Word Finder - causality

definition

The agency of a cause; the action or power of a cause, in producing its effect.

definition

The relationship between something that happens or exists and the thing that causes it; the cause and consequence relationship.

Locke's thoughts about Causality and Active Power are especially noteworthy, for he rests our knowledge of God and of the external universe on those ultimate ideas.

But this is by no means the whole or even the principal part of Berkeley's philosophy; it is essentially a theory of causality, and this is brought out gradually under the pressure of difficulties in the first solution of the early problem.

He facilitated this awkward transition by adding to Kant's a priori forms of space and time an " a priori form of alternative causality," or, as he also called it, " an intuition of causality involved in the elementary exercise of perception," which is the key to his whole philosophy.

In the first place, the intuition of causality does not require will at all, because we often perceive one bodily member pressing another involuntarily; a man suffering from lockjaw neither wills nor can avoid feeling the pressure of his upper and lower jaws against one another.

Nevertheless he gives absolutely no proof of the assumption that there is no sense of causality.

Precisely like Fechner, he holds that there is a physical causality and energy and there is a psychical causality and energy, parallels which never meet.

He uses this psychical causality to carry out his voluntarism into detail, regarding it as an agency of will directed to ends, causing association and understanding, and further acting on a principle which he calls the heterogony of ends; remarking very truly that each particular will is directed to particular ends, but that beyond these ends effects follow as unexpected consequences, and that this heterogony produces social effects which we call custom.

How then do we arrive at causality?

Nevertheless he believes that, when we can apply measures to the combination of empirical appearances, then we can apply the logical principle as causal law to this combination, and say that one appearance is the cause of another, thus adding a notion of causality not contained in the actual observations, but specializing the general notion of causality.

He quotes as an instance that Newton in this way added to the planetary appearances contained in Kepler's laws the gravitation of the planets to the sun, as a notion of causality not contained in the appearances, and thus discovered that gravitation is the cause of the appearances.

But, using substance as he does always in the Kantian sense of permanent substratum beneath changing phenomena, and never in the Aristotelian sense of any distinct thing, he proceeds to make distinctions between the applications of causality and of substance.

We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes.

Secondly, though causality requires alternatives in the material cause, e.g.

On this assumption of a sense of sensations, but not of causality, he deduces that we could not from such data infer any particular kind of cause, or a bodily cause, e.g.

In the Augsburg Confession (1530), which was largely due to him, freedom is claimed for the will in non-religious matters, and in the Loci of 1533 he calls the denial of freedom Stoicism, and holds that in justification there is a certain causality, though not worthiness, in the recipient, subordinate to the Divine causality.

Judgment is consciousness of the identity or difference and of the causal relations of the given; naming the actual combinations of the data, but also requiring a priori categories of the understanding, the notions of identity, difference and causality, as principles of thought or laws, to combine the plurality of the given into a unity (Schuppe).

It would make no difference to the form of induction, if, as Kant thought, the notion of causality is a priori; for even Kant thought that it is already contained in experience.

But whether Kant be right or wrong, Wundt and his school are decidedly wrong in supposing " supplementary notions which are not contained in experience itself, but are gained by a process of logical treatment of this experience "; as if our behalf in causality could be neither a posteriori nor a priori, but beyond experience wake up in a hypothetical major premise of induction.

His solution, within the Kantian circle of ideas, was that such principles as the Kantian principle of causality were justified as " postulates of the endeavour after complete knowledge."

Kant reviewing the enterprise of Aristotle in modern times has given a complete list of the laws of thought, but it is arbitrary in classifica Cousin, there are but two primary laws of thought, that of causality and that of substance.

In the order of nature, that of substance is the first and causality second.

In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.

It is not clear from the analysis whether the self is immediately observed as an acting or originating cause, or whether reflection working on the principle of causality is compelled to infer its existence and character.

If self is actually so given, we do not need the principle of causality to infer it; if it is not so given, causality could never give us either the notion or the fact of self as a cause or force, far less as an ultimate one.

And further, the principle of causality, if fairly carried out, as universal and necessary, would not allow us to stop at personality or will as the ultimate cause of its effect - volition.

Starting from sensation as our basis, causality could never give us this, even though it be allowed that sensation is impersonal to the extent of being independent of our volition.

Causality might tell us that a cause there is of sensation somewhere and of some sort; but that this cause is a force or sum of forces, existing in space, independently of us, and corresponding to our sensations, it could never tell us, for the simple reason that such a notion is not supposed to exist in our consciousness.

Causality cannot add to the number of our notions, - cannot add to the number of realities we know.

Sensation might arise, for aught we know, so far as causality leads us, not from a world of forces at all, but from a will like our own, though infinitely more powerful, acting upon us, partly furthering and partly thwarting us.

And indeed such a supposition is, with the principle of causality at work, within the limits of probability, as we are already supposed to know such a reality - a will - in our own consciousness.

Immediate spontaneous apperception may seize this supreme reality; but to vindicate it by reflection as an inference on the principle of causality is impossible.

Kant distinguishes as "transcendent" the world of things-in-themselves as being without the limits of experience; while "transcendental" is his term for those elements which regulate human experience, though they are themselves beyond experience; such are the categories of space, time, causality.

To prove this, our thoughts of space, time, infinity, power, substance, personal identity, causality, and others which " seem most remote from the supposed original " are examined in a " plain historical method," and shown to depend either on (a) perception of things external, through the five senses, or on (b) reflection upon operations of the mind within.

Faith in the existence of God is virtually with Locke an expression of faith in the principle of active causality in its ultimate universality.

And though the Stoic doctrine of determinism did not, when applied to moral problems, advance much beyond the reiteration of arguments derived from the universal validity of the principles of causality, nor the Epicurean counter-assertion of freedom avoid the error of regarding chance as a real cause and universal contingency as an explanation of the universe, it was nevertheless a real step forward to perceive the existence of the problem.

Hume's doctrine follows logically from his theory as to the nature of causality.

Though He may not be conceived as the absolute cause of the world, the idea of absolute causality as symbolized in it may be taken as the best approximate expression of the contents of the religious consciousness.

It is impossible that His causality should have any other sphere than the world, which is the totality of being.

The divine omnipotence is quantitatively represented by the sum of the forces of nature, and qualitatively distinguished from them only as the unity of infinite causality from the multiplicity of its finite phenomena.

In this way, by a theory which, according to Averroes, involves the negation of science, the Moslem theologians believed that they had exalted God beyond the limits of the metaphysical and scientific conceptions of law, form and matter; whilst they at the same time stood aloof from the vulgar doctrines, attributing a causality to things.

Substantiality is impossible without causality, and to this as its true correlative we now turn.

Topics covered include anaphora and verbal anaphora, discourse influences and thematic roles, and the processing of causality information.

As such, it is not causal in the mechanistic sense; nonetheless, it exhibits a kind of causality.

Mr Dikes implies that universal causality (or randomness) - ie, materialism - equates with coercion.

These results should be treated cautiously as the data does not allow for conclusions to be made regarding causality.

Thus, linear causality is the bedrock of technology and social contracts.

They can be said to operate by circular causality without agency.

The use of dia can again denote efficient causality.

Like Berkeley, Brunton does not consider personal relationships, free will, or physical causality.

This is a universal view of causality and determinism where humans are essentially mechanistic, emotionally driven carbon units.