Causation Quotes and Analyses
The official PHIL 101:02 definition of causation:
c causes e =df. (i) c and e are wholly distinct events; (ii) c is temporally prior to e, and (iii) c makes e happen.
Sadly, there are huge problems for our official definition. Clause (iii) isn't very informative. Please take some time to consider the analyses of causation provided below.
"The only immediate utility of all sciences, is to teach us, how to control and regulate future events by their causes. Our thoughts and enquiries are, therefore, every moment, employed about this relation: Yet so imperfect are the ideas which we form concerning it, that it is impossible to give any just definition of cause, except what is drawn from something extraneous and foreign to it. Similar objects are always conjoined with similar. Of this we have experience. Suitably to this experience, therefore, we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never existed."
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: Section VII, Part II
Hume's First Account: Causation is constant conjunction among instances of event types. (Hume's "Constant Conjunction" or "Regularity" account)
P > Q =df. If it were the case that P, then it would be the case that Q.
Let ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, and so on be events.
Read ‘Oa’ as the proposition that a occurs.
Read ‘~Oa’ as the proposition that it is not the case that a occurs.
Hume's Second Account: c is the cause of e iff (i) c and e are wholly distinct events; (ii) c is temporally prior to e; and (iii) ~Oc > ~Oe. (Hume's counterfactual analysis of causation)
"Causal dependence among actual events implies causation. If c and e are two actual events such that e would not have occurred without c, then c is the cause of e. But I reject the converse. Causation must always be transitive; causal dependence may not be; so there can be causation without causal dependence. Let c, d, and e be three actual events such that d would not have occurred without c and e would not have occurred without d. Then c is a cause of e even if e would still have occurred (otherwise caused) without c.
We extend causal dependence to a transitive relation in the usual way. Let c, d, e . . . be a finite sequence of actual particular events such that d depends causally on c, e on d, and so on throughout. Then this sequence is a causal chain. Finally, one event is the cause of another iff there exists a causal chain leading from the first to the second. This completes my counterfactual analysis of causation."
David Lewis, "Causation"
e depends causally upon c iff (i) c and e are wholly distinct events; (ii) Oc > Oe; and (iii) ~Oc > ~Oe.
David Lewis's Counterfactual Analysis: c is the cause of e iff there is a chain of causal dependence from c to e.
The "Transfer of Energy" Account:
TE: c is the cause of e iff there is a sufficient transfer of energy from c to e. (A simplified version of an account presented by David Fair)
The Singularity Account:
"When we look at these diagrams, we can immediately see that they are possible causal patterns, in most cases empirically possible patterns (you could construct such a circuit). Counterfactual theories of causation (and, it may be added, regularity theories and probability-raising theories of causation) struggle with these diagrams. Wittgenstein spoke of an open door that we had only to see and go through to escape philosophical confusion....The solution that I recommend to the problems posed by the neuron diagrams is very simple. Where there is an arrow in a diagram showing that one neuron brings it about that another neuron fires, or is rendered incapable of firing, take it that here there is a genuine two-term relation of singular causation holding between cause and effect. Where there is no such arrow, deny that there is any such relation. This is the open door."
D.M. Armstrong, "Going through the Open Door Again"