Introduction



On the Notion of CauseLaurie Endicott ThomasAbstract: In his 1912 paper On the Notion of Cause, Bertrand Russell explained some of the problems with the early 20th century ideas about causality, and why some scientists and many philosophers would rather avoid the entire subject of causality. Yet from a 21st century perspective, it is clear that the American educational system, from K-12 to medical school, needs to do a better job of teaching people about causality. Causality is of practical and political importance whenever we are faced with choices whose consequences matter. Causality is not a mathematical or logical concept but a form of mythology. To serve our emotional needs, we human beings tell ourselves stories about the relationships among the events that we perceive. Yet our perceptions are inevitably limited, biased, or imprecise, and the act of observation is itself an event that could affect other events. Although all theories of cause and effect are mythoi, not all mythoi are created equal. Some mythoi clearly have better explanatory and predictive power than others have. IntroductionDoes cigarette smoking cause lung cancer? Is the heavy worldwide use of fossil fuels causing climate change? Do fatty diets cause heart disease? Do vaccines cause autism? According to the overwhelming consensus among scientific experts, the answers to those questions are yes, yes, yes, and hell no. The question I want to deal with here is why debates about those questions have gone on far longer in the public arena than in the scientific community. The answer is simple: all of those questions are questions about cause and effect. Most people have had no formal training in how to figure out cause-and-effect relationships, and some industries have a vested interest in preventing consumers and voters from believing that certain cause-and-effect relationships exist. As a result, various industries have been propagating contrarian views on topics of major importance to public health and safety. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Oreskes</Author><Year>2010</Year><RecNum>177</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">1</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>177</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551836507">177</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Oreskes, N.</author><author>Conway, E.M.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming</title></titles><dates><year>2010</year></dates><pub-location>New York, NY</pub-location><publisher>Bloomsbury Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>1 Philosophers can and should be teaching laymen and even scientists how to see through this smokescreen when thinking about causal relationships. Unfortunately, few people get basic training in philosophy. Russell’s On the Notion of CauseTo understand why philosophers have largely quit the field, with regard to teaching about causality, read Bertrand Russell’s paper On the Notion of Cause, which he presented to the Aristotelian Society in 1912. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Russell</Author><Year>1912</Year><RecNum>178</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">2</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>178</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551836638">178</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Journal Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Russell, Bertrand</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>On the Notion of Cause</title><secondary-title>Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society</full-title></periodical><pages>1-26</pages><volume>13</volume><dates><year>1912</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>2 In that paper, Russell argued that the word cause has become so “inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable.” Russell went on to describe some philosophical problems related to causality, pointing out that many of the scientists of his day, mainly physicists and astronomers, had practically stopped talking about causes. Yet in the 21st century, scientists in many fields (especially medicine, the social sciences, ecology, and climate science) focus mainly on trying to find causes and to document effects. To be successful in those endeavors, scientists need some basic training in philosophy. Unfortunately, few scientists and practically no medical doctors have had even an introductory-level course on philosophy. (This should terrify you, because many diagnoses and all treatment decisions are based on some notion of cause.) Neither have most people in the humanities, a fact that goes far toward explaining why so much antiscience gibberish has been produced under the rubric of postmodernism. Thus, philosophers should think about how the training in basic skills in philosophy can be effectively incorporated into the K-12 and undergraduate curricula. Why Causality Matters Causality is important for the following reasons: it deals with how the past relates to the present and how the present relates to the future. An understanding of causality helps to guide our choices. It enables us to make reasonably accurate forecasts about the future. An understanding of causality can also help us decide how to hold individuals accountable for the things that they have done or failed to do. For a democratic society to function, and even for humanity to survive, a critical mass of the population needs to have reasonably good skills in figuring out cause and effect. Unfortunately, our schools, including our medical schools, ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Thomas</Author><Year>2013</Year><RecNum>110</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">3</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>110</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1514816349">110</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Journal Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Thomas, L. E.</author></authors></contributors><auth-address>28 Niles Ave., Madison, NJ 07940, United States. Electronic address: laurie@.</auth-address><titles><title>How evidence-based medicine biases physicians against nutrition</title><secondary-title>Med Hypotheses</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Med Hypotheses</full-title></periodical><pages>1116-9</pages><volume>81</volume><number>6</number><edition>2013/11/19</edition><keywords><keyword>Clinical Trials as Topic</keyword><keyword>Evidence-Based Medicine/*methods</keyword><keyword>Humans</keyword><keyword>Nutritional Sciences/*education</keyword><keyword>Physicians/*psychology</keyword><keyword>Western World</keyword></keywords><dates><year>2013</year><pub-dates><date>Dec</date></pub-dates></dates><isbn>1532-2777 (Electronic)&#xD;0306-9877 (Linking)</isbn><accession-num>24238959</accession-num><urls><related-urls><url> do a poor job of preparing people to think about causal relationships. As a result, even many educated people are prone to making two kinds of error: either they accept superstitions, which are unreasonable beliefs about cause and effect, or they embrace an unreasonable skepticism bordering on pathological denial: they insist that “the jury is still out” when there is no longer room for reasonable doubt. Aristotelians and CausalityWhy did Russell write a paper to the Aristotelian society about the misleading associations bound to the word “cause”? Doubtless, it is because the “causes” that Aristotle talked about are not the same thing as the causes that modern scientists talk about. The Aristotelian causes (material, formal, efficient, and final) are useful concepts for talking about objects that were made on purpose. For example, the material cause of a wooden dining table is the wood from which the table is made. The formal cause is the design of the table. The efficient cause is the carpenter who built the table. The final cause is the purpose for which the table was built, namely serving as a dining table. In the middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas used this theory of four causes as the basis of much of his theology. To Thomists, God is the first cause of all things, the cause of every other cause. The Aristotelian four causes are useful concepts for talking about objects that human beings make on purpose. However, these Aristotelian concepts are not useful for talking about natural phenomena that happen without any intelligent being willing them to happen. So unless you are satisfied with the explanation “It is God’s will,” then the Thomist idea of cause is not useful in science. Furthermore, the Aristotelian notions of “cause” do not actually correspond with how English-speakers currently use the word cause. Fortunately, the problem of misleading associations with the word cause has largely vanished since Russell’s day, since so few people have read Aristotle or Aquinas. Also, today’s scientists are practicing agnostics, at least in their scientific work. In contrast, many Victorian scientists had been motivated by the desire to understand the Creator’s master plan. Of course, even some ancient Greek writers, such as the authors of the Hippocratic Corpus, turned away from supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. That is why modern medicine traces its ancestry to Hippocrates. The Hippocratic text On the Sacred Disease, which was about epilepsy, explains, “It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from the originates like other affections.” ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Hippocrates</Author><Year>400 BCE</Year><RecNum>179</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">4</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>179</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551836958">179</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Ancient Text">51</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Hippocrates</author></authors><translated-authors><author>Adams, Francis</author></translated-authors></contributors><titles><title>On the Sacred Disease</title></titles><dates><year>400 BCE</year></dates><urls><related-urls><url> The problem, of course, is that it can be really hard to find those natural causes. Even today, most cases of epilepsy remain unexplained. Yet few educated people today would consider these cases to be manifestations of the supernatural. Causality as MythologyTo be good at figuring out causal relationships, you need some skill in logic and mathematics. However, causality itself is neither a logical nor a mathematical concept. It is a mythological concept. An assertion of a cause-and-effect relationship is actually a mythos. It is a story that we formulate in order to make sense out of what we observe. Joseph Conrad gave an excellent illustration of this principle in his novel Heart of Darkness. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Conrad</Author><Year>1897</Year><RecNum>181</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">5</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>181</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551837606">181</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Conrad, Joseph</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Heart of Darkness</title></titles><dates><year>1897</year></dates><pub-location>London, UK</pub-location><publisher>Blackwood&apos;s Magazine</publisher><urls><related-urls><url> In that novel, the narrator describes a presumably illiterate African man who had been trained to tend the boiler in a steamboat. This fireman had been told that a spirit lived in the boiler. The fireman had to supply the right amount of water and fire to the boiler to keep the spirit happy. This mythos enabled the fireman to do a good job of tending the boiler. Of course, it would not be adequate for helping him design a better boiler. For that, one would need to use much more sophisticated mythoi, such as the principles of fluid dynamics. Yet even the principles of fluid dynamics are a mythos. They are, at best, an approximation and oversimplification of what is happening in an actual boiler. Even our mental image of a particular boiler is a mental construct that is only a representation of the actual boiler. As Alan Sokal has documented extensively, some postmodernists seem to embrace cognitive relativism, implying that there is no way to judge whether one mythos is better than another. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Sokal</Author><Year>2008</Year><RecNum>180</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">6</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>180</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551837196">180</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Sokal, Alan</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New York, NY</pub-location><publisher>Oxford University Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>6 Yet scientists have clear criteria for judging the quality of a scientific theory. One of those criteria is explanatory power. Explanatory power is the ability of the theory to explain the subject matter it pertains to. Explanatory power can be retrospective or prospective. Descriptive power is retrospective. It is the theory’s ability to account for the things that we have already observed. Predictive power is prospective. It is the theory’s ability to generate predictions that turn out to be true. It’s nice for a theory to have good descriptive power, but you really want one with good predictive power. If you have several theories with equal explanatory power, it is best to pick the simplest one. This preference is called the principle of parsimony. A theory that is both powerful and simple is considered elegant. Yet even an elegant theory is still a mythos. It is still just a story in your mind.This assertion that scientific theories are mythoi is not meant as a criticism of science. A good mythos allows you to make uncannily accurate predictions, and it may reveal how you could control things that are important to you. Yet even a good mythos is still a mythos. It is still a mental construct, not reality itself. It is a mental map, rather than being the territory that the map represents. Causality Is Not a Logical or Mathematical ConceptIt is important to understand why causality is a mythological concept, as opposed to being a logical or mathematical concept. This distinction is hard to notice because scientists use a lot of sophisticated mathematics when trying to figure out causal relationships, and the arguments related to causality sound a lot like logical arguments. In fact, we want our scientific theories to be logical, but they go beyond logic. Logic deals with the relationships among propositions, whereas causality deals with the relationships among events. Bertrand Russell once wrote that a fact is something that makes a proposition either true or false. I suggest that an event is a particular kind of fact. It is something that makes a particular kind of proposition—let’s call it an event-proposition—either true or false. Linguistically, the propositions in classical logic are sentences. They have a subject and a predicate. The verb in the predicate can be an action verb or a linking verb, but it has to be in the indicative mood. Thus, a proposition is a statement of fact, as opposed to being a question, a command, a wish, etc. Likewise, the propositions that express events are sentences with a subject and a predicate. However, the verb must be marked or modified in some way to express a restricted timing. Because of these restrictions on timing, it is often possible to put events in some sort of sequence. When we try to figure out causality, we often use sentences and even arguments that sound very much like logical arguments. But there is a crucial difference. In classical logic, we are concerned with how the truth-values of various propositions are interrelated. But in causality, we are concerned with how events are interrelated. The Guinea Pig Paradox is a perfect example of this. Construct a truth table for the following if-then statement: If you pick up a guinea pig by the tail, its eyes will fall out. PQPQTTTTFFFTTFFT Since guinea pigs do not have tails, you can never pick one up by the tail. As a result, the antecedent is always false. Since the antecedent is always false, then the conditional statement is considered true. Yet even though the conditional statement is true, the conditional statement is not an expression of causality. The Grammar of CausalityTo understand the difference between classical logic and the study of causality, you need to understand something about linguistic modality. In classical logic, you have propositions that are linked together with coordinating and subordinating conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs: Socrates is a man, and all men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is a mortal. If Socrates is a man, then he is mortal, because all men are mortal. You may be using conjunctions to link those propositions together into an argument, but the verbs in those propositions are still in the indicative mood, which is a realis modality. Realis modalities are used for expressing facts and truth. Irrealis modalities, in contrast, are used for expressing situations or actions that are not known to have happened. We use irrealis modalities for asking questions, issuing commands, expressing hopes, or talking about what might have been or what could happen. In the 1960s, logicians started to do a lot of work on modal logic, which allows you to incorporate statements about possibility and necessity. In English, this involves some modal auxiliary verbs: what can be true or what must be true, if some other propositions are true. But when you start talking about causality, you go beyond 20th-century modal logic because you start using other irrealis modalities. You are imagining some alternative state of affairs: either forecasting the future (what could eventually be) or imagining an alternative version of the past or present (what would otherwise have been). In short, you are no longer evaluating whether facts are true, you are engaging in something akin to science fiction. Mythology and Emotional NeedsSome people may be alarmed to hear me say that causality is mythology. To many people, the word myth means a false explanation—a superstition. Yet ancient mythology and modern scientific theories spring from the same impulse and are bound by the same limitations. Like our ancient ancestors, we modern-day people want to find explanations that satisfy our emotional needs. One such emotional need is the need to feel that we understand why things happen. For this reason, we like explanations that are analogies to familiar objects and relationships. As people became familiar with more sophisticated technologies, such as telephone switchboards, radios, and then computers, their ability to understand complicated natural phenomena improved. For example, cell biologists use terminology from radio (e.g., signal, amplification, and feedback) to describe the behavior of inter- and intracellular signaling pathways. Thus, something that has become familiar (radio) is used as a metaphor to help people understand something unfamiliar.The mythoi that we develop and embrace are likely to be shaped by our culture and experiences. In Heart of Darkness, the story about the spirit in the steamship’s boiler was a useful mythos for an illiterate man from an animistic preindustrial society. (It is easy for a European to sneer at the fireman for being ignorant and superstitious. Yet it is possible that the man understood that the ghost in the machine was just a metaphor and that the man was reasonably terrified by the very real prospect of a boiler explosion.) Similarly, the Hippocratics developed a medical theory that was based on an analogy to pottery, which was a high-tech industry in their day. To produce pottery, you need to work with four “elements”: earth, water, fire, and air. Likewise, the Hippocratics imagined that health depended on a balance among these four elements. Although the Hippocratics knew about pottery, they had no microscopes, which is why they did not develop the germ theory of disease. Like the ancients, modern people (even modern scientists) are often blind to what they need to see, and they like to draw analogies to concepts that are already familiar. Another emotional need is the need to feel that we can control or at least predict the things that matter to us. For this reason, we will prefer the mythoi that give us at least the illusion that we can predict and control events. Modern scientific theories are better than ancient myths because scientific theories are rejected if they provide a poor fit to the available evidence, and especially if they lead to predictions that fail.The Sociology and Politics of ScienceScientific theories are formulated by human beings within a particular social and political context, and the theories themselves can be shaped by social and political factors, such as the scientists’ own personal and cultural biases and the decisions made by the bodies that issue research grants. For example, there has recently been a huge amount of genetic research on diseases with extremely low heritability. Predictably, much of this research has led nowhere. However, some postmodernists have taken the fact that scientists are human beings operating in a cultural and political context to mean that scientific theories are merely expressions of cultural attitudes and political ambitions, and that “alternative ways of knowing” should have equal epistemological standing with the scientific method. A few postmodernists have even gone so far as to impugn the scientific method (sometimes disparaged as the “Eurocentric scientific methodology”)—even equating it with rape, torture, and slavery. Sandra Harding has been widely ridiculed for alluding to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica as “Newton’s rape manual.” (NB: Sir Isaac Newton was reportedly still a virgin when he died.) I can only imagine what Harding might have thought of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica ( REF _Ref3294944 \h Figure 1)! Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1. A particularly lurid passage from Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Russell’s ConcernsRussell raised several important points in On the Nature of Cause. Among them are two central questions about causality. One is how we define an event. As Russell put it, An "event" in the statement of the law, is obviously intended to be something that is likely to recur, since otherwise the law becomes trivial. It follows that an "event" is not a particular, but some universal of which there may be many instances. It follows also that an "event" must be something short of the whole state of the universe, since it is highly improbable that this will recur. What is meant by an "event" is something like striking a match, or dropping a penny into the slot of an automatic machine. If such an event is to recur, it must not be defined too narrowly: we must not state with what degree of force the match is to be struck, nor what is to be the temperature of the penny. For if such considerations were relevant, our "event" would occur at most only once, and the law would cease to give information. An "event," then, is a universal defined sufficiently widely to admit of many particular occurrences in time being instances of it.So Russell’s “events” are actually categories that we create through a process of making definitions and setting boundaries. The other central question that Russell raised was the question of timing. A cause must precede its effect, but by how much? This question of timing got even more complicated after Einstein published his theory of relativity. From the frame of reference of a photon leaving the sun, the time that it takes to reach earth is 0. Yet from an earthly frame of reference, it would take roughly eight minutes and twenty seconds for that photon to travel from the sun to the earth. The same trip by the same photon would have different durations, depending on the frame of reference of the measurement. Events and PerceptionsWe can know about events only through observation. Yet we cannot observe the events themselves. What we actually observe is the sensations that occur as our nervous system interacts with something related to an event. We know about a supernova because of how our eyes, perhaps aided by a telescope, interact with the photons that left that supernova thousands or even billions of years ago. Our brain then turns the nerve impulses from the eyes into a visual image. Our brain then interprets that image and tries to make sense of it. We may want to know what has happened to the star. Yet the star, and the supernova, are mental constructs that we use to make sense out of the way that the starlight registered on our photographic equipment and on our nervous system. Thus, our perceptions of events are representations constructed by our perceptual system, as opposed to being the events themselves. To put it in Platonic terms, we cannot see what is going on outside our cave. All we can see is the shadows that some of passersby cast on the back wall of our cave. Events and objects can be altered by our attempts to observe them. For example, you cannot do carbon-14 dating of an ancient manuscript without removing and destroying a piece of that manuscript. DeterminismOnce you understand the mythological character of causality, as well as Russell’s caveats about “events,” you will understand why strict determinism is a pipe dream. In physics, strict determinism is the idea that if you knew enough about a set of initial conditions, you could compute future states. The problem is that there will probably always be some conditions that you don’t know about and thus cannot include in your model. There may also be things that you do know about but ignore because you mistakenly think that they do not matter. Also, your observations will always be a little bit imprecise, even if they are accurate. For example, if you are measuring a continuous variable, your measurement will inevitably come with error bars. If the system is exquisitely sensitive to tiny difference in initial conditions, then the decision of how to measure things, such as whether to round off your measurements to four instead of five significant digits, could lead to huge differences in your predictions. So even if you have a pretty good idea of how a system works, you will still never be able to predict the future with high precision and absolute accuracy.No Laws, But Methods and CaveatsSince causality is not part of mathematics, we will never be able to derive mathematical laws that govern it. But through careful observation, we can discover some patterns that some kinds of events tend to follow. These patterns are called laws of nature. Some of these patterns, such as the laws of thermodynamics, seem to be universal and invariable and thus can help us make some important predictions. Laws of nature often sound like mathematical laws, since they tend to involve expressions of quantity or probability. Yet laws of nature rest on observation, rather than being derived from pure thought like a mathematical theorem. So instead of learning mathematical laws of causality, scientists learn methods of observation and caveats that help them avoid misinterpreting their observations. Sir Francis Bacon is regarded as the father of the scientific method because of his formulation of methods for figuring out cause and effect. These methods start with establishing that the purported cause and the presumed effect coincide. Yet even if two events are associated with each more than you would expect by random chance, this association does not prove that a causal relationship exists, or in which direction the causality would run. Thus, we also need caveats, such as the fallacies of questionable cause (e.g., post hoc ergo propter hoc, fallacy of the single cause, the wrong direction fallacy).People with only a little training in logic often misunderstand how to make proper use of logical fallacies. For example, they dismiss the results of observational studies because “correlation does not prove causality” when they should be regarding correlation as a vital though not confirmatory piece of evidence. They sneer at inconvenient expert opinions because they reject “arguments from authority,” even though an argument from authority can be strong (i.e., the probability that the expert’s opinion is reliable may be high). The Politics of CausalityFrancis Bacon once wrote, “Ipsa scientia potestas est.” Knowledge itself is a form of power. If you know that your actions have predictable consequences, then you can choose your consequences by choosing your actions. Given that knowledge of cause and effect is a form of power, it should come as no surprise if our educational system does a poor job of teaching people about causality. The educational methods that are used in our public schools have been subjected to selective pressures, which would weed out the methods that work too well in enabling ordinary people to afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted. Meanwhile, the public relations industry has worked hard to confuse people about many causal relationships. Up until the 1930s, carcinoma of the lung was rare. Then, doctors suddenly saw an astounding increase in the incidence of that deadly disease. Most of the cases were in men who had taken up cigarette smoking during World War I. As evidence of the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer mounted, the cigarette companies went on the defensive. They hired experts to promote unreasonable skepticism. One of those experts was Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, who was perhaps the most important figure in biomedical research in the 20th century. Fisher literally wrote the book on how to design experiments so that you could use statistical testing to evaluate the results. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Fisher</Author><Year>1925</Year><RecNum>182</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">7</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>182</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551838340">182</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Fisher, R.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title> Statistical Methods for Research Workers</title></titles><dates><year>1925</year></dates><pub-location>Edinburgh, UK</pub-location><publisher>Oliver and Boyd</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>7 He was a mathematical genius, but he was also a smoker and a bit of a curmudgeon—and he was also in the pay of the cigarette companies. So he proposed all sorts of preposterous objections to the conclusion that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Stolley</Author><Year>1991</Year><RecNum>138</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">8</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>138</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1515878062">138</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Journal Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Stolley, P. D.</author></authors></contributors><auth-address>Clinical Epidemiology Unit, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia 19104-6095.</auth-address><titles><title>When genius errs: R.A. Fisher and the lung cancer controversy</title><secondary-title>Am J Epidemiol</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Am J Epidemiol</full-title></periodical><pages>416-25; discussion 426-8</pages><volume>133</volume><number>5</number><edition>1991/03/01</edition><keywords><keyword>England</keyword><keyword>Epidemiologic Methods</keyword><keyword>History, 20th Century</keyword><keyword>Humans</keyword><keyword>Lung Neoplasms/epidemiology/*etiology</keyword><keyword>Smoking/*adverse effects</keyword><keyword>Statistics as Topic/*history</keyword></keywords><dates><year>1991</year><pub-dates><date>Mar 1</date></pub-dates></dates><isbn>0002-9262 (Print)&#xD;0002-9262 (Linking)</isbn><accession-num>2000852</accession-num><urls><related-urls><url> In response to Fisher’s shenanigans, Sir Austin Bradford-Hill proposed a set of considerations (he did not regard them as strict criteria) that are important when one is trying to establish a causal relationship between some environmental factor and a disease. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Hill</Author><Year>1965</Year><RecNum>140</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">9</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>140</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1515878596">140</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Journal Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Hill, A. B.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The environment and disease: association or causation?</title><secondary-title>Proc R Soc Med</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Proc R Soc Med</full-title></periodical><pages>295-300</pages><volume>58</volume><edition>1965/05/01</edition><keywords><keyword>*Environment</keyword><keyword>*Environmental Health</keyword><keyword>Humans</keyword><keyword>*Occupational Medicine</keyword><keyword>*industrial medicine</keyword></keywords><dates><year>1965</year><pub-dates><date>May</date></pub-dates></dates><isbn>0035-9157 (Print)&#xD;0035-9157 (Linking)</isbn><accession-num>14283879</accession-num><urls><related-urls><url> For example, the cause must precede the event. The presumed cause should be tightly correlated with the purported event, and the correlation should show up in many different studies conducted in different settings. There should be some dose effect, which means that a bigger dose of the cause should produce a greater incidence or severity of the effect. The causal relationship should be biologically plausible, and analogous to other causal relationships that we know about. The causal relationship should also be the most reasonable of the possible explanations, and it should be consistent with other things that we know. Notice that some of the Hill criteria are involve statistical analysis, while others are a matter of judgment. Math and logic are useful when you are trying to establish causality, but you need more than math and logic. If you use Hill’s approach, you will accept the conclusion that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. You will also realize that that atherosclerosis is reversible ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Ornish</Author><Year>1990</Year><RecNum>186</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">10</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>186</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1552148374">186</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Ornish, D.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Dr. Dean Ornish&apos;s Program for Reversing Heart Disease</title></titles><dates><year>1990</year></dates><pub-location>New York</pub-location><publisher>Random House</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>10 and type 2 diabetes is curable ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Kempner</Author><Year>1958</Year><RecNum>187</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">11</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>187</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1552148591">187</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Journal Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Kempner, W. </author><author>Peschel, R.L.</author><author>Schlayer, C.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Effect of rice diet on diabetes mellitus associated with vascular disease</title><secondary-title>Postgraduate Medicine</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Postgraduate Medicine</full-title></periodical><pages>359-371</pages><volume>24</volume><number>4</number><section>s</section><dates><year>1958</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>11 through a change to a low-fat, plant-based diet. The body of evidence is overwhelming. Yet doctors are loathe to recommend this dietary change, partly because they are unaware of its effectiveness and partly because they are worried about the prospect of a dietary deficiency of protein or calcium—neither of which has ever been a public health problem, even among people eating a purely plant-based diet.. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Bayliss</Author><Year>1917</Year><RecNum>188</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">12</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>188</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1552148690">188</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Bayliss, W.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The Physiology of Food and Economy in Diet</title></titles><dates><year>1917</year></dates><pub-location>London, UK</pub-location><publisher>Longmans, Green &amp; Co</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>12 Providing Models of CausalityHuman beings enter the world with a brain that seeks to perceive patterns, including patterns among events. In childhood, we refine our sense of cause and effect by playing with objects and learning to use tools. We then use the simple causal relationships we learn about in this way as metaphors to help us understand more complicated relationships. So to help people learn about causality, we should teach them the vocabulary to describe some familiar causal relationships. Then, they can apply those words and those models in other situations. This kind of knowledge tends to build upon itself. The more someone learns about how various systems work, the more models the person can use for understanding still more causal relationships.One important model is the fire model, which is useful for teaching about necessary and insufficient causes. A cause is necessary if it must be present for the effect to occur. A cause is insufficient if the effect may fail to occur even if that cause is present. To have a fire, you need three things: fuel, oxygen, and a source of ignition energy ( REF _Ref3021623 \h Figure 1). All three items are necessary causes. If you remove any one of the three, you will no longer have a fire. However, none of them is sufficient, on its own, to produce a fire. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 2. Oxygen, fuel, and a source of ignition energy, such as heat, are all necessary causes of a fire. Remove any of the three and you will have no fire. Image by Gustavb courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.Many health problems have a necessary but insufficient cause. For example, atherosclerosis is practically nonexistent among people whose total cholesterol is consistently below 150 mg/dL, yet not everyone with high cholesterol levels gets atherosclerosis. Thus, high cholesterol can be considered a necessary but insufficient cause of heart attacks and ischemic stroke. For this reason, the simplest and cheapest way to prevent deaths from heart attack is to teach people the kind of diet that would help their total cholesterol drop naturally into the heart-attack-proof zone. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Ornish</Author><Year>1990</Year><RecNum>186</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">10</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>186</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1552148374">186</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Ornish, D.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Dr. Dean Ornish&apos;s Program for Reversing Heart Disease</title></titles><dates><year>1990</year></dates><pub-location>New York</pub-location><publisher>Random House</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>10Sufficient causes are a slippery concept. A cause may be sufficient only in the presence of some other factors, some of which may be unknown. Thus, the sufficiency of a particular cause may seem hit-or-miss and will be heavily dependent on context. Contributing causes are things that are neither necessary nor sufficient but can make an event more likely. For example, cigarette smoking is a contributing cause of lung cancer. Smoking makes a person far more likely to get lung cancer. But not all smokers get lung cancer, and not all lung cancer patients have smoked. Nevertheless, avoiding cigarette smoke does reduce your risk of getting lung cancer. Precipitating causes are events that provoke some other event, but only after other causes have made that event possible. For example, a whiff of perfume could trigger an asthma attack in someone with asthma, but it wouldn’t cause an asthma attack in someone with healthy lungs. Sometimes, a precipitating cause is a seemingly insignificant event, such as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, or one additional snowflake triggering an avalanche. Another important model is the Swiss cheese model ( REF _Ref3021629 \h Figure 2), which is useful in accident prevention. Each slice of Swiss cheese has holes. The cheese itself represents effective prevention, while the holes represent an opportunity for something to cause an accident. If you line up slices of Swiss cheese, the holes in one slice can be blocked by the solid portions of other slices. Only if all the holes line up would you end up with an accident. Thus, you could prevent more accidents if you reduced the size of the holes or added more slices of cheese, especially if you added slices that were specifically designed to block the holes in other slices. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 3. The Swiss cheese model of accident causation illustrates that, although many layers of defense lie between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that can allow the accident to occur. The model was propounded by Dante Orlandella and James T. Reason of the University of Manchester. Image by Davidmack, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.CaveatsThe first caveat is that a cause-and-effect relationship is a mythos. A proposed causal relationship is a mental construct that may (or may not) provide an accurate model for predicting observable events. Even a theory that provides predictions that are accurate enough for a given purpose, within a given setting, might still have deep flaws that may become apparent later on. A theory that provides accurate predictions in many different settings can be described as robust. The second caveat is that the logical fallacies related to cause and effect are useful for reminding you that “it ain’t necessarily so.” For example, not everything that happens cum hoc or even post hoc is really propter hoc. Also, even if there is a causal relationship, it is easy to get the direction of the causality reversed. It is easy to mistake effects for causes. The logical fallacies that deal with causality have been articulated to help you avoid making such mistakes. The third caveat is that finding a logical fallacy in an argument about causality does not prove that there is no causal relationship. The fallacies of causality simply remind us that the conclusion of causality can be false, they do not prove that the conclusion is false. All arguments about causality are invalid. But an invalid argument is simply one with a nonzero probability that its conclusion is false even when its premises are all true. In other words, all inductive arguments are invalid. The probability of the conclusion being false is nonzero, but it might still be very low. Since induction is the basis of the scientific method, all scientific arguments (other than purely mathematical proofs) are invalid, which simply means that there is a nonzero probability that their conclusion is false even if all of their premises are true. But that does not mean that all science is arbitrary nonsense. Although the inductive probability of a scientific argument can never reach 100%, it can still be very high. If you reject strong arguments as invalid, you commit the “fallacy fallacy.” For example, the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists is that the use of fossil fuels is contributing to global climate change. If you dismiss this consensus of expert opinion, precisely because it represents expert opinion, then you are making a grave mistake.ImplicationsOne of the purposes of a liberal arts education or a science education is to help the student develop good skills in figuring out what is real and what is imaginary, how to label things and sort them into categories, how to approach the mind-body problem, and how to deal with questions of cause and effect. These skills, which all fall under the rubric of metaphysics, become important when people are faced with choices that matter. When a critical mass of the general population have poor skills in these areas, a democratic society becomes impossible. I suspect that many of our social problems result from the deliberately engineered failure of our educational system in the United States to help young people develop those skills. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Thomas</Author><Year>2013</Year><RecNum>185</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">13</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>185</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551839805">185</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Thomas, L. E.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free</title></titles><dates><year>2013</year></dates><pub-location>Dekalb, IL</pub-location><publisher>Freedom of Speech Publishing</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>13 The symptoms of this failure are numerous and troubling. Michio Kaku has warned us that the United States has “the worst educational system known to science,” and that the American scientific community would collapse if it were not for the H1B visa program. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Kaku</Author><Year>2011</Year><RecNum>184</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">14</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>184</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551839158">184</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Interview">64</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Kaku, Michio</author></authors></contributors><titles><secondary-title>SAP Sapphire Now/TechEd conference </secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2011</year></dates><pub-location>Madrid, Spain</pub-location><urls><related-urls><url> The symptoms are also obvious in the humanities, where many so-called postmodernists produce nonsense and even gibberish when they could be producing important critiques of scientific institutions and the scientific community in general. ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Sokal</Author><Year>2008</Year><RecNum>180</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">6</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>180</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551837196">180</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Sokal, Alan</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New York, NY</pub-location><publisher>Oxford University Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>6The solutions to these problems are not easy, but they are simple—and they were laid out for us in ancient times. We need to teach the classical liberal arts, including the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as well as the quadrivium of mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy. Once students have developed basic skills in those disciplines, they are prepared for studying the humanities, including philosophy, as well as the natural sciences. Unfortunately, our public schoolteachers have been trained and even forced to use watered-down curricula and ineffective teaching methods (e.g., sight words instead of phonics for teaching reading). ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Thomas</Author><Year>2013</Year><RecNum>185</RecNum><DisplayText><style face="superscript">13</style></DisplayText><record><rec-number>185</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ra0raf2pcfzzxxedx2lvwz22prz9a0ffzrs9" timestamp="1551839805">185</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Thomas, L. E.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free</title></titles><dates><year>2013</year></dates><pub-location>Dekalb, IL</pub-location><publisher>Freedom of Speech Publishing</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>13 It is high time for philosophers to weigh in on these issues. We need philosophers to review the K-12 and undergraduate curricula and work with experts on child development to bring those curricula up to reasonable standards. We also need philosophers to serve as public intellectuals, to provide continuing education as well as inspiration to adults. Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica may have been a milestone in the philosophy of mathematics, but his efforts to educate the public about philosophy and science and his leadership in the peace movement have had much more of an effect on society at large. References ADDIN EN.REFLIST 1.Oreskes N, Conway EM. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press; 2010.2.Russell B. On the Notion of Cause. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 1912;13:1-26.3.Thomas LE. How evidence-based medicine biases physicians against nutrition. Med Hypotheses. 2013;81(6):1116-1119.4.Hippocrates. On the Sacred Disease. In:400 BCE.5.Conrad J. Heart of Darkness. London, UK: Blackwood's Magazine; 1897.6.Sokal A. Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2008.7.Fisher R. Statistical Methods for Research Workers. Edinburgh, UK: Oliver and Boyd; 1925.8.Stolley PD. When genius errs: R.A. Fisher and the lung cancer controversy. Am J Epidemiol. 1991;133(5):416-425; discussion 426-418.9.Hill AB. The environment and disease: association or causation? Proc R Soc Med. 1965;58:295-300.10.Ornish D. Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease. New York: Random House; 1990.11.Kempner W, Peschel RL, Schlayer C. Effect of rice diet on diabetes mellitus associated with vascular disease. Postgraduate Medicine. 1958;24(4):359-371.12.Bayliss W. The Physiology of Food and Economy in Diet. London, UK: Longmans, Green & Co; 1917.13.Thomas LE. Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free. Dekalb, IL: Freedom of Speech Publishing; 2013.14.Kaku M. In. SAP Sapphire Now/TechEd conference Madrid, Spain2011. ................
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