What is Epistemic Causality?
Yahya Mohamed
Causality (causation) has two different forms, one is epistemological belief, and the other is ontological. Ontological causality is further divided into physical and metaphysical. Thus, there are three different forms of causality: physical, metaphysical, and belief.
The first two causalities, the physical and the metaphysical, are existential, while the latter is epistemological. Though this epistemological belief is the very requirement to prove the metaphysical and the natural causalities, no one has shed light upon this form of causality. It is capable of proving everything, whether existential, epistemological, or ethical.
The 'Belief causality' is fundamentally different from the other two causalities, and it also differs from all kinds of knowledge, as it does not in itself represent an epistemic proposition but rather a mental function that works on justifying propositions and interpreting beliefs by making them take an epistemic role, and without it, the epistemological concept is completely absent, so knowledge becomes no more than purely psychological and physiological states.
Therefore, 'belief causality' is even able to explain logical propositions based on the law of non-contradiction. The proposition that states: (A) either exists or does not exist, and it cannot be existing and non-existent at the same time, all is a mere belief according to the abstract belief causality, meaning that the mind has a revealing ability that explains to us that logical contradiction is impossible according to rational intuition. We have sufficient epistemic reason to believe that (A) is not contradictory, and this epistemic reason is determined by the law of non-contradiction according to the example presented.
Likewise, when we believe in the principle of general causality; to suggest that every event has a cause and that it is impossible for an event to exist without any cause, then this belief is epistemologically dependent on 'belief causality,' as it is the only one that can reveal to us why we have to abide by this belief.
Moreover, if it is often possible to determine the reason for what we believe in, at other times we do not know why we accept certain epistemological issues as valid. All that can be said in this regard is that we only see these propositions as being true, or that we believe in them according to rational intuitions. For example, we may conjecture that a place is infinite, but what makes us believe in this characteristic? All that can be said is that there is a reason for this belief, and this reason may be unknown to some, as it may be known to others.
In addition, why do we believe that the endless chain of causes is not usually accepted by the mind, is it just for the sake of simplicity and economy? Or is it because our revealing vision only shows us that? Just as this revealing vision shows how the sensory things that are in front of us appear to us even though we know that their actual reality is not like that, we nevertheless see them as such.
The above applies to probabilistic issues, for example, when I want to determine the color of a ball in a box in front of me, and I have no prior knowledge except that it is either black or white. in this case, I find it logically justified that the probability of any of the two mentioned colors is equal to half, meaning that there is an epistemological reason for me to specify this value, and this reason is determined by the fact that I do not have the information that makes the probability of one color of the ball greater than the other's probability.
Finally, the two physical and metaphysical causalities are closely related, and without the 'Belief causality', we would not have known the reason behind natural phenomena and consequently recognize the unknown metaphysical causes.
Translated by Zaid Kanady
Translation review by Ali al-Inizi
The reference
https://www.fahmaldin.net/index.php?id=2557