Bulletin

Issue: July 2006

Research in Action

A seesaw helps philosophers explain causal powers

Many areas of philosophic reasoning have little interest to the general public - although some have vital bearings on our lives. They escape out attention because we deem them too complex and theoretical. Thus few outside the fields of philosophy and pure mathematics are aware of the important knowledge stemming from what philosophers call ‘causal powers’.

Theoretical framework for the analysis
of motivational complexity.

Two philosophers at La Trobe University, Professor Brian Ellis and Dr Behan McCullagh, have recently been investigating the importance of causal powers in nature and in history.

The traditional theory of causal relations is based largely on the work of David Hume (1711-1776), who many believe was the most important philosopher to write in English. He maintained that causes and effects are related by general laws discovered by scientists studying regularities in nature.

The revival of interest in causal theory stems largely from two seminal books published in 1975, Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity by Rom Harré and E.H. Madden, and A Realist Theory of Science by Roy Bhaskar. They suggested that causes are related to their effects, not by general laws, but by causal powers. Professor Ellis and Dr McCullagh explain causal powers by using the analogy of a seesaw.

‘If you exert a force on one end of a balanced see-saw by sitting on it, that end of the see-saw will go down. This is so regularly the case as to be regarded as a causal law.

‘But the see-saw will not go down if there is an equal or greater force at that time on the other end. In that case the seesaw will not move, or it will be depressed at that other end instead.

The moral is that causal laws are true only so long as nothing in the environment interferes with the process they describe. They are true in closed, controlled situations, like laboratories, where interference can be excluded.

But the world is open to all kinds of unpredictable and uncontrolled forces. So causal laws are not strictly true of events in the world, for often they are, or could be, falsified by interfering conditions.

‘But instead of saying the causes and effects are related by a general law, we could say that causes trigger tendencies to bring about certain changes in things, even though those tendencies can be offset by other tendencies in the environment.

‘Sitting on one end of see-saws triggers a tendency they have to depress under the force applied at that end. But that tendency can be offset by other tendencies at work, when someone sits on the other end. ‘Causal powers are the tendencies things have to bring about changes of certain kinds in certain circumstances. Often the tendencies are reciprocal. Thus see-saws tend to depress at the end where someone sits on them, and sitting on an end of a see-saw tends to depress it’.

Professor Ellis has been fascinated by the new philosophy of nature that comes with acceptance of causal powers. Instead of things in the world being inert, related to one another by contingent laws, he now sees things as possessing a number of causal powers that are essential to their nature.

He is particularly interested in the theoretical entities of chemistry - including atoms, molecules, molecular structures, and electron shell structures - and their intrinsic properties. Professor Ellis has elaborated his views in two recent books: Scientific Essentialism (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The Philosophy of Nature(Acumen: Chesham, 2002).

Dr McCullagh, in a recent seminar paper, ‘The Driving Forces of History’, considered the place of causal powers in history.

He says that history studies human behaviour, and the causal powers moving people to act as they do are better known as ‘dispositions’ to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. ‘These are not universal, but vary between societies and individuals.

Historians often take them for granted, but when people behave strangely, they are driven to ask why, and to study the dispositions that moved them. The event that triggers a disposition can be regarded as a cause of the behaviour that results,’ he says.

‘Once the importance of dispositions is recognised, historians can study the way in which different, often competing dispositions, have interacted to produce the behaviour that interests them. They then have a theoretical framework for the analysis of motivational complexity.’