Category Archives: Causation

In my posts involving causation, two key ideas are:

1. By what she wears or anything else, a person does not cause the harm that you do to her. This comes up in “The Istanbul Seaside.”

2. For a given event, there is no unique cause, ascertainable by science, despite the seemingly common view discussed for example in “Happiness.” Causation is relative to us, as illustrated in a passage from Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics, quoted in “War and Talk” (which itself is based mainly on Tolstoy and considers also Plato):

For example, a car skids while cornering at a certain point, strikes the kerb, and turns turtle. From the car-driver’s point of view the cause of the accident was cornering too fast, and the lesson is that one must drive more carefully. From the county surveyor’s point of view the cause was a defect in the surface or camber of the road, and the lesson is that greater care must be taken to make roads skid-proof. From the motor-manufacturer’s point of view the cause was defective design in the car, and the lesson is that one must place the centre of gravity lower.

If the three parties concerned take these three lessons respectively to heart accidents will become rarer …

The post “On Causation” is dedicated to Collingwood’s theory.

The Istanbul Seaside

December 3, 2014 – 11:00 am

The original purpose of this article was to display and explain two photographs by me: one of a seaside park, the other of an abandoned car. I do this, and I talk about the stresses and compensations of the big city. I continue with the theme of Freedom from an earlier article of that name.

It is now early December in Istanbul, 2014. We have hardly seen the sun for weeks. Some rain falls almost every day. One has to learn to go out when one can. Last Saturday was cloudy, but dry, so we walked down to the Tophane-i Amire—the “Cannon Foundry Imperial.” The name is romantic, because it dates from Ottoman times, and because, like Koh-i-Noor, it is in a Persian grammatical form that is obsolete in Turkish. Today’s name of the cannon foundry would be Amire Tophane.
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By David Pierce | Also posted in Bosphorus, Collingwood, Gezi, History, Istanbul, Nature, Philosophy, Pirsig, Psychology, Tophane, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

Uniformity

November 21, 2014 – 5:22 pm

For certain reasons, this is something of a follow-up to an earlier article, Interconnectness, in which I quoted myself from December of 1987 as saying,

I came to think that if one understood the law of contradiction, there would be nothing left to understand.

I am going to quote now the person I quote the most, Collingwood, from the fourth paragraph from the end of Religion and Philosophy:

Uniformity, in a word, is relative to our needs; and to suggest that a game of cricket, for instance, would be impossible if we supposed that the ball might suddenly decide to fly to the moon, is no less and no more sensible than to suggest that it is impossible because the bowler might put it in his pocket and walk off the field. We know that the friend we trust is abstractly capable, if he wished, of betraying us, but that does not prevent our trusting him. It may be that our faith in the uniformity of matter is less removed from such a trust than we sometimes imagine. Whether we describe it as faith in matter or faith in God makes, after all we have said, little difference.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Contradiction, Mathematics, Philosophy | Tagged | Comments (2)