Causality

Causality (also referred to as 'causation', or 'cause and effect') is the agency or efficacy that connects one process (the cause) with another (the effect), where the first is understood to be partly responsible for the second. In general, a process has many causes, which are said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of many other effects, which all lie in its future.

Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses, so basic a concept that it is more apt as an explanation of other concepts of progression than as something to be explained by others more basic. The concept is like those of agency and efficacy. For this reason, a leap of intuition may be needed to grasp it. Accordingly, causality is built into the conceptual structure of ordinary language.

In Aristotelian philosophy, the word 'cause' is also used to mean 'explanation' or 'answer to a why question', including Aristotle's material, formal, efficient, and final "causes"; then the "cause" is the explanans for the explanandum. In this case, failure to recognize that different kinds of "cause" are being considered can lead to futile debate. Of Aristotle's four explanatory modes, the one nearest to the concerns of the present article is the "efficient" one.

Causality (disambiguation)

Causality may refer to:

Economics:

Linguistics:

Mathematics:

Philosophy:

Science and engineering:

Television:

Other:

See also

Causality (physics)

Causality is the relationship between causes and effects. It is considered to be fundamental to all natural science, especially physics. Causality is also a topic studied from the perspectives of philosophy and statistics.

Cause and effect in physics

In physics it is helpful to interpret certain terms of a physical theory as causes and other terms as effects. Thus, in classical (Newtonian) mechanics a cause may be represented by a force acting on a body, and an effect by the acceleration which follows as quantitatively explained by Newton's second law. For different physical theories the notions of cause and effect may be different. For instance, in the general theory of relativity, acceleration is not an effect (since it is not a generally relativistic vector); the general relativistic effects comparable to those of Newtonian mechanics are the deviations from geodesic motion in curved spacetime. Also, the meaning of "uncaused motion" is dependent on the theory being employed: for Newton it is inertial motion (constant velocity with respect to an inertial frame of reference), in the general theory of relativity it is geodesic motion (to be compared with frictionless motion on the surface of a sphere at constant tangential velocity along a great circle). So what constitutes a "cause" and what constitutes an "effect" depends on the total system of explanation in which the putative causal sequence is embedded.