How undemocratic.

So democracy, too, is a myth. Far from being evil, it just doesn't exist!

More importantly, though... If the constitution cannot be amended by the will of the people, then it ain't democratic.

Check and mate. :D

It can rule out the abolishment of the democratic system through its constitution. So, an undemocratic agenda is ipso facto unconstitutional and can be dealt with by the law. — Πετροκότσυφας

I see! So it is not the case that the will of the people, or the majority vote, is always the democratic choice; we have to place restrictions on what the vote can do from the outset.

Why exactly would a population of people vote away their power? — yatagarasu

I dunno. Get in a time machine and ask the Germans in the 1930s why they did that.

Gotcha. So if the population of a country decides that they want to vote out democracy, there is no democratic way to constrain them?

In my hierarchy, democracy is not a good, and therefore the question becomes unanswerable. I don't think it is even a necessary evil -- in my appraisal it is a quite unnecessary evil. — Mariner

Gotcha. Glad to hear all that, by the way. So you have a from-a-distance appraisal of democracy, but you are not politically involved enough to care.

I am surprised - people are normally not so open about such opinions.

But this hierarchy will be imported by the people doing the answering, it is not a given in the assumption. — Mariner

Okay, cool! So how does it work out using your hierarchy of values?

Thanks, SLX. I actually considered just PMing you this question, but I figured I'd let everyone else weigh in, too.

Fitch's paradox is about unknown truths, not unknown statements. He wants to show that, if all truths are knowable, then all truths are known.

The term, or idea, is not unique to one speaker, but it's not exactly clear what this resonance consists in. — Moliere

Hmmm, okay. Let me try something a little different: you have to differentiate being to get different entities so it's not all a big metaphysical lava-lamp. A mode of being, then, is what differentiates entities. If you alter the hammer so that it can no longer be used as a hammer, then it's not ready-to-hand as a hammer, just present-at-hand as a broken hammer. So it has lost that mode of being and taken on a different one.

It boils down to the question, "If there were no modes of being (or only one), what would that look like?" That gives you a clue about modes of being; the means by which phenomena individuate. Possibility vs. closure. What can you do with it? Depends on how it is. The space of possibilities has to be constructed somehow, and modes of being are how that happens.

But I have a nagging suspicion that perhaps I've missed that underlying resonance that makes this intelligible to both parties. Perhaps it will help to imagine where they might disagree. A broken hammer can be fixed, but you can't hammer anything with it; it's ready-to-hand qua object that can be repaired, but only present-to-hand otherwise. If you insist that it's ready-to-hand and I claim it's not, then we have to get specific about the sense in which it's ready-to-hand, because you're seeing a possibility that I don't, a way-of-being that the hammer could have that it currently doesn't, and thus, a way-of-being that it has presently. This has something of a circular flavor, though. I guess this is where Heidegger would "step outward" and involve time, which is where Being and Time gets its spiral structure...

How's that work?

Why would you want to explain it to someone who doesn't get the gist? Because you want them to get the gist? In that case, I would just use examples.

But I suspect that you are asking this question because you feel that you have only a tentative grasp, since you can't articulate it fully. But I'm not sure it needs to be articulated fully. Is there really a need to parse out a concept like "being a certain way"?

You could use an aphorism here: "The way-of-being of an entity is the way that entity must be, if it is to be at all. If it can't be that way, it can't be." Kind of feels as if it's dissolving into wordplay there, which sets off my you-are-wandering-up-a-garden-path alarm. But maybe that'll help.

There is a Metallica song called "Frayed Ends of Sanity," and one of the lines goes like this: "TWISTING UNDER SKITZ-OH-FRENYAAA!!"

For some reason, I often say "Sapientia" in my head the same way he says "schizophrenia." SAY-PEA-ENTYAAA!!

What are you talking about? I'm a ray of fuckin' sunshine. You clearly haven't read my work closely enough.

In all seriousness, though, philosophy is a subject that tends to make people cranky (academic philosophy at least) because it involves a lot of argumentation, so it's easy for people to look grumpier on a forum like this than they really are.

I'll ascribe another one you haven't expressed: you know that you typed those words. My, aren't I presumptuous?

You keep on telling me what I think and what I'd say. Yet every time you do that, you get it wrong. It might be time to stop making assumptions about what other people think. — andrewk

I mean, if your position is that you have no idea whether or not my pressing these keys has something to do with letters appearing on the screen, then I can't help you. If you told a psychologist that during an evaluation, they'd wonder if you had problems. But we both know you'd never say something like that outside of this discussion. Calling it quits for now.

No, we don't.

What we may be able to agree on is that you thought to yourself that if you pushed the keys you would expect some letters to appear and, having thought that, you decided to push some keys, and then some letters appeared. If that's what you thought - whether explicitly or implicitly.

Injecting the word 'cause' into that quite clear scenario only confuses things. — andrewk

This is the kind of thing that only pops up in a philosophical discussion. If I asked you why the letters appeared, youd reply, "Because you push the keys." It's not that hard. Outside of discussions like this, you know good and well why those letters appeared.

In all sincerity, you seem to be assuming that I'm appealing to some metaphysical or formal definition of cause, because that's how you're used to responding to people when they talk about causation. But I am doing no such thing. We all know that some things result from other things. Saying that it's not about causation because the exact word, "cause," isn't used, is like saying that this post isn't addressed to you because I'm not calling you by your full name.

If we're going to discuss this issue, you have got to meet me halfway, not just launch into the Standard Wittgensteinian Script in response to someone doing philosophy.

No. Failure to assent to sentence S is not equivalent to assenting to its negation. — andrewk

Irrelevant. My pushing the keys causes the letters to appear, and we both know this. Even if you think this is all a silly game, you could at least humor me and pretend to be serious, or pretend a little more convincingly.

That you feel that is what most interests me here. What sort of benefit do you hope to obtain from an investigation into an approach to causality - beyond the sheer joy of human interaction in conversations like this? — andrewk

I want to investigate causality in order to investigate causality, because that's what I want to do.

No, I'm afraid I don't agree about the keys. — andrewk

Okay, so the following sentence is false: "The letter appears on this screen because I pushed a key."?

Come on, man. Even philosophical prevarication has limits.

If it is clear to you what you mean by that statement about the keys, then why do you feel the need for an investigation into an approach to causality? — andrewk

Because there's more to causality than pushing keys.

I'm fully in support of being Wittgensteinian in the approach to this. I don't think the later Witt would have seen any point in spending time trying to find a way to approach causality. — andrewk

The later Wittgenstein wouldn't have seen any point in having this discussion. And yet, here we are.

Anyway, we do know, in some cases, what we mean by cause. The cases where we DO know far outnumber the ones where we don't, all considered. I know that touching the keys on this keyboard cause the letters to appear on the screen. If you agree that touching the keys causes the letters to appear (and you do), then we have one case right here where we know what cause is.

I think that definitions are overrated; as such, our way of approaching causality need not include one.

Formal definitions, that capture every single instance of a class, aren't what they're cracked up to be. For the most part, they're not even necessary. A cursory reading of Wittgenstein will show you that such definitions, in addition to being quixotic, are not even necessary. We all can use the word "cause." A philosophical investigation need not have a definition for it. Definitions are not what philosophy is about.

If you want to support a model other than efficicient causation you will need to show that other models are intuitively comprehensible. — John

The only way to show that something is intuitive is to look at it and see if your intuition likes it. That's what "intuitive" means.

That being said, look into Aristotle's causality - there are some old, old, old folk-notions of cause that are intuitively plausible.

I'll take a swing at it. Not an argument I'd use, but you could say this: cows are cows because they have certain features. The sum of those features describes an "ideal cow." As to whether it exists "objectively..." *shrug*

Passive disbelief in P is merely lacking belief in P. This kind of disbelief can be unconscious. Until you read this sentence, you were not conscious that you lacked a belief in a rainbow-colored invisible blue idea shaped like a round triangle hovering over your head, but you still passively disbelieved it.

Active disbelief of P is 1) lacking belief in P, 2) lacking belief that possibly-P, and 3) being aware of both of these things. I don't mean phenomenal awareness, per se, so much as in the sense that I am aware that I have five toes on my left foot, even though I'm not always concentrating my attention on that belief.

Aside: I do not thing that the negation of state of affairs is another state of affairs. This is not a technical term - you can replace "state of affairs" by something less highfalutin like "situation."

Good point! If I'm interested in why something is the way it is, then I'm not going to be satisfied with an explanation of what it is.

I show you a broken crowbar and tell you what it is: "This is a broken crowbar."
You ask, "Why is it broken?"
I say, "Because it's in two halves."
This is not a good answer on my part if you want to know how the crowbar ended up being broken.

Right, I don't understand this what/why distinction and how you relate it to explanation and causation. Also, I am not sure whether you think you are explicating preexisting meanings or inventing your own. — SophistiCat

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what to say. "What" and "why" are two different English words. That's all.

I'm not sure how to take this. You don't understand the difference between saying what something is and saying why it's that way?

Out of curiosity, do you have any way to avoid this type of reductionism? — Marty

I haven't heard any convincing arguments for it. The ones I hear can easily be flipped around: "Everything your body does boils down to the interaction of its fundamental particles." Flip it around: "Any fundamental particle in my body does what it does as a result of its interactions with the particles around it."

Any attempt to boil this stuff down to fundamental particles can be bounced back up to a higher scale in analogous manner. There's just no reason to be that kind of reductionist.

Explanation is only different from causation when you are explaining what something is. When you're explaining why something is a certain way, the lines become very blurry.

Good stuff, SX. I am, overall, suspicious of much discussion about causation held over the past few hundred years because it seems to take for granted that everything reduces to efficient cause in the final analysis, which is just not true. I strongly suspect that this is the root of goofy reductionist theories that claim that causation only happens between fundamental particles or whatever - a dogmatic reduction of every instance of causation to efficient cause.

In regards to the last remark quoted from Oyama, I think that a good analysis of causation in a system depends on two things. First, you need a good "nose" for the level of invariance in the relevant background conditions - that is, when you use a ceteris paribus, you have to have a good estimate of how likely it is that everything else really will be held the same. Second, you have to be sensitive to scope. Anything that posits an effect on a particular scale has to take into account causes/conditions on that scale. If I claim that a riot in a small town will spread across a nation, I have to take into account conditions in the rest of the nation, for example.

One place where this really irks me is getting causation backward and, more importantly, confusing one's mode of knowing with the thing known. There is a difference between knowing that there is fire because you see smoke and assuming that smoke causes fire (or, indeed, that fire causes smoke). The post hoc ergo propter hoc is a more insidious and subtle fallacy than you might think - it's not just about people taking statistics the wrong way.

For an example of how it can be insidious (that relates to our discussion of causality), consider this statement: "Every time I've seen A, I also see B." Some smartass tells you that this is just "anecdotal evidence." The correct reply (which people always seem to miss) is this: "What are the odds that I would always see A and B together if one did not cause the other?" That is how you know when a anecdote comprises a data point, I think.

(Sorry if this is all a little vague - I am somewhat sleep-deprived right now)

I think this falls into the same trap I mentioned in the OP. "Is the system more than the sum of its parts?" is like asking "Is any single part something besides a component in a system?" The system does what it does based on isolated interactions; the isolated interactions are the way they are because of the system. Trying to decipher this to get at causality doesn't work, because this tension between local and global is causality.

I think we agree here, although our terminologies have minor diifferences.

That being said - and this is coming from someone with an analytic background - I think it's a waste of time to try and "do causality" with FOPL. You can do specific instances of causality and understand certain laws using math (physics!), but FOPL will get you nowhere. People have tried that for a long time, and it runs into an intractable tangle as soon as things get complex (again, Mackie's work and those who responded to him). I think that, if we want a general understanding and perspective (not "theory") on causality, we need something vague enough to make various causal processes "show up for us" as causal, but specific enough to throw some light on them. That's a delicate dance.

Perhaps part of the problem is grammatical, insofar as it's too easy to speak of 'cause' as an independent entity, whereas the formula ought to be, in set theoretic terms: efficient causality={cause, condition}. — StreetlightX

In addition to grammar, one big problem is that everyday paradigmatic instances of causation that are readily visible to us fit the "billiard ball" image quite well: rock hits window, window breaks. How about evolutionary biology or something like that? A notion of causality derived from the former will break down when applied to the latter, as we've both observed in this thread.

Efficient causation, I think, is basically a heuristic. An object interacts with its environing system and change happens. We observe this interaction and parse out a relevant characteristic of the object/system interaction that we're interested in (usually something we want to control). This characteristic is then sedimented, in our minds at least, as the efficient cause.

This goes back to a debate you and I had on the old board about causation. I posited that any event is the result of a vast history of changes that eventually led to that event in a manner reminscent of light cones in physics. You stated that there was nothing in my account that qualified as "causation." I think I agree with you that there was no efficient causation in it, but I don't think that efficient causation is a paradigm of cause - at most, it's a special case that we happen to be familiar with because of the kinds of organisms we are. The problem with my old account was that I was taking a FOPL-esque approach, which, as I said above is not useful in this context.

Well, a language game is a body of practices where words are used in a particular way. That's about it, as far as I can tell.

A vantage point always requires separatation. Saying something about a particular word doesn't compare to saying something about Language. — Mongrel

I've never separated from myself, but I'm talking about myself in this sentence. And you're talking about language in this post, but I don't see anything separate or transcendent about it.

I think, then, that the question of understanding causality becomes one of characterizing time. — Moliere

This was one of the catalysts for the OP. I'm thinking of the tension between "eternal" laws (e.g. math, physics) and events embedded in time. Becoming, on this view, isn't a "falling away" from Being. It's rather the tension between the ontic and the ontological, to use Heidegger's terminology. Particular vs. universal, general vs. specific. I think of causality as one way that this tension unfolds, the constant working-through and tug back and forth between individual and context. Causality is not a creature of becoming opposed to being, but is the tension between them - or, to shy away from a strict definition, is one way in which that tension "shows up" for us.

Causal processes take time to happen, of course, so they're clearly related. Time is a constitutive world-feature, inasmuch as you can't have a world without it, or at least, not a world like this one. I think time is something that characterizes our lived experience as creatures subject to becoming, and here I'm talking about felt time, the feeling you have right now of time "passing."

on the one hand the philosopher wants the claims made to have results for the ordinary use of the expression, yet on the other wants to be careful to divorce it from its ordinary use — The Great Whatever

I think that this tendency also lies at the root of the tendency of certain philosophers to espouse elaborate metaphysical theses and then say, "Oh, what, I'm just using common sense!!" Ugh.

So talking about language games is a language game. It's a game in which we propose to have a transcendent viewpoint on language. — Mongrel

Strictly speaking, it doesn't have to be "transcendent." I don't have to "transcend" something to talk about it. If I give you the etymology of the word, "etymology," that doesn't mean I have to "transcend" etymology.

"Language game" is a term you use while engaging in (the social practice of) philosophy. The kinds of human interaction that constitute philosophy give meaning to the term, "language game."

I guess it's a little weird and meta from some angles. But I don't see any real problems from this angle. I think Wittgenstein has other problems, though.

To clarify a bit: there's a chicken-or-egg thing going on with particulars and their contexts. You don't solve the chicken-or-egg problem to figure out causality. Causality just is the chicken-or-egg problem.

I agree with most of this, but I am somewhat leery of over-emphasizing context. There is never not a context, I grant you. There's also never not individual entities. Chicken or egg.

More precisely, there is such a thing as independence, simply because not every change in context obliterates a given particular. But independence is not absolute, and neither is context. That's why I prefer to see causation as a process of the world working-through the tension between particulars and their contexts.