Ruth and causality (General)

by dhw, Friday, August 16, 2013, 17:00 (3905 days ago)

Causality is the subject of another section of Ruth's Chapter 7, initially headed "Hume's elimination of causality", and once more I'm having trouble with the argument. I don't have a problem when she says that cause preceding effect in the empirical world "should not be thought of as necessarily extendable to the unobservable entities of the micro-world" (and I particularly like the word "necessarily"). But I do find it extremely confusing when scientists and philosophers apply their anti-causality theory to empirical reality itself. Ruth gives an example of a cue ball striking a second ball in a game of billiards, thus (apparently) causing the second ball to move:-RUTH: However, we never actually SEE the cause; all we see is the pattern of events, which is repeated every time we perform these actions. [...] the cue ball striking the second ball is not OBSERVABLY a 'cause'. It is simply an event. Our expectation that the second ball must move is based on the fact that we have always seen this happen. It is certainly conceivable that the second ball could just sit there, despite having been hit. The motion of the second ball is predicted by physical law; but again, physical law simply describes patterns of events; it does not say WHY they happen. For this reason, Hume concluded that causation is not really in the world, but it is something we INFER from what he termed the "constant conjunction of events"."-Some people argue that NOTHING is "really in the world", and the basis of the whole problem may well lie in definitions: by what criteria do we judge what is and isn't "real"? It's inevitably linked also to our definition of knowledge and to the key topic of subjectivism. Ruth's example, however, common-sensically assumes the real existence of the balls, and if we can accept that, and if we can accept that the second ball really moves after being hit by the first, then we can also accept (on the same commonsense level) that this is a connected sequence. The fact that experience teaches us to have expectations seems to me irrelevant. A child on first seeing a cue ball strike a second ball will have no expectations, but that doesn't alter the fact of the connected sequence. It is indeed conceivable that the second ball may just sit there, but if so, that too will have a cause-and-effect explanation: perhaps someone drilled a hole through the billiard table and the ball and stuck a rod through it.-To classify this as "simply an event" again requires a definition of "event", and even among philosophers there's no consensus on what it means. For most of us, it's an occurrence within space/time that involves change of some kind, and for most of us change entails a sequence of cause and effect. The change here is in the position of the two balls, and we can trace this back to an endless chain of "events" (i.e. causes that create effects which become causes that create effects etc.) going back to the Big Bang. Physical law may only describe "patterns of events" (which some of us might call patterns of cause and effect), but I don't think physicists would have difficulty explaining WHY one movable object has moved after being struck by another movable object on a smooth surface with sufficient space for movement. They needn't make predictions unless they wish to extrapolate laws, but it's true that these will engender expectations and that the physicists INFER a general principle from events. However, the fact that something is inferred doesn't mean it isn't real. Experience teaches us over and over again that in our space/time world the inference IS real. If you don't believe me, step in front of a bus. -Ruth follows this up with references to Russell and Salmon, and with somewhat recondite examples, but these lead to the same conclusion: "Hume and Russell (1913) were right: causality is NOT an ontological feature of the world. In TI terms, it is an inference we make based on situations involving very probable transactions [...] -Why "probable"? Again this relates to predictions, which can always be thwarted by unforeseen causes and their effects (the rod in the billiard ball). How does this invalidate past and present sequences of cause and effect? Is a predicted future the only "reality"? It seems to me that the apparent evidence against causality takes place in a quantum world nobody understands (so let us by all means keep an open mind in that context), while the only objection within our empirical space/time world is a matter of language (e.g. what we mean by "event", or by "real") plus the assumption that, despite all our experiences to the contrary, inference automatically means that what is inferred is "not really in the world". Am I alone in my confusion? If so, perhaps Ruth or someone else will hit me with an intellectual cue ball and pot me into the pocket of enlightenment.