“The means whereby this work of Nature is brought to its consummate issue are forces of Nature working under her Laws by the method of cause and effect. The principle, or "law," of causation is a metaphysical postulate; in the sense that such a fact as causation is unproved and unprovable. No man has ever observed a case of causation, as is a commonplace with the latterday psychologists.”

— Thorstein Veblen

Source: The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, 1914, p. 67

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Thorstein Veblen 41

American academic 1857–1929

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“The opinion appears to be gaining ground that this very general conception of functionality, born on mathematical ground, is destined to supersede the narrower notion of causation, traditional in connection with the natural sciences. As an abstract formulation of the idea of determination in its most general sense, the notion of functionality includes and transcends the more special notion of causation as a one-sided determination of future phenomena by means of present conditions; it can be used to express the fact of the subsumption under a general law of past, present, and future alike, in a sequence of phenomena. From this point of view the remark of Huxley that Mathematics "knows nothing of causation" could only be taken to express the whole truth, if by the term "causation" is understood "efficient causation." The latter notion has, however, in recent times been to an increasing extent regarded as just as irrelevant in the natural sciences as it is in Mathematics; the idea of thorough-going determinancy, in accordance with formal law, being thought to be alone significant in either domain.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290 ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 29): The Nature of Mathematics.

“Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond of their law which in the mood of vague and inaccurate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an effect.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.39

“Throughout Nature, as distinguished from idealising mind, there reigns, in fine, no causation but transmission.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.39

“An event recognised as responsible for the production of a certain outcome… Human intuition is extremely keen in detecting and ascertaining this type of causation and hence is considered the key to construct explanations… and the ultimate criterion (known as “cause in fact”) for determining legal responsibility.
Clearly, actual causation requires information beyond that of necessity and sufficiency: the actual process mediating between the cause and the effect must enter into consideration.”

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

Source: Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2000, p. 309, as cited in: Rinke Hoekstra (2009), Ontology Representation: Design Patterns and Ontologies... p. 181

“The problem of method … includes four main issuesː the possibility of an alternative to logic and causation, capable of overcoming the inadequacies of both rationalism and historicism; the link between this third method and causality; the connection between the meaning of an act for its agent and its meaning for an observer; and the relationship of systematic theory to historical understanding.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Law in Modern Societyː Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (1976), p. 245

“It is just in thinking all these elements in an active originating Unit-thought, or an "I," that the essential and characteristic nature of man or any other real intelligence consists. Such an originating Unit-thinking, providing its own element-complex of primal thoughts that condition its experience, and that thus provide for that experience the form of a cosmic Evolutional Series, is precisely what an intelligent being is. Thus creatively to think and be a World is what it means to be a man. To think and enact such a world merely in the unity framed for it by natural causation, is what it means to be a "natural" man; to think and enact it in its higher unity, its unity as framed by the supernatural causation of the Pure Ideals, supremely by the Moral Ideal, is what it means to be a "spiritual" man, a moral and religious man; or, in the philosophical and true sense of the words, a supernatural being — a being transcending and yet including Nature, not excluding or annulling it.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.47

“A science that observes the laws of causation, and so is value-free, threatens human freedom and man’s religious, ethical, and legal responsibility. The philosophy of values raised to that challenge, in the sense that it opposed a sphere of values, as a realm of ideal valuations, to a sphere of being that was only causally understood. It was an attempt to assert the human being as a free, responsible creature, indeed not in itself, but at least, in its valuation, what one called value. That attempt was put forth as a positivistic substitute for the metaphysical.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1959)

“Three principles — the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality — are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.”

Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) American physicist

TED talk on beauty and truth in physics —video timecode 14m28s (March 2007) http://ted.com/index.php/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_beauty_and_truth_in_physics.html.

“If Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes than they are from one another—then it seems to follow that if any process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, that process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 125

“By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event. …I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty. …We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, pp. 257, 260 & 271

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