Now I get it! The OP wants to know if causality is synthetic a priori (or not).

it. I'm not inclined to assume non-physical things exist if the relevant phenomena can be adequately accounted for in physicalist terms — Relativist

That's exactly what I'd expect. But notice that 'phenomena' means 'what appears'. Who it appears too is omitted by this, but I expect you think that 'only phenomena exist'.

The OP wants to know if causality is synthetic a priori (or not). — Agent Smith

There's obviously a connection. I think the whole question of what constitutes a synthetic a priori judgement is still wide open.

There's obviously a connection. I think the whole question of what constitutes a synthetic a priori judgement is still wide open. — Wayfarer

:up:

Thanks to Kant and his apriori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic distinctions, we have an opening to prove the logical necessity of causality as a synthetic a priori truth!

The question is how?

But notice that 'phenomena' means 'what appears'. — Wayfarer

No. I was referring to physical phenomena, not to perception. If you choose not to trust your perceptions, that's an entirely different issue.

I agree they exist in nature, within the objects that exhibit them. I have a problem with assuming they have independent existence, because that raises more unanswered questions. — Relativist

Maybe not within the objects themselves. Rather in their spatial relation with other objects, or the spatial relations of the parts of which the object is made up (in which case the lay within the object, in a certain sense)). We know nothing about the objects themselves. We call the contents of objects (and the objects they are made of, way down to the fundamental level) physical charge and mass. These contents we only get to know if we literally consume them and they become part of us.

No. I was referring to physical phenomena, not to perception. — Relativist

Regardless, 'phenomena' means 'what appears', 'a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen'. That is a matter of definition. The idea that phenomena constitute the totality of experience is commonplace, but mistaken.

My view is, all of these primitive or basic intellectual operations such as number and logical principles underpin the process of rational thought and language — Wayfarer

That's you want them to underpin the process of rational thought and language.

.at least as far as our kind of intelligence...
— Mww

What other kind is there? — Wayfarer

There are more creatures in this world. People are by no means unique.

The question is how? — Agent Smith

Without causality, no life. Only if causality exists, life can exist. Life exists. So causality is an a priori logical necessity.

Without causality, no life. Only if causality exists, life can exist. Life exists. So causality is an a priori logical necessity. — Hillary

That's how I'd approach the problem. I don't quite like it though. Something about it is off.

Sure, giving reasons for reasons is superfluous; reason is what we live in... What I've said does not stand against that. I don't see why you raised it...

I'm beginning to suspect that the very existence of reason is actually an inconvenient truth for a lot of analytical philosophy. — Wayfarer

How odd for you.

But they meet all the time.. — Wayfarer

No, they do not. Physical cause is not logical necessity. It is not modus ponens. You seem to me to continue to insist on something that is blatantly not the case, and yet not address this criticism.

Physical causality is a logical necessity for life to exist. It's not a sufficient logical necessity though. But without it, life can't evolve in the first place.

Physical causality is a logical necessity for life to exist. It's not a sufficient logical necessity though. But without it, life can't evolve in the first place. — Hillary

Yeah, me concurs!

Sure, giving reasons for reasons is superfluous — Banno

Which you nevertheless have no hesitation in doing:

rationality is a group enterprise; since it is dependent on language, it is an aspect of our institutional world. — Banno

Physical cause is not logical necessity. — Banno

But they meet in places, e.g. ' For instance, (in) the proposition, “In all changes of the material world, the quantity of matter remains unchanged”; or, that, “In all communication of motion, action and reaction must always be equal.'

Physical cause is not the same as logical necessity, but it sure is a logical necessity.

"The wave flushed over me and physically caused me to fall"
"The wave flushed over me and logically necessitated me to fall"

Draw your conclusion.

But they meet in place — Wayfarer

These are not necessary truths. There are possible worlds in which the quantity of matter changes, in which action and reaction are not opposites.

"The wave flushed over me and logically necessitated me to fall" — Hillary

The wave flushed over me and yet I succeed. No contradiction in the negation, and hence not a necessary proposition.

Here's a discussion of this issue by G.E.M. Anscombe: Causality and Determination — Wayfarer

Hands up – who actually read Anscombe's article?

The wave flushed over me and yet I succeed. No contradiction in the negation, and hence not a necessary proposition. — Banno

:up:

Hands up – who actually read Anscombe's article? — Banno

Hand up. At a slight tangent, it is relevant to the use of statistics in public health. Durkheim studied suicide rates and noticed that whilst each suicide is an individual choice made from personal motives the death rates from suicide in a population are remarkably similar from year to year. The cause of an individual event can be seen differently from the cause of a pattern or rate of such events.

https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/suicide.html

I don't know whether it qualifies as a paradox. Random coin flips result in a predictable result of ever more approximately equal heads and tails.

A different but related idea is the Prevention Paradox. To reduce the rate of heart attacks in a population the interventions need to apply to the whole population, people at low risk as well as at high risk.

‘Why do some individuals have hypertension?’ is a quite different question from ‘Why do some populations have much hypertension, whilst in others it is rare?’ — G Rose

https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/30/3/427/736897

I award myself beta plus minus for the above. "It is an interesting connection but you did not relate it back to the original article." True. I leave that to others and anyhow I'm supposed to be working.

Kudos, especially for drawing attention to wider applications of the principles discussed. The tendency is to only consider examples from physics, doubtless biassing the analysis.

There are possible worlds in which the quantity of matter changes, in which action and reaction are not opposites. — Banno

So much for fine-tuning, then.

Hand up. At a slight tangent…. — Cuthbert

Slight? :chin: More like, ‘in no way connected, but…’

I did read the Anscombe article, that I posted. Didn’t find it particularly illuminating although full credit to her for at least mentioning indeterminism in physics.

Didn’t find it particularly illuminating... — Wayfarer

...but posted it anyway.

Now it seems to me to set out in section (I) the "genealogy" of the error of equating cause and logical necessity, then in section (II) to show that determinism does not work in classical physics, that there can be uncaused events in more recent physics and to show that determinism is incompatible with freedom, and showing that determinism is a cultural artefact that is not needed for doing science.

So it seems to me to be shining a light directly on the error of your OP. A puzzle then, that you did not find that light illuminating.

I'm not necessarily endorsing or arguing for causal determinism.

I think I'm trying to articulate the nature of the relation between ideas and reality. I mean, it's presumed that ideas are 'in here', artifacts of the mind or culture, whilst the 'physical world' is 'out there', over which we cast our net of ideas and concepts, often to great effect. That is what I'm questioning. It's nothing like what Anscombe is concerned with.

I'm not necessarily endorsing or arguing for causal determinism. — Wayfarer

Sure, here's your topic...

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

The Anscombe article shows that they are quite distinct things.

I think I'm trying to articulate the nature of the relation between ideas and reality. — Wayfarer

Ah, Ok, so to the deeper issue. Isn't this a bit like trying to rationalise rationality? How to put into words the very act of putting things into words? Looks to me like something we show but not say; something at the very edge of language use. Something like that seems to be implicit in the last few paragraphs of Anscombe's article. I suspect that she has some Thomistic solution she is hinting at but not setting out, that might well be more in line with your approach than with mine.

It wouldn’t surprise me if she did. And yes the issue is a metaphysical one. It revolves around divesting the world of reason. No coincidence that Hume is also associated with the -is-ought problem’. This is not fortuious.

But to 'explain reason' is to invariably sell it short! As soon as you account for it in anything other than it's own terms, then you're denying the sovereignty of reason. I'm beginning to suspect that the very existence of reason is actually an inconvenient truth for a lot of analytical philosophy. — Wayfarer

This is why Banno characterizes (defines) "reason" as "a group enterprise", rather than as the activity of an individual mind. Instead of describing reasoning as something which an individual mind does, Banno describes reasoning as having the essential property of "language" (requiring, or needing language). This makes language logically prior to reasoning.

Now, instead of the true description, in which individual reasoning minds use language as a tool, Banno has a group of people involved in an activity called reasoning, and the group are using language as their tool. The obvious problem with Banno's argument is that it is utterly impossible to locate, identify, and understand this group activity, called reasoning. Every time that we try to find and identify the activity of reasoning, we see very clearly that it is the activity of an individual reasoning mind. Therefore Banno's argument is based on a false description; the unsound premise that reasoning is a group enterprise.

How this intuition of time, manifesting as order, is itself grounded, whether it is grounded in experience, or something more fundamental than experience, as prior to experience, and a condition for the possibility of experience, is probably an issue of how we define the terms. — Metaphysician Undercover

The whole comment was pretty good, but it all comes down to this, for which I can find no fault. As great and wonderful as human reason is, each of us has his own and he is at the mercy of it. Hence, you take the red pill in defining terms in one way, I take the blue pill in defining terms another way, while trying to find something in common. Which hardly ever works.

Maybe, the red pill and the blue pill actually consist of the very same thing?

Actually though, I think there is a very real difference, which involves the relationship between space and time. As explained in my post, intuitively, time is logically prior to space. And for any person who takes a few moments to contemplate this question, in meditation or any other mystical practise, this intuition starts to become very clear. But in the science of physics, this order has been reversed, such that space is prior to time. Therefore we can conclude that our true intuitions must be suppressed for the sake of adopting the time/space relationship employed by physics.

When presented with this problem, we can proceed toward resolution by assuming that our basic intuition of time is wrong, or by assuming that the representation of time employed within physics is wrong, (or both). But if we assume that our fundamental (base) intuitions are wrong, then we have nothing left to go on. We must dispose of the most basic principles of logic, such as identity, and non-contradiction, and we are left with zero, nothing as a starting point. Any chosen starting point, for any sort of understanding, would be completely arbitrary and randomly chosen.

This is what "pure mathematics" gives us. It appears like we can choose any arbitrary starting point (axiom), and produce a synthetic conceptual structure based solely on One point. Order is not necessary, we can start at any given point. However, the nature of logic, and it's ground in intuition, really demonstrates to us that this is untrue. In reality we need more than one starting point. And, we need an assumed relationship between the plurality of starting points. If the relationship between the multitude of points is not assumed to be one of necessity, the entire structure has no logical stability.

In turn, this reality show us something about "intuition" itself. It can be neither a priori nor a posteriori, but it must necessarily be a combination of both. That is what produces reliability.

As great and wonderful as human reason is, each of us has his own and he is at the mercy of it. — Mww

Subjectivism.