Yes, for me this is the great value of Anscombe’s analysis. She’s urging a conceptual clarification, while remaining as neutral as she can be about what actually goes on in the world. And 70 years later, we can say that her neutrality was justified, because we still aren’t very close to knowing how causality plays out in the world, especially when it comes to actions initiated by conscious beings. And even within mathematical physics, my best understanding is that enormous questions remain, despite physics’ predictive success. As for necessity . . . A conclusion can be logically necessary, given certain premises. I’ll settle for that as the only surefire use of “necessity,” though of course that won’t stop us from examining other uses.
It’s curious that those who seem defensive of determinism and causation have not addressed Anscombe’s arguments.
Anscombe’s simply riffing on Hume.
Hardly. Her disagreement with Hume is one of the jumping-off places for her own views:
But as touching the equation of causality with necessitation, Hume’s thinking did nothing against this but curiously reinforced it. For he himself assumed that necessary connection is an essential part of the idea of cause and effect, and he sought its nature. (89-90)
I’ll again point out that there is a paper associated with this thread, that presents a series of arguments serving to differentiate causation from determination. They are outlined in my opening post.
Those who maintain that science explains the word entirely in terms of deterministic causes might do well to addressed those arguments.
It is not science which forces this restriction on the meaning of “cause”, it is scientism which does this. Scientism reduces causation, or restricts the meaning of the word, to the deterministic sense which we find in physics. This restriction disallows the possibility of causation in the sense of free will. But as you say in the opening post, Anscombe allows that causation extends beyond the deterministic sense employed in physics
I found the arguments rather puzzling. They seemed to be making good points, but there was a strong feeling that she was missing the point. It took me much longer than it should have done to realize that, although the argument appears to be about the traditional idea of causation as some sort of necessity and/or universal generalization, she doesn’t really intend to confront it, or not directly. I think the key to understanding what is going on is in the following from p.93. She asks:-
How did we come by our primary knowledge of causality?
Her answer is:-
in learning to speak we learned the linguistic representation and application of a host of causal concepts. Very many of them were represented by transitive and other verbs of action used in reporting what is observed. Others - a good example is ‘infect’ - form, not observation statements, but rather expressions of causal hypotheses. The word ‘cause’ itself is highly general. How does someone show that he has the concept cause? We may wish to say: only by having such a word in his vocabulary. If so, then the manifest possession of the concept presupposes the mastery of much else in language. I mean: the word ‘cause’ can be added to a language in which are already represented many causal concepts. A small selection: scrape, push, wet, carry, eat, burn, knock over, keep off, squash, make (e.g. noises, paper boats), hurt. But if we care to imagine languages in which no special causal concepts are represented, then no description of the use of a word in such languages will be able to present it as meaning cause. Nor will it even contain words for natural kinds of stuff, nor yet words equivalent to ‘body’, ‘wind’, or ‘fire’. For learning to use special causal verbs is part and parcel of learning to apply the concepts answering to these, and many other, substantives.
It is striking that she limits the sense of “cause” to physical causation. The ordinary concept of causation is wider than that and the concept of the “physical” does not necessarily coincide with the philosophical distinction. But let that pass. However, this does open up the possibility of objecting that the “philosophical” sense of causation is pretty much a technical notion, designed for the context of, I suppose, Newtonian science.
Changing the subject is a perfectly respectable philosophical tactic, but I think there are better ways to identify the fundamental mistakes.
In philosophy “necessary” has come to mean “logical necessity” as the paradigm case. But necessity, like “real”, is defined by its context. Anscombe gives an example (p. 97):-
In a chess-game, the antecedent possibilities are, say, the powers of the pieces. By the rules, a certain position excludes all but one of the various moves that were in that sense antecedently possible. This is logical antecedence. The next move is determined.
Normally, of course, there are several possible moves within the rules from a given position in chess. “The next move” can only be determined when it has been made - but, when it is made, it is determined; the rules say so.
“Physical necessity” is necessity in the language-game around physical objects; “Logical necessity” is necessity in the context of logic. There is no need to try to force either into the mould of the other. It is like trying to work out whether Pegasus exists.
On p. 91, Anscombe makes a different point:-
Now it’s not difficult to show it prima-facie wrong to associate the notion of cause with necessity or universality in this way. For, it being much easier to trace effects back to causes with certainty than to predict effects from causes, we often know a cause without knowing whether there is an exceptionless generalization of the kind envisaged, or whether there is a necessity.
- Related, but somewhat different, is the idea of causation as an exceptionless generalization. I don’t think it will do simply to point out (on p. 89) that:-
… we’d know what was being described - what it would be like for it to be true - if it were reported, for example, that a kettle of water was put, and kept, directly on a hot fire, but the water did not heat up.
Anscombe is right to allow that:-
… the assumption of relevant difference is a sound principle of investigation.
But I don’t see this as some sort of consolation prize. Nothing can close off the possibility that there is an as yet undiscovered additional factor. So this principle is unfalsifiable, so not true/false.
What’s more, we cannot construct the standard kinds of exceptionless generalization, we turn to probabilities and statistics and extract what understanding we can from those
- The orthodox idea of causality and determinism has a certain appeal that we can at least come close to - in limited contexts or closed systems. But the grand philosophical conclusion pushes the idea beyond these rather hum-drum ideas and attempts to think about them in open systems and beyond all specific contexts.
Laplace’s demon, which is probably the most famous expression of this idea, is presented as a thought-experiment. But it seems to me more like a fantasy, incapable of realization.
Finally, whether the asymmetry of time has anything to do with this, I would not like to say. But it seems a perfectly reasonable arggument. My reason for saying so is simply that the concepts of possibility and probability require it.
Possibilities and probabilities are inherently undetermined, but they also, by implication, define what is required for each possibility or probability to become an actuality. The idea that all possibilities and probabilities are either actualities or not in advance of the outcome undermines the coherence of these concepts.