Children in their simplicity keep asking why. The person of understanding has given this up; every why, he has long found out, is merely the end of a thread that vanishes into the thick snare of infinity, which no one can truly unravel, let him tug and worry at it as much as he likes.
W. Busch,The Butterfly, translated by W. Arndt
Abstract
Causality is a concept which is sometimes claimed to be easy to illustrate, but hard to explain. It is not quite clear whether the former part of this claim is as obvious as the latter one. I will not present any specific theory of causation. Our aim is much less ambitious; to investigate the formal counterparts of causal relations between events, i.e. to propose a formal framework which enables us to construct metamathematical counterparts of causal relations between singular events. This should be a good starting point to define formal counterparts for concepts like “causal law”, “causal explanation” and so on.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Solomon Feferman, R. L. Vaught,The first order properties of products of algebraic structures Fundamenta Mathematica XLVII (1959), pp. 57–103.
Arend Heyting,Die formalen Regeln der intuitionistischen Mathematik, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Mathematisch-Physikalische Klasse, (1930), pp. 57–71, 158–169.
Roman Ingarden,Über die kausale Struktur der realen Welt. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt III,, Max-Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1974.
Stanisław Jaśkowski,Propositional Calculus for Contradictory Deductive Systems Studia Logica XXIV (1969), pp. 143–160.
Stanisław Jaśkowski,On the modal and causal functions in symbolic logic, Studia Philosophica, (1951), pp. 72–92.
G. E. Hughes, Max J. Cresswell,A Companion to Modal Logic,, Methuen London 1984.
Jan Łukasiewicz,Analiza i konstrukcja pojecia przyczyny, Przeglad Filozoficzny, (1906), 105–179.
Jan Łukasiewicz,On variable functors of propositional arguments Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy vol54, Section A, No2 (January 1951) 24–35.
Ingolf Max, Zur Interpretierbarkeit vierstelliger Funktorvariablen als Kausalrelationen. Eine Kritik an Urchs' Einwänden.Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universität Halle XXXIX/2 (1990), pp. 53–61.
Donald Nute,Algebraic semantics for conditional logics Reports on Mathematical Logic 10 (1979), pp. 79–101.
August Pieczkowski: Undecidability of the homogeneous formulas of degree 3 of the predicate calculus,Studia Logica, vol. XXII (1968), pp. 7–15. bs
August Pieczkowski, Causal implications of JaśkowskiStudia Logica XXXIV/2 (1974), pp. 169–186.
Wolfgang Rautenberg,Klassische und Nichtklassische Aussagenlogik, Vieweg Braunschweig und Wiesbaden 1978.
Werner Stelzner,Effektive epistemische Logik, Dissertation B, Leipzig 1979.
Werner Stelzner,Epistemische Logik — Zur logischen Analyse von Akzeptationsformen, Akademie-Verlag Berlin 1984.
Max Urchs, Kripke-style semantics for Jaśkowski's system Qf Bull. Sec. of Logic 10/1 (1981), pp. 24–29.
Max Urchs,Systemy z implikacja przyczynowa wyznaczone poprzez logiki modalne, Dissertation, Toruń 1982.
Max Urchs,Kausallogik Habilitation, Leipzig 1987.
Max Urchs,Parakonsistenz in schwachen Modalkalkülen, Konstanzer Berichte zur Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie 11, (1990).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
The work on this paper was supported by grants from the Humboldt-Foundation, the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and from the Fulbright-Foundation.
This paper concerns a larger project on causal logic, Uwe Scheffler from Humboldt-University and I have been working on for several months. This collaboration explains the usage of plural forms wherever they occur in section 1 and 6. However, all results of this paper, if not stated explicitely otherwise, are due to its (single) author.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Urchs, M. On the logic of event-causation Jaśkowski-style systems of causal logic. Stud Logica 53, 551–578 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01057650
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01057650