Concrete Necessity and Human Insight

Of course we have not proved our view of the goal of thought. There can be no proof, or even a question about proof, if the nature of proof itself is already in question. All we can say is: Here is the standard and ideal that we actually use in thinking.

When we understand, it's always through a system. As our understanding grows more complete, it's always through a system of greater unity.

If the ideal seems unconvincing and artificial, consider its alternatives. Do they formulate better or worse what we mean by understanding? When we read a famous book called Ethics Geometically Demonstrated, most of us feel we are getting insight.

In the end this illumination is merely following associations.

But that explanation of understanding cannot itself be verified.

If we deny all degrees to necessity, and confine it to a set of the barest abstractions, not much insight remains. The genuineness of insight does not depend on ensuing changes in practice. Perhaps in a poem, a piece of music, or some religious experience an insight is gained that one hesitates to call understanding, because understanding has become so identified as something abstractly intellectual. But such insight is understanding, unique, limited in degree, but still with rights of its own. And to reject it as understanding on the ground of its concreteness is absurd.

If I accept the ideal of concrete necessity, these varying insights are legitimized, ordered, and appraised. If I accept any other, some insights must be excluded.

32.24

The Goal of Reflection

From it's beginning in perception, thought more or less unknowingly seeks a potential goal in every idea, the unified system implicitly at work at every stage of reflection, exercising its steady influence against irrelevant excursions and developing its fragmentary knowledge by the rules of an ideal system. The farther thought progresses, the more clearly does its system reveal the character of a system that lies beyond it.

Our study of reflection began with examples of the kind of unified system that governs reflection in ordinary thought. They were only provisional. Because the impulse of thought is toward self-revision, those examples become superseded by more complete systems. What is at the end of this process of continual self-revision is unknown, nor can we ever know what it is until we have attained it. But we can see the direction in which we must move if we want to attain it.

Thought tries to supersede all partial systems by a more developed overall system that will absorb and extend its earlier gains, and it can rest only when this process cannot be continued further. And thought is the potentiality of the object it seeks to know. Therefore, what fulfills the theoretic impulse must also bring about the most complete and immediate experience of the real.

32.23

Transcendence Realizes Immanence

The universe of existing things is a system in which all things are related internally. Let a and x be any two things in the universe. They are then related to each other causally. But if they are related to each other causally, then they are related to each other intrinsically. And if they are related intrinsically, then they are also related to each other necessarily in the sense that they causally act as they do in virtue of their nature or character, and that to deny such activity would entail denying them to be what they are. And to have this kind of relation to all other things is what being related to them internally means.

The immanent goal of thought is relevant to the experienced nature of things. To the best of our knowledge the immanent and transcendent goals coincide. The aim of thought from its very beginning is understanding. To understand anything means to apprehend it in a system that renders it necessary. The ideal of complete understanding would be achieved only when this system that rendered it necessary was not a system that itself was fragmentary and theorefore contingent, but one that was all-inclusive and so organized internally that every part was linked to every other by intelligible necessity.

But was this more than an ideal? Was there any reason to suppose that by its attainment thought would be nearer to its second end, the apprehension of things as they are? Such an ideal is remote from the world of actual experience, where we are met at every turn by seaming contingency and unintelligibility. At least it is thus remote at the first glance, and perhaps also at the second and third. But in the very nature of terms in relation, and in the nature of causality, there is ground for believing that such contingency is apparent only. In what we take as the real world, we can see the outlines of a necessary structure that is the counterpart of thought's ideal. There is nothing to stay our conclusion that with approximation to its immanent goal, the achievement of systematic necessity, thought is also approximating its transcendent goal, the apprehension of the real.

Consequently, I have reached the goal of my inquiry. I have sketched the ideal of thought, and shown that it is applicable to the real.

The idea of a completely coherent system is still obscure.

There are two kinds of obscurity. One is the obscurity that comes from relaxing logical tension in the face of ultimate difficulty, of letting all holds go, surrendering to wishful thinking, and plunging blindly into the mist. As one nears so high a conclusion, and one so much to be desired as the intelligibility of the world, the tendency to relapse into a murky mysticism is strong. But there has been no compromise with this kind of thing.

But there is a kind of vagueness whose condemnation, on such an issue, would be far less reasonable. If thought is the pursuit of a goal whose character can be realized only as the pursuit advances, a full and clear account of that goal must in the nature of the situation be impossible at any point along the journey. An account that was really adequate would not now be intelligible. An account that was quite simple, neat and plain could only be suspicious. The tale we have told of the concrete universal, and concrete necessity, and a system of parts such that none can be or be known without the others, cannot be rendered entirely clear from a logic of mosaics.

32.22

Conclusion

Everything is causally connected with everything else, directly or indirectly. Being causally connected involves being connected by the relation of logical necessity. Therefore, everything that exists is related internally to everything else, so that without this relation it would not be what it is.

Causality involves intelligible necessity in every case of inference. But can we say the same of causality generally? The principle can be extended to other mental processes, even though the presence of necessity is less discernible. But is there any evidence of intelligible connection among causal processes in physical nature?

There is nothing in causality but regularity of sequence or functional dependence. Between cause and effect there is some kind of intrinsic connection, and this is confirmed by the fact that ordinary inductive procedure involves an argument which without this intrinsic connection would be invalid.

This intrinsic connection is necessary, because when anything is said to have a consequent or a consequence because of its special nature, necessity is part of our meaning, and what follows can't be denied without self-contradiction. This is not to say that we can see why a specific hammer-stroke drives a particular nail. And without some core principle for this, the principle on which all practice is conducted and on which all causal argument is based, would be illusory.

32.21

Causality, Intrinsic Connection, and Necessity

So the view which denies any intrinsic connection to causality and reduces it to conjunction is false. There must be some intrinsic connection. And the insight that between cause and effect there is an intrinsic connection shows that it's also a necessary connection.

If the meaning of 'same cause, same effect', which is the principle of all inductive causal argument, is taken as expressing conjunction only, no evidence or argument for it are possible. And if it's accepted anyway, it's because we have an insight that is felt to justify it.

Think of a state of affairs in which there is causation but no uniformity. Everything now has a cause, but the causes vary. Everything produces effects, but the effects vary. The blow of the hammer sinks the nail today, but tomorrow under the same conditions, it does not, and produces instead the Melody in F or a case of measles in Kiev. We can talk that way, but we can't think that way, because to say this implies that when a produces x, the nature of a had nothing to do with the result. Taht result could equally have appeared if nothing resembling a had been on the scene. Therefore, to say that anything may produce anything is to render the word "produce" meaningless. If a, because of its nature, had no constraining influence, there is no reason to say it produced anything. It is a thing of special character. This character makes it what it is. And we would be talking idly if we said that it produced something when this character was not engaged in any way.

To assert a causal connection between a and x implies that a acts as it does because it is what it is. For the causal relation which connects a with x connects a cause of the nature a with an effect of the nature x, and therefore must hold between any a and any x.

When a is said to produce x because of its nature as a, the connection referred to is not only an intrinsic relation but a necessary relation. First, reflection shows that necessity is part of our meaning when we call such relations intrinsic. If we lay down a yellow card, then to the right of it an orange card, and to the right of that a red one, they have spatial relations to each other, but those relations are not prima facie intrinsic, because as far as we can see there is nothing about a card of one color as such to demand space relations to cards of other colors.

Furthermore, regarded as mere color, orange comes between red and yellow. And that relation is intrinsic in the present sense, since it is determined by the natures of the three colors. But it's also necessary. Yellow, orange, and red being what they are, orange must come between the other two, and could not possibly fall elsewhere. And this is the case with all relation that turn on the content or character of the terms.

Necessity is not seen with equal purity or clearness in all such cases, but whenever a relation depends on a's being what it is, we see that the relation is necessary whether we can isolate the nexus or not. For example, whether the tendency to gratitude follows from the nature of modesty we may not be sure, but if we are, we are certain that modesty must carry with it this tendency. In fact, to say that something follows from the nature of a, but not necessarily, is meaningless.

And this is necessity in the logical sense. To say that a produces x in virtue of being a, and yet that, given a, x might not follow, is inconsistent with the laws of identity and contradiction. Of course if a were a cluster of qualities abstracted from their relations, and its modes of causal behavior were another set of qualities conjoined with the former externally, then one could deny the externally conjoined qualities and retain the relationally abstracted qualities consistently.

But when we say a causes x, we do not mean that kind of conjunction. We mean an intrinsic relation, that is, a relation in which a's behavior is the outgrowth or expression of a's nature. And to assert that a's behavior, could be different while a was the same, would be to assert that something both did and did not come from the nature of a, which is self-contradictory.

That statement would also conflict with the law of identity. It implies that a thing may remain itself when you have taken away from it everything which it is such as to be and do. To strip it of these things would be to strip it of what makes it what it is, that is, to say that it is other than it is.

You're confusing two different statements:

A has some causal property because it has it.

and

A must have some causal property because nothing which did not have it could be A.

The first statement is a truism, but the second one is not obviously true, and can even be frequently false.

You're either saying the first statement, which is trivial, or the second statement, which begs the question.

I'm not making the first statement because I hold that in 'A causes B' I do not assert merely that B accompanies A, but that it does so because of A's nature.

And I'm not making the second statement. Even if I were, no begging of the question would be involed.

"A has some causal property because nothing which did not have it could be A"

asserts a material implication:

"A has some causal property because nothing which did not have it could be A"

is equivalent to the assertion that it is not the case that

"A has some causal property"

is true while

"Anything that does not have that property must be other than A"

is false.

But this is not saying merely that A has some property and that X's not having that property entails its not being A. It is saying that A has that property because of its nature as A, so that it entails and is not merely accompanied by, the truth of this second assertion.

But aside from this point, there is no begging the question. To say that A produces something because of its nature as A entails the statement that X's not having that property entails its not bieng A. It would be absurd to deny this.

The statement that anything produces anything because of its nature must be questionbegging.

But in that case it's question-begging to adopt any position on any issue. When we consider what we mean by saying A causes B or has the property of causing B, part of the meaning is that A acts in this way or has this property because of its nature. Therefore, the statement is not question-begging.

32.20

Sequence, Paradox, and Absurdity

If causality means regular sequence, then every unique event must be uncaused. An unexampled biological entity could not be thought to be a miracle, since miracles are supposed to be caused. It would have to be an explanation of chance.

Furthermore, no human action would ever spring from a self or from a motive. There's no intrinsic connection between volition and behaviour, character and conduct, motive and performance. Strictly speaking, no one murders anyone, though in some cases homicide has unhappily and quite inexplicably associated itself with certain elements of a person's constitution.

This association is more unfortunate because, And even though this association is completely irrational, it's also permanent. This view conflicts with our everyday judgments about practical action and accountability And even though all these judgments may be mistaken, the fact that the sequence view would require them to be mistaken is enough to impose a heavy burden of proof.

Note that we used the word 'require'. It was natural to use it, and those who hold the regularity view use it frequently. Yet, if they hold any belief that is said to be required by their theory, it's being required cannot have anything to do with them believing it.

And the sequence explanation of how we came to assume that causality involved more than association has some core issues. The usual explanation is that the regular repetition of a and b together produced a habit of conjoining them in thought.

A habit or even a thought of uniform conjunction is clearly different from the thought of necessity. And what is meant by 'produced'? When one says that regular repetition produces a habit, it's not likely that one means only that there is a regular repetition of regular-repetition's-being-followed-by-a-habit.

Moreover, the statement

"We cannot perceive anything more than sequence in the connection of particular events."

Even though the way the body acts on the mind remains obscure, when we resolve to attend to something more closely and 'in consequence' succeed in doing so, we have a sense of 'enforcement' that does not leave us completely blank about the mode of connection. And in some cases of perception we are immediately aware of being causally acted on by some external agency.

Also, the position would guarantee a skepticism that may be unavoidable, but is not to be accepted until necessary.

Between the percept and its cause, there is no intrinsic connection. Since we have no access to nature except through impressions that are presumably produced in us causally, we must depend for knowledge on nature on an argument from the character of the impressions to the character of their source. This argument would be impossible by the kind of causation we are considering.

Also, the memory of our own experiences would be impossible by the above argument. When I recall something that happened yesterday, one of the factors that led to the remembrance was the occurrence of the past event itself. And when we say that this event 'conditioned' this recall, we don't mean that all similar events are followed by such recall, because we have in mind one event happening at a point in past time.

Finally, to say that causality involves nothing but regular sequence conflicts with common sense and science. The ordinary person has it fixed in their head that when they drive a nail with a blow of their hammer, there is an inner connection between these events which is not found in either of them and, say, a stom in the Antilles.

Their view is worthless.

Science from the beginning has had the same obsession. In some works, the uniformity view is insisted on, and some have even said that the name and notion of causality should be dropped by science (Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 180). But in this area scientific thought, even in physics (Stebbing, A Modern Introduction to Logic, 289) cannot succeed in getting rid of it, because behind the scientist's desire to discover the cause of things is their desire to understand, and their intuition that in mastering the cause of something they have to some extent understood it. We don't believe that the only reason why the scientific mind has rejected astrology is that the correlation between positions of the stars and the ups and down of human fortune has been imperfectly made out. We don't believe that when the connection was revealed between tuberculosis and bacilli, physicians would have admitted that it provided no further understanding of the disease, but only a new fact, concomitant though completely external.

The physical scientist finds their ideal in mathematics. And if they continue to refine and purify their statements of abstract connection, it's because in do so they feel themselves approaching not only the precision but also the necessity of mathematical relations. Of course their conviction may have been a delusion from the beginning. But whoever says that assumes the burden of proof. In their daily work and apart from philosophical controversy, no scientist will accept a bare given conjunction as ultimate truth. Thinkers and scientists looked for causes because they want to explain events, and if they had seriously held from the beginning the views of causation which many philosophers hold today, half the inspiration of the scientific search for causes would have been missing and induction would never have been trusted at all. (Bosanquet, The Distinction between Mind and its Objects, 59-60).

32.19

Conjunction and Inductive Argument

Even those who accept the regularity view are compelled, sometimes in the statement of that view itself, to assume that that regularity view itself is false.

Events have causes in the sense of regular and special antecedents.

Do you intend to apply that to the future as well?

Yes.

But you have not experienced the future.

No.

Then you must be using an argument. You're saying that b will continued to follow a in the future because b has followed a in the past.

But unless a is connected with b by something more than mere proximity of place or time, there's no ground for that argument.

Without some other connection, there is no reason for saying that past uniform sequence must be followed by future uniform sequence.

When we've argued from past uniformities to their continuation in the future, our expectations have been verified.

But the uniform sequence of verification of your expectation is just another sequence. It has no special privileges when we're asking why one should argue from any past sequence to future ones.

It's a matter of probability. Two or more events frequently occuring together is more likely to be maintained than broken.

You're either repeating the old assumption whose basis is in question, that the past is a guide to the future, or else it's is false.

If a and b are unconnected, there's no more reason to expect them to continue together than there is to expect an unloaded penny to continue turning up heads because it has just done so ten times in a row.

We 'postulate' the uniformity of nature, namely that the same cause is always followed by the same effect.

But what's the status of that posulate itself?

It can't be an arbitrary assumption, because it comes from experience.

But it's not a conclusion derived from experience, because the argument would be circular. If we did not assume 'same cause, same effect', we wouldn't argue that the same cause in the past would be followed by the same effect.

What part does this assumption play in the argument? It is the principle of the inference, just as the principle of syllogism is the rule involved in any syllogistic reasoning.

Now if the principle of an argument or inference can be without necessity, then the 'inference' to which it applies is not really an inference.

It's not even cogent.

The principle of uniformity not have the necessity of geometric demonstration, since the terms viewed as causes and effects themselves remain vague. But going from past sequences to future ones is itself an argument, and the principle of the argument, like the principle of inferences generally, must be more than a chance proximity of symbols or characters.

Therefore, the connections between causes and effects being used to predict their future sequences are always assumed to be intrinsic.

32.18