[Critical-Realism] Causal de-onts: a thought experiment?

["Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Howard--

Sorry for poking into this after being distracted, so I'm not entirely sure
I'm following the argument.  I'd like to clarify for myself what you're
saying by offering a thought experiment rather different from Mervyn's dog.

So: as you may know, during the Renaissance some doctors prescribed
"quicksilver" as a medical treatment.  Quicksilver of course is mercury,
which is highly poisonous; it's a miracle any patients survived.  My
question is this: the patients would not have ingested mercury had it not
been for their doctors, but did the doctors do this strictly because they
possessed a (false) theory about mercury's medicinal powers, or was their
ignorance of its true effects also causal?  More generally, is it in fact
correct to say "They did this *because* they didn't know better"?

As I look at it, the question has to be interpreted in terms of (open,
partial) totalities, what might be called holistic causality, so I would
answer that in this case an absence (ignorance) did have its own causal
powers.  People sometimes do things *because* they don't know better,
sometimes even when they've been told better.  That leads me to ask two
further questions: (1) Is it correct to approach the question in this
holistic manner? and (2) *If* it is, could the holistic approach used for
this instance be generalizable, in particular to non-human causation?  And
there may be a third, namely whether holistic analysis could be correct but
nevertheless perhaps I'm interpreting my own example incorrectly.

Thanks,

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus@xxxxxxxx
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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