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The cause of something may also be described as the reason for the event or process. [2] In general, a process can have multiple causes, [1] which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future.
Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect.The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one.
What can be experienced is one event following another. The reductionist approach to causation can be exemplified with the case of two billiard balls: one ball is moving, hits another one and stops, and the second ball is moving. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume coined two definitions of the cause in a following way:
Causal inference is the process of determining the independent, actual effect of a particular phenomenon that is a component of a larger system. The main difference between causal inference and inference of association is that causal inference analyzes the response of an effect variable when a cause of the effect variable is changed.
In 1965, the English statistician Sir Austin Bradford Hill proposed a set of nine criteria to provide epidemiologic evidence of a causal relationship between a presumed cause and an observed effect. (For example, he demonstrated the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.) The list of the criteria is as follows: [1]
Causal analysis is the field of experimental design and statistics pertaining to establishing cause and effect. [1] Typically it involves establishing four elements: correlation, sequence in time (that is, causes must occur before their proposed effect), a plausible physical or information-theoretical mechanism for an observed effect to follow from a possible cause, and eliminating the ...
Causal research, is the investigation of (research into) cause-relationships. [1] [2] [3] To determine causality, variation in the variable presumed to influence the difference in another variable(s) must be detected, and then the variations from the other variable(s) must be calculated (s).
Reverse causation or reverse causality or wrong direction is an informal fallacy of questionable cause where cause and effect are reversed. The cause is said to be the effect and vice versa. Example 1 The faster that windmills are observed to rotate, the more wind is observed. Therefore, wind is caused by the rotation of windmills.