seemed to treat as being real and causal. Doesn't that what you mean
>
> *"The truth arises from arguments amongst friends"* -- *David Hume*
>
>
>
> One of my goals at Friam, believe it or not, is actually to get some
> fundamental issues settled amongst us. We had, last week, a brisk
> discussion about causality. I don't think I was particularly articulate,
> and so, to push that argument forward, I would like to try to state my
> position clearly and succinctly.
>
>
>
> The argument was between some who felt that causality was "real" and those
> that felt that it was basically a figment of our imaginations. The
> argument may seem frivolous, but actually becomes of consequence anytime
> anyone starts to think about how one proves that X is the cause of Y. Intuitively,
> X is the cause of Y if Y is X's "fault". To say that X is the cause of Y
> is to accuse X of Y. Given my current belief that story-telling is at
> the base of EVERYTHING, I think you convince somebody that X is the cause of
> Y just by telling the most reasonable story in which it seems obvious that Y
> would not have occurred had not X occurred. But there is no particular
> reason that the world should always be a reasonable place, and therefore, it
> is also ALWAYS possible to tell an UNREASONABLE story that shows that Y's
> occurrence was not the responsibility of X, no matter how reasonable the
> original causal attribution is. One of us asked for a hammer and nail,
> claiming that if he could but drive a nail into the surface of one of St.
> John's caf? tables, none of us would be silly enough to doubt that his
> hammering had been the cause of the nails penetration of the table. Not
> withstanding his certainty on this matter, several of us instantly offered
> to be JUST THAT SILLY! We would claim, we said, that contrary to his
> account, his hammering had had nothing to do with the nail's penetration,
> but that the accommodating molecules of wood directly under the nail had
> randomly parte d and sucked the nail into their midst.
>
>
>
> How validate a reasonable causal story against the infinite number of
> unreasonable causal stories that can always be proposed as alternatives. By
> experience, obviously. We have seen hundreds of cases where nails were
> driven into wood when struck by hammers (and a few cases where the hammer
> missed the nail, the nail remained where it was, and the thumb was driven
> into the wood.) Also, despite its theoretical possibility, none of us has
> EVER seen a real world object sucked into a surface by random motion of the
> surface's molecules. So it is the comparative analysis of our experience
> with hammers and nails that would have convinced us that the hammering had
> driven in the nail.
>
>
>
> So what is the problem? Why did we not just agree to that
> proposition and go on? The reason to me is simple: the conventions of our
> language prevent us from arriving at that conclusion. We not only say
> that Hammers Cause Nails to embed in tables, which is what we know to be
> true, we also say that THIS Hammer caused THIS nail to be embedded in the
> wood. Thus our use of causality is a case of misplaced concreteness. Causality
> is easily attributed to the pattern of relations amongst hammers and nails,
> but we err when we allow ourselves to assert that that higher order pattern
> is exhibited by any of its contributory instances. In fact, that in our
> experience the missed nails have not been driven into the wood is as much a
> real part of our notions of causality and hammering as the fact that a hit
> nail is. Causality just cannot be attributed to an individual instance.
>
>
>
>
> The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is so widespread in our
> conversation that we could barely speak without it, but it is a fallacy
> all the same. Other instances of it are intentions, dispositions,
> personality traits, communication, information etc., etc., and such
> mathematical fictions as the slope of a line at a point. Whenever we use
> any of these terms, we attribute to single instances properties of
> aggregates of which they are part.
>
>
>
> Now, how do we stop arguing about this? First of all, we stop
> and give honor to the enormous amount of information that actually goes into
> making a rational causal attribution that hammering causes embedding,
> information which is not available in any of its instances. Second, we
> then stop and give honor to the incredible power of the human mind to sift
> through this data and identify patterns in it. Third, and finally, we
> stop and wonder at whatever flaw it is in our evolution, our neurology, our
> cognition, our culture, or our language that causes us to lodge this
> knowledge in the one place it can never be ? single instances.
>
>
>
> Are we done?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM (nick at redfish.com)
> Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (
> nthompson at clarku.edu)
>
>
>
>
>
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