The Two Meanings of The Word "Cause"

The word “Cause” has two different meanings.

We don’t always pay attention to this important fact.

One meaning is closer to the meaning of the word “reason”, the other is normally applied to inanimate objects.

When I ask you why you did something, the normal assumption is that I am asking about a chain of reasoning that led you to choose an action.

I am asking for your reason for doing it.

Presumably you had a goal.

You thought about that goal and realized that performing some specific action would likely lead to that achieving that goal.

We played soccer last Sunday and you passed the ball to John.

Why?

Your answer would involve your belief that John was in the best position to score a goal.

When I ask what caused the earthquake, that is a different question.

The answer has to do with movement of tectonic plates and the build-up of pressure.

It has nothing to do with a goal or a belief that some choice might lead to that goal.

We use words like “why” and “cause” in both the soccer and earthquake scenario.

But their meanings are barely related.

Now imagine I ask you why you got so angry with John for missing the goal and why you started yelling at him.

Did you stop to think which kind of “why” was appropriate?

You could have answered that your goal was to improve John’s playing so that he would be less likely to miss next time. You coldly realized that yelling at him would make him concentrate better next Sunday.

On the other hand, you could answer that there was no purpose you were trying to

achieve. You have traumas from childhood about being dropped from your junior school soccer team. When a team-mate lets you down, you lose control and start going crazy.

That would be a totally different type of cause.

Let’s take a different example.

Human beings are well adapted for surviving. The cause of these adaptations is the fact that those that had them were more likely to survive and produce offspring.

That does not necessarily mean that in our minds there is ever-present will to survive.

Sure. A desire to survive would be a good adaptation for actually surviving.

However, there might be other ways.

The need for the family to survive is another way of passing down genes.

Worker bees are sterile. They will never have children. However, that mechanism built into their genes is exactly why they survived.

We may think explicitly about the goal of survival and create strategies to make sure it happens. But we also have many other goals, and even our survival can take second place to those goals.

Photo by AZGAN MjESHTRI on Unsplash