Cause and Effect

I found the Cause and Effect website to be helpful and very useful. Causation is very important to the concept of inductive reasoning. I liked the example that the website gives regarding the case of a car accident. Upon first reading the example, I felt that it was the illegally parked truck that ultimately caused the car accident. With an inductive argument, it “carries as part of its second premise the implication that there is otherwise no significant difference, these causal arguments carry the implication that there is only one significant difference.” I learned that there are two rules when dealing with causation.

The first rule is that, “The cause must precede the event in time. On one hand, arguments that have the effect before the cause are examples of the relatively rare fallacy of reverse causation. One the other, arguments whose only proof of causation is that the effect followed the cause are examples of fallacious post hoc reasoning.”

The second rule is that, “Even a strong correlation is insufficient to prove causation. Other possible explanations for such a strong correlation include coincidence, reversed causation, and missing something that is the cause of both the original "cause" and and its purported "effect."