Explanation, Causality and Causal Inferences

Abstract

One of our main activities, as human beings, consists of the attempt to explain and to understand what is not known (yet) by what is already known and familiar. Our explanations are often causal which is why it is frequently considered that to explain a phenomenon means to describe its causes. But we must keep in mind the idea that explaining what is new and we do not know yet through known notions is a complex and risky process. Some of the most common risks consist of the fact that sometimes, through such explanation we don't succeed to bring any extra knowledge and other times we fail to grasp the real causal connections between the phenomena, which lacks our judgments of truth value. The modifications of the concept of causality due to the new discoveries of physics added to our tendency to invent causal explanations is confusing in science as well as in philosophy. In the case of the judicial philosophy for instance, the manner in which the relations and social phenomena are understood and explained have direct influence over the legal regulation, making the law enforcement more or less efficient. In this paper we intend to analyze to what extent our willingness to provide explanations for everything that happens affects the concept of causation and whether these difficulties can be related to causal inference. In classical logic, the specialists analyzed the causal inferences and the logical rules implied in order to achieve reliable conclusions and we will refer to them with the purpose of avoiding errors.

How to cite: Matic, A.E. (2017). Explanation, Causality and Causal Inferences. Logos Universality Mentality Education Novelty, Section: Philosophy and Humanistic Sciences, V(1), 15-28. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18662/lumenphs.2017.0501.02