PHI403 Lecture 05 — Same Cause, Same Effect?

Examines the philosophical commitment underlying the regularity theory: robustness and repeatability as necessary for a cause. Norton and Kutach call this the folk theory of causation — causes necessitate effects, determinism holds, the same cause gives the same effect.

In practice, life-science and social-science data rarely show perfect regularities. The course catalogues the rescue strategies scientists deploy:

Exceptions — universal truths admit of albino ravens.
Outliers — deviating data points are discarded as mistakes.
Noise / error — smaller deviations fitted by the model's error term.
Non-responders — patients who don't respond to treatment.
Interferers — contextual factors that disturb the effect.

All of these are ways to save the principle "same cause, same effect" rather than giving it up. Hume's corollary — different effect ⇒ different cause — motivates causal expansion.

Connections

Back-link: sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-causation-in-science. Concepts: concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation · concepts/dispositionalism · concepts/causation.