"Emanuel Kant once decreed that human understandin was such that we necessarily saw the world in terms of cause and effect..." The man on the street still does. How do today's scientists understand this relation?
Jerome
Jerome
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I think causality is still pretty firmly ensconced in scientific thinking. Its not ALL there is, there is acausality too, but its still important.
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Where were you heading with this? I will try to give a wide-open answer, that might get a discussion going. If you had a particular argument against something (refutation) you wanted to discuss, I'm sorry, give me a more idiot-proof pointer in the right direction.
Depends what you mean by the terms "cause" and "effect." If you think both as things that can be counted in whole numbers and assigned full explanatory power then there will be some trouble fitting everything into that framework.
Much scientific knowledge sounds more statistical than causal, e.g. "we know that people of a certain gender, age, weight etc. will die of heart disease at *this* rate if untreated and *that* rate if receiving a particular treatment."
An object falls (in Newtonian terms) the way it does because the total of the gravitational atraction of every object in the universe happens to add up that way, not because the Earth is in that direction. It can be very difficult to tell precise stories of what are the "all things being equal" that leave only what we would like to call "the causes" in the story of why things happen the way they do. (If you want to say that a car hit a pedestrian because the car was going too fast, why can't we say just as easily that the car was going too slow, or the pedestrian was going too fast?)
