The causality debate has been centered on two issues, one metaphysical, the other epistemic. The metaphysical issue concerns the nature of the connection between cause and effect: How and in virtue of what does the cause bring about the effect? The epistemic issue concerns the possibility of causal knowledge: How, if at all, can causal knowledge be obtained?
Syllogism A demonstrates the fact that planets are near but does not explain it because it does not state its causes. On the contrary, syllogism B is explanatory because it gives the reason why planets do not twinkle: because they are near. Explanatory syllogisms like B are formally similar to nonexplanatory syllogisms like A. Both are demonstrative arguments of the form: all Fs are Gs; all Gs are…
Most of Aristotle's views were accepted by the Scholastics. Aristotle thought that the chains of efficient causes must stop at some "unmoved movers"—that is, things that are themselves unmoved but produce motion to other things. The Scholastics thought that the only proper efficient cause was God, being the ultimate unmoved mover. Later thinkers revolted against all but…
René Descartes (1596–1650) distinguished all substances into two sorts: thinking things (res cogitans) and extended things (res extensa). He took the essence of mind to be thought and that of matter extension. Unlike Aristotle, he thought that matter was inert (since its essence is that it occupies space). Yet, there are causal connections between bodies (bits of matter) and between mi…
Descartes's successors were divided into two groups: the occasionalists and those who reintroduced activity into nature. Occasionalism is the view that the only real cause of everything is God and that all causal talk that refers to worldly substances is a sham. Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) drew a distinction between real causes and natural causes (or occasions). As he put it: &#x…
In his ground-breaking A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), David Hume made the scientific hunt for causes possible, by freeing the concept of causality from the metaphysical chains that his predecessors had used to pin it down. For Hume, causality, as it is in the world, is a regular succession of event-types: one thing invariably following another. His famous first definition of causal…
It was Hume's critique of necessity in nature that awoke Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) from his "dogmatic slumber," as he himself famously stated. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant tried to demonstrate that the principle of causality—namely, "everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows by rule," …
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) charged Kant with showing the absurd result that all sequence is consequence. As he noted, the tones of a musical composition follow each other in a certain objective order and yet it would be absurd to say that they follow each other according to the law of causality. This has also been a major objection to Hume's views. Hume left the metaphysics of c…
In his monumental A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) defended the Regularity View of Causality, with the sophisticated addition that in claiming that an effect invariably follows from the cause, the cause should be taken to be the whole conjunction of the conditions that are sufficient and necessary for the effect. For Mill, regular associatio…
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), in his "On the Notion of Cause" (1918), argued that the concept of causality was incoherent. But this was just as well for him, since, as he claimed, physics has stopped looking for causes: for "there are no such things." Here is his famous dictum: "The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophe…
A central element of the empiricist project was to legitimize—and demystify—the concept of causality by subsuming it under the concept of lawful explanation, which, in turn, was modeled on deductive arguments. This project culminated in Carl Hempel (1905–1977) and Paul Oppenheim's Deductive-Nomological model of explanation. According to this, to offer an explanation of …
Be that as it may, the Deductive-Nomological model, as well as any attempt to tie causality to laws, faces a rather central conceptual difficulty: the problem of how to characterize the laws of nature. Most Humeans have come to adopt the Regularity View of Laws: laws of nature are regularities. Yet, they have a hurdle to jump: not all regularities are causal. Nor can all regularities be deemed law…
Among the more recent attempts to develop more defensible versions of the Regularity View of Causality, J. L. Mackie's (1917–1981) inus-conditions approach stands out. Mackie stressed that effects have, typically, a "plurality of causes" (p. 61). That is, a certain effect can be brought about by a number of distinct clusters of factors. Each cluster is sufficient to bri…
In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) Hume stated briefly another way to view causality. He said that an object is the cause of another when "if the first object had not been, the second never had existed" (1975 ed., p. 146). This view has been articulated into a theory of causality by David Lewis. Lewis (1986) defined causality in terms of the counterfactual dependenc…
No matter how one thinks about causality, there are certain platitudes that this concept should satisfy. One of them may be called the difference platitude: causes make a difference—namely, things would be different if the causes of some effects were absent. This platitude is normally cast in two ways. We have already seen the first, the counterfactual way: if the cause had not been, the e…
Another central platitude of the concept of causality may be called the recipe platitude: causes are recipes for producing or preventing their effects. This platitude is normally cast in terms of manipulability: causes can be manipulated to bring about certain effects. G. H. von Wright (1906–2003) developed this thought into a full-blown theory of causality. He took it that what confers on …
Lately, there have been a number of attempts to show that there is more to causality than regular succession by positing a physical mechanism that links cause and effect. In his Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (1984), Wesley Salmon (1925–2001) advanced a mechanistic approach, roughly that an event c causes an event e if and only if there is a causal process that…
Hume found any appeal to causal powers suspect, since he thought there were no impressions of them. Hume's views were dominant until the last quarter of the twentieth century, when there was a resurgence of Aristotelianism. A few contemporary philosophers think that causation should be best understood in terms of causal powers—that is, powers, dispositions, and capacities things hav…
Anscombe, G. E. M. Causality and Determination. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Aristotle. Physics. In vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. ——. Posterior Analytics. 2nd ed. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Armstrong, D. M. What Is a Law of Nature? Cambridge, U.…
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