Causality in Chemistry: Regularities and Agencies

Abstract

THE MEANING OF CAUSAL statements and claims has been and continues to be a topic of great interest to philosophers. Before we turn to the role of causal concepts in chemical discourse a survey of the main lines of the philosophical debates on the meaning of causal language will provide the necessary groundwork for this study. It will be useful to maintain the following distinction: The word “causation” will be used as the name for the relation between causes and effects; the word “causality” will be used for the corresponding concept and its many synonyms as they appear in causal discourses. Since antiquity causal discourses have mostly been taken to be species of explanatory discourses. The analysis of explanatory discourses begins, for our purposes, with Aristotle’s writings on the subject (Aristotle 1984). For him, an explanation requires four components: a material aitia, what stuff is involved; a formal aitia, what structures are to be taken into account; an efficient aitia, what brings about the change to be explained; and a final aitia, to what end does the thing to be explained tend. Subsequent philosophical discussion of the nature of causation has led to two main proposals According to one popular view “causation” refers to the production or generation of effects by material and human agents, often allied to the Aristotelian view of efficient causes and in recent writing to the revival of the notion of “causal power” (Kistler and Gnassanou 2007). The alternative builds on the principle that “causation” refers to an observed regular concomitance between similar pairs of events leading to an expectation of the occurrence of the second event on the occasion of the occurrence of the first, as Hume argued. The philosophy of chemistry has inherited this problem “space.” Should we follow the lead of Aristotle or take our analytical tools from Hume? Or should we look for some kind of hybrid? Recent attempts by followers of the Aristotelian plan to revive the concept of causal power have included conceptual studies of what this concept and others allied in use mean (Cartwright 1987) and analyses of the logical form of attributions of causal powers (Cheng 1997; Hiddleston 2005).