@BrightNoon,
BrightNoon;69777 wrote:
E.g. John notices that whenever X happens, Y always follows. After years of study and consistent empiric observation, John concludes that X causes Y. However, a few decades later, John II discovers that in rare instances when C is nearby, X does not cause Y, and also that sometimes Y appears without X. New observations are made, new processes are discovered, and the objects involved are defined more specifically, and so the relationship between X and Y becomes a correlation. Because all phenomena are infinitely complex, we can with equal reason level the charge of post hoc propter hoc error against any causal relationship; i.e. any claim that X causes Y will eventually be invalidated by the discovery of new aspects to X or Y, which reveal that the relationship is not so simple, and that C or Q are in fact involved in a more complex causation: and so on ad infinitum.
this is what I got from reading Bertrand Russell's explanation too. We might think that acid rain causes fish to have difficulty, putting the blame on pH change, but then if we find later, that if the fishes' chloride channels ( I'm just making this up ) are not affected for some reason or other, then the pH change doesn't exert that effect any more. It's now to do with chloride channels, and pH change is just one of the changes that may indirectly "cause" the effect.
So we get "closer and closer" ( by our way of thinking) , in an never-ending approach to percieving reality. There never was a cause/effect relationship, but noticing that if the rain is acid, fish die...that's good enough for now
It's "the cause".
We might even try to be more specific, and say that atmospheric CO2 is "behind" the acid rain ( it makes carbonic acid ) and thus behind the fish death..but then again, CO2 might go back into the atmosphere, and then we think it was the sulphuric acid, not carbonic acid.
In this case, being less specific is actually being "less wrong".
To me it becomes a struggle to be less wrong, rather than a struggle to be closer to the truth