ABSTRACT
Russell was hardly alone in that opinion. Other writers of the period, such as Ernst Mach, karl Pearson, and Pierre Duhem, also rejected as unscientific the notion of causation. Their view was shared also by most of the logical positivists. Indeed, the concept of causation was regarded with suspicion by philosophers, as well as by many statisticians and social scientists, throughout much of the twentieth century. Contrary to Russell’s claim, however, the most casual perusal of the leading scientific journals reveals that causal locutions are commonplace in science. The 2006 volume of Physical Review Letters contains articles with titles like “Inverse Anderson Transition Caused by Flatbands” (by Masaki Goda, Shinya Nishino, and Hiroki Matsuda) and “Softening Caused by Profuse Shear Banding in a Bulk Metallic Glass” (by H. Bei, S. Xie, and E. P. George). Indeed, physicists refer to a variety of phenomena as “effects”: the “Hall effect,” the “kondo effect,” the “Lamb-shift effect,” the “zeeman effect,” and so on. Presumably where there are effects, there are causes as well. Causal claims are even more common in the medical sciences: for example, a 2005 editorial by E. k. Mulholland and R. A. Adegbola in the New England Journal of Medicine bore the title “Bacterial Infections – a Major Cause of Death among Children in Africa.” Given the ubiquity of causal claims in the sciences, causation deserves to be a concept of great interest to philosophers of science.
