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JohnM,
See
interposed.
Regards,
Tim
Tim:
to your two posts of today:
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:01 AM
(1)
and
Sent: Monday, February 14,
2005 6:55 PM (2)
Subject: Re: Causality vs.
Entailment
you have a way with words, I read them several
times and they still don't come up with an easily understandable content
in my mind.
TG: If you
think it was hard to read...just imagine how hard it was for me to write!
<g>
You combine causality with entailment.
TG: Not quite combine...but they are intimately
related. I see entailments as required to be embedded in a realm of either
causal or inferential relations. Its kind of like if you have vectors, they are
embedded in some vector space; if you remove the underlying vector space
then you no longer have vectors, you just have a bunch of arrows. Similarly,
with entailment if you remove the necessity supplied by the underlying realm of
either causal or inferential relations, then the 'necessary consequence'
relation in entailment falls apart.
According to my didactically learned English, causality is the process of the
origination of events/effects in a deterministic way, usually done within a
model where we formally identify 'a cause' which points to the starting
point.
TG: I take
a somewhat more general view that 'causality' is the set of necessary relations
which occur in the external world. Its vague, but it leaves open the full range
of possibilities for how 'cause' might work in the external world. Phrases like
"starting point" can, in my view, lead to causality being unduly cast in
temporal terms and/or in linear-chain terms. I think this is also why Rosen
formulated his Natural Law without specifying the details of these (causal)
relations, instead just specifying that "the ambience is not entirely arbitrary
or whimsical; there are relations (e.g., causal relations) manifest in the world
of phenomena)" [LI p. 58].
Entailment, however, - the word - is a
'tail-end', the consequential termination of the
happening, - which makes it
comparable to 'effect', 'outcome', 'result', not the origination of the
process or the happening.
TG: For
me, 'entailment' indicates the whole relation, not just the "consequential
termination".
So I see two distinct concepts (both
within 'causality' as shown below):
1. defined cause(s) - then the happening
- coming to an effect (outcome) and
2. the deterministic unlimited natural
system's change - leading to necessary entailments -( may we
know all that is to a/effectuate it or not). I believe it is a futile
distinction which of the two is more comprehensive, 'a cause' is a limited
formal model-identified reductionistic item, the deterministic nature is an
unlimited totality. Yet the entailments may well be fewer, or scimpier than what can be assigned to "cause" becuase of
interfering obstacles we may not consider in the 'causal' model.
RR used (maybe) preferably "entailment" -
2500 years after Aristotle. Just think about the epistemic enrichment passing
through the religious eras, Descartes' dualism, Spinoza's pantheism, the
materialists, Bogdanov's first complexity, Bertalanffy's systems, Kohler's
gestalt, Bohm's implicate order, Godel's limited access to knowledge bases,
Popper's impossibility of proof, Kuhn's paradigm, all the way to a position of
his 'complexity (I believe parallel to my wholistic worldview). Because of the
still conventional academia he had to make his explanations
compatible with the Aristotelian arguments in public (writing). There was
nothing else acceptable if he did not want to be cut off from the audience he
wanted to reach. It is easy today with the internet, even a decade ago
things were much stiffer.
One more thing:
I don't feel a 'time factor' as generally
includable: in asking about a simple cause "Why did you say so?" and the
answer "because I think that's the truth" has no time aspect. Looking for
cause in a mechanistical sequence does imply
time, but not in the nature of the 'cause', rather by the nature of
the process. It fades away clearly in wider-scoped pointing to (necessary)
entailments.
TG: Agree
re time.
Tim, when you wrote:
"As I see it,
entailment is meaningful only as it occurs in either inferential
or causal structures." - I felt you call the
fundamentally deterministic nature "causal",
which is OK,
except when we differentiate limited model cause and wholistic entailment.
In an
interconnected (inter-influencing) nature everything is deterministic =
causal, as in "originated by changes". You supported this
iunderstanding:
"Causality in my view is the entire locus
of necessary (i.e., causal) relations between phenomena in the external
world, ..."
provided that
we accept your causality as the concept of the deterministic
connections. You empowered such acceptance pointing to an 'entire locus'.
The
punctum saliens is the reductionistic modeling, a "cause" - used
unfortunately by the same word.
John
Mikes
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