What Is Causality?

The French philosopher and mathematician Ren Descartes and his school made cause the same with substance. The physical scientists quite frequently had a mechanical view of causality, bringing cause to a motion or change followed by other motion. The British philosopher David Hume carried to a logical conclusion the contention of Sextus Empiricus that causality is not a real relation, but a fiction of the mind. To take in account for the origin of this fiction Hume used the doctrine of association. Hume's explanation of cause led the German philosopher Immanuel Kant to hypothesize cause as a fundamental category of understanding. Kant stated that the only predictable objective world is the product of a synthetic activity of the mind. In addition, Kant decided that causality is one of the principles of coherence obtaining in the world of phenomena, and that it is universally present there because thought, as part of its contribution to the nature of that world, always puts it there.

Although many philosophers have their own contentions, a good explanation of causation is hard to derive specifically. There is ultimately always another reason for each event that occurs rather than the one given. To come to one event or a few events to determine the actual root of the action is a different task for everybody. If one event has a direct association and is correlated quite distinctly with the incident, then one can say it caused the other to happen. Not only can one say anything caused the other to happen and could quite possibly be correct with that claim, there must be a strong correlation between the two events. Without the evidence to relate the two, one can not conclude anything beyond, what is stated with the facts; no inferences can be taken as a standard.

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