Correlation vs Causation
What do we know?
Quine taught that there are many explanations for any set of facts. We see that every day in the political news - very diverse explanations for the same set of facts.
The question arises: How do we tell which explanation explains the reality of what happened? I can just hear Scotty muttering - reality? how quaint.
Kant told us that we have no way of directly contacting reality - that we can't know the thing in itself since that thing is only detectable by our ambiguous senses.
It's been years since I've had a sunburn. But once in Southern Italy I got a bad sunburn. Next day I was peeling sheets of dead skin off my thighs. I thought (in the words of Dennett) ooo - bad outcome - mustn't do that again. If you lay out in the Italian sun you will get an indirect experience of the sun as a thing in itself.
When I was doing that. I was correlating my experience of lying in the sun with my later sunburn. I didn't know anything about the complete causal explanation of how that was possible. Such an explanation would be infinite and impossible to comprehend. I just needed to learn to not bask in a southern sun longer than 15 minutes..
For lots of things that kind of correlation is not satisfying. The issue goes back to Quine - We often need to know which of the many possible causal chains that could account for the correlation is the actual one in this case.
We can get it wrong. That is we can jump to the wrong conclusion. Science spends a lot of effort to avoid jumping to the wrong conclusion and even then rarely presents certainty. When I was a physics student I did a lab once where I had to measure a cube and calculate the uncertainty of the measurement - it was tricky. I'd spend more time calculating the uncertainty than doing the actual measurement.
Conspiracy theories seem to be based on jumping to the wrong conclusion. A child has autism - for some it's obvious that it was caused by a vaccine. The ones who think that way don't offer any sort of causal explanation that I've seen. Instead they point to correlations like the incidence of autism is going up and connect that to the rise in vaccinations.
I admit that vaccination is counter intuitive unless you understand how the immune system works and the first vaccines were developed before we had that knowledge. Wikipedia tells me that the Chinese knew about vaccines in the 16th century. Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796. I surmise that at that time the only evidence for the efficacy of the vaccine was correlation.
We know a lot more now. I suspect that the covid-19 vaccine wasn't discovered; instead it was constructed to do the job. I think there is a causal explanation for why that vaccine works but I don't have the specialized knowledge to understand it.
I do know that there are risks associated with vaccines. I get a warning every time I get a shot and I need to wait for a bit at the clinic to make sure I don't have a reaction. I have a friend who sometimes gets sick for a day after a vaccination.
Lots of diseases that were once common are now rare in Canada and I think that's because of vaccination. There is a correlation between vaccination rates and occurrence of disease. I think that I can see a causal explanation for that even though I'm not an expert. But seeing that depends on a scientific outlook and quite a bit of knowledge. That's my world. Others live in different worlds.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.