cause & effect experience (APPL)

Causality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Causality denotes a necessary relationship between one event (called cause) and another event (called effect) which is the direct consequence of the first.[1]

Though cause and effect are typically related to events, other candidates include processes, properties, variables, facts, and states of affairs; which of these make up the correct causal relata, and how best to characterize the nature of the relationship between them, has as yet no universally accepted answer, and remains under discussion.

According to Sowa (2000),[2] up until the twentieth century, three assumptions described by Max Born in 1949 were dominant in the definition of causality:

1. "Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word entity means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause, B the effect.
2. "Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect.
3. "Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact." (Born, 1949, as cited in Sowa, 2000)