Causality

An author states that “causes exist in the real world; they are not just human constructions to help us understand it… they have been called ‘the cement of the universe’… they are processes which, once started, end up producing a particular outcome at a later point in time.” Sure, this seems like sound logic as per today’s scientific world. But there are two issues I have with this. One, in the holistic and infinitely complex world we live in, how can we ‘really’ know causality – and especially in a scientific sense? I understand that we have measures to minimize this type of indiscretion, but they are based on the societal/scientific information we hold today. This understanding changes with every new discovery – just as we once thought the world was flat and that disease was caused by evil spirits rather than bacteria (which is even in dispute today if you look at Chinese Medicinal concepts). Science has not accounted for such a large part of the world and its social existence that it is simply not appropriate to claim causality without allowing for these unknown factors.

Secondly, what is defined as a cause? If A ‘causes’ B, but C causes A, then is it not C that causes B theoretically? It is less direct, but B does not happen without A. This can be traced back to the/a ‘point of origin’ of existence and that is COMPLETELY unknown (though there are obviously plenty of theories for it out there). So what is causality then? Stated above, ‘they are not just human constructions’. Yet if the original causes are indefinable – or at least indefinable with today’s knowledge set – then we are really just clutching at a singular slice of temporal space of understanding and saying that A causes B without understand or knowing C. So this to me seems like a constructed center of existence as per the knowledge (i.e. socially accepted information) that we hold at this moment in time. Yes, perhaps some could say ‘causes’ exist in some form, but I would think of this as indefinable today. Yet by labeling things in the world as such today, what we are in fact doing is constructing our ‘best guesses’ at ‘causality’.

The author then addresses a point of critique on people that say ‘causality’ doesn’t exist. I am not saying that. This point is valid, we can see tendencies – as in an example on lung cancer being caused by cigarette smoking – but in this model we take several instances and we try to isolate how those ‘several’ incidences rank in causality to one other incidence. Of course there is a relationship, of course it matters, but one of the problems that I see with the social sciences today is that they are spending a great deal of time working on these ‘temporal/special slices of reality’ and ‘defining’ causes. Does smoking cause lung cancer? A to B, studies have shown that it increases the chances. But why do people smoke, what are the social origins of this, why aren’t we looking at the systemic structure of the world that puts people in a position to smoke, drink, or partake in other forms of real world ‘distractions’ and other forms of escapism? Do we smoke due to historical/cultural issues, is it a physical thing to ‘calm the nerves’, or is it perhaps because the capitalist system profits from it and has shown it to be ‘cool’? Is it a mixture of all of these things plus another indefinable everything else? All of these are interesting questions, but not asked in any form of consequence in the ‘real’ world (by this I mean the world that actually matters – the public, non-scientific community). This simple causality used in the social sciences to me is an excuse; it’s an easy way of assigning basic relationships to infinitely complex things so as to miss the bigger picture – which the author ascribes flippantly as only known to ‘God’! But doesn’t this inference completely corroborate what I’ve just said? What is God? Debatable topic today I think?!? Is it perhaps today’s ‘term’ for what causes everything, yet is indefinable?  The speaker's line of reasoning on causality turns out to be an excuse not to trace things backward very far, and to simply rely on what we can ‘quantify’ and then pawn it off as ‘fact’ – even though, as the author repeats throughout, we really can’t ‘control’ for everything in the social world. Thus, to me, it seems we just can’t/don’t really know (despite what the sciences say). The author summarizes it well: ‘most social science data is not experimental, and this leads to some challenging difficulties with the process of drawing causal inferences.” Whoops…

I guess perhaps I am thinking about the issue more in semantic terms on some level. Doing research on society and deducting possible relationships between things is important for attempting to understand our physical and social environment better. But, I don’t think the word ‘cause’ should be used. As the author said, the word ‘cause’ implies that everyone that smokes gets cancer – as it implies a perfect cause/effect relationship – and this is obviously refuted as soon as one smoker doesn’t get lung cancer. If you look up ‘cause’ in the dictionary it is said to be: “the producer of an effect, result, or consequence” or “the one, such as a person, event, or condition, that is responsible for an action or result”; and this wording implies to me that one leads to another with certainty - and it speaks in the "singular" form. The ‘producer’ or the one ‘that is responsible’ are both quite definitive terms. What is ‘the producer’ of lung cancer? If it was that you smoked and you got lung cancer, then smoking would produce lung cancer, but as it is not absolute it is not the cause, it is one of an indefinable number of ‘causes’ (as used in today’s terminology).

This connection should be redefined linguistically. Perhaps ‘induce’ is a softer way, but still there can be an ‘absolutist’ connotation there under certain circumstances. One thing affects the other? My point is, that ‘cause’ as a word to me implies an absolute. This is problematic as I don’t think we know anything as absolute, so we should probably find a new word to describe these less than concrete relationships. But then again, this type of absolutism can be powerfully alarmist; if you didn’t say ‘cause’, people might not get scared enough to stop smoking. And this of course is our goal, as breathing in the smoke from someone else’s cigarette ‘causes’ other people to get annoyed… ;)