> On Oct 9, 2014, at 3:05 PM, Stephen C. Rose <stever...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The notion of a complete cause of any event involves one in speculation for > which there is no answer that is not metaphysical. The cause of any event > must either be immediate or traceable to the point that it can no longer be > traced.
I think the bigger issue is just getting clear on what we mean by “cause.” Underneath a lot of discussions are deep equivocations and ambiguities over that term. Peirce gets at this somewhat in his comments on Mill. > On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 4:33 PM, Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com > <mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com>> wrote: > > This is to say that if one were to follow Mill's principle that "the complete > cause of any happening is the aggregate of all its antecedents" then one > would be left with something like the notion that everything preceding it is > the cause of any occurrence, which is what I take Peirce to mean in writing > that Mill's principle "would eviscerate the conception of Cause of all > utility." Elsewhere in KS in a passage not quoted in this section he writes: I think when one thinks about the underlying physics this is a real problem. Effectively you end up with an universal Hamiltonian that evolves over time. However breaking out individual parts and saying how they cause other things is difficult and perhaps ultimately arbitrary and somewhat misleading. So when we talk about causes, typically philosophers try to avoid this issue of holism in various ways. The question then becomes how one is avoiding holism. Again, this is a place I’m not sure people are as careful as they should be. When you narrow from events to particular types of facts it is perhaps a little easier to handle causation. The typical way to do this in physics is to simplify and then get first or second order approximations and see if they explain a lot. I’m sure that in part this is what is behind Peirce’s thinking here. Again, while I think Peirce’s focus on facts is extremely helpful it doesn’t necessarily illuminate the meaning of an event. My sense is that everyone talks about events with a kind of vague intuition of what we mean. Because we share intuitions we think we all know what we’re talking about. However because it is so vague, there are many properties that are unknown and that can disrupt our analysis if we aren’t careful. In terms of Peirce’s notion of causation, Richard Smyth, has a rather interesting treatment in Reading Peirce Reading. The focus of the book is on how Peirce’s thought arises from engagement with other philosophers. Here he see a similarity between natural causation and Kant’s analysis of human freedom. “He judges, therefore, that things can act upon him in ways that have practical effects, because he is aware that he has technical-practical obligations, and he recognizes that he is a part of a natural order of causes and effects - a fact which, without a consciousness of these counsels of prudence would remain unknown to him.” (233) While “The Fixation of Belief” is not necessarily the best place to consider Peirce’s notion of causation, Smyth develops a rather interesting approach I think. Effectively he argues that Peirce takes a Kantian ethics of belief and this leads to a notion of scientific causation out of an ethical analysis.
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