Quotes About Causation

On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world. In other words, guns do not cause crime.

A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors—let's call them X and Y—but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It's possible that X causes Y; it's also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor, Z.

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).

The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.

Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence, and the yardsticks for making rational choices alone and with others.

Moving" and "changing" are not enough grounds for the mind to construe an event in a particular way. It also cares about finer-grained concepts like forcing versus enabling a force, causing versus letting, and before-and-after versus at-the-same-time.

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated. But this says nothing about their causation.

To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers. There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances.

Hume is thus led to the view that, when we say 'A causes B', we mean only that A and B are constantly conjoined in fact, not that there is some necessary connection between them.

There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances. This interaction throughout the centuries will be the topic of the following pages.

There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances

Data can tell you that the people who took a medicine recovered faster than those who did not take it, but they can't tell you why. Maybe those who took the medicine did so because they could afford it and would have recovered just as fast without it.

Where causation is concerned, a grain of wise subjectivity tells us more about the real world than any amount of objectivity.

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existance of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.

But this is useless speculation, anyway: we can't decide that one thing happening control everything else in out life. Every choice is the result of other choices, which are a result of choices before that. We can't control what bodies we're born with or how people treat us because of them. Maybe the world is similarly out of our control. Small forces, large ones, one choice leading to another, a machine of causation beyond understand.

post hoc ergo propter hoc

We should be cautious about embracing data before it is published in the academic press, and must always avoid treating correlation as causation.

The deduction reached by top modern philosophers on this question is that things exist for two reasons: they are either necessary or they were caused.

Many people, conservatives point out, grow up in dismal social conditions yet become law-abiding citizens. This is rather like arguing that because some smokers don't die of cancer, nobody who smokes dies of cancer.

Which brought me back to my worry. Why had he turned up just then? Why at that precise moment? Why not the day before or after, for example? Was it just random, or was there an underlying pattern I couldn't yet see? Shakespeare, you understand, as interpreted by Henry Lytten. The greater the coincidence, the greater the importance of the hidden causation.

Big data is great when you want to verify and quantify small data - as big data is all about seeking a correlation - small data about seeking the causation.

Culture influences our understanding of the world. Our biological perception equipment is influenced by our mental constructions; we do not simply 'see the world as it is,' either in the literal sense of vision or in the metaphorical sense of overall apprehension. Our explanations for the patterns we observe are produced in part by what we are taught about the rules of causation, i.e., 'how the world works.

the fact that crime and poverty are correlated is automatically taken to mean that poverty causes crime, not that similar attitudes or behavior patterns may contribute to both poverty and crime.