How to Reason A Practical Guide + Reasoning in the Sciences by Richard L. Epstein

Author:Richard L. Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938421457
Publisher: Advanced Reasoning Forum
Published: 2019-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Necessary conditions for cause and effect

What conditions are needed for a causal claim to be true?

The cause and effect both happened.

That is, the claim describing the cause and the claim describing the effect are both true. We wouldn’t say that Spot’s barking caused Dick to wake up if Spot didn’t bark or Dick didn’t wake up.

It’s (nearly )impossible for the cause to happen and the effect not to happen.

It has to be (nearly) impossible for the claim describing the cause to be true and the claim describing the effect to be false. It can’t be just coincidence that Dick woke up when Spot barked.

That’s the same condition for an argument to be valid or strong. But here we’re not trying to convince anyone that the conclusion is true: we know that Dick woke up. What we can carry over from our study of arguments is how to look for possibilities—ways the premises could be true and the conclusion false—to determine if there is cause and effect. As with arguments, we’ll often need to supply unstated premises to show that the effect follows from the cause.

•A lot has to be true for it to be impossible for “Spot barked” to be true and “Dick woke up” to be false:

Dick was sleeping soundly up to the time that Spot barked.

Spot barked at 3 a.m.

Spot was close to where Dick was sleeping.

We could go on forever. But as with arguments, we state what we think is important and leave out the obvious. If someone challenged us, we could add “There was no earthquake at the time”—but we just assume that as part of the normal conditions.

Normal conditions The normal conditions for a causal claim are the obvious and plausible claims that are needed to establish that the relation between the purported cause and the purported effect is valid or strong.

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