A CURIOUS THING ABOUT CAUSE
Abstract In the mid-nineteenth century, Augustus De Morgan was pressing for a broadened and more abstract
mathematical understanding of syllogistic, one in which verbs other than the copula could be given a role, singly or
in composition; specifically, these provided informative relational components that traditional syllogistic insisted
upon shunting into the predicate term. The motive was partly a mathematical desire for generality, but also scientific,
since this liberalized view would make of logic a more useful instrument for physical inquiry and explanation.
During the same era, George Boole was proposing a semantic understanding of the conditional form that was
categorical in character. It is natural to reflect upon the implications of De Morgan’s proposed generalization of
categorical form upon that semantic account. Since De Morgan’s aim was to equip logic for a role in science, we
raise corresponding questions about the explanatory role of the ‘if…then’ form. It becomes apparent that from the
point of explanatory theories, not all verbs eligible for the role of copula in De Morgan’s scheme are of equal value.
In this connection, we consider particularly the verb cause. Our study of cause is less semantic in character than it is
bio-linguistic, and finds a common source of Hume’s doubts and De Morgan’s misgivings, in the unhelpful origins of
the word, and in the nature of language.
1.
Getting to the Point
In his Cambridge lectures, Augustus De Morgan complained about traditional syllogistic that the only relation it
was prepared to accept was that associated with the copula verb, that all other relational terms must be relegated to
the predicate.
The only relations admitted into logic, down to the present time, are those which can be signified by is
and denied by is not. … All other relation is avoided by the dictum that it shall be of the form of
thought to regard the relation and the related predicate as the predicate, and the judgement as a
declaration or denial of identity between this and the related subject. (On the Syllogism: IV; and on the
Logic of Relations. Trans. Camb. Phil. Soc., X (1860), pp. 331–358) p. 213 in the Heath volume)
So, for example, the syllogistic demands that we represent the sentence,
[Three] is greater than [two]
as:
All [three] is [a thing greater than two]
But then the evidently valid argument:
4 > 3; 3 > 2/∴ 4 > 2
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A Curious Thing About Cause
must be accounted syllogistically invalid, since when, as the tradition requires, we give the copula its accustomed
pre-eminence, the resulting representation commits the syllogistic fallacy of introducing four terms: four, things
greater than three, three, things greater than two, and two. De Morgan did not quite have the means to make his
point as we would now most naturally put it, but his intention was clear enough. What makes syllogistic work is not
the particular relation that the copula represents, but rather some assumed formal properties of that relation. From our
vantage point, we see that there are really two relations: that of inclusion, and that of set membership. So, to consider
an example, in general the first figure syllogism in Barbara is valid in virtue of the transitivity of set inclusion, but in
the special case in which the subject term is singular, the validating property can also be understood as the
monotonicity of membership along inclusion. To say that a relation R is monotonic along a relation S is to say that for
any individuals x, y, and z if Rxy and Syz, then Rxz. (Thus to say that a binary relation R is transitive is to say that it is
monotonic along itself.) Membership is monotonic along inclusion, because for any individual x, and any sets a, and
b, if x ∈ a, and a ⊆ b, then x ∈ b. Contains is monotonic along identity because for any individuals x, and y, and any
set a, if x ∈ a, and x = y, then y ∈ a. De Morgan preferred the language of composition. The composition, R
two binary relations R and S is the set of pairs { x, y
say that R
S of
∃z: Rxz & Szy}. To say that R is monotonic along S is to
S ⊆ R.
Thus, properly understood, a first-figure syllogism in Barbara in which both the minor and the middle term are
singular owes its validity to that monotonicity. The language of syllogistic made no special use of these distinctions,
the undifferentiated copula serving adequately for its rather limited purposes. However, De Morgan observed, seen
from the vantage point of sufficient mathematical abstraction, the first figure syllogism in Barbara shares a valid
form with the greater than argument cited, and with some arguments in which distinct premisses introduce distinct
relations, provided that the relations bear to one another the right second-order relationships (inclusion, monotonicity,
and so on) in the right combinations. First-figure Barbara, in which the major term and middle terms are singular,
shares a valid form with:
y < z; x = y /∴ x < z.
The philosophical rejoinder to De Morgan’s observations came notably from Sir William Hamilton (about whose
intellectual capacities in comparison to those of De Morgan, the less said the better): these relations (greater than
and so on) belong, not to the form of the proposition, but to its content. That De Morgan had a point here ought to
have been evident from the fact that, on Hamilton’s view, even when we merely paraphrase
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A Curious Thing About Cause
Tully is Cicero; Cicero is Marcus; therefore Tully is Marcus
by
Tully is identical to Cicero; Cicero is identical to Marcus; therefore,
Tully is identical to Marcus
we thereby pass from a valid syllogism to one having four terms. Any occurrence of the so-called ‘is of identity’ can
always be replaced by a construction containing only the ‘is of predication’. Now the court of subsequent logical
history has given its verdict, with minor qualifications and the indirection that such developments usually take, to the
side of the plaintiff. Certainly De Morgan would be justified in feeling himself fully vindicated in the eventualities,
even though he himself had no direct part in the development of modern first-order logic. But, partly because his own
considerable formal innovations have been eclipsed by those larger and more fundamental ones, De Morgan’s more
general philosophical observations have been overlooked, and their significance never properly assessed. The deep
methodological divide that separates the intellectual style of Hamilton from that of De Morgan has remained
unexplored, and the more general philosophical lessons of the dispute have remained unlearned.
Now it is fair to say that the solid lines that demarcated the distinct domains of mathematics and logic in De
Morgan’s times have mostly been redrawn as the dashed lines within a federation, but it is arguable that emerging
cartography pencils in ever-darkening lines between the domains of logic and philosophy. Speaking as a
mathematician to logicians, De Morgan wrote, ‘Logic is bound by the laws of form, not to represent differences by
agreements, except when it is formally shown that the differences cannot affect the object to be gained (1966, p.60).
The stricture, mutatis mutandis, might nowadays be offered by logic to philosophy as the maxim:
Do not formulate theories in such a way as to require
the suppression of distinctions. The simplicity of such
a theory will be merely apparent, and its generality
illusory. Rather, formulate a theory with sufficient real
generality that distinctions are preserved, discovered
and accommodated.
2.
Boole
The observations of De Morgan might have found immediate application in the theory of conditionals, since
virtually the only contemporary formal semantic account of the conditional, that of George Boole, was essentially
categorical. Boole divided the class of all propositions into ‘two great classes, to which the respective names of
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A Curious Thing About Cause
“Primary” or “Concrete Propositions,” and “Secondary” or “Abstract Propositions,” may be given.” (Boole 1854,
p.52) Primary propositions expressed relations among things; secondary propositions, relations among propositions.
Not always, but usually, the presence of if, either, or and so on indicate that a proposition is secondary. However, on
Boole’s account, ‘the formal laws to which the operations of the mind are subject are identical in expression in both
cases’. (p.162) Whereas primary propositions are to be represented as expressing relationships between classes of
things, secondary propositions are represented as expressing relationships among intervals of time. So, for example,
“…the conditional proposition ‘If the proposition X is true, the proposition Y is true.’ An undoubted meaning of this
proposition is that the time in which the proposition X is true, is time in which the proposition Y is true.”(p.163) The
indefinite article represents a significant concession. Boole goes on, “This indeed is only a relation of coexistence,
and may or may not exhaust the meaning of the proposition, but it is a relation really involved in the statement of the
proposition, and further, it suffices for all the purposes of logical inference.” (p.163). Boole’s view of the matter, and,
in particular, his mathematician’s conception of form, is certainly compatible with distinct semantic representations,
though his own thinking comprehended none but temporal indices. And, in a remarkable anticipation of the proof
theory/truth theory distinction, he allows, “we commonly reason by the aid of words and the forms of a wellconstructed language, without attending to the ulterior grounds upon which those very forms have been established.”
(p.164)
There appears to have been nothing in Boole’s formal commitments to preclude a semantic representation of
secondary propositions in which moments of time, or possible states of physical systems, replaced intervals of time
as indices. The distinction between moments and intervals seems to have been just beneath the level of specificity of
this thinking on the subject. We may safely say ‘just’, as his semantic account of the conditional is supposed to be
analogous to his representation of the universal affirmative categorical, which is semantically understood as
expressing a relationship between classes of non-overlapping objects. Admittedly the displacement of moments of
time by states of a system takes us off at another more oblique angle. At any rate, there is scope enough for
modifications to Boole’s semantic theory that could have aroused Augustus De Morgan, and would have alarmed
David Hume. After all, at the centre of a categorical account of the conditional is the copula. And, as De Morgan
observed, it is not the copula itself, but the formal properties of the copula that determine categorical form. Replace
the is by gives or produces and, if both Boole and De Morgan are right, all of the desired formal properties of the
conditional ought to be preserved. Hume was as suspicious of produces as he was of causes. But had he lived to read
Boole and De Morgan, he would already have read Kant, and would, perhaps, have been grateful that that worthy
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A Curious Thing About Cause
should have had at least one or two sensible successors. By De-Morganizing Boole, a hypothetical syllogism of the
form:
γ > β; α > γ / ∴ α > β
ought to find a suitable semantic representation in the following schema on any of the given variations uniformly
(and for some combinations, even non-uniformly) applied:
All γ -moments [states] are [give, yield, produce, cause] β- moments [states].
All α-moments [states] are [give, yield, produce, cause] γ- moments [states].
All α-moments [states] are [give, yield, produce, cause] β- moments [states].
The expansion of the discussion to Boole and the conditional is an important ingredient of this discussion, for
the charges that De Morgan brings against a philosophical reliance on the categorical proposition can be brought with
equal justice against a reliance of philosophical theory upon the conditional form. In fact the blind spot as it affects
our use of the conditional is more insidious in its consequences than that of his traditionalist opponents. The
inelegance of the various attempts to force items of relational vocabulary into the predicate speaks persuasively
against the traditional view of logical form. No one whose professional self-worth was not dependent upon a belief in
the primacy of syllogistic could suppose that the correctness of Reid’s argument
A = B; B = C/ ∴ A = C
was dependent upon its construal as:
Things equal to the same are equal to one another; A and C are things
equal to the same; therefore A and C are equal to one another.
No mathematicians, even in De Morgan’s time, would deny that De Morgan, and not the categoricalists, had seen
the correct way out of the puzzle posed by Reid. Now, in the case of the conditional, we expect sentences in the ifand the then- clauses. In the simplest conditionals we expect indicative sentences in both places, but in the main, in
conditionals that interest logicians, we find indicative sentences rather than interrogatives or imperatives in the thenclause at least. In theory, we suppose, we might also find nested conditions to any finite depth. However, here, for
reasons that will be come apparent, our interest is exclusively in first-degree conditionals having simple sentences in
the then-clause. Such sentences, had Boole been right about the matter, assert relationships among things. To
accommodate De Morgan’s generalization, we might insist that the relationships they assert are drawn from a wider
field of acceptable candidates than the single one that Boole envisaged, and therein lies the point of interest. Well,
one of two points of interest, because if we apply De Morgan’s generalization to Boole’s semantic representation of
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A Curious Thing About Cause
the conditional, the resulting semantics would accommodate a broader category of relationships between moments of
the if-clause class and moments of the then-clause class, and, derivatively, between states of the if-clause class and
states of the then-clause class. But first things first. Unlike the case of the categorical proposition, in the case of the
conditional, there is nothing inelegant or forced about relational vocabulary turning up in what is semantically the
predicate clause. It is, rather, exactly what we should expect. For an example, consider:
If pigs are clean, and the clean are godly, then pigs are good to eat
or
If 3 > 2 and 2 > 1, then 3 >1.
But we also find then-clauses with anaphoric reference to the if-clause in the subject place. As an example consider
the construction
2.1 If Jane marries Mr. Bingley, then that will throw her younger sisters in the way of other rich men.
even:
2.2 If I press this button, it will cause the alarm to sound.
In such cases we see, at one remove, something of the tyranny of standard form that De Morgan complained of in the
practice of syllogistic. Of course, it is convenient to have sentences in the if- and the then-clauses, and if our
reasoning is to make use of propositional rules, such a formulation is as it must be. But anyone who insists upon 2.1
as the form of the sentence must justify the insistence of its primacy over the construction of the original:
"It was, moreover, such a promising thing for her younger daughters,
as Jane'
s marrying so greatly must throw them in the way of other
rich men..." (Austen 1985, p.141)
which seems more specifically to predict a physical effect on her sisters of Jane’s marrying Mr. B. Similarly, the
conditional form of 2.2 has the appearance of a conditional standardization of:
2.3 My pressing this button will cause the alarm to sound.
As De Morgan sought to teach logic, so science might teach philosophy:
Do not formulate theories in such a way as to require the suppression
of distinctions. The simplicity of such a theory will be merely apparent,
and its generality illusory.
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A Curious Thing About Cause
In fact, from the point of view of someone interested in explanatory theories, as distinct from someone merely
interested in taxonomies, the De Morgan generalization of categorical form represents the only sensible course. In
general it is the relational vocabulary rather than the copula that presents the empirical information, and therefore
frames the interesting empirical theoretical questions. It is the physical counterpart of the relational vocabulary that
calls for empirical examination. But, from the same point of view, much the same consideration prompts iterations of
the generalization as successive relational terms are exported from the right-hand term, or clause, to the copular
position. In general, for the purposes of physical understanding, as the démarche of a physical examination, one
wants the most particular vocabulary available in the main position. So, for example, though 2.3 is an improvement
over 2.2 in this regard, the form:
2.4 My pressing this button will sound the alarm.
is an improvement over 2.3. The investigation is of the physical process of sounding.
De Morgan’s exposure of the traditionalists was intended in part as a demonstration of the uselessness of
syllogistic as an instrument of scientific investigation. Outside of mathematics it was, he quipped, a cannon that they
spent nearly all their writing in loading and very little in firing. (On the Syllogism: IV; and on the Logic of
Relations. Trans. Camb. Phil. Soc., X (1860), pp. 331–358) p. 239 in the Heath volume) It is evident enough
why De Morgan would have regarded his own proposal as an improvement on this score. Insofar as explanation
involves decomposing causal relationships into spatio-temporal component relationships, a general theory of
relations and their compositions would provide a general mathematical theory of scientific explanation. But he had
little to say on the subject of reforming syllogistic specifically for scientific application, or for expressing structured
theoretical understanding. To be sure, he included causes and gives among his list of alternative copulas, so there is
provision for temporally ordered productions of states. But although he saw the possibility of composing relations in
arguments as,
Lucas is a son of Laurie,
Laurie is a sister of Alison,
Martyn is a son of Alison,
Therefore, Lucas is a cousin of Martyn.
he made no special plea on behalf of any particular decomposable relations, such as those of cousin, nephew, niece,
as providing analytical grist for his mill. His point was the more general one, that for purposes of detailed
philosophical, or other understanding, inclusion relations between classes of items, whether objects or moments or
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A Curious Thing About Cause
states, relations that depend upon identities between elements, provide inadequate resources. Part of the reason is that
identity, as deployed in the definition of inclusion, does not allow for predictable transition of states, or for regularity
of change. Nevertheless, although other copulas such as causes, produces, and gives, permit us to register transitions
of things and states, they register no information as to the nature of the transition. Without further information, they
are not usefully decomposable into temporally ordered, or other successions of relations. Of course, if one state
produces another, then there must be some succession of processes by which it does so; however, to speak of
decomposition here is to imply that our understanding of the decomposable copula itself supplies the information as
to what that succession of processes is, as grandparenthood is decomposable into an iteration of parenthood.
It is on this account that the language of cause exercises its own tyranny over our understanding. And as the
aphorism hints, the uniformity of expression represents no unity of understanding. We evidence no underlying unity
of explanatory resources in applying the language of cause both to the formations of nebulae and to the rate of
adolescent pregnancy. The two fields require, and to a large extent, have acquired their proper sets of transitive verbs.
Thus a De Morgan reform of Boolean conditional semantics, pressed, might have us export transitive forms of
intransitive then-clause verbs to copular position, as from
2.5 If I chop for a bit, then that causes the tree to fall
I
semantically construed as:
2.6 AII occasions of my chopping for a bit are occasions of my causing the tree to fall
A
to
2.7 My chopping for a bit causes the tree to fall
M
2.8 My chopping fells the tree
M
to
Mathematically, we free up the syllogism by the successive release of relational vocabulary from predicate into the
copular position. But, scientifically, we free it up by iterated exportations by which we replace indecomposable
copulas by decomposable ones taken from the predicate position. The advantage of the verb fell over the verb cause
is that we can give a direct detailed, that is, compositional account of how chopping fells. To be sure, in this case, the
account is exactly the same as the account of chopping causing falling. Any account of the causing must, however,
refer to the felling for its details, but not the reverse. Indeed this is a reason not to exchange the oppression of the
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A Curious Thing About Cause
copula is for the oppression of cause, not, to put the matter in De Morgan’s terms, to replace the tyranny of one
copula by the tyranny of another. The explanatory information is always elsewhere.
Now, an attempt to formulate some general semantic account of cause can be viewed as an attempt, on behalf of
explanatory theorizing, to find a terminological middle ground between vacuously formal generality and
ungeneralizable empirical particularity. One wants general principles, but principles with physical application: a
usable understanding of cause, one might have supposed, would fit the methodological bill. By contrast, the tendency
of the preceding discussion, were it attended to, would be to suggest as a target zone for the enterprise the region
between particular transitive verbs and cause. In doctrinal terms, the claim is this: to assert merely that A causes B is
to claim that there is some or other, as yet undisclosed, causal relationship between A and B. It is the particularly
specified compositional account of that relation that must bear any such explanatory burden as is there to be borne.
Our question here is: why should cause be, in itself, so bereft? Why, in De Morgan’s terms, should it not be
decomposable into more informative copulas? This is the subject of the remainder of this essay.
3.
The Wall That Hume Met
Language is primarily a biological phenomenon. This not to deny the study of syntax and semantics a place; it
is only to say that, as it presents itself to observation, language is physical. Every act of speech, every inscription, is a
physical intervention with physical consequences. To be sure the effects of language are conventional, but from a
biological point of view, this is only to say that the physical significance of a linguistic intervention has itself a
physical source in the physical significance of earlier linguistic events. To observe that we have non-linguistic
ancestors is to add that the physical significance of linguistic interventions is ultimately descended from the physical
significance of non-linguistic interventions. As an explanatory account of the emergence of that new class of
physically significant events must provide the details of that transition, so any explanatory account of more recent
linguistic phenomena must trace the transition from less recent linguistic phenomena. Much the same can,
presumably, be said for syntactic features of language and their role in its physical significance. As for semantics, we
remark only that it is an altogether curious matter that theorists concern themselves so overwhelmingly with it in the
case of this physical phenomenon, since it plays no role in the explanation of any other. This is not to deny the
connection between language and the non-linguistic. Every linguistic intervention both modifies and exploits an
environment which is already rich in sensory inputs and complex neural connectivities. The effectiveness and the
efficiency of a linguistic act are dependent upon the effective exploitation of these non-linguistic features.
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A Curious Thing About Cause
Now, much more can, and has been said, along these lines. (endnote?). However, those few banalities will
suffice to set the background of our discussion. Hume’s puzzlement about cause provides a convenient entry-point.
The barrier to understanding that Hume met, the biological source, rather than the reason for his scepticism was, we
wish to claim, linguistic in nature. If language in general is a biological phenomenon, then so too is the language of
cause. It, too, is subject to the constraints imposed by the facts of linguistic transmission. It follows that the best
understanding of the word cause (or of any other naturally occurring vocabulary) that anyone can count a priori upon
obtaining is whatever level of understanding is guaranteed by the transmission of the language from one generation
of users to the next at its normal rate of change. Unfortunately, all that is passed from one generation to another is the
ability to use the vocabulary of cause in the making of conversation; indeed, conversational ability is precisely what
is transmitted. Thus, the only level of understanding that is guaranteed us for this as for any other naturally occurring
elements of any present natural language is the conversational understanding of whatever generation, whatever
population of language users we are born into; nor is there any guarantee that any unified or consistent account of
that understanding can be given. That there is on average a non-zero rate of change can be inferred from the fact that
the ability to speak a language is no guarantee of an ability to speak any sufficiently archaic ancestral language. The
fact of language change is also reasonably inferred from the fact that language is in general transmitted through its
acquisition by children. There is no independent semantic audit during adolescence that reconciles one’s use with any
objective, let alone previous, standard. Nor could there be, since every generation of language users has been in a
similar predicament.
The general point is well illustrated by a brief mention of connective vocabulary. English, like every other
natural language, owes all of its connective vocabulary to a consequent feature of language transmission: that is, the
tendency for some relational vocabulary to become appropriated, through discernible stages, to connective use. In
this process, two separate changes reinforce one another: morphological reduction, and the loss of relational
information. Butan (outside) gives us but; however, we (those of us outside of Scotland at any rate) lose the
information (irrelevant to the transmission of but in its various non-relational uses) that it ever had a relational use.
We can explain its acquisition of its various functionalized uses, indeed we can do so in some detail, but those
explanations neither require nor yield a semantic account.1 Parallel remarks can be made about other English
connectives. As users of the language, we are ill placed to see how poorly we understand them, since, generally
speaking, we have unexceptionable conversational facility with them. The lexical significance that originally
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equipped them for their eventual functional role is not itself needed in that later role, and has not in general survived
unless in dialects. In what follows, we explain why cause has suffered a similar divestiture.
The word cause entered the English vernacular in the fourteenth century from the Latin causa of medieval
philosophers and lawyers, and has retained to this day many of the lexical uses that, according to the references,
causa had for those worthies, viz, on account of, through which any thing takes place or is done, a cause, a reason,2 a
motive, inducement, an occasion, opportunity, to be the cause of, responsible, just cause, good reason, the first part
of the process, that which lies at the basis of a rhetorical representation, a condition, a state, situation, relation and
position (Lewis and Short 1962, p.303ff. and Simpson and Weiner 1989, pp.1000, 1001). Also, judicial proceedings,
a legal case, a ground of action, a causal or metaphysical principle, a causal agency, origin, history, and, on behalf
of (Glare 1985, p.289 and Simpson and Weiner, pp.1000, 1001). Therefore, in its nominal and verbal forms, the word
cause was multi-tasking even at its entry point into English, inheriting the multiple uses of the Latin causa. A
biological understanding of language may enable us to predict such interchangeability of use, but interchangeability
does not help the metaphysical enterprise. Once released into its new linguistic environment, cause became subject to
local evolutionary pressures. Joining with the preposition ‘by’ to form the subordinator, ‘by the cause that’, it
suffered morphological reduction. With the general ellipsis of ‘that’ along the way, it evolved into the subordinator
‘because’ (Simpson and Weiner, p.1001); further morphological reduction has yielded ‘‘cos’’, the universal solvent
of adolescent explanation.
The word cause also became a part of English philosophical language. This was to be expected since early
medieval scholars had used the Latin causa to translate Aristotle’s Greek aitia. Cause became, and remains, the
English word used to translate aitia (Guthrie 1981, p.223). There is some controversy in modern philosophical
literature as to whether or not cause can continue to be a useful translation of aitia, given modern assumptions of
causality that were not at work in Aristotle’s use of aitia, nor in the medieval translators’ understanding of cause
(p.223). Modern assumptions stem mainly from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which was, in large
measure, a reaction to the Aristotelian account of the natural order. The new scientific paradigm postulated an
ordered, mechanistic universe with hidden forces and regulating laws. The notion of cause and its usage became a
subject of enquiry, or a problem, amongst English-speaking philosophers and scientists. Locke sought to explain
cause as a power or an agency, albeit hidden from human sensory experience, that necessarily brings something
about (Locke 1967, p.180). Hume, in recognizing the obscurity of the notion of causal power, sought to fix its
meaning by claiming that, since it is not experienced perceptually in objects, it must be subjectively determined, that
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is, a construct that the mind imposes on the physical world as a response to experiencing a constant conjunction of
types of events or of objects of experience (Hume 1993, pp.40, 50). The English translators of Descartes have used
the word cause to translate his seventeenth-century use of causa. Descartes, writing within a mechanistic worldview,
uses causa to describe a power, a something or other, that brings something else into being (Descartes 2003, p.28).
He, however, had no easy time stilling the persistent anxieties of Elizabeth of Bohemia regarding the nature of the
causal relationship between mind and body (Shapiro, 2003).
The difficulties faced by each of these philosophers in explaining cause may have derived from the nature of
their enquiries. They approached its usage variously as either a problem of the external world or as one of mind; none
of them seems to have considered it as a problem of language. (Nietzsche, according to Nehamas (2002, 93), would
later recognize it as such, arguing that the notion of cause and effect originally emerged from the structure of
sentences that posit a doer as subject and a deed as predicate). Certainly, the use of the vocable cause in sentences
does not give us any specific information, other than temporal, about the nature of the transaction between events or
states that ‘cause’ or are ‘caused’; nor does it tell us much about the events and objects themselves. We have already
illustrated the comparative informational deficiency of cause in comparing the statements, ‘My chopping for a bit
causes the tree to fall’ and, ‘My chopping falls the tree’.
A brief etymological tracking of the Latin word ‘causa’ might at once reveal something of what occasioned the
earliest ancestral uses of the word, and elucidate the difficulties encountered when it appears in metaphysical
discourse. Unfortunately, in the matter of its Latin etymology, we immediately come to a dead end. The etymology of
causa (caussa, caws, caus) is unknown (Buck 1949, p.1242, and Ernout and Meillet 1959, p.108, and Klein 1966,
p.252). Reference works offer some speculations as to its historic usage, but perhaps more germane to a philosophical
discussion, is the occasion of its first appearance in the argot of Roman philosophical discourse as a suitable
translation of the Greek aitia. We may ask why Roman scholars believed that they had the right word in causa ready
to hand for the Latin translation.
Greek-English references translate ‘aitia’ as ‘responsibility’ mostly in environments in which guilt or blame is
also applied (Liddell and Scott 1961, p. 44). Its use, on this account, would point to the language of morality or
human agency. Guthrie claims that its use to describe the notion of ‘responsibility for’ was established before
Aristotle (Guthrie 1981, p.223). Here our own methodology prompts a parenthetical objection. By the standards that
a biological understanding of language enforces, ethicists, and the rest of us, understand the inherited language of
responsibility no better than we understand the inherited language of cause. As we must for cause, so to understand
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our use of responsibility, we must subject it to the same kind of study as the one to which we are now subjecting
cause. The connection between responsibility, (or answerability, to speak sturdy Anglo-Saxon) and blame (a reduced
form of blaspheme) likewise requires such a study. We cannot conduct it here. But if such a study can be allowed to
dictate propriety, we already know enough to cast doubt upon the propriety of citing responsibility in an explication
of aition. We do better to parallel the work of L.W. Palmer (1950) (L.R. Palmer. The Indo-European Origins of
Greek Justice. TPhS 1950) on the Indo-European sources of Greek justice. Aition has its own history: there is no
reason to suppose that that history paralleled that of the word responsibility, or that there was, in Aristotelian Greek,
any word whose use corresponded except in degree of vagueness to the modern use of responsibility. Certainly it is
fair to say that Aristotle appropriated the word aition from its more social deployments to label the factors that, as he
supposed, had to be accounted for in scientific explanations of natural phenomena. But his adoption was just that: an
appropriation. These factors were of four kinds: the formal, or the essence of a thing, the material or structure of a
thing, the efficient, or motivation, and the final, or the design and purpose. His use, then, was considerably broader
than modern English uses of ‘cause’. Düring, one Aristotelian translator who takes exception to the use of cause as a
translation of aitia, insists that the one feature of aitia that must not be dropped in its translation is that of
‘responsibility for’, but we might satisfy both Düring and Guthrie, as well as other commentators, if we rather
preserved contact with the notion of human authorship rather than that of human answerability (p.223).
At the root of this twentieth-century controversy amongst Aristotelian translators is the linguistic fact that, as
we ought to assume, the present use of the word cause is the product of an historical process covering at least two
millennia. Since, to early medieval scholars, causa was reckoned an appropriate Latin translation of Aristotle’s aitia,
we can reasonably infer that causa had for those scholars, if not the same range of uses as aitia, then at least the same
general area of application. Assimilated into the new language of English as cause, it came with that loose affiliation,
seeding the confusion that it generates in modern lexical use.
That medieval scholars had inherited a polysemous causa is reflected in Roman philosophical and judicial
literature. In classical Latin, causa seems to have been used either as a reference to reason as in motivation or
inducement, or in the judicial senses of ‘a cause to be defended’, or ‘the first part of a trial’ (Lewis and Short 1962,
p.44). Both uses survived into medieval times, and, of course, survive to this day. Roman examples may be found in
Aurelius and Cicero. According to modern English translators, the Latin translators of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman
writing in Greek, used causa to denote ‘reason’ as in ‘for what reason’ or ‘why’, and ‘for the sake of’:
“…quam ob causam quis suspectam habeat omnium rerum mutationem
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et in partes dissolutionem? (Aurelius 2003, Book 2:17)
(why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution
of all the elements?) (Long 1993, 15)
and,
“Perpendens decretum illud, animalium ratione praeditorium alterum
alterius causa natum esse…” (Aurelius 2003, Book 4:3)
(Recall to thy mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another…) (Long 1993, 22)
A similar use of causa as reason can be found in the works of Cicero:
“Verum ego hoc, quod iam pridem factum esse oportuit,
certa de causa nondum adducor ut faciam.” (Cicero 2003 [1], I: 5)
(But yet this, which ought to have been done long since, I have good
reason for not doing as yet) (Cicero 2003 [2], I: 5)
and,
“Dixi ego idem in senatu caedem te optumatium contulisse
in ante diem V Kalendas Novembris, tum cum multi principes
civitatis Roma non tam sui conservandi quam tuorum consiliorum
reprimendorum causa profugerunt.” (Cicero 2003 [1], I: 7)
(I said also in the senate that you had fixed the massacre of the nobles
for the 28th of October when many chief men of the senate had left Rome
not so much for the sake of saving themselves as of checking your designs.)
(Cicero 2003 [2], I: 7)
In Boethius, a Roman philosopher writing four centuries after Aurelius, we find causa used to refer to the
equivalent of Aristotle’s material cause:
Tu causis animas paribus uitasque minores
prouehis et leuibus sublimes curribus aptans
in caelum terramque seris quas lege benigna
ad te conuersas reduci facis igne reuerti” (Boethius 1990, p.272)
(You then bring forth, with the same bases, lesser living souls,
and giving them light chariots fitting their heavenly nature,
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A Curious Thing About Cause
broadcast them in the heavens and the earth, and by your bounteous law
make them, turned towards you, with returning fire, come back.) (p. 273)
Accordingly, it would seem fair to suppose that Boethius, likely the first Roman to translate the lost works of
Aristotle, used causa to translate Aristotle’s aitia. Since much of early medieval Aristotelian scholarship was based
on the Boethian translations, then it is to be expected that medieval scholars would fall in with his use of causa, and
with that translation.
No matter which Roman first used the word causa as a translation of Aristotle’s aitia, we again pose the
question: why was the word causa selected? What in its historical use would have suggested it to a Roman translator?
With the signpost of aitia as a guide, we can hazard five speculative answers gleaned from the reference works. The
first is the suggestion by Lewis and Short that the roots of causa may lie with cav, ‘ a warning’, so ‘that which is
defended or protected’ and its derivative caveo, or, ‘to take care of legally’ (Lewis and Short 1962, p.305). The
second suggestion comes from Glare to the effect that the ‘v’ of caveo is replaced by ‘u’ and is given a more active
definition,‘ to be wary’ or, ‘to be on one’s guard’ (1985, p.287). Wherever these speculations may take us, it seems
fair to expect that, given an evolutionary model, words denoting warning would be amongst the first uttered or
inscribed by early linguistic users. Also, it would not seem far-fetched to speculate that cav would develop into a use
of ‘he about whom one needs to be wary’, or ‘he who is the source of my wariness’ or ‘he from whom I need to be
protected or defended’, then on to ‘he who needs protection from an accusation’. The later development of the
judicial use of causa seems to indicate such a drift, as does a third suggestion that the origin of causa lies with
caudex, ‘a block of wood split or sawn into planks, leaves or tablets, and fastened together’ and ‘the block of wood to
which one was bound for punishment’. (p.287) The fourth speculation comes from Klein who suggests that ‘causa’
may have its origins in caudtra, used to denote ‘a striking’, ‘to strike’, or ‘to beat’ (Klein 1966, p.252). The final
speculation, suggested by the softening in Latin of the plosive ‘d’ through voiced fricative to voiced sibilant ‘s’, is
cauda, ‘the tail of an animal’, also meaning ‘to flatter and fawn’, ‘to have a tail stuck in mockery’, ‘to make a fool of’
(Lewis and Short 1962, p.303).
The five mooted origins of causa fall into two groupings. The first grouping is that of cauda, caudtra and
caudex. Their etymology is unknown, but they may be linked figuratively: a strip of wood, struck from a block of
wood, resembles the tail of an animal and would function for striking. If cauda was the origin of causa, then there
may be the simple explanation that since the tail of an animal is attached to its body, then the early users of causa had
no more a sophisticated understanding of causa than as that which is physically attached, or at the other end from the
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A Curious Thing About Cause
head. The second grouping is that of cav and cau, both used in situations requiring a warning, and developing into
uses having to do with protection and defence against something. Such usage, like the Greek aitia, lies within the
broader category of agency.
Their morphology tempts speculation that all five mooted origins belong to the same evolutionary word stream,
with the second grouping preceding the first. The link between the two groupings is caudex in its use as ‘the block of
wood to which one was bound for punishment’. The vocable ‘caudex’ might have had a figurative use in the
language of morality. Its further evolution into cauda may well have included a semantic transmission of moral
valuing in that cauda came to play a role, again figuratively, in the language of mockery. On any of these conjectural
origins, we may infer that causa played a role in Latin sufficiently like that of aitia in pre-Aristotelian Greek that the
one was the most suitable translation for the other. Both seem at any rate to have been transmitted through moral
language involving ascription of authorship.
Now all this is speculative and by no means to be satisfactorily established on the available evidence. But
unlike much of the discussion available in the philosophical literature, it does not anachronistically import the
language of responsibility into an account where authorship would do. Responsibility and its Germanic counterpart,
answerability, are later developments. If only for the sake of intellectual hygiene and greater clarity of understanding,
students of ethics ought to be told of those developments, but this is not the place for that story. The point of such an
exploration, like the point of this one, would be to elucidate, and in some measure to explain, the difficulties created
by later philosophers in their metaphysical deployments of such vocables, and to diagnose those difficulties as
linguistic at root. It could not pretend to alleviate the difficulties: quite the opposite. What the present investigation
suggests is that the early metaphysical uses of causa, the Latin ancestor of cause, must be regarded as a figurative
appropriation that sets aside the earlier connection with human agency. As a migrant into metaphysical language
from moral language, as a translation of Aristotle’s correspondingly migrant aition, it was ill equipped to play any
explanatory role with respect to the workings of the physical universe. It can have been at best schematic, standing in
for more particularly informative transitive verbs and their nominal cognates. Hume may have intuitively understood
this when he argued that the idea of cause as a power that produces or gives rise to an effect does not emerge from an
examination of physical objects themselves; claiming rather that it emerges from human perception of temporal
regularities of events. He, thus, explains the idea of causation as subjectively generated, and unjustifiably imposed on
the physical universe (1993, p. 41ff.). One might have wished that he had applied his robust good sense to the idea of
idea as well. Much the same could have been said, and saved a lot of grief, not to mention a lot of Kant. On the
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A Curious Thing About Cause
linguistic account of the nature of the difficulty, the problem is not that the language of causation had unwarranted
lexical content, but that in (and by) its philosophical uses, it had long since been relieved of the only lexical content it
had ever had. Beyond conversational requirements, we need not know what we are talking about when we talk about
cause, and since we do not need to know, it is overwhelmingly probable that language provides no means for us to
find out.
Notes
1
See in particular Jennings (2002, 2003 and 2004) . 2002 ‘La Sémantique et L’Explication’ in François
LePage, Michelle Paquette and François Rivenc eds. Carnap Aujourd’hui. 2004. ‘The Meaning of Connectives’ in
Semantics: A Reader, ed. Steven Davis and Brendan Gillon. New York: Oxford University Press.
. 2005 ‘The Semantic Illusion’ to appear in Errors of Reason, ed. Andrew Irvine and Kent Peacock.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
for more detailed discussions of the semantic difficulties of connectives
2
George Berkeley provides us a particularly apt example. "And, indeed, there is cause to suspect several erroneous
conceits of the philosophers are owing to the same original: while they began to build their schemes not so much on
notions as on words, which were framed by the vulgar, merely for conveniency and dispatch in the common actions
of life, without any regard to speculation." (Berkeley 1979, 78)
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