Q&A: Causality: From Reason or from Intuition
Causality: From Reason or from Intuition
Question
It is stated in the book Two Carts that causality comes from intuition, and that reason "perceives" both the general principle of causality and "the causal dimension within a concrete particular event."
Isn’t it more reasonable to say that reason does not directly perceive concrete causality, but rather that when it combines the general principle embedded within it with the basic assumption of reason that behind every phenomenon there is some law-like order (and therefore the fact that "it always works" forces us to find the regularity behind it) — reason arrives at the conclusion that this particular event made use of the principle of causality?
(Because I, the undersigned in my poverty, am unable to "perceive" directly the causal dimension within a particular event.)
Answer
Possibly. Though on your approach one would need to explain when we decide that there is a causal relation between events and when we do not. Moreover, I’m not sure that perceiving concrete causality is not the basis on which the general principle of causality is built.
Discussion on Answer
There can be an innate category in the mind (which is not the result of observation).
Right. And the innate category is the basis for the general principle of causality.
But before that you wrote, in these exact words, "I’m not sure that perceiving concrete causality is not the basis on which the general principle of causality is built"—meaning that the general principle is not based on an innate category but on perceiving concrete causality. And about that I asked: how could perceiving concrete causality be possible unless it is based on an innate category? If so, the general principle (which comes from the innate category) is the basis for perceiving concrete causality, not the other way around.
This hair-splitting is going a bit beyond the bounds of reasonableness. My claim was that there can be an innate category of causality (the concept) that is not the product of experience, on the basis of which we perceive and identify specific causal connections, and after we’ve seen several such cases we infer the general principle of causality. It seems to me we’ve exhausted this.
But then doesn’t the problem of induction arise on your view?
Which you also solved by means of a general rather than a particular view?
Indeed. And that is exactly why I tend toward the possibility that we also perceive the general principle of causality (and do not merely infer it). Above, I only raised the possibility that if one is already adopting only one aspect, then there is some plausibility to moving from the particular to the general.
For a one-time event, there’s no reason to claim that it involves causality. But if I try again and it indeed "succeeds," then I have to find the regularity behind it, and I explain that there is causality here.
As for the "moreover"—I didn’t understand: how is it possible to perceive concrete causality if the mind has no category of causality??