A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by
causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
It is possible to understand that Napoleon had power and so events occurred; with some effort one may even conceive that Napoleon together with other influences was the cause of an event; but how a book, Le Contrat social, had the effect of making Frenchmen begin to drown one another cannot be understood without an explanation of the
causal nexus of this new force with the event.
There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of
causal laws, one belonging to physics and the other to psychology.
Genius studies the
causal thought, and far back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters.
He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and
causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet.
By using some recent arguments made in the methodology of economics and philosophy of physics, it is highlighted, firstly, that
causal understanding and the properties of entities are intimately related and, secondly, that poor descriptive performance does not entail the abandonment of entity characteristics essential in terms of
causal understanding.
However, to quantify the
causal inference produced, statistical techniques are commonly used that contrast the association among the variables of interest, not precisely of
causal effect.
Wade, Ph.D., from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and colleagues estimated the
causal effect of BMI on gross-level and detailed cardiovascular health in healthy participants from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children at age 17 years (1,420 to 3,108 participants for different outcomes) and an independent sample from the same cohort (for Recall-by-Genotype [RbG]) at age 21 years (386 to 418 participants).
Therefore, good strategy depends on the effective identification and manipulation of
causal relationships.
The schools were found liable in Hennepin County District Court for consumer fraud and deceptive trade practices and a restitution order was enacted that provided criminal-justice students with a rebuttable presumption of harm and causation that resulted from their claims.<br />It was error to presume a
causal nexus, the Court of Appeals ruled on June 4, meaning that only the 15 testifying students were eligible for relief.<br />That apparently leaves the rest of the students in that program over the years without a remedy, as the Court of Appeals found that there was no proof of a
causal nexus between the school's fraudulent conduct and the harm to students.
A
causal hermeneutic also pays off for analysis of particular virtues, as the book's opening case study of the cardinal virtue of temperance illustrates.