THE PROBLEM OF CAUSALITY

1. INTRODUCTION

   The word "cause" comes from the Latin word "causa", and is the correlative to the term "effect." A cause is that which occasions, determines, produces, or conditions an effect; or a cause is the necessary antecedent of an effect.

2. HISTORY
   1. Aristotle has probably developed the most complete doctrine of causality, distinguishing four kinds of cause: efficient, material, formal and final causes. For example, in the making of a statue the efficient cause would be found in the blows of the chisel upon marble block, the final cause would be the reason why the sculptor was making the statue, the material cause would be the marble out which the statue was made, and the formal cause would be the form or shape which being imposed on the block of marble. All four causes are to be found in all that is, although in natural objects the final and formal causes coincide, since it is the final cause of the acorn to become an oak, and since this is also the form to be realized. Later concepts of causality have been derived from Aristotle's treatment by omitting one or more kinds of causality.

   2. William of Ockham considered efficient cause the most useful of Aristotle's four types of cause, and he probably began the common identification of cause with efficient cause.

   3. David Hume set out to demolish the concept of causality which he identified with efficient causality. He held that experience gives us particulars, that is, with separate and detached instances of sensory impressions. He argued that, with no other basis than habit, a connection or relation between these instances is slipped in. All that experience gives us is a particular A that is always followed by another particular B. Hume argues that upon this invariable sequence "A then B," through habit, we insert between A and B a fictitious necessary connection, which we call a causal relation, and conclude that A is the cause of B. He says that in sense experience we only find the invariable sequence and never this necessary relation. And the ground for this concept of a general and necessary relation holding between the particulars of sense experience is not found in sense experience, but simply in the expectation born of habit. There is no reasonable proof of the existence of universal and necessary relations called the Laws of Nature. It should be pointed out here that Hume is not denying that there are such general statements as Newton's Laws of Motion, but that any rational justification of them is possible from within sensory experience only.

   4. Immanuel Kant was shocked from his "dogmatic slumber" by Hume's skepticism. He set about to provide a rational justification for such general and necessary relations. Hume claims that sensory experience does not provide this justification. Kant agrees with Hume; sensory experience does not provide a rational justification of general and necessary relations, but the structure of mind itself provides this justification. The mind is equipped with certain innate forms which order and interpret sense experience. After the data of experience are formed by space and time in Transcendental Aesthetic, that part of mind Kant calls the "understanding" takes over. The "understanding" possesses twelve innate categories. It is from these categories that our experience derives its universal and necessary relations. Those general and necessary judgments, that Hume claimed impossible to justify, are the products of the operation of the categories of the mind upon the data of experience. In a causal inference, for example, experience provides us with the data "A then B," "A then B," etc. These data are interpreted by the category of causality, and the judgment "A causes B" results.

3. CONCLUSION

   The invention and development of the differential calculus by Newton and Liebniz to deal with change of motion, replaced the Aristotelian concept of causality with the concept of mathematical functions. A mathematical function is defined as a relation of dependency between two or more variables, one of which is called the dependent variable, and the others are called independent variables. This mathematical relation is something entirely different from the necessary relation A causes B and has completely replaced the Aristotelian concept of causality in the physical sciences.