structure for 'Natural Theory'    |     alphabetical list of themes    |     unexpand these ideas

---

26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 5. Direction of causation

[explain the past-to-future direction of causes]

19 ideas

5861	People assume events cause what follows them [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: Men take its occurring after as its occurring because.
	From: Aristotle (The Art of Rhetoric [c.350 BCE], 1401b30)
	A reaction: The Latin is 'post hoc propter hoc' - after this so because of this. It is quite a good inductive rule, but obviously open to abuse, as in legal cases, as when someone happens to acquire a lot of money just after a crime.

11207	A cause can exist without its effect, but the effect cannot exist without its cause [Aquinas]
	Full Idea: When things are so related that one causes the other to exist, the cause can exist without what it causes but not vice versa.
	From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.103)
	A reaction: This is open to question, if causes are supposed to be sufficient for effects. Presumably Aquinas would support the view that if the cause had not been, the effect would not have happened. But the current idea indicates the priority relation.

8410	A theory of causal relations yields an asymmetry which defines the direction of time [Reichenbach, by Salmon]
	Full Idea: Reichenbach wanted to implement a causal theory of time. He did not stipulate that causes are temporally prior to their effects. Instead, he constructs a theory of causal relations to yield a causal asymmetry which is used to define temporal priority.
	From: report of Hans Reichenbach (The Direction of Time [1956]) by Wesley Salmon - Probabilistic Causality
	A reaction: I find his approach implausible. I suspect strong empiricism is behind it - that he wants to build from observable causes to unobservable time, not vice versa. But normal intuition sees time as one of the bedrocks of reality, making events possible.

8363	p is a cause and q an effect (not vice versa) if manipulations of p change q [Wright,GHv]
	Full Idea: What makes p a cause-factor relative to the effect-factor q (rather than vice versa) is the fact that by manipulating p, producing changes in it 'at will', we could bring about changes in q.
	From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §8)
	A reaction: As a solution to the direction-of-causation problem, I suspect that this proposal is begging the question. Will a causal explanation be offered of the action of manipulation? If he mistook his manipulation for a cause when it is actually an effect...

8364	We can imagine controlling floods by controlling rain, but not vice versa [Wright,GHv]
	Full Idea: Given our present knowledge of the laws of nature, we can imagine ways of controlling floods by controlling rainfall, but not the other way round. That is should be so, however, is contingent.
	From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §8)
	A reaction: Despite my objections to Idea 8363, this is a good example. It won't establish the metaphysics of the direction of causation, though, because God might control rainfall by controlling floods. Maybe causation is more like a motorway pile-up than dominoes.

8351	With diseases we easily trace a cause from an effect, but we cannot predict effects [Anscombe]
	Full Idea: It is much easier to trace effects back to causes with certainty than to predict effects from causes. If I have one contact with someone with a disease and I get it, we suppose I got it from him, but a doctor cannot predict a disease from one contact.
	From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §1)
	A reaction: An interesting, and obviously correct, observation. Her point is that we get more certainty of causes from observing a singular effect than we get certainty of effects from regularities or laws.

8413	Cause must come first in propagations of causal interactions, but interactions are simultaneous [Salmon]
	Full Idea: In a typical cause-effect situation (a 'propagation') cause must precede effect, for propagation over a finite time interval is an essential feature. In an 'interaction', an intersection of processes resulting in change, we have simultaneity.
	From: Wesley Salmon (Causality: Production and Propagation [1980], §8)
	A reaction: This takes the direction of time as axiomatic, and quite right too. Salmon isn't addressing the real difficulty, though, which is that the resultant laws are usually held to be time-reversible, which is a bit of a puzzle.

15278	Humean accounts of causal direction by time fail, because cause and effect can occur together [Harré/Madden]
	Full Idea: The Humean effort to ground the intuition of causal directionality on temporal priority of cause alone fails, because in fact some causes and effects are simultaneous. The moving of the knife and separation of the orange occur together.
	From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 6.IV)
	A reaction: Since I take causation to be largely concerned with movements of 'energy', this idea that cause and effect might be simultaneous sounds more like a matter of pragmatics and convention. Moving the knife and moving the orange are different.

8405	A theory of causation should explain why cause precedes effect, not take it for granted [Lewis, by Field,H]
	Full Idea: Lewis thinks it is a major defect in a theory of causation that it builds in the condition that the time of the cause precede that of the effect: that cause precedes effect is something we ought to explain (which his counterfactual theory claims to do).
	From: report of David Lewis (Causation [1973]) by Hartry Field - Causation in a Physical World
	A reaction: My immediate reaction is that the chances of explaining such a thing are probably nil, and that we might as well just accept the direction of causation as a given. Even philosophers balk at the question 'why doesn't time go backwards?'

8427	I reject making the direction of causation axiomatic, since that takes too much for granted [Lewis]
	Full Idea: One might stipulate that a cause must always precede its effect, but I reject this solution. It won't solve the problem of epiphenomena, it rejects a priori any backwards causation, and it trivializes defining time-direction through causation.
	From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.203)
	A reaction: [compressed] Not strong arguments, I would say. Maybe apparent causes are never epiphenomenal. Maybe backwards causation is impossible. Maybe we must use time to define causal direction, and not vice versa.

8433	There are few traces of an event before it happens, but many afterwards [Lewis, by Horwich]
	Full Idea: Lewis claims that most events are over-determined by subsequent states of the world, but not by their history. That is, the future of every event contains many independent traces of its occurrence, with little prior indication that it would happen.
	From: report of David Lewis (Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow [1979]) by Paul Horwich - Lewis's Programme p.209
	A reaction: Lewis uses this asymmetry to deduce the direction of causation, and hence the direction of time. Most people (including me, I think) would prefer to use the axiomatic direction of time to deduce directions of causation. Lewis was very wicked.

8393	We can only reduce the direction of causation to the direction of time if we are realist about the latter [Tooley]
	Full Idea: A reductionist can hold that the direction of causation is to be defined in terms of the direction of time; but this response is only available if one is prepared to adopt a realist view of the direction of time.
	From: Michael Tooley (Causation and Supervenience [2003], 4.2.1.2)
	A reaction: A nice illustration of the problems that arise if we try to be reductionist about everything. Personally I prefer my realism to be about time rather than about causation. Time, I would say, makes causation possible, not the other way around.

8401	Physical laws are largely time-symmetric, so they make a poor basis for directional causation [Field,H]
	Full Idea: It is sometimes pointed out that (perhaps with a few minor exceptions) the fundamental physical laws are completely time-symmetric. If so, then if one is inclined to found causation on fundamental physical law, it isn't evident how directionality gets in.
	From: Hartry Field (Causation in a Physical World [2003], 1)
	A reaction: All my instincts tell me that causation is more fundamental than laws, and that directionality is there at the start. That, though, raises the nice question of how, if causation explains laws, the direction eventually gets left OUT!

8400	Identifying cause and effect is not just conventional; we explain later events by earlier ones [Field,H]
	Full Idea: It is not just that the earlier member of a cause-effect pair is conventionally called the cause; it is also connected with other temporal asymmetries that play an important role in our practices. We tend to explain later events in terms of earlier ones.
	From: Hartry Field (Causation in a Physical World [2003], 1)
	A reaction: We also interfere with the earlier one to affect the later one, and not vice versa (Idea 8363). I am inclined to think that attempting to explain the direction of causation is either pointless or hopeless.

8402	The only reason for adding the notion of 'cause' to fundamental physics is directionality [Field,H]
	Full Idea: Although it is true that the notion of 'cause' is not needed in fundamental physics, even statistical physics, still directionality considerations don't preclude this notion from being consistently added to fundamental physics.
	From: Hartry Field (Causation in a Physical World [2003], 1)
	A reaction: This only makes sense if the notion of cause already has directionality built into it, which I think is correct. The physicist might reply that they don't care about directionality, but the whole idea of an experiment seems to depend on it (Idea 8363).

4210	If the concept of a cause says it precedes its effect, that rules out backward causation by definition [Lowe]
	Full Idea: You can't include in your concept of causation a clause stipulating that the cause occurred earlier than the effect, because that would rule out backward causation by definition.
	From: E.J. Lowe (A Survey of Metaphysics [2002], p.176)
	A reaction: It may, though, be the case that backward causes can't occur, and time is essential to causes. The problem is our inability to know this for sure.

10375	At least four rivals have challenged the view that causal direction is time direction [Schaffer,J]
	Full Idea: The traditional view that the direction of causation is the direction of time has been challenged, by the direction of forking, by overdetermination, by independence, and by manipulation, which all seem to be one-directional features.
	From: Jonathan Schaffer (The Metaphysics of Causation [2007], 1.3.1)
	A reaction: Personally I incline to the view that time is prior, and fixes the direction of causation. I'm not sure that 'backward causation' can be stated coherently, even if it is metaphysically or naturally possible.

10389	Causal order must be temporal, or else causes could be blocked, and time couldn't be explained [Schaffer,J]
	Full Idea: Reasons for causal order being temporal order are that otherwise the effect might occur but the cause then get prevented, ..and that they must be the same, because the temporal order can only be analysed in terms of the causal order.
	From: Jonathan Schaffer (The Metaphysics of Causation [2007], 2.2)
	A reaction: If one took both time and causation as primitive, then the second argument would be void. The first argument, though, sounds pretty overwhelming to me.

10390	Causal order is not temporal, because of time travel, and simultanous, joint or backward causes [Schaffer,J]
	Full Idea: Reasons for denying that causal order is temporal order are that time travel seems possible, that cause and effect can be simultaneous, because joint effects have temporal order without causal connection, and because backward causation may exist.
	From: Jonathan Schaffer (The Metaphysics of Causation [2007], 2.2)
	A reaction: The possibility of time travel and backward causation can clearly be doubted, and certainly can't be grounds for one's whole metaphysics. The other two need careful analysis, but I think they can be answered. Causation is temporal.