A Psychological Approach to Causal Understanding and the Temporal Asymmetry
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A Psychological Approach to Causal Understanding and the Temporal Asymmetry Elena Popa 1,2,3 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice for correct inferences of causal structure, I show it to serve as a preliminary understanding of causal concepts as asymmetric, that later incorporates other types of evidence (leading up to difference-making, or causal processes). This approach supplies causal models with an asymmetric concept of causation that underlies hypotheses about causal structure, as I will illustrate from the framework of the knowledge-based causal induction model. I further argue for an integrating perspective, showing how the understanding of causes as preceding their effects underlies both psychological models and philosophical debates over time and the causal asymmetry, particularly regarding problem cases such as simultaneous causation or backwards causation, and the conceptual connection between causation and action.
1 Introduction A distinctive feature of causal relations is their asymmetric character: causes bring about their effects, while effects do not bring about their causes. Within the metaphysics of causation several types of asymmetries have been investigated corresponding to various kinds of dependence including the direction of time, counterfactual dependence, processes, agency. In epistemic context, the causal asymmetry plays out at an
* Elena Popa [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Asian University for Women, Chittagong, Bangladesh
2
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
3
Bacau, Romania
Popa E.
explanatory level – while one can infer causes from effects and effects from causes, only causes explain their effects. Since these uses presuppose an understanding of the asymmetric character of causality, the question is how people understand the causal asymmetry in the first place. In providing an answer from a conceptual or phenomenological perspective, I argue that the causal asymmetry is understood in temporal terms, drawing from recent findings in experimental psychology, particularly on causal reasoning and causal learning in children and adults. In so doing, this paper also attempts to bridge philosophical and psychological research on causality, by disclosing how the ordinary understanding of causal concepts in temporal terms underlies philosophical considerations on different causal concepts and cues to causality. My approach is to investigate causal reasoning and the usage of causal concepts, with emphasis on the weight attributed to evidence from
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