Causality

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 philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm" (1918, p. 180). His suspicion of the concept of causality was inherited by the movement of logical positivism (the Vienna Circle), which set the agenda for most of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. They took to heart Hume's critique of the supposed necessary connection between cause and effect. The twist they gave to this critique was based on their verificationist criterion of meaning. As the leader of the Circle, Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), stressed, positing a "linkage" between two events would be tantamount to "committing a kind of nonsense" since all attempts to verify it would be necessarily futile (1979, p. 245). Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) thought that insofar as the concept of causality is useful to science, it should be understood by reference to the notion of laws of nature. He insisted that the only meaningful content that causal talk can have is when we call "cause" the event, or the physical magnitude, or the physical state, which temporally precedes another one nomologically dependent on the former. The logical positivists took the laws to be exceptionless regularities that are expressed by true universal statements of the form "all Fs are Gs" (e.g., all planets move in ellipses).