"The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present." — Wittgenstein

I think that is exactly Hume, provided 'inferred' means logical inference.

"Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus." — Wittgenstein

I don't think so. Belief in the causal nexus is when you think that walking under a ladder will get you to the other side unless you trip. In other words, it's an underlying belief of our everyday lives and of the possibility of living them. Superstition is belief in a cause where there isn't one.

Now here is what I think about causal necessity.

When you know that pressing P must (all countervailing factors excluded) but must (goddammit) get you P - then something is going on that is not an assertion of a fact or a statement of a belief. What 'something'? I invoke speech act theory and hold that it is a normative statement of scientific policy. You are in effect saying - "If P does not apear when I press P then I refuse to give up until I have found a satisfactory explanation. Further, if someone refuses to give up, then I say they are a lazy investigator, shrugging off events as too difficult or not necessary to explain. Further still, what I will count as a 'satisfactory' explanation is one that accounts for all the other stuff we have managed to explain and one that does not stand out in a 'whoa-that's-a-weird-miracle' kind of way." That is the force of the 'must' of causal necessity. You will see that it does not contain any assertions of fact - only normative and evaluative statements. That is because metaphysics is not about the way the world is. It's about how we choose to live our lives and to think about the world.

Suppose I get a flat tire on my bike. Something must have caused it. 'Must' in the sense that goddamit, I'm not going to shrug this off as just the kind of thing that could happen in a notoriously random and indeterministic universe. So I start looking for a puncture.

The weakness in my last post being - "OK, you insist on looking for a cause. Now tell me just what it is that you are insisting on looking for?" Which brings us back where we started.

:up: Very interesting topic!

A Wittgensteinian answer to this question ... — Wayfarer

Confusing "out of this world" and "empty", as often is the case. I really wonder what people see in this highly depressive guy ...

Hume recognized that there are two categories of knowledge: empirical and mathematical/logical — Wayfarer

Here's my guy! As I often say myself, "My reality is mainly based on experience and logic."
I have thanked you in the past for various things. Thanks once more for bringing this up! :smile:
I will get a closer look to this ref.

I have a deep confusion about why philosophy sees this disconnection between logical necessity and physical causation. — Wayfarer

Here, I would like to clear out something: By "physical causation", I assume you mean cause and effect in the physical universe, i.e. on a material basis. However, the subject of "cause and effect" is much wider than that: it includes non-physical things as well. And since these two "worlds" are different, we can't speak for both of them as one thing. Both "logical necessity" and causality are much more specific and obvious in the physical world than in the non-physical one.

It seems to me computer science relies on the connection between the two - microprocessors basically comprise chains of logic gates to effect physical outputs. — Wayfarer

Not clear to me, although I am an IT person. Among other things, what are these "two - microprocessors" and what do microprocessors have to do in this discussion? Most probably you refer to electric circuits and more specifically to "logical circuits" ... If this is the case, we have here only rudimental logical principles, quite restricted in scope. So, I wouldn't involve machine logic in the current subject, even if it produced by human thinking.

And more broadly, the link between logical necessity and physical causation seems fundamental to science generally, and even to navigating everyday life. — Wayfarer

True. But does this resolve the problem of "logical necessity" in general?

With Kant, you frequently get a good deal of technical jargon, which, to my mind, is not always needed - it can tend to obscure his point, or at least makes it much more likely that someone will not read him properly.

So let's grant what Kant argued, that causality is something through which we interpret the world. Fine. Makes good sense. Hume said something similar but called it an "animal instinct", this is the reason why we believe in causality. Nevertheless, it is true that the mechanisms by which Kant and Hume spoke of causality were quite different.

Ok. The issue is, as I see it, that the problem is not solved. How are we guaranteed that future experience will necessarily be like past experience? That we attribute cause to the world because it is a part of the way we view the world, does not solve the problem.

If I misunderstood what you meant, and went off on a useless tangent....let me know so I can adjust accordingly. — Mww

I think you did understand me even though I did t say it very well.

So we end up with two meanings for "world". There's the world we know, which is the world that's available to science.

And there's the world we can't know.

That we attribute cause to the world because it is a part of the way we view the world, does not solve the problem — Manuel

The idea of law is also built into perception, right?

Hmmm.

It looks to me as if it were a sub component of perception. So yes.

Of course, Hume and Kant were heavily influenced by Newton, but now we may have to take into account the new physics, if it be relevant to the discussion, which is not always clear.

but now we may have to take into account the new physics — Manuel

Quantum mechanics or relativity?

For Kant, relativity.

Kant spoke of "space" and "time" as forms of sensible intuition, because he thoughts these were absolute.

Now we know they're not. We should speak of "spacetime".

Kant spoke of "space" and "time" as forms of sensible intuition, because he thoughts these were absolute. — Manuel

But Relativity emerged from thought experiments, so it indicates that the world does conform to the way we're bound to think.

Sure.

Everything ultimately emerges from our minds. The hard thing is to determine what is innate at birth and how to best phrase and understand these factors.

Space shows itself by objects moving in it. This moving involves time. Space and time can be considered separately but space depends on motion and thus time, while motion, and thus time, depends on space. The finite and frame-independent speed of light gives the relative notion of spacetime and the notion of mass, cause, and effect. In the Newtonian concept of spacetime, the speed of light is infinite and space and time absolute, while mass, cause and effect, can't exist (which wasn't clear to Newton yet, as they obviously do exist, but he couldn't conclude that yet).

So we end up with two meanings for "world". — frank

Maybe under the auspices of something like phenomenology, but not in metaphysical doctrines before that. “World” is a singular conception, defined as “that which contains the objects represented only as phenomena”, which implies there can only be a single word that represents such a thing. And if meaning belongs to words, and words belong to conceptions, then “world” can only have one meaning.

Even if you might be saying there is the world as it is and there is the world as we think it is, we are nonetheless referring to one conceptual representation when we use the word, even if under different conditions.

On the other hand, you might be thinking the world of real things external to reason, and the internal world of objects of reason itself. Which is ok, if one defines “world” to suit. Problem is, everybody’s world of objects of reason is necessarily different depending solely on that which they think about, which is a quality, while everybody’s world of real things is only contingently the same, depending solely on the extent of their experiences, which is a quantity. So we’d have to contend with that categorical distinction somehow. Technically, then, the “world” of objects of reason, is properly termed a manifold, or something similar, leaving “world” to represent empirical objects.

Besides....if there were two meanings, we would need something to inform us which meaning pertains in which case. Seems like over-complicating the issue, that.

I glanced at that, yet another dense academic paper. I might try and find time to look at it later. Suffice to say that at this point I'm happy to accept 'the standard story' of classical physics with LaPlace preaching strict determinism and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle holing it beneath the waterline. I am of the view that amongst the quantum pioneers, Heisenberg was philosophically acute; every essay I've read of his seems to hold up pretty well. And he's one of the two or three central advocates of the Copenhagen interpretation (in fact he devised that name.)

I'm not sure what logical causation is then — T Clark

The term is 'logical necessity' and the question is the relationship (if any) between logical necessity and physical causation. My (tentative) argument is that scientific laws are where these are united in some sense - that scientific laws are where material causation converges with logical necessity. But I know I'm skating on thin ice.

First, I would state Hume was unable to prove this separation [between deductive and inductive] — Philosophim

Your analysis is essentially the same as the 'common-sense' critics of Hume that Kant mentions - Joseph Priestly, Thomas Reid and others. Kant says that Hume freely acknowledges that of course causal relationships are assumed as a practical matter, in science and in everyday life; so that is not the point at issue. He's not denying that causality operates, but saying that its nature is not at all self-evident, even though we naturally assume it to be. 'The philosopher's task is to wonder at what men think ordinary.'

And the point at issue is in fact very subtle. It has to do with the distinction between a priori (what can be known without any reference to experience), a posteriori (what can only be known by observation) - and the mysterious 'synthetic a priori', a term which he introduced, and which is at the very centre of the Critique of Pure Reason. Hume says that only deductive truths can be known with apodictic certainty (i.e. can't be denied) and purely on the grounds of reason. Kant wants to show that the synthetic a priori is of another kind. But understanding that, requires grasping the central point of the CPR and Kant's 'Copernican Revolution in Philosophy'.

The empirical derivation, however, which both of these philosophers attributed to these conceptions, cannot possibly be reconciled with the fact that we do possess scientific a priori cognitions, namely, those of pure mathematics and general physics. — Mww

I'm interested in the fact that Kant acknowledges 'pure physics'. Pure maths, I can understand (not that I'm any good at maths) but physics always seems to me a combination of logical posits and empirical observations. I'm now reading the Prolegomena, which is a useful re-intro to the CPR, looking for some clarity around that. But from one of the SEP entries on Kant, I read:

Kant’s view of the mind arose from his general philosophical project in CPR the following way. Kant aimed among other things to,

* Justify our conviction that physics, like mathematics, is a body of necessary and universal truth.

So I understand the idea of 'pure maths' but I'm finding the idea of 'pure physics' pretty hard to get my head around as it seems to me physics is always a combination of the analytic with the experiential.

THAT, is Hume’s problem: the conception of A cause, or THE cause, is impossible if the human intellect didn’t already possess the pure conception of “causality” as a natural precursor. We would never understand that a thing is possible, if we didn’t already possess “possibility”. And this thesis continues with ten more pure conceptions of the understanding, which are called the categories. — Mww

Well stated.

You will see that it does not contain any assertions of fact - only normative and evaluative statements. That is because metaphysics is not about the way the world is. It's about how we choose to live our lives and to think about the world. — Cuthbert

True, but Kant's aim is to try and present metaphysics as a science - a vain hope, according to most later philosophers. (I'm exploring his idea of normativity through this book.)

The role of the modern logician is thus akin to the role of a tennis umpire, who adjudicates and documents the conduct of interacting actors, whilst remaining agnostic with respect to the outcome of the game. — sime

Thereby shelving (or 'bracketing') the prospect for a science of metaphysics as such.

So let's grant what Kant argued, that causality is something through which we interpret the world. Fine. Makes good sense. Hume said something similar but called it an "animal instinct", this is the reason why we believe in causality. — Manuel

There's a world of difference between habituated responses, which any creatures exhibit, and reasoned inference, which are the sole prerogative of h. sapiens.

However, the subject of "cause and effect" is much wider than that: it includes non-physical things as well. — Alkis Piskas

Ah, but does it? That is one of the major questions at issue.

Pointing to more recent developments in logic hasn't grabbed the attention of the crowd. It's apparent that the confusion in the OP can be displayed in linear logic. But not easily.

Linear logic potentially sorts out the ambiguities in the notion of physical cause, so that these might be contrasted with modus ponens. It's an interesting approach.

But it remains that the answer to the OP is that physical causation is not logical necessity.

There's a world of difference between habituated responses, which any creatures exhibit, and reasoned inference, which are the sole prerogative of h. sapiens. — Wayfarer

There sure is, you're correct.

Just pointing out that Hume was very much an innatist, contrary to popular belief. But his innate mechanisms are very weak, compared to Kant, or even Descartes.

The term is 'logical necessity' and the question is the relationship (if any) between logical necessity and physical causation. My (tentative) argument is that scientific laws are where these are united in some sense - that scientific laws are where material causation converges with logical necessity. But I know I'm skating on thin ice. — Wayfarer

I called it the wrong thing, but I think my position stays the same. I don't see any connection between physical cause and logical necessity. Seems like the premises of a syllogism are where you load the phenomena we observe in the world, e.g.

[Premise] If I push on this button then P will show up on the screen
[Premise] I push on the button
[Conclusion] P will show up on the screen

The conclusion is connected to the premises by logical necessity, but the only role a physical entity like cause can fill is in the premises.

You could say that it was Kant who pointed out that the empiricist's ideas of the 'blank slate' were fallacious.

Kant thought that Berkeley and Hume identified at least part of the mind’s a priori contribution to experience with the list of claims that they said were unsubstantiated on empirical grounds: “Every event must have a cause,” “There are mind-independent objects that persist over time,” and “Identical subjects persist over time.” The empiricist project must be incomplete since these claims are necessarily presupposed in our judgments, a point Berkeley and Hume failed to see. So, Kant argues that a philosophical investigation into the nature of the external world must be as much an inquiry into the features and activity of the mind that knows it. — Kant, Metaphysics, IEP

it remains that the answer to the OP is that physical causation is not logical necessity. — Banno

What about the claim that scientific law is where logical necessity and physical causation meet? That this is what accounts for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences?

You could say that it was Kant who pointed out that the empiricist's ideas of the 'blank slate' were fallacious. — Wayfarer

"Here we have a wide ocean before us, but we must set our sails. Were sense knowledge and understanding [against Hobbes] ,then he that sees light and colours, and feels heat and cold, would understand light and colours, heat and cold, and the like of sensible things... Whereas the mind of man remaineth altogether unsatisfied, concerning the nature of these corporeal things, even after the strongest sensations of them, and is but thereby awakened to a further... inquiry and search about them, what this light and colours, this heat and cold...should be; and whether they be indeed qualities in the objects without us or only phantasms and sensations in ourselves."

- Ralph Cudworth

EDIT:

"The essences of light and colours’, saith Scalinger, ‘are as dark to the understanding as they themselves are to sight’. Nay, undoubtedly so long as we consider these things no otherwise than sense represents them, that is as really existing in the objects without us, they are and must needs be eternally unintelligible. Now when all men naturally enquire what these things are, what is light, and what are colours, the meaning hereof is nothing else but this, that men would fain know or comprehend them by something of their own which is native and domestic, not foreign to them, some active exertion or anticipating of their own minds…"

- Cudworth

I shouldn't keep out Henry More, either:

"That the exact Idea of a Circle or a Triangle is rather hinted to us from those describ'd in Matter then taught us by them, is still true notwithstanding that Objection, that they seem exist to our outward Senses carelessly perusing them, though they be not so. For we plainly afterward correct our selves, not onely by occasion of the figure, which we may ever discern imperfect, but by our Innate knowledge, which tells us that the outward Senses cannot see an exact Triangle, because that an Indivisible point, in which the Angles are to be terminated, is to the outward Sense utterly invisible."

- Henry More

"But now for other Objections, That a Blind man would be able to discourse of Colours, if there were any Innate ideas in his Soul, I say, it does not at all follow; because these Ideas that I contend to be in the Soul, are not Sensible, but Intellectual, such as are those many Logical, Metaphysical, Mathematical, and some Moral Notions. All which we employ as our own Modes of considering sensible Objects, but are not the sensible Objects themselves, of which we have no Idea, but onely a capacity, by reason of the Organs of our Body, to be affected by them. The reason therefore of a blind man's inability of discoursing of Colours, is only that he has no Substratum or Phantasm of the Subject of the discourse, upon which he would use these innate Modes or frame of Notions that are naturally in his Mind, and which he can make use of in the speculation of sundry other sensible Objects.”

- Henry More

EDIT EDIT: No more edits, promise! @Mww, this might pique your interest. These are the people referred to by the great philosophy historian Arthur Lovejoy, as having articulated Kant's philosophy (some important parts of it at least) by several decades, yet these are barely known at all. I learned about it through Chomsky.

In any case Lovejoy, for some unknown reason, was very Anti-German, so, his opinion on German philosophers are to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, he makes a valid point. As I said, maybe this is the type of stuff you find interesting. I don't know.

What about the claim that scientific law is where logical necessity and physical causation meet? That this is what accounts for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences? — Wayfarer

I think it telling that this conjectured meeting cannot be set out clearly. It's the promise of an explanation for the supposed mystery of the effectiveness of mathematics, not the explanation as such.

It's the promise of an explanation for the supposed mystery of the effectiveness of mathematics, not the explanation as such. — Banno

Of course. I would not like to rush in where even Einstein feared to tread, but it is at least plausible.

:up:

Even if you might be saying there is the world as it is and there is the world as we think it is, we are nonetheless referring to one conceptual representation when we use the word, even if under different conditions. — Mww

That makes sense. So a world is always a construction.

A trite argument would be that you are just looking for something transcendent, and choose to see it in the supposed mysterious effectiveness of mathematics.

An equally trite argument would be that I am not looking, and so refuse to see it.

Neither progresses the discussion.

But it seems to me that the ball is in your court; that what has to be done is for you to set out clearly the supposed relation between logical necessity and physical causation. Because if you cannot do this, there is no case for me to answer.

Now my point about modus ponens is in a sense a hint at a direction in which you might head. Modus ponens is a logical necessity, with a hint of causation about it.

Or you might have your own path in mind.

Either way, without your presenting some case, silence ensues.

Apart from the incessant background rumblings about Kant, of course. And the handwaving quotes.

Now my point about modus ponens is in a sense a hint at a direction in which you might head. Modus ponens is a logical necessity, with a hint of causation about it. — Banno

I'll look into that.

unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences — Wayfarer

It's not magic, it takes work and re-iteration from pure maths back and forth between the natural sciences. Calculus, complex numbers and chaos theory were developed to cope with the ineffectiveness of current maths to deal with emerging problems in physics. Integers and fractions are ok for most agriculture, then we needed negative numbers and zero for trade, plane geometry for architecture and engineering and spherical geometry for astronomy, set theory for computing etc etc. Also, when I measure and cut wood it never fits.

Also, when I measure and cut wood it never fits. — Cuthbert

Yes! The unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics....

I corresponded with an emeritus professor about this question. He noted that all the major breakthroughs in physics needed new mathematics; that Einstein had to seek instructions in tensor calculus in order to finalise the theory of relativity. And of course Liebniz and Newton both claimed credit for the invention of calculus, which was needed for the calculation of the rate of change of a quantity over time. But none of that undermines the basic observation that through mathematical physics, in particular, many discoveries have been made, that could not have been made by any other means, so far as we know. And I think the notion of synthetic a priori logic is central to that.

Your computer always seems to operate, though - as I said, with uncanny degrees of efficiency and precision. Had quantum physics not been discovered, then this could not have happened.

I do have a meta-philosophical aim in mind. It has to do with what Max Horkheimer called 'the eclipse of reason'. In classical cultures, it was assumed that the Universe was in some fundamental sense intelligible - that things happened for a reason, and that the aim of philosophy (including what we now call science) was in discerning it. As Horkheimer and his associates argued, this sense of the objective standing of reason was progressively weakened and ultimately undermined altogether in the modern period. So modern and post-modern philosophy is in some radical sense irrational, in that it proposes that reason only pertains to (for example) syllogistic arguments, or is internal to the minds of humans, and in any case is not discernable in the natural world. Hence Wittgenstein's fulminations that belief in causal connection is 'superstition'. Hence also the subjectivism and relativism which characterises much of modern discourse, arising from the typically modern conviction of a universe governed by chance (as articulated in such texts as Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity).

There's a lot of work involved in articulating that, and despite the claim that the argument is not progressing, many of the comments and objections are informative. It gives me a better idea of what I need to understand, and pieces of it are starting to emerge.

The OP's concern can be rephrased as is a world without causality possible? Let's put on our thinking caps.

A world in which there's no causality would be chaos manifest. Nothing physical would make sense. To give you an idea of what this would look like, slap on the face would be painful, pleasurable, neither and it'd be impossible to predict what would follow a given action.

Furthermore, events would occur spontaneously e.g. one would feel pain, one would burst out laughing, drop dead, etc. for no reason at all.

In short, a world where causality doesn't exist displays

1. Inconsistency in "effect".

2. Spontaneous/uncaused events.

1 & 2 is a description of chaos.

Some creation myths claim that the universe began as The Void (Chaos). Check Wikipedia out for more. In other words, chaos/The Void (spontaneous randomness) is the primum movens (the uncaused cause, the prime mover). What happened after that is a mysterious transition from acausality to causality...true if and only if cause and effect isn't an illusion.

Calculus, complex numbers and chaos theory were developed to cope with the ineffectiveness of current maths to deal with emerging problems in physics — Cuthbert

Not entirely true. Complex numbers arose in the study of roots of polynomial equations, more pure math than physics.

Does physical acuasality lead to (a) contradiction(s)?

What does it mean when Hume claims that a (billiard) ball could do anything (attain any velocity or even vanish into thin air or transmogrify into Ivanka Trump for all we know) when struck with a cue or another ball? The takeaway being there's no logical necessity to causality

Point of interest: The word "anything". Are contradictions included too? Apparently not. So, our job, to prove causality is logically necessary, is to show acuasality implies one or more antinomies. Can we do that? It's back to square one, I've circled back to Hume's dukkha (dissatisfaction)...or have I? I went through all that for nothing?! :sad: