Causality and determination: an inaugural lecture,

by G.E.M. Anscombe

Genres: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Science, Nonfiction

32 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 1971

About the author

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she became an authority on his work, and edited and translated many books drawn from his writings, above all his Philosophical Investigations. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. Her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the language of analytic philosophy; this and subsequent articles had a seminal influence on contemporary virtue ethics. Her monograph Intention is generally recognized as her greatest and most influential work, and the continuing philosophical interest in the concepts of intention, action and practical reasoning can be said to have taken its main impetus from this work.

Reviews

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m writing an essay on Anscombe for my course on theoretical philosophy; I figured I’d read her inaugural lecture on Causality and Determination, to give me a better understanding of her thoughts on the notion of causality.

Anscombe peruses some of the conceptions of causality that have gone before her. For Aristotle, when the agent and patient “meet suitably to their powers, themone acts and the other is acted on of necessity.” Spinoza also considered that, “given a determinate cause, the effect follows of necessity, and without its cause, no effect occurs.” The view of Hobbes, as sketched by Anscombe, is similar. Since Hume, however, it is no longer accepted that the following is a logical connection:

”If a causes b, then whenever situations like a occur situations just like b occur.”

However, Hume still held that causation involves a kind of necessary connection. So did Kant. Later accounts, following Mill, focused on necessary and sufficient conditions. But, Anscombe asks, can’t something be sufficient in the sense of being enough to bring about the effect, without guaranteeing the effect?

It is easier to discern causes from effects than to judge effects from causes. Anscombe uses the following illustration:

”For example, we have found certain diseases to be contagious. If, then, I have had one and only one contact with someone suffering from such a disease, and I get it myself, we suppose I got it from him. But what if, having had the contact, I ask a doctor whether I will get the disease? He will usually only be able to say, ‘I don’t know – maybe you will, maybe not.’”

Moreover, we can know causes without knowing the correct account of causation. But what, then, is the correct account of causation? Here Anscombe answers:

”It is this: causality consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes. This is the core, the common feature, of causality in its various kinds.”

This is the core of what Anscombe is arguing. Causality is the derivativeness of an effect from its causes. Effects derive from, arise out of, come of, their causes. Accounts of necessitation miss this, since something can be a necessitating condition without being a cause, and vice versa. That is, analysis in terms of necessity is unable to tell of the derivativeness of effect from cause(s). Therefore, causation should not be identified with necessitation.

Anscombe addresses several possible objections to her claim, which I won’t go into here. In the second part of her lecture, she sharpens some of the ideas she proposed in the first, and come to her largest point. This is that the laws of nature restrict, but do not uniquely determine, the future. She sums it up with the following illustration:

“Thus in relation to the solar system (apart from questions like whether in the past some planet has blown up), the laws are like the rules of an infantile card game: once the cards are dealt we turn them up in turn, and make two piles each, one red, one black; the winner has the biggest pile of red ones. So once the cards are dealt the game is determined, and from any position in it you can derive all others back to the deal and forward to win or draw. But in relation to what happens on and inside a planet the laws are, rather, like the rules of chess; the play is seldom determined, though nobody breaks the rules.”

Determinism means that there is a guarantee, before future events unfold, that there is a single possible (unique) outcome. According to Anscombe:

“It has taken the invention of indeterministic physics to shake the rather common dogmatic conviction that determinism is a presupposition, or perhaps a conclusion, of scientific knowledge.”

In the end, Anscombe clarifies that she does not mean that “any motions lie outside the scope of physical laws, or that one cannot say, in any given context, that certain motions would be violations of physical law.” It is the against the ‘always when this, then that’ notion, and the assumption that true singular causal statements are derived from such ‘inductively believed’ universalities, that she is – I think successfully – arguing. (Though, it must be said, I haven't the necessary background in physics and logic to truly assess the value of her work.)