There cannot be a cause that is irrational; for, as incoherent, any “thing” irrational could not be realized concretely in itself, or therefore in its effects. It could not be a thing. So there cannot be a brute cause; a cause, that is, which is prior to reason. Nor by the same token could there be a brute state of affairs prior to reason, and thus without reason or ratio; for, what is not logically consistent cannot subsist.
No Lógos → no reason → no cause → no being.
Being;; ergo, Lógos. QED.
NB: this argument – *like all arguments whatsoever* – presupposes the Lógos.
Hence, a corollary argument: no Lógos → no argument; argument; ergo, etc.
What are the practical implications of these arguments? Get to church, dude! Confess, and repent! The Lord our God – who is the Lógos, logic himself in person – is implacable. All your pathetic puerile gamma atheist dodges are for naught. Get home, now, or begone, into the outer darkness.
Up to you.
NB: that it is up to you presupposes the Lógos. By the definition of the Lógos, everything does.
The Orthosphere 
“Cause” is a tricky word to define.
St John Henry Newman gives a description of its use, to describe: “the fact that things happen uniformly according to certain circumstances, and not without them and at random: that is, that they happen in an order; and, as all things in the universe are unit and individual, order implies a certain repetition, whether of things or like things, or of their affections and relations.”
This comes pretty close to Hume’s notion that the idea of causality is wholly derived from constant conjunction.
It was this that led Bertrand Russell to declare that “The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”
Miss Anscombe, in her inaugural lecture at Cambridge, queried whether necessity was an invariable component of causality, over and above derivation of an effect from its cause: “The dog made a funny noise.”
It is pretty obvious that notions of “causality” are abstracted from verbs like, scrape, to push, to wet, to carry, to eat, to burn, to knock over, to keep off, to squash, to make (noises, paper boats), to hurt. Also nouns like wind and fire.
What I argue in the OP is that “cause” is reducible to “reason.” Whatever it is that renders an effect reasonable to us – intelligible to us – in view of its antecedents, we take to be the cause, or causes, thereof.
But “grounds” or “reasons” or “motives” are quite distinct from “causes.”
If Hume is right, then “causes” are simply observed regularities. Miss Anscombe brought this out very clearly in her famous debate with C S Lewis: “Giving one’s reasons for thinking something is like giving one’s motives for doing something. You might ask me: ‘why did you half-turn towards the door?’ and I explain that I thought I saw a friend coming in, and then realized it was someone else. This may be the explanation although I did not at the time say to myself ‘Hello! There’s so-and-so; I’ll go and speak to him; oh no, it’s someone else.’ So when I give the explanation it is not by way of observing two events and the causal relation between them.”
Again, if we wish to show someone’s belief are irrational, we tend to explain them precisely in terms of “causes,” such as passion, self-interest or wishful thinking.
Now, I think Hume’s reduction of “cause” to “constant conjunction” is inadequate, but that does not affect the distinction Miss Anscombe is making.
Aristotle, one recalls, regarded bad choices as paralogisms (παραλογισμός = Unreasonable or fallacious). Of course, he acknowledged that such choices have “causes” (instinctive or dispositional factors), but they remains logically incoherent.
They are different types, sorts or aspects of the same thing: relations of motions.
If all causes are reasons, then all reasons are causes. Lo, we find that we can translate from the lingo of causation to the lingo of ration and motivation, and back, quite straightforwardly. With perfect intelligibility, and without at all courting controversy, we can say, “the reason the 8 ball went into the corner pocket is that the cue ball nudged it in.” Likewise we can say, again with perfect intelligibility, and without at all courting controversy, “My feeling that someone had entered the room caused me to look up.”
In both cases – that of the billiard balls interacting, and that of the interaction of the perceptual feeling and the motor response – we are confronted with a togetherness of events, of their more or less immediate adjacency in the extensive continuum.
There is a togetherness of events; that they appear to us to be ordered to each other intelligibly grounds the inductive inference that they are indeed ordered to each other intelligibly; this, in just the way that the apparent whiteness of the cue ball grounds the inductive inference that the ball is indeed white. Nothing more is needed to warrant these inductive inferences (despite that and even though subsequent appearances might in their turn prompt, motivate, cause, urge a reconsideration of our prior conclusions). And that’s a good thing, because as Hume observed, nothing more *can* be given to warrant those inferences; and if the appearance of intelligible order among events was *not* sufficient to warrant the inductive inference that events are intelligibly ordered, then (as Hume pointed out) we could not warrantably aver the truth of any general statement whatever. As he noticed, that would render animal life impracticable.
The difference between the reasons that order the relations of the motions of the billiard balls, on the one hand, and those that order the relations of the motions of our own acts, is that the billiard balls are not aware of the reasons that order the relations of their motions, whereas we are from time to time aware of the reasons that order the relations of our own motions (and, for that matter, those of the billiard balls).
If.
In the first place, if Hume’s account of the warrantable inferences from our experience is right, then there just are no such things as observed regularities, properly so called; for, a regularity is just the sort of order among events that Hume is amused to show we cannot warrantably infer. Then there are, rather, only particular observations that have nothing regular to do with each other.
Then if Hume is right, knowledge is impossible (for, even our awareness of logical or mathematical truth is an experience of an observed regularity (of the relations of implication or entailment among concepts as entertained in the mind’s eye)); so that we can’t know that Hume is either right or wrong. Since on Hume’s account of knowledge we can’t know that his account of knowledge is right, I infer by an act of induction (to which sort of acts, on his account, all conclusions equally – and with equal unreliability (which is to say, equal reliability) – reduce) that he is wrong.
Notice that passion, self-interest, and wishful thinking – and paralogisms – are all reasons that we are motivated to act as we do. They are not (as the physicalists incoherently propose) brute causes that operate upon us the way that the cue ball affects the 8 ball. They are rather causes that are reasons, intelligible and cogent enough to urge the intellect to act according to their order; it’s just that they are mistaken reasons.
If we take rational to mean that means are suited to ends, any causal connection may be seen as rational. But this requires us to see all states as ends, which requires us to presuppose teleology. I’d like your argument to be valid but I think it may be circular. It proves teleology by assuming teleology. We have no choice about that, for there is no alternative.
A good point, which I had myself considered when the thought that founded the post first came to me. But on reflection I decided that it didn’t truly appertain. Even should we excise final and formal causation from our analysis of becoming, we’d be left with the reality that each moment follows the last in orderly fashion, somehow or other; in, that is to say, rational fashion. Even merely efficient and material causes, taken alone and bereft of any notions of teloi or idea, evidently result in an orderly and rational cosmos. Thus even material and efficient causation must be suffused with order – in one way or another. They must, that is, be rational.
“an orderly and rational cosmos”
If everything I see is blue, one reason might be that I am wearing blues spectacles.
“Think of chemical investigations,” says Wittgenstein, “Lavoisier makes experiments with substances in his laboratory and now he concludes that this and that takes place when there is burning. He does not say that it might happen otherwise another time. He has got hold of a definite world-picture – not of course one that he invented: he learned it as a child. I say world-picture and not hypothesis, because it is the matter-of-course foundation for his research and, as such, also goes unmentioned.” – On Certainty (Emphasis added)
The belief that a substance A always reacts to a substance B in the same way, given the same circumstances is neither logically necessary nor empirically verifiable; not logically necessary, for one can easily imagine it happening otherwise (We know what it would be like for it to be true) and not empirically verifiable, unless we assume what happens in the future will be the same as what happened in the past – which is the point in issue, a pure petitio principii.
We cannot even say it is probable. As Hume insisted long ago, “probability is founded on the presumption of a resemblance betwixt those objects, of which we have had experience, and those, of which we have had none; and therefore it is impossible this presumption can arise from probability” – Treatise on Human Nature 1 3 6 (Emphasis added)
The truth is that it is our “world-picture” that determines what we count as testing, proving, how we interpret evidence and our whole system of verification.
Sure. How could it be otherwise?
From the obvious fact Wittgenstein has noticed, that our world picture determines what we count as testing, proving, and so forth, it does not follow that we are *wrong* in what we count as testing, proving, and so forth. We have willy nilly these world pictures, that it behooves us to test, at our peril. And there’s the reliable test: our peril. If our world picture inclines us to acts that as carried into practice imperil our survival, prosperity, reproductive success, satisfaction, health, and so forth – aye, and also such things as our feeling that we understand, that we know, that we are in our thoughts well and properly ordered, tidy, well kempt, coherent, consistent, nowise crazed or confused or misled – then we can be pretty sure that there is something wrong with it, that wants correction.
Does it hurt? You’ve almost certainly erred (or, others have, and so done you evil). Simple
All credit to Peirce re that.
Back to Hume. Every time I kick the stone, my toe hurts like crazy. If I’m Hume – or Berkeley, on the far distant other hand – and intellectually honest, and encouraged by my convictions – my agony doesn’t disincline me to kick the stone again, and again, and again. Good for Hume – and Berkeley – for their bravery, and their consistency. But even the diced up bits of flatworms do better.
Kristor
The ground-consequence (GC) relation cannot be reduced to the cause-effect (CE) relationship, although confusion can arise as we use “because” to describe both
“I feel squeamish this morning, because I had too much to drink last night” (CE) and “I must have had too much to drink last night because I feel squeamish this morning.” (GC)
The must is the give-away, for necessity is a logical relationship between propositions, not between events.
To repeat, “If everything I see is blue, one reason might be that I am wearing blues spectacles.” Our “world-view” predisposes us to look for order. The earth never describes the same orbit two years running. Of course, the man of science will say that this is the result of planetary perturbation, but note what he is doing here. He is not appealing to our experience of regularity but accounting by hypothesis for the absence of experience; the hypothesis being that the same formula that describes the behaviour of falling bodies on earth can be applied to the behaviour of the celestial bodies. The irregularity is a fact; the explanation is notional.
Again, if we delve into history, there are any number of accounts of witches flying, tables turning, saints being levitated, oracles coming true, horoscopes being verified, broken limbs being cured by faith-healing, and the like. Most people will adopt one of two explanations, both designed to support the belief in order: (1) Such phenomena fall under a law that awaits discovery (which is to beg the question) or (2) to declare the accounts to be false although, apart from their conviction of the uniformity of nature, they have no ground whatever for supposing the evidence for them to be inadequate.
Of course. How not? Why not? What sort of world view could predispose us otherwise, and also be a view of a world, properly so called?
The only circumstance in which it would not make sense to try to make sense of things – in which trying to make sense of things was a mistake – is if there were no sense of things. But if there were no sense of things, there could be no such thing as a mistake. If you can’t get anything right, nor then can you get anything wrong. Thus if there is no sense of things, so that nobody can be right or wrong about anything, nor then can there be such a thing as truth, nor then knowledge, nor a fortiori acts anywise ordered in respect to an environing world. Indeed, in that case, there can be no coherent world. And to such a state of affairs, no propositions or relations thereof could appertain.
But, empirically, our lives consist entirely of moments more or less somehow ordered to their environing world, to which, we find, systems of propositions *do* appertain. The consequent is false. So then must the antecedent be false.
That does not mean, or even indicate, that the planetary system is disorderly; that, i.e., it is a *mistake* to try to ascertain the order of it. It indicates rather only that reality is more complex than our formal models thereof, so that our models cannot adequate to all the phenomena that can in good orderly fashion transpire in the systems under their gaze. That, too, is to be expected; is indeed unavoidable; for, it is in the nature of models per se that they should be simpler than what they model. The details of the scree slope change every day; does that mean the topo map is wrong, or wrongheaded?
If the causal matrix of an event is not completely and reasonably – i.e., rationally, ergo intelligibly – related thereto (at least in principle), it cannot properly be said to be the cause thereof. Then the reason of an event is logically prior to the causation thereof; causation supervenes ration.
Thus I can say that I feel queasy this morning because I drank too much last night only on the basis of a previous recognition of the logical relations between drinking too much and being later hungover. If there were no prior logical connection between drinking too much and subsequent queasiness, nobody would draw a connection between actual drunkenness and actual hangovers. We would all then go about drinking our heads off and being *completely flummoxed* about the agonies that followed.
But then, if we say that the causal matrix of E does not completely account for E, the proper inference is not to the conclusion that there just is no causal matrix of E that can account for E completely, but rather that our understanding of the causal matrix of E must be defective somehow. But even if our understanding is incorrigibly defective, it does not follow that there is no perfect understanding out there to be had, at least in principle (by, say, an infinitely competent mind – by omniscience).
If there is no possible causal account of E, then reason is impossible per se; so that we cannot reason to the conclusion that there is no sufficient causal account of E.
Bottom line: if the Principle of Sufficient Reason is false, then there is no such thing as reasoning, or therefore of any such principles as the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the principle of the falsity of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. What is more, if the PSR is false, so that there are no sufficient reasons for events, then nor are there sufficient causes for events.
Kristor wrote
“If there were no prior logical connection between drinking too much and subsequent queasiness, nobody would draw a connection between actual drunkenness and actual hangovers.”
Observed regularities are not logical connections. Thus Hume: “probability is founded on the presumption of a resemblance betwixt those objects, of which we have had experience, and those, of which we have had none “ He adds, “We suppose, but are never able to prove, that there must be a resemblance betwixt those objects, of which we have had experience, and those which lie beyond the reach of our discovery.” – Treatise on Human Nature 1 3 6 (Emphasis added)
The relationship between drinking and hangovers is empirical and contingent – I can easily imagine it happening otherwise; I know what it would be like for the converse to be true.
Indeed, it did happen otherwise for me until I was about 35, when I suffered my first hangover! That was a disappointing shock.
But NB: a connection betwixt objects need not be absolute in order to exist. Each event is unique, but it is wrong to suppose that there is therefore no resemblance among them, no similarity of their effects, and so no order to things. From the fact that there is a Many, it does not follow that there is no integration thereof, no reconciliation or agreement. E.g., unique events are all alike in being each unique. And so forth. Thus is it possible to make true statements of a general nature; to understand.
Granted that we cannot prove that an empirically observed regularity is perfectly general. We have to keep learning, and testing our understanding; that’s why we are so often and so regularly conscious. But then, let us test the contrary: suppose arguendo that our presupposition of cosmic regularity is simply false, so that there is no real regularity to things – no Stoic Lógos, no cosmos. How in such a case could we arrive – how could we arrive regularly, indeed without practicable alternative – at the notion that there are indeed regularities? The presupposition of regularity, of cosmic order – of, i.e., the cosmos, ergo of acts ordered thereto – can work at all, indeed can be conceivable in the first place, only in a universe wherein it is reliable.
The notion that there are no regularities is autophagous: if there are no regularities, then we cannot say that it is always the case that there is no regularity.
The notion that there are some regularities (so that our epistemological obligation, as agents devising apt acts, is to discern and then to understand them) on the other hand, is *not* autophagous.
But regularities are not, necessarily, chains of causation.
In a cloud of mutually gravitating particles, there is nothing we can call a “cause” and nothing that we can call an “effect”; there is simply a formula.
Typically, we resort to the mathematics of ignorance, namely statistics. Thus, we have James Clerk Maxwell: “The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.”
From the fact that it lies beyond our poor powers to ascertain all the causal factors operant in a given situation, it does not follow that there are no such factors. From the truth of the notion that there are no causal factors, on the other hand, it follows that we cannot know anything; e.g., that we cannot know that there are no causal factors.
No, it means that “causality” is not a particularly useful concept.
As Bertrand Russell argued, “The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”
In fact, mature sciences do tend to replace the notion of causality with that of functional dependence – As in the instance of the mutually gravitating particles.
Of course, Russell concedes that “A proposition is necessary with respect to a given constituent if it remains true when that constituent is altered in any way compatible with the proposition remaining significant.” (The “constituent” referred to being the argument or arguments of a propositional function).
If you find it useful to replace “formal causation” with “functional dependence,” I think you are on target to an approximation close enough.
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