Causality

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Introduction; Rival Notions; Modern Directions

Introduction

Causality, in philosophy, relationship of a cause to its effect. The Greek philosopher Aristotle enumerated four different kinds of causes: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. The material cause is what anything is made of—for example, brass or marble is the material cause of a given statue. The formal cause is the form, type, or pattern according to which anything is made; thus, the style of architecture would be the formal cause of a house. The efficient cause is the immediate power acting to produce the work, such as the manual energy of the laborers. The final cause is the end or motive for the sake of which the work is produced—that is, the pleasure of the owner. The principles that Aristotle outlined formed the basis of the modern scientific concept that specific stimuli will produce standard results under controlled conditions. Other Greek philosophers, particularly the 2nd century skeptic Sextus Empiricus, attacked the principles of causality.

Rival Notions

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In early modern philosophy, Aristotle's laws of causality were again challenged. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes and his school believed that a cause must contain the qualities of the effect or the power to produce the effect. The physical scientists of the 17th and 18th centuries often had a mechanical view of causality, reducing cause to a motion or change followed by other motion or change with a mathematical equality between measures of motion. The British philosopher David Hume carried to a logical conclusion the contention of Sextus Empiricus that causality is not a real relation, but a fiction of the mind. To account for the origin of this fiction Hume used the doctrine of association.

Hume's explanation of cause led the German philosopher Immanuel Kant to posit cause as a fundamental category of understanding. Kant held that the only knowable objective world is the product of a synthetic activity of the mind. He accepted Hume's skeptical result as far as it concerned the world of things. Dissatisfied, however, with the concept that experience is only a succession of perceptions without any discoverable relationship or coherence, Kant decided that causality is one of the principles of coherence obtaining in the world of phenomena, and that it is universally present there because thought, as part of its contribution to the nature of that world, always puts it there.

The British philosopher John Stuart Mill took up the problem at this point. He denied the fundamental postulate of Kant's transcendentalism, namely, that thought is responsible for the order of this world. Mill sought to justify belief in universal causation on empiricist principles; for him, a proposition is meaningful only if it describes what can be experienced.

Modern Directions

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Along with the method of empiricism as the source of all knowledge goes a definition of cause that is widely accepted today. The cause of any event is a preceding event without which the event in question would not have occurred. This is a mechanistic view of causality popular in scientific circles. All the previous events would constitute the complete cause.

Many philosophers deny the ultimate reality, or at least the fundamental validity, of the causal relation. Thus, the American philosopher Josiah Royce maintained that the category of serial order, of which the category of cause is a particular case, is itself subordinate to the ultimate category of purpose. The French philosopher Henri Bergson maintained that ultimate reality or life is not bound by exact causal sequences. It is a process of growth in which the unpredictable, and therefore the uncaused, constantly occurs. No exact repetition happens in real time; and where there is no repetition, there is no cause, for cause means that the antecedent is repeatedly followed by the same consequence.

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Introduction

Rival Notions

Modern Directions