Re: Entailment in the Ambience: Causality

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

Rosen was quite careful in his discussion of 'causality'. He states quite
clearly that, in his view, the very idea of causality - entailment in the
external world - is something that cannot itself be entailed. The notion of
such causal entailment relations rests on a double imputation: "the first
from sensation to phenomena, the second from phenomena to relations between
them. Thus, if our knowledge of phenomena is already once removed from the
ambience, any talk of of entailment, or any other kind of relation between
phenomena, is twice removed. On top of all this is a further problem, that
what we do perceive is only a sample of what we could perceive and the
problems of induction arising therefrom..."[LI p. 56] Instead, on the basis
of our subjective evidence, "we will suppose that relations of entailment do
indeed exist between phenomena; the question then becomes not whether, but
when, such relations hold."[LI p. 56]

He imposed no a priori conditions upon the nature of those causal entailment
relations, other than 1) that they exist, and 2) that they are at least
somewhat recognizable and cognizable. He does not specify that the relations
are deterministic or indeterministic, temporally unidirectional or not,
hierarchical or not, linear or not, networks or not, and so on. His
assertions of Natural Law leave the specific manner of these relations quite
open:
"1. The succession of events or phenomena that we perceive in the ambience
is not entirely arbitrary or whimsical; there are relations (e.g., causal
relations) manifest in the world of phenomena.
2. The relations between phenomena that we have just posited are, at least
in part, capable of being perceived and grasped by the human mind, i.e., by
the cognitive self." [LI p. 58]

So, to say that "the idea of cause is conceptually a local, linear,
antisymmetric, transitive relation:  A causes B causes C, etc." may
characterize someone's view of causality, but it does not characterize
Rosen's. Likewise, the notion of causal loops is not problematic for Rosen
precisely because Rosen's characterization of causality does not a priori
preclude such notions. He avoided accepting or asserting the kinds of
preconceptions that led to artefactual limitations in such things as the
Newtonian paradigm.

It is also important to note that the Aristotelian analysis of entailment in
formal or natural systems is just that: an analysis. It was his assertion
that formal or causal system entailment relations were amenable to this kind
of analysis; but, I do not see any indication that he asserted that it the
only kind of analysis possible, or that it was ultimately exhaustive. In its
most general form, as "why?" questions with "because" answers, it does
provide a very general framework, which is applicable to entailment
relations in both formal and natural systems. But I think it would be a
mistake to say that Rosen therefore thought that causality was a matter
fully and forever characterized by the four Aristotelian categories - that
he made this kind of ontological imputation to the material world. He wrote
no such thing, and it would have been one of those artefactual preconditions
that he took pains to avoid; indeed, one of the hallmarks of complex natural
systems he found is that the causal categories do not remain distinct - they
become intertwined in an Aristotelian analysis of such systems.

Regards,
Tim