§ 05 Causal Competence
With our causal competence, we assume that one thing or situation, which we might understand as a momentary configuration of things conceptualised into a situational thing, is the cause of another. If such a causal relationship as we conceive it is empirically confirmed, we know what to do in a given situation, whatever the real causes of that relationship might be.
Causality is one of the knottiest problems in philosophy.
It appears that the only sensible thing one can really say about causality is that everything at all scales active within the universe causes everything. And as that is quite a paralysing description, we perhaps ought to avoid talk of real cause, and talk more modestly of causal competence.
Causal competence is the ability to read the signs of one’s environment and know what sign belongs to what event or situation, and what implications might follow from that. It is a skill and stops you pretending to know what causes what, or run the risk of becoming reductive in your modelling of cause and effect. Instead, more modestly, you say: “Well, causality is difficult, but I know that if I do A, then effect B follows.”
In terms of causal competence, it is useful to revisit Aristotle’s four causes or ‘why’ questions: the material, formal, efficient and final causes of things.1 (see also the section on Style)
The material cause is simply the material something is made of, which can be described in terms of its behaviour.
The formal cause is the organisation of that material into a matter-form compound, which again can be described in terms of its behaviour as it interacts with its environment.
The efficient cause is a historical and technological question: how did the material/form compound come to be the way it is.
The final cause needs, for my purposes at least, to be further refined.
Use-driven, habit-forming agents like human beings may assign purposes to things but paying homage to the notion of evolution by selection, we can say that without that habit-forming ability of sapient creatures endowed with memory and cognition, final causes are generally not purpose-driven but use-driven.
Purpose assumes an a priori function (for example: ‘the eye was designed by God, to see’) that we conceive of somehow as inherent to the thing.
Use on the other hand merely assumes the a posteriori function of a thing, that, if selected for whatever reason becomes part of the co-creation of things in interaction (we speak of an eye having evolved from a piece of skin sensitive to light, through a series of small beneficial and therefore selective steps, to acquire the ability to see, an advantage that again became selective). (see the section on selection and evolution)
If the posited causal relationship is not empirically confirmed, any relevant theory we might have in which that relationship plays a role, falls, and we carry on searching for a new causal theory that will hold and be useful to us. That is what I mean by causal competence.
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- Aristotle, Posterior Analytics. I 2, and II 11; Physics II 3 and Metaphysics V 2 ↩︎