Causality
Causality
(Lat. causa) The relationship between a cause and its effect. This relationship has been defined as
a relation between events, processes, or entities in the same time series, such that
when one occurs, the other necessarily follows (sufficient condition),
when the latter occurs, the former must have preceded (necessary condition),
both conditions a and b prevail (necessary and sufficient condition),
when one occurs under certain conditions, the other necessarily follows (contributory, but not sufficient, condition) (“multiple causality” would be a case involving several causes which are severally contributory and jointly sufficient); the necessity in these cases is neither that of logical implication nor that of coercion;
a relation between events, processes, or entities in the same time series such that when one occurs the other invariably follows (invariable antecedence),
a relation between events, processes, or entities such that one has the efficacy to produce or alter the other;
a relation between events, processes, or entities such that without one the other could not occur, as in the relation between
the material out of which a product is made and the finished product (material cause),
structure or form and the individual embodying it (formal cause),
a goal or purpose (whether supposed to exist in the future as a special kind of entity, outside a time series, or merely as an idea of the pur-poser) and the work fulfilling it (final cause),
a moving force and the process or result of its action (efficient cause);
a relation between experienced events, processes, or entities and extra-experiential but either temporal or non-temporal events, processes, or entities upon whose existence the former depend;
a relation between a thing and itself when it is dependent upon nothing else for its existence (self-causality);
a relation between an event, process, or entity and the reason or explanation for its being;
a relation between an idea and an experience whose expectation the idea arouses because of customary association of the two in this sequence;
a principle or category introducing into experience one of the aforesaid types of order; this principle may be inherent in the mind, invented by the mind, or derived from experience; it may be an explanatory hypothesis, a postulate, a convenient fiction, or a necessary form of thought. Causality has been conceived to prevail between processes, parts of a continuous process, changing parts of an unchanging whole, objects, events, ideas, or something of one of these types and something of another. When an entity, event, or process is said to follow from another, it may be meant that it must succeed but can be neither contemporaneous with nor prior to the other, that it must either succeed or be contemporaneous with and dependent upon but cannot precede the other, or that one is dependent upon the other but they either are not in the same time series or one is in no time series at all.
— M.T.K.