Peirce had his model of tychism or the probability of propensities. Popper recapitulated it. So the idea has been taken seriously.

Thank you for this thoughtful response. Lots to think about.

Reality is dichotomies all the way down. Not turtles. — apokrisis

I always thought it was contingencies all the way down. :razz: But then, I’m not a philosopher, so I can afford to think what I do (for now), which is that so called reality is inaccessible, and all we can know are constructs, some of which work for our purposes, some do not. And perhaps that’s enough: to navigate life by the models that seem to work (at least for a time), without pretending we’ve ever touched some "essence" beyond us. Is this what you are hinting at below?

So causality is foundational. It is always just our idea of reality. And yet also, one has a reality to check things with. Once you understand this is the game, the rest is just working out the details to the point you find a good reason to care. — apokrisis

This is enticing. Can you expand on the latter part of this para?

Do humans need to do this for everyday living? Almost universally they prove that they can get by without any measurable degree of logical or mathematical or experimental rigour.

They can just see trees and mountains and imagine instead how much better things would look with as a flattened plaza with some public artwork and this year's version of fashionably blocky buildings. Even beauty can have its necessary other. Be determined by the eye of a beholder. Be considered as a celebration of all things civilised and well-machined. — apokrisis

I wonder if this is unfair. Certainly there are examples of this. But there are also plenty of folk who don’t care about philosophy and just see mountains and trees and want to preserve and nurture such things.
The impulse to destroy or "redevelop" is not a necessary byproduct of our ontology.

Nice OP!

I feel you have demonstrated less that cause is not a useful concept, but that the concept needs a lot of refinement to generalize beyond toy cases. The problem is that people want to take the toy concept and apply it to everything.

As you point out, "did X cause Y?" is almost always the wrong question, as there is almost never a single cause if an event. I think of cause and effect less like a segmented arrow (A causes B, which causes C, which causes...) and more like a directed graph (A, B, C together cause D, which, together with B and E, causes F ...)

To give a simplified example, think of a family tree, terminating with yourself at the bottom. Everyone you can reach by moving only up in the tree caused you. If you need to travel down to reach someone, they did not cause you. This is already a useful distinction. Moreover, every cause of you is more or less proximate, with your parents being the nearest.

In a family tree, every cause is necessary, none is sufficient. In the full spectrum of casual relationships all four permutations of necessary/sufficient are possible.

In a family tree there is a orderly relationship between causes and effects, where every effect has two immediate causes, four nearest proximate causes, 8 second nearest, and so on. In reality there is no such order. any event may have any number of causes, arising from anywhere on the graph. Effects of a cause may even simultaneously serve as a cause of the cause, in the case of feedback loops.



Moreover, there are an immense number of casual relationships omitted by the family tree (ie, your parents had sex, causing your mother's egg to be fertilized by your father's sperm, causing...) These are real, but irrelevant to the story the family tree is telling. Every casual account is a story that might be telling the truth, but never the whole truth. The whole truth is beyond the scope of human communication, but that is not to say it is unreal. The whole truth is the God's Eye view of casual reality. Every casual story filters the vast majority of reality out, to tell something focused and specific about the events it tries to describe.

This is to me a sketch of a sketch of a more general account of casualty.

My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. — T Clark

Reality is dichotomies all the way down. — apokrisis

Wouldn't one response be, T Clark, that identifying a dichotomy also depends on were you look? That what constitutes a dichotomy is also a matter of convention, at least as much as a matter of fact?

But further, it's not clear that making such a move would be at odds with what Apo has to say. After all, isn't viewing nature in the systems science tradition one choice amongst many - a matter of convention?

Causality seems to me to be something that is multifaceted. Causality in humans is different than say when heat causes water to boil. In humans, causality is more like gradations of transversely communicating probabilities across a multitude of drives and physiological mechanisms. This is ola key concept of Quine's inscrutability of reference... that no two humans share a homology of receptors that "shared stimulus" doesn't reslly exist, so "causality" in you would have different stimulus pathways.

gradations of transversely communicating probabilities across a multitude of drives and physiological mechanisms. — DifferentiatingEgg

Now, there's a tongue twister. Not many times you can honestly say a person has the honor of creating a unique sentence no man has ever uttered before. Not a coherent one, at least. Bravo. :100:

Though is there a slight chance of reducing its complexity just a smidgen? I'll give it a go:

"Things that vary upon other things"

Or does that simply remove any and all value you attributed to such?

a simple way to imagine it is as if your body is filled with millions of broadcasting stations. But reduce the wording however you want?

I have taken a look at it and I do not see the connection with what I have said. Probability imitates reality through similarity and subsumes it into the predictable. What I am talking about is very different from the predictable; it is something that cannot be predicted and consists of the production of the real as a unique, unrepeatable event. This is related to the nature of time, in which each moment is absolutely unique.

Mechanical forces are quite a particular subset of physics. They depend on the simplistic ontology of atoms in a void. Particles that have mass, shape and motion. They can stick together or recoil at the instant they happen to come into physical contact. They can compound or scatter as a second order topological fact.

So yes. This is a very restricted, if very useful, model of causality. — apokrisis

I'm lost. Confused. Is what we are calling mechanistic cause the same as efficient cause. That was what I intended. It's Newtonian cause. f = ma; F = G(m₁m₂)/r²; and then updated by general relativity and quantum mechanics. Me pushing a shopping cart, throwing a ball. Also included are all the things that happen with no people around--a billion light years from here.

I think you and I speak a different language.

It is exactly what you want if you are in the business of turning nature into a system of machinery. — apokrisis

As you wrote--pushing buttons and pulling levers.

So the natural world has a rich causality. — apokrisis

By this do you mean rich efficient causality? Please describe to me how that works. How it's different from f = ma.

I was just saying that the links in the chain of events you listed represent two very different types of cause. — Patterner

What are the two types of causes? I was trying to limit my discussion to efficient cause. Did I fail?

Wouldn't one response be, T Clark, that identifying a dichotomy also depends on were you look? — Banno

And the other response would be – it depends where you find it?

After all, isn't viewing nature in the systems science tradition one choice amongst many - a matter of convention? — Banno

So what are these many other choices that you have in mind?

Isn't it odd how when you thrash about looking for them – as with Gallow's SEP article on (token~type)x(constant~variable) – you arrive at a little four valued table. The cross product of a dichotomy of dichotomies. One not at all unlike Aristotle's own four causes. Just renamed as token causation, type causation, token influence and type Influence. :grin:

So when it comes to models of causality, we find that they tend towards either the triadicity of a hierarchical holism or the monism of a substance reductionism. And that these both arise out of the dualism of an initial dichotomisation. A very simple idea like a world that has causes and so effects. This first thought can then be developed into its complementary triadic and monistic extremes.

The whole deal ends up unified as a unity of opposites of course as, at the end of the day, the triadic view is the irreducible one. Holism has the generality that can incorporate reductionism into it as its particularised case. The Peircean argument.

So your "matter of convention" is more a nod here to woke diversity as the socially appropriate thing to be saying in a public forum these days. It is the necessary presupposition that conditions all the philosophy that feels axiomatically correct in terms of modern cultural convention. It puts one already on the correct side of any debate that could be had in a forum such as PF.

One simply must be a pluralist, an anti-totaliser, a believer in multitudes, an absolutist in value judgements to be a member of the club. One couldn't dream of being anything else in the polite and refined circles of philosophical discussion. Systems thinking sounds so ... horribly and tiresomely plebeian. So non-U.

What are the two types of causes? I was trying to limit my discussion to efficient cause. Did I fail? — T Clark

I don't know if you failed according to Aristotle, or anyone roast. I'm saying the reason the 8 ball moved is the physical impact of the cue ball, and the reason the cue moved is your decision to move it. Those seem very different to me.

I always thought it was contingencies all the way down. — Tom Storm

And yet maths tells us that even chaos is a structured pattern.

One never arrives at the sound of the one hand clapping. The clapping just get weaker and weaker until it finally seems to fade completely away. :wink:

This is enticing. Can you expand on the latter part of this para? — Tom Storm

Does one need to wonder about why the ant turned left rather than right? Well we could drill down to those causes. And indeed we did in my biology classes where we ran cockroaches on one-sided treadmills to see how that confused them into thinking they had made an unwanted turn.

But I mean, in our models of the world, we only have to be right for all practical purposes. We don't need to know everything to know enough.

I wonder if this is unfair. Certainly there are examples of this. But there are also plenty of folk who don’t care about philosophy and just see mountains and trees and want to preserve and nurture such things. The impulse to destroy or "redevelop" is not a necessary byproduct of our ontology. — Tom Storm

But what happens when the greenie and the developer meet to discuss their mutual prejudices? Doesn't the frustration soon rise to the point where each must assert their dominance in terms of some moral absolutism?

Or don't you talk to developers much. What do you make of a spectacle like Trump telling the UN that climate change is the world's biggest hoax?

You might enjoy this video on the guy who tried to bottle the patterns of architectural form that humans find the most convivial. You will note that it is not completely fractal nor completely mechanical in its design. It indeed answers best to what we, as social creatures with biological requirements, find the most liveable in those terms.



So it is not black and white. Maths and feelings may be opposing limits in a discussion of beauty. But the focus can be tightened in from the Cosmos and self as the universal whole, to groups of people building the villages that sustain a community. We can develop an architecture of the everyday in terms of just that narrowed scope of pragmatic inquiry.

I’m curious as to how it resonates with your reading of Collingwood. — Joshs

I was using Collingwood's definition of metaphysics, not specifically causality. My claim is that causality is a metaphysical principle. It can't be verified or falsified empirically. He does talk about causality in "An Essay on Metaphysics" and I interpret his understanding of cause as being similar to what I call efficient cause. Here is what he has to say:

(a) ’In Newtonian physics it is presupposed that some events (in the physical world; a qualification which hereinafter the reader will please understand when required) have causes and others not. "Events not due to the operation of causes are supposed to be due to the operation of laws. Thus if a body moves freely along a straight line pi, p^, pz, A • • • its passing the point at a certain time, calculable in advance from previous observation of its velocity, is an event which is not according to Newton the effect of any cause whatever. It is an event which takes place not owing to a cause, but according to a law. But if it had changed its direction at p^, having collided there with another body, that change of direction would have been an event taking place owing to the action of a cause (see Note on p. 57).

{b) -In the nineteenth century we find a different presupposition being made by the general body of scientists: namely that all events have causes. About the history and interpretation of this I shall have more to say in the concluding chapters. Here I will anticipate only so far as to say that I do not know any explicit statement of it earlier than Kant ; and accordingly I shall refer to the physics based upon it as the Kantian physics. * The peculiarity of Kantian physics is that it uses the notion of cause and the notion of law, one might almost say, interchangeably : it regards all laws of nature as laws according to which causes in nature operate, and all causes in nature as operating according to law.

(c) In modem physics the notion of cause has disappeared. * Nothing happens owing to causes; everything happens according to laws. Cases of impact, for example, are no longer regarded as cases in which the Laws of Motion are rendered inoperative by interference with one body on the part of another; they are regarded as cases of ‘free’ motion (that is, motion not interfered with) under peculiar geometrical conditions, a line of some other kind being substituted for the straight line of Newton’s First Law. — R.W. Collingwood

I find Collingwood difficult sometimes, so I'm not really sure if what he calls action without cause--type (c) in his classification, is the same thing I am talking about.

It isn’t a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. Organisms live causality as an ongoing, enactive process, not as a formal reciprocal equation. — Joshs

Aren't you talking about what I've called "probabilistic causality" or "complex systems?" As I noted in the OP, I see those as evidence that the idea of cause is not a useful one.

OK, how would you describe "changes in energy", while avoiding the notion of Causation? — Gnomon

In the OP I've given specific examples of situations where changes take place but it is not useful to use the term "causality." Many people here have disagreed with my characterization.

I think you and I speak a different language. — T Clark

Not sure if we even live on the same planet. :up:

Is what we are calling mechanistic cause the same as efficient cause. That was what I intended. It's Newtonian cause. f = ma; F = G(m₁m₂)/r²; and then updated by general relativity and quantum mechanics. Me pushing a shopping cart, throwing a ball. Also included are all the things that happen with no people around--a billion light years from here. — T Clark

So you have differential equations. And you have a notion of a world populated by objects. A world of medium-sized dry goods as the metaphysician would scoff. You believe in both causal agents and causal agency as there are laws that apply everywhere in spacetime but also all the things a person might choose or want to do at some point in a vast Cosmos.

There is indeed a reason for confusion. You have glimpses of fragments and they all seem to come from different puzzles. This could take a while.... :grin:

But that is the metaphysical architecture that sets up the dynamic interplay over time. It is boiling causality down into the logical account rather than describing it in terms of the blooming, buzzing confusion one might appear to experience. — apokrisis

This is the point I'm trying to make. What does it add to the discussion to talk about causality instead of just describing the "blooming, buzzing confusion?" My answer--not much, and it misleads people into thinking there is a simple chain of events when, in reality, there is a complex system of interactions. That misunderstanding has significant consequences when you try to go about figuring out what buttons to push and levers to pull.

Something that interests me greatly is the singularity of the effect that cannot be reduced. — JuanZu

I'm not sure what you mean in this context. Previously I suggested just describing the conditions rather than attributing causality. Is that the same thing you are talking about.

What does it add to the discussion to talk about causality instead of just describing the "blooming, buzzing confusion?" My answer--not much — T Clark

And there will be those who just love such an answer.

But there is a reason why pragmatism describes it as the natural state of the newborn helpless babe when thrust kicking and screaming into the strange new world.

We start with the simple things so as to move on to the complicated things. Or in your case, its a shrug of the shoulders? Once you seem to be getting by, why should other folk still be working hard to get ahead?

Peirce had his model of tychism or the probability of propensities. Popper recapitulated it. So the idea has been taken seriously. — apokrisis

I looked up "propensity probability" on Wikipedia and it said this:

Propensities are not relative frequencies, but purported causes of the observed stable relative frequencies. Propensities are invoked to explain why repeating a certain kind of experiment will generate a given outcome type at a persistent rate. Stable long-run frequencies are a manifestation of invariant single-case probabilities. — Wikipedia

That seems like a patch to me. A patch to cover the hole in the idea of causality related to what I called as probabilistic causality.

Nice OP! — hypericin

Thank you.

I feel you have demonstrated less that cause is not a useful concept, but that the concept needs a lot of refinement to generalize beyond toy cases. The problem is that people want to take the toy concept and apply it to everything. — hypericin

Do you consider the description of the salt marsh I discussed as a "toy case?" If so, I disagree.

In a family tree there is a orderly relationship between causes and effects, where every effect has two immediate causes, four nearest proximate causes, 8 second nearest, and so on. In reality there is no such order. any event may have any number of causes, arising from anywhere on the graph. Effects of a cause may even simultaneously serve as a cause of the cause, in the case of feedback loops. — hypericin

The question I've been asking is--if it is such a complex system of events, why bring the idea of causality into it at all. Why not just describe the system? To be clear, I acknowledge it is possible to express just about any situation in the language of causality, it's just that in many, most, cases it doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Wouldn't one response be, T Clark, that identifying a dichotomy also depends on were you look? That what constitutes a dichotomy is also a matter of convention, at least as much as a matter of fact? — Banno

To tell the truth, I'm not really sure what @apokrisis means by "dichotomy" in this context.

I'm saying the reason the 8 ball moved is the physical impact of the cue ball, and the reason the cue moved is your decision to move it. Those seem very different to me. — Patterner

I see what you mean, but I tried to keep human intention out of the question. I can see I kind of slipped some in.

I tried to keep human intention out of the question. — T Clark

Good luck with that. :grin:

Not sure if we even live on the same planet. — apokrisis

Even I'm not sure the US is on the same planet as everyone else these days.

There is indeed a reason for confusion. You have glimpses of fragments and they all seem to come from different puzzles. — apokrisis

It's clear from this thread I'm working on pulling my thoughts on this subject together. I don't think that's the same thing as glimpsing fragments from different puzzles.

This could take a while.... — apokrisis

Yes, I knew I was in trouble when you brought Peircian triads into the discussion.

And there will be those who just love such an answer.

But there is a reason why pragmatism describes it as the natural state of the newborn helpless babe when thrust kicking and screaming into the strange new world.

We start with the simple things so as to move on to the complicated things. Or in your case, its a shrug of the shoulders? Once you seem to be getting by, why should other folk still be working hard to get ahead? — apokrisis

A bit condescending.

I'm not sure what you mean in this context. Previously I suggested just describing the conditions rather than attributing causality. Is that the same thing you are talking about. — T Clark

It has nothing to do with that. In fact, what I am talking about hardly has anything to do with the issue of causality. It is simply to express the inadequacy of causality as it is classically understood (linear, regular, general, proportional, etc.) with respect to the irreducible novelty of becoming. In my view, you are looking for a theory that continues to subsume the case to the generality of a law and its universals. I am also looking for a better law or principle that accounts for the production of the singular, which is neither particular nor universal, neither general nor specific.

I have taken a look at it and I do not see the connection with what I have said. — JuanZu

I am also looking for a better law or principle that accounts for the production of the singular, which is neither particular nor universal, neither general nor specific. — JuanZu

Peirce had a theory of tychism or objective chance. And that justified his "propensity" approach to probability. The claim is that chance or indeterminism is a real fact of reality. And that then makes synechism or the forming of long-term habits – evolving into patterns of regularity – a real fact of reality too.

So you want the thing of the irreducible novelty. But the best you are going to get is the dichotomy of irreducible chance and inescapable pattern forming. The development of a world organised by its propensities or dispositions. Neither chaotic nor rigid, but the balance that is being a system constrained towards desired ends while employing uncertain means.

Peirce built a whole logic around this concept. Quantum physics now produces a whole world. :grin:

Quantum tunneling is an example of being able to make that jump into the future which proves to be the way you could have just escaped from that past. A fluctuation that could hurdle a barrier. An action, but also one meeting the constraints of being a "least" kind of one. The briefest time for which the right amount of energy could be borrowed for.

So matter which way you turn in causality, there is always going to be a dichotomy. And an irreducible novelty can be classed in semiotic terms as a difference that makes a difference. A fluctuation that also has a distinct meaning.

So tychism asserts that reality is basically a spontaneity of fluctuation. A vacuum state. A sea of difference that is generally a state of indifference, yet also capable of generating events that make a difference. A random action can start something, as in the example of sandpiles and their critical state.

A trickle of sand for a while just piles up. But then its slopes reach a critical angle. Some next falling sand grain is the one to break the camel's back or buckle the beam. It strikes just right to trigger a sand avalanche. And do the system resets, having to build its slope back up, then wait for some random grain to make history by again becoming the difference that made a difference.

I presume you want more from what you mean by "novelty". But in physics and Peircean metaphysics, this kind of complex systems approach is your best starting point. The idea that everything starts from a state of poised criticality. For a long time nothing seems to be happening, and suddenly it does. Thom's catastrophe theory. Linear change becomes non-linear change as a sudden phase transition.

Switching models again – there are so many – think of the ball resting on the dome or the pencil on its tip. Spontaneous symmetry breaking. So many directions to go, only one will get picked. So many things could be accused of rocking the ball or the pencil off its perfect balance, but even the smallest imaginable fluctuation is already – in causal terms – enough. Sufficient. We don't even have any good reason to try to single it out. Some air molecule could have done it. Somebody coughing in another room and faintly vibrating the building.

So the irreducible novelty, the difference that makes the difference, is the smallest nudge within the most critically poised context. No bigger nudge was needed. And no less poised context would have worked. There had to be these two things in some exact reciprocal relation that one could measure even down to the Planck scale of the quantum.

Again, every way you turn, there will be a dichotomous structure to causality. Novelty is just then the badge of honour pinned on the lapel of the difference that turned out to make the difference. It could make a difference because it was indeed a difference. But it made a different kind of difference to all the other difference. It actually changed its own world in some obvious fashion. The pencil toppled, the ball rolled, the slope slide, the particle tunnelled, the beam buckled.

The thing – the propensity – that was always the inevitability indeed eventually happened. And it was also as "accidental" as such a thing could be. It was hard to have picked it out in a crowd of exactly-similar looking events in a context that was also "all the same" in being loaded to the gills in a state of critical tension poised for some global topological transition. A world that would never be quite the same again.

It's clear from this thread I'm working on pulling my thoughts on this subject together. I don't think that's the same thing as glimpsing fragments from different puzzles. — T Clark

Don't be insulted. Even a rag bag of fragments is not only as far as most folk get in knitting together their lives into some sort of semblance of a coherent whole, it is even a respectable achievement in the eyes of PoMo types like @Joshs and @Banno. They call it bricolage. A nice French term for do it yourself. Grab whatever is at hand and whack up some kind of art work.

[[Whisper it softly: there is then a bit of a feud going on in the bricolage camp.

Some talk as if this creative reassembly is a crafty rearrangement of stable elements. Others angrily protest that life must instead involve an ongoing emergence and transformation of the found elements.

Dichotomies. Always there lurking to bite you on the philosophical bum!]]

Ok, fair enough. His is an answer for everything, so certainly not my cup of tea. There appear to be various quite different sorts of causal accounts, and no need for an overarching explanation as to what they have in common, beyond the general idea of regularity and our capacity for inference. it's more a way of offering an explanation than some underlying universal mechanism.

PoMo - How rude! :rofl:

Don't be insulted. — apokrisis

I’m not insulted at all. I was just making an observation. I think this post confirms my observation is correct.