Another view is that causes and effects are ‘states of affairs’, with the exact natures of those entities being less restrictively defined than in process philosophy.Īnother viewpoint on the question is the more classical one, that a cause and its effect can be of different kinds of entity. An example is ‘his tripping over the step was the cause, and his breaking his ankle the effect’. In this view, one opinion, proposed as a metaphysical principle in process philosophy, is that every cause and every effect is respectively some process, event, becoming, or happening. That is to say, it would make good sense grammatically to say either “ A is the cause and B the effect” or “ B is the cause and A the effect”, though only one of those two can be actually true. One viewpoint on this question is that cause and effect are of one and the same kind of entity, with causality an asymmetric relation between them. OntologyĪ general metaphysical question about cause and effect is what kind of entity can be a cause, and what kind of entity can be an effect. The nature of cause and effect is a concern of the subject known as metaphysics. The topic of causality remains a staple in contemporary philosophy. Of Aristotle’s four explanatory modes, the one nearest to the concerns of the present article is the “efficient” one. In this case, failure to recognize that different kinds of “cause” are being considered can lead to futile debate. In the English language, as distinct from Aristotle’s own language, Aristotelian philosophy uses the word “cause” to mean “explanation” or “answer to a why question”, including Aristotle’s material, formal, efficient, and final “causes” then the “cause” is the explanans for the explanandum. For this reason, a leap of intuition may be needed to grasp it. Accordingly, causality is implicit in the logic and structure of ordinary language. The concept is like those of agency and efficacy. Causality is metaphysically prior to notions of time and space.Ĭausality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses, so basic a concept that it is more apt as an explanation of other concepts of progression than as something to be explained by others more basic.
An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future. In general, a process has many causes, which are said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is what connects one process (the cause) with another process or state (the effect), where the first is partly responsible for the second, and the second is partly dependent on the first.
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