Abstract
Philosophers often attend to our common judgments, however casual or erroneous. The language we commonly use and the errors we commonly make are supposed to clarify the principles of sound judgment. That supposition has, I think, been justified by the results of attending closely to our common judgments in matters of perception, morals and logic. But curiously, philosophers have tended to neglect our common causal judgments. They have been causal snobs preoccupied with ‘the right causes’, those endorsed by the scientific élite. There is concern only with long-established causes such as billiard balls, freezing water, flipped switches, and indigestible dinners. The popular causes of the common man — Fate, charms, conspiracies, and various divinities — are beneath consideration and contempt. Even causes once favored by scientists themselves are neglected: the planet Vulcan attracts no more philosophic attention than its ancient namesake.
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References
Mill’s definition of ‘the cause’ (A System of Logic, III, v. 3) and J. L. Mackie’s definition of ‘a cause’ (Amer. Phil. Quart. 2 (1965) 245), respectively.
At the outset of the play, Molière himself shows some sympathy for virtus dormitiva. “Un julep hépatique, soporatif et somnifère, composé pour faire dormir Monsieur” is the only item on the apothecary’s bill which Argan pays for in full and without complaint.
Details of the sort that the woodcutter concocts when forced in Le Médecin malgré lui to give a cause of the impediment to the action of the tongue by which he has initially explained Lucinde’s muteness (Act II, scene 6).
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The Child’s Conception of Causality.
On one possible reading of the term participation in Primitive Mentality.
On Generation and Corruption, 323b33ff.
Science and Method, ch. IV.
Physics, Bk. II, ch. 5 (196b10ff.).
Berkeley found ideas essentially passive, hence incapable of producing any other ideas. But most empiricists have allowed an idea associated by ‘contiguity’ or ‘resemblance’ with another idea to be its effortless cause.
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Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 61. For this law, Popper substitutes two non-tautologous laws in a footnote. But the explanatory power is not thereby increased. That power resides in the notion of an exceeded breaking point. But I am anticipating Section III below.
Consider these ‘empirical generalizations’: ‘Blows cause injuries.’ (Hart and Honore) ‘Fragile things tend to break when struck hard enough, other conditions being right’. (D. Davidson) ‘Flames are hot and cause melting’. (Hume) ‘When hard particles of steel are in immediate contact with soft particles of bone, the latter give way’. (Schlick) ‘Insults cause anger’. (Nagel) ‘Whenever the sun (or some other luminous body) is above the horizon, and its rays travel in straight lines, and there is no opaque body in a straight line between that luminous body and the part of the earth where we are situated, then it is a day there’ (J.S. Mill).
For counter-examples to the Popper-Hempel models of explanation, see, for example, S. Bromberger, ‘Why-Questions’, in Mind and Cosmos (ed. by R. G. Colodny), sec. V, pp. 91–95. For additional conditions to meet these and other counter-examples, see forthcoming papers by J. Kim.
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The non-explanatory laws cited against Hempel’s model of explanation often have visual terms as antecedents (E.G., ‘angle of light-ray incidence’, ‘apparent stellar brightness’). See Bromberger, op. cit. (note 14 above).
See Physica II, 3; J. McT. E. McTaggart, Philosophical Studies 7, pp. 156–178.
See J. J. Katz, ‘The Logic of Questions’, in Proceedings of the Third International Congress for Logic, Methodology and the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming).
Alfred J. Ayer, The Foundations of Emperical Knowledge, Macmillan & Co., London, 1963, pp. 199ff.
Ibid., p. 206.
Paul Weiss, Reality, Peter Smith, New York, 1949, p. 172.
Richard M. Gale, ‘A Reply to Smart, Mayo and Thalberg on “Tensed Statements”’ The Philosophical Quarterly 13, 352.
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© 1969 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Ruddick, W., Schuster, M.M. (1969). Causal Connection. In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1966/1968. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3378-7_15
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