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Cause and Effect III

 


 So we return to last week's subject: why not accept the views of Wesley Salmon?

There is an obvious motive in their favor. They exclude much of what we intuitively think of as "magical thinking." If I do X over here and Y happens waaaaay over there: is this enough to dub X the cause of Y? Salmon says emphatically no. It is not even enough to assert that as a coherent hypothesis. One needs spatio-temporal continuity. X was in contact with A which was in contact with B ... which produced event Y way over there. 

Enough with the magic thinking. Do your homework! Come up with at least a hypothetical continuity! That is what Salmon has to say to us. And it seems useful advice. "Useful," remember, is a word of high praise from a pragmatist. 

But, gravity remains the great conundrum here. It certain seems that the sun is acting upon the earth across a vacuum, and independent of anything passing from the one location to the other. Einstein tells us to think of this as a property of space-time itself: masses bend it. S space-time serves to give certain facts within space and time ... spatio-temporal continuity.

Sorry, but with due respect that sounds inadequate to me. 

I don't know whether Salmon addressed gravity explicitly but, thinking in his spirit, we might say that precisely this is what has motivated the search for a particle that CARRIES gravity. A graviton. 

The search has not gone well:  [gr-qc/0601043] Can Gravitons Be Detected? (arxiv.org)

That so many bright minds pursue the graviton without success suggests to me that it may be necessary to uncouple causation from spatio-temporal continuity after all. So Wesley Salmon doesn't have the final say here. 

That will be the end of my meditations on the subject for now, though. When I have more to say, you can be assured, I will say more. 


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  1. HemantJanuary 12, 2022 at 10:04 AM

    Judea Pearl, "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference," (Academic) and

    Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie, "The Book of Why" (Popular).

    Currently, the leading expert in the world on the topic of causality is Judea Pearl, to the best of my understanding. How does his thinking differ from Wesley Salmon's?

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    Replies
    1. ChristopherJanuary 12, 2022 at 10:47 PM

      Pearl's understanding of cause and effect makes it dependent on counterfactuals. The statement, "X caused Y" implies, "If X had not happened, Y would not have happened.' More important, the first sentence implies the second not as an object might imply the shadow but as the shadow might imply the object.

      Salmon quite deliberately expressed his own views in ways that did not depend on counterfactual reasoning.

      There are common counterexamples to any counterfactual-centered theory. Suppose two snipers aim at and fire at a political figure at close to the same moment. Sniper X fires a fatal shot to the head. Sniper Y fires a would-have-been fatal shot to the heart.

      Sniper X offers the following defense in court. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the indictment claims that my shot caused the death of the candidate. Philosophers tell us that this implies that if I had not taken the shot from the office building, he would have lived. But that is plainly not the case, since he would have died in such a case have died from my professional rival's shot from the grassy knoll."

      I'm guessing the defense doesn't work. Common intuitions would hold that the first assassin is the cause of the death, and so the murderer. His rival is at most an attempted murderer -- the attempt failed because the job had already been done. Salmon has an easier time explaining these intuitions than Pearl would.

      Delete
  2. HemantJanuary 13, 2022 at 8:24 AM

    Very interesting! I guess I will have to think far more carefully about this issue (which will at least allow me to decide the thinker(s) I find more congenial).

    The illustration you chose reminds me of the controversy over Lenin's death. He died many years after an assassin (?) shot him. Apparently, the bullet remained in his (Lenin's) head and was most likely a serious contributing factor in his death. The question is: can we say that the assassin succeeded in his attempt? Was Lenin assassinated? Is there a window of time for an assassination attempt to be pronounced successful?

    ReplyDelete
  3. HemantJanuary 13, 2022 at 8:33 AM

    Sorry, the bullet (fired by Fanny Kaplan) punctured Lenin's lung and got lodged under his collarbone. (Not in Lenin's head.) But, yes, it is believed that the many strokes suffered by Lenin in his final years -- and his eventual demise -- were caused by this bullet.

    ReplyDelete
  4. HemantJanuary 13, 2022 at 8:35 AM

    Fanny Kaplan being a woman, the question should be rephrased as: did the assassin succeed in HER attempt?

    ReplyDelete

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