-- by JLS
---- for the GC
FURTHER to some points on cause and implicature (and cfr. remarks by Doctorow in "Causation vs correlation", this blog, I was referring to Mackie, himself referred to by Walker ("Conversational implicature") for a Griceian extension to 'subjective' conditionals (recall that Grice's essay IV is only supposed to cover, as per the later title of the essay goes, 'indicative' conditionals.
This from wiki under 'causality':
"J. L. Mackie argues that usual talk of "cause," in
fact refers to INUS conditions"
where INUS stands for
Insufficient and
Non-redundant parts of
Uunnecessary but
Sufficient causes.
"For example, a short circuit as a cause for a house burning down."
"Consider the collection of events"
a. the short circuit,
b. the proximity of flammable material, and
c. the absence of firefighters.
"Together these are unnecessary but sufficient to the house's destruction (since many other collections of events certainly could have destroyed the house)."
"Within this collection":
"the short circuit is an insufficient but non-redundant part (since the short circuit by itself would not have caused the fire, but the fire would not have happened without it, everything else being equal)."
"So, the short circuit is an INUS cause of the house burning down."
The 'romance' of Mackie and Grice is long dated:
"[Mackie] is much too kind to Grice's claim that 'If P then Q ' and ' P ) Q ' do not differ in meaning but only in "conversational implicature ". ...
www.jstor.org/stable/2217728
(Review of Truth, Probability and Paradox). The INUS thing came out with his later book on the cement of the universe.
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it's both insufficient, and sufficient? typical philosophastical examples. Actually Mr Mackie, that looks like mere sufficiency, and may sort of hold; at least one could stuff "short circuit -> house burning down" into something like a proposition, even if it only happens 25% of the time. That's what sufficiency means. Other things could have caused it as well, and who said premises should be necessarily true, or even highly probable? Now, they might require that in engineering or physics classes. Not in philosophizin'.
ReplyDeleteWhich is to say, the logicians' informal causality is hardly closer to science than soothsaying. Even a boring data-based approach, like what insurance men do--say, examine a few hundred fires, and rank the causes of the fires, etc.-- comes a bit closer to truth.
But a Mr. Mackie's little conditional could not begin to address complex natural phenomena....say hurricanes. NOAA, with some of the most massive servers crunching millions of numbers all the time, cannot accurately predict hurricane strength, or even times, except in the most generalized fashion. Then LaPlace was onto that problem two centuries before Oxbridge logicians were...
Well. Yes. J may be reminded that HACKING, who is a sort of a Griceian fellow, tried to address the historical issue by writing about the 'emergence of probability'. I mean, I AM reminded! The book is a light read. Too light for my taste! But got good reviews. It has a good chapter on 'signs' which sort of reminded me of how 'physiognomical' Grice was, for the early Grice (1948, 'Meaning') was all about 'signs' and 'natural signs' and Hacking notes that THAT was the idea behind probability back in the day.
ReplyDeleteI see the point. Aristotle is all about 'proof' and he does use 'semeion' to mean proof. And from 'proof' and 'provability' to 'probability' there is a change of ONE phoneme only!