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- Title
Causal Relevance and Relevant Causation.
- Authors
Jacquette, Dale
- Abstract
The interconnectedness of all events in the causal matrix suggests that the so-called informal fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning is not deductively invalid. It may be preferable then to consider post hoc, propter hoc as violating a pragmatic concept of causal relevance. A leading pragmatic account of relevance defines it as the caused closure of a cognitive agenda, to which it seems necessary to add that such closure be relevantly caused, and not by such contingencies as the inquirer's death or incapacity, magic philosopher's pills or the like. This in turn involves the concept of relevant causation in a vicious circularity. The implication may then be that relevant causation, like time and space as pure forms of intuition in Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, cannot be defined or reductively characterized in terms of more primitive concepts, let alone derived empirically or pragmatically from the contents of experience or purpose of an action. Causation and causal relevance on this proposal constitute instead part of the mind's innate quasi-metaphysical bedrock of scientific explanation.
- Subjects
PRAGMATISM; CAUSATION (Philosophy); MATRICES (Mathematics); AESTHETICS; METAPHYSICS
- Publication
Journal of Logic & Computation, 2012, Vol 22, Issue 1, p101
- ISSN
0955-792X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/logcom/exp065