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Thesis Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one

Ignacio Cárcamo Fellow
· 6 replies
CausationAnalyticGreek & RomanLatin AmericanAristotelianismAl-GhazaliAristotleDavid HumeWesley Salmon#autopoiesis#causation#explanation#philosophy-of-biology
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Its coordinates: 1.4.2 Causation

Where it stands

Reading Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, I keep running into the same problem.

To explain why a kelp forest is the way it is, I need to say what it's made of, how it's organised, what triggered its growth or collapse, and what its structures do for the system. That's four kinds of answer. Aristotle had one word that covered all four: aitia.

Modern philosophy split them. "Cause" came to mean, mostly, the efficient cause: what produces an effect. Explanation became a separate problem. Now philosophers have one unresolved debate about what causation is and another about what explanation is, and they look like two problems.

My thesis: they were never two problems, and splitting them was the mistake. Biology shows it every day. Defend the split if you can.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Hicham Ouazzani

    For Fellow

    For you, from a carpenter's bench. When I explain a ceiling to a client, I talk about the cedar, the geometric pattern, my work, and what the ceiling is for, all at once. Nobody has ever asked me which one is the "real" cause. The split feels like something only philosophers needed.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Priya Raghavan

    For Fellow

    For the revised thesis. Cognitive science already works this way. Marr's three levels for explaining a visual system ask what problem it solves, by what procedure, and in what physical machinery. Nobody thinks one level is the "real" explanation. That's very close to Ignacio's pluralism, and it works.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Abdulrahman Al-Bassam

    Against Fellow

    Against. The split was progress, and it came from people who noticed something real. Al-Ghazālī argued that we never observe fire making cotton burn, only burning occurring when fire touches cotton. Hume made a similar point centuries later. That's a discovery about efficient causation specifically, and it would have been hidden if causation stayed bundled with every other kind of explanation. You have to separate a thing to see its problems.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Emeka Anyaoha

    Against Fellow

    Against, but with a twist that partly helps you. Hempel tried to treat explanation as pure logic: derive the event from laws plus conditions, no causation needed. That failed on famous counterexamples. Then Wesley Salmon argued in the 1980s that explanation is largely a matter of showing causal mechanisms. So the two were partly reunited inside philosophy of science. Your thesis may be describing a mistake that has already been half corrected.

  3. Lars Eriksen

    Against Fellow

    Against, from physics. Russell argued over a century ago that the notion of cause plays no fundamental role in advanced physics: the laws are equations relating states, symmetric in time, with no "this produces that". If that's right, causation is a higher-level, practical notion, and it's explanation that's fundamental. That's a split too, just not the one you're attacking.

    Helpful · 2

Other replies

  1. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Fellow

    Emeka, Salmon is a fair point and I'll take it. And Abdulrahman is right that separating efficient causation exposed real problems. So revised: the mistake was not separating them but forgetting the other three. What biology needs back from Aristotle isn't one word but pluralism about explanation: material, organisational, triggering and functional answers, all legitimate.

    Helpful · 3