims that the reliance on final causes "would have been sufficient to keep the human race in darkness to all eternity if mathematics, which does not deal with ends, but with essences and properties of forms, had not placed before us another rule of truth."

Nevertheless, the tendency to restrict causality to efficiency-a motion producing a motion-gains headway.

By the time Hume questions man's ability to know causes, the term cause signifies only efficiency, understood as the energy expended in producing an effect.

Hume's doubt concerning our ability to know causes presupposes this conception of cause and effect, which asserts that "there is some connection between them, some power in the one by which it infallibly produces the other."

The identification of cause with the efficient type of cause becomes a commonly accepted notion, even among those who do not agree with Hume that "we are ignorant . . . of the manner in which bodies operate on each other;"

And that "their force and energy is entirely incomprehensible" to us.

The narrowing of causality to efficiency also appears in the doctrine, more prevalent today than ever before, that natural science describes, but does not explain-that it tells us how things happen, but not why.

If it does not require the scientist to avoid all reference to causes, it does limit him to the one type of causality which can be expressid in terms of sequence and correlations.

The exclusion of all causes except the efficient tends furthermore to reduce the causal order to nothing but the relation of cause and effect.

The four causes taken together as the sufficient reason for things or events do not as such stand in relation to an effect, in the sense in which an effect is something separable from and externally related to a cause.

That way of conceiving causation-as a relation of cause to effect-is appropriate to the efficient cause alone.

When the efficient cause is regarded as the only cause, having a power proportionate to the reality of its effect, the very meaning of cause involves relation to an effect.

In addition to Aristole's four causes, there are two other ways to classify causes.

First is the distinction between an accidental cause and an essential cause.

An accidental cause is a necessary condition for a given effect, but not a sufficient condition.

Conceiving a son may be a necessary condition for having a grandson, but it is not a sufficient condition.

An essential cause is a sufficient condition for an effect; cutting off the fuel supply is a sufficient condition for stopping a diesel engine.

Another distinction is between a principal cause and an instrumental cause.

When a man shoots another, the murderer is the principal cause, while the exploding gunpowder is the instrumental cause.

In his attempt to prove that a prime mover exists, Aristotle tried to prove that a given effect cannot have an infinite number of causes.

Descartes claimed that such a proof is not possible unless you can prove that the world has a definite beginning in time.

Genesis 1: 1 can be annoying with its failure to define "In the beginning."

The argument is valid Aquinas makes clear, only if we distinguish between essential and accidental causes.

"It is not impossible," he says, "to proceed to infinity accidentally as regards efficient causes . . . It is not impossible for man to be generated by man to infinity."

But, he holds, "there cannot be an infinite number of causes that are per se required for a certain effect; for instanct, that a stone be moved by a stick, the stick by the hand, and so on to infinity."

In the latter case, it should be observed, the cooperating causes are simultaneous and so if there were an infinity of them, that would not require an infinite time.

The crux of the argument, therefore, lies either in the impossibility of an infinite number of simultaneous causes, or in the impossibility of an infinite number of causes related to one another as instrumental to principal cause.

Among causes so related, Descartes, like Aquinas, argues that there must be one first or principal cause.

"In the case of causes which are so connected and subordinated to one another, that no action on the part of the lower is possible without the activity of the higher; e.g. in the case where something is moved by a stone, itself impelled by a stick, which the hand moves . . . we must go on until we come to one thing in motion which first moves."

But for Descartes, unlike Aquinas, this method of proving God as the first cause of all observable effects has less elegance than the so-called "ontological argument" in which the conception of God as a necessary being, incapable of not existing, immediately implies his existence.

The argument from effect to cause is traditionally called ‡ posteriori in reasoning, in contrast to ‡ priori reasoning from cause to effect.

According to Aristotle and Aquinas, the latter mode of reasoning can only demonstrate the nature of a thing, not its existence.

Aquinas, furthermore, does not regard the ontological argument as a form of reasoning at all, but rather as the assertion that God's existence is self-evident to us, which he denies.

Kant questions whether the ‡ posteriori method of proving God's existence really differs from the ontological argument.

It is, according to him, not only "illusory and inadequate," but also "possesses the additional blemish of an ignoratio elenchi-professing to conduct us by a new road to a desired goal, but bringing us back, after a short circuit, to the old path which we had deserted at its call."

In PART IV we will describe the effect of causation on creation and providence. Finally, we will discuss the difference between experimental science and philosophical science.

The dogma of creation requires the conception of a unique type of cause.

Even if the world always existed-a supposition which is contrary to Christian and Jewish faith but not to reason-the religious belief in a Creator would remain a belief in that unique cause without whose action to preserve its being at every moment the world would cease to be.

On the assumption that God created the world in the beginning, it is, perhaps, easy enough to see with Augustine how "the creating and originating work which gave being to all natures, differs from all other types of causation which cause motions or changes, or even the generation of things, rather than their very existence."

It may, however, be more difficult to understand the creative action of God in relation to a world already in existence.

But a theologian like Aquinas explains that "as long as a thing has being, so long must God be present to it: as the cause of its being--a doctrine which Berkeley later reports by saying that this makes "the divine conservation . . . to be a continual creation."

Aquinas agrees that "the conservation of things by God is not by a new action, but by the continuation of that action whereby he gives being."

But in the conservation of things Aquinas thinks that God acts through natural or created causes, whereas in their initiation, being is the proper effect of God alone.

The dogma of divine providence also requires a theory of the cooperation of the first cause with natural or secondary causes.

Dante, in describing the direction which providence gives to the course of nature, uses the image of a bow.

"Whatsoever this bow shoots falls disposed to its forseen end, even as a thing directed to its aim."

That God governs and cares for all things may be supposed to reduce nature to a puppet show in which every action takes place in obedience to the divine will alone.

Natural causes would thus cease to have any genuine efficacy in the production of their own effects.

Some theologians have tended toward this extreme position, but Aquinas argues contrariwise that natural causes retain their efficacy as instrumental causes, subordinate to God's will as the one principal cause.

"Since God wills that effects be because of their causes," he writes, "all effects that presuppose some other effect do not depend solely on the will of God;"

and, in another place, he says, "whatsoever causes He assigns to certain effects, He gives the power to produce those effects . . . so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures."

The discussion of cause takes a new turn in modern times.

New issues arise, not from different interpretations of causality, but from the skeptic's doubts concerning our ability to know the causes of things, and from the tendency of the physical sciences to limit or even to abandon the investigation of causes.

According to the ancient conception of science, knowledge, to be scientific, must state the causes of things.

The essence of scientific method, according to the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, consists in using causes both to define and to demonstrate.

Sometimes genus and differentia are translated into material and formal cause;

Sometimes a thing is defined genetically be reference to its efficient cause, and sometimes teleologically by reference to its final cause.

The degree to which this conception of science is realized in particular fields may be questioned.

The treatises of the astronomers, for example, do not seem to exemplify it as much as do Aristotle's own physical treatises or Harvey's work on the circulation of the blood.

Yet until modern developments in mathematical physics, the ascertainment of causes seems to be the dominant conception of the scientific task;

and until the separation widens between the experimental and the philosophical sciences, the possibility of knowing causes is not generally doubted.

Galileo's exposition of the new mechanics explicitly announces a departure from the traditional interest of the natural philosopher in the discovery of causes.

The aim, he says in his Two New Sciences, is not "to investigate the cause of the acceleration of natural motion, concerning which various opinions have been expressed by various philosophers;"

But rather "to investigate and to demonstrate some of the properties of accelerated motion."

The "various opinions" about causes are referred to as "fantasies" which it is "not really worthwhile" for the scientist to examine.

Hume goes further.

He insists that all causes are hidden.

By the very nature of what causes are supposed to be and because of the manner in which the human mind knows, man can have no knowledge of how causes really produce their effects.

"We never can, by our utmost scrutiny," he says, "discover anything but one event following another, without being able to comprehend any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connection between it and its supposed effect."

All that men can be referring to when they use the words "cause" and "effect," Hume thinks, is the customary sequence of "one object followed by another, and where all objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second."

So far as any knowledge based upon reason or experience can go, the relation of cause and effect is simply one of succession, impressed upon the mind "by a customary transition."

That one event leads to another becomes more and more probable-but never more than probable-as the sequence recurs more and more frequently in experience.

Hume's skepticism about causes, as his interpretation of the meaning of cause, gains wide acceptance in subsequent thought, especially among natural scientists.

William James, for example, considering the principle that 'nothing can happen without a cause,' " declares that "we have no definite idea of what we mean by cause, ore of what causality consists in."

"But the principle expresses a demand for some deeper sort of inward connection between phenomena than their merely habitual time sequence seems to be."

"The word 'cause' is, in short, an altar to an unknown god, and empty pedestal still marking the place for a hoped-for statue."

"Any really inward belonging-together of the squent terms," he continues, "if discovered, would be accepted as what the word cause was meant to stand for."

Hume claims, "though there is no such thing as chance in our world, our ignorance of the real cause of any event has the same influence on the understanding, and begets a like species of belief or opinion."

Hume's position is that man's ignorance of real causes is a product of human limitations rather than a product of anything intrinsic to nature.

Source. Philosophy-irc.org