Quotes About Causation

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

Furthermore, plot, as JG wisely put it, is the storyteller's equivalent to the philosopher's argument; its importance lies in it being an interpretation (one based on causation) of why the world works the way it does.

Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

Are we to say that any individual who's on steroids that has an angry moment is due to steroids? What about the individual who gets angry and kills someone who's not on steroids? What do we blame it on now?

With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?

Instead of trying to find out what goes on inside a person's head ("mentalism"), to know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way. Our

The evidence is truly overwhelming that disease is pluri-causal.

Social class or socioeconomic status (SES) is the strongest predictor of health, disease causation, and longevity in medical sociology.

every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man

The atomists knew that causation must start from something, and that no cause can be assigned to this original something. Motion was simply a given. The atomists asked mechanistic questions and gave mechanistic answers. When they asked "Why?" they meant: what was the cause of an event? When their successors—Plato, Aristotle, and so on—asked "Why?" they were searching for the purpose of an event.

Like many philosophers, I reject the idea that free acts must be uncaused; freedom is not only consistent with but demands determinism. Were actions not caused by antecedent factors, including preferences, an agent himself would not know what he was about to do and could be surprised by his freedom. Free choice might go against the agent's own stable values, a nightmare caricature of autonomy.

I think it would take a real stretch to think that I caused the problems with the economy.

People come into McDonald's two to three times a month - to extrapolate that to the cause of obesity is a real stretch.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

All your behavior results from the thoughts that precede it.

Much action and the play of forces even on a huge scale and with enormous material effects is often irrelevant, and counts for little or nothing in the final result: but along the chain of commanding causation even the smallest events are vital.

Ryan and Frederick (1997) showed that in a population suffering from debilitating pain, pain level per se did not detract from vitality. Instead, pain fright was negatively associated with vitality, as was attending treatment for external as opposed to internal reasons. Some of the factors that may influence one's sense of vitality and contribute to its resilience are one's feelings of personal causation, optimism, and perceptions of social support.

Indeed, proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that when this condition is removed, the phenomen will no longer appear.

post hoc, propter hoc

you are receiving treatment for an existing disease and you develop new symptoms then, until proved otherwise, you should assume that the new symptoms are caused by the treatment you are receiving. 1

The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent.

For many philosophers, causation is a suspicious metaphysical concept that we do best to avoid when trying to understand science. This suspicion is, again, common within the empiricist tradition. It derives from the work of Hume. The suspicion is directed especially at the idea of causation as a sort of hidden connection between things, unobservable but essential to the operation of the universe.

it is always dangerous to treat simultaneity as causation