JUDEA PEARL

NAMED 81st FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURER

The Art and Science of Cause and Effect*

Transcript of lecture given Thursday, October 29, 1996, as part of the
UCLA 81st Faculty Research Lecture Series
*This lecture serves as Epilogue to CAUSALITY: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming January 2000.

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SLIDE 1: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT
OPENING STATEMENT

Thank you Chancellor Young, colleagues, and members of the Senate Selection Committee for inviting me to deliver the eighty-first lecture in the UCLA Faculty Research Lectureship Program. It is a great honor to be deemed worthy of this podium, and to be given the opportunity to share my research with such a diverse and distinguished audience.

The topic of this lecture is causality - namely, our awareness of what causes what in the world and why it matters. Though it is basic to human thought, Causality is a notion shrouded in mystery, controversy, and caution, because scientists and philosophers have had difficulties defining when one event TRULY CAUSES another. We all understand that the rooster's crow does not cause the sun to rise, but even this simple fact cannot easily be translated into a mathematical equation.

Today, I would like to share with you a set of ideas which I have found very useful in studying phenomena of this kind. These ideas have led to practical tools that I hope you will find useful on your next encounter with a cause and effect.

And it is hard to imagine anyone here who is NOT dealing with cause and effect. Whether you are evaluating the impact of bilingual education programs or running an experiment on how mice distinguish food from danger or speculating about why Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon or diagnosing a patient or predicting who will win the 1996 presidential election, you are dealing with a tangled web of cause-effect considerations. The story that I am about to tell is aimed at helping researchers deal with the complexities of such considerations, and to clarify their meaning.


SLIDE 2: OUTLINE
This lecture is divided into three parts. I begin with a brief historical sketch of the difficulties that various disciplines have had with causation. Next I outline the ideas that reduce or eliminate several of these historical difficulties. Finally, in honor of my engineering background, I will show how these ideas lead to simple practical tools, which will be demonstrated in the areas of statistics and social science.

SLIDE 3: ADAM AND EVE (DURER)

In the beginning, as far as we can tell, causality was not problematic. The urge to ask WHY and the capacity to find causal explanations came very early in human development. The bible, for example, tells us that just a few hours after tasting from the tree of knowledge, Adam is already an expert in causal arguments. When God asks: "Did you eat from that tree?" This is what Adam replies: "The woman whom you gave to be with me, She handed me the fruit from the tree; and I ate." Eve is just as skillful: "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

The thing to notice about this story is that God did not ask for explanation, only for the facts: It was Adam who felt the need to explain - the message is clear, causal explanation is a man-made concept. Another interesting point about the story: explanations are used exclusively for passing responsibilities. Indeed, for thousands of years explanations had no other function. Therefore, only Gods, people and animals could cause things to happen, not objects, events or physical processes.

SLIDE 4: THE FLIGHT OF LOT (DORE)

Natural events entered into causal explanations much later, because, in the ancient world, events were simply PREDETERMINED. Storms and earthquakes were CONTROLLED by the angry gods, and could not, in themselves, assume causal responsibility for the consequences.

SLIDE 5: BOARD GAME (EGYPTIAN TOMB)

Even an erratic and unpredictable event such as the roll of a die was not considered CHANCE event but rather a divine message demanding proper interpretation.

SLIDE 6: ON BOATS AND WHALES

One such message gave the prophet Jonah the scare of his life when he was identified as God's renegade and was thrown OVERBOARD. Quoting from the book of Jonah: "And the sailors said: `Come and let us cast lots to find out who is to blame for this ordeal.' So they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah." Obviously, on this luxury Phoenician cruiser, "casting Lots" were not used for recreation, but for communication - a one-way modem for processing messages of vital importance.

In summary, the agents of causal forces in the ancient world were either deities, who cause things to happen for a purpose, or human beings and animals, who possess free will, for which they are punished and rewarded.


SLIDE 7: ARCHIMEDES' SCREW PUMP (VITRUVIUS, 1511)

This notion of causation was naive, but clear and unproblematic. The problems began, as usual, with engineering; when machines had to be constructed to do useful jobs.

SLIDE 8: "... AND I WILL MOVE THE EARTH" (VAVIGNON, 1687)

As engineers grew ambitious, they decided that the earth, too, can be moved, but not with a single lever.

SLIDE 9: EARTH MOVING MACHINE (DELMEDIGO, 1629)

Systems consisting of many pulleys and wheels, one driving another, were needed for projects of such magnitude. And, once people started building multi-stage systems, an interesting thing happened to causality - PHYSICAL OBJECTS BEGAN ACQUIRING CAUSAL CHARACTER\. When a system like that broke down, it was futile to blame God or the operator - instead, a broken rope or a rusty pulley were more useful explanations, simply because those could be replaced easily, and make the system work. At that point in history, Gods and humans ceased to be the sole agents of causal forces - lifeless objects and processes became partners in responsibility. A wheel turned and stopped BECAUSE the wheel proceeding it turned and stopped - the human operator became secondary.

Not surprisingly, these new agents of causation TOOK ON some of the characteristics of their predecessors - Gods and humans. Natural objects became not only carriers of credit and blame, but also carriers of force, will, and even purpose. Aristotle regarded explanation in terms of a PURPOSE to be the only complete and satisfactory explanation for why a thing is what it is. He even called it a "FINAL CAUSE", namely, the final aim of scientific inquiry.

From that point on, causality served a dual role: CAUSES were the targets of credit and blame on one hand, and the carriers of physical flow of control on the other.

SLIDE 10: WATER-MILL

This duality survived in relative tranquility until about the time of the Renaissance, when it encountered conceptual difficulties.

SLIDE 11: THE CASTLE OF KNOWLEDGE (RECORDES, 1575)

What happened can be seen on the title page of Recordes' book "The Castle of Knowledge," the first science book in English, published in 1575. The wheel of fortune is turned, not by the wisdom of God, but by the ignorance of man. And, as the role of God, the final cause, was taken over by human knowledge, the whole notion of causal explanation came under attack.

SLIDE 12: GALILEO (Portrait, 1613)

The erosion started with the work of Galileo.

SLIDE 13: GALILEO (PRISON SCENE)

Most of us know Galileo as the man who was brought before by the inquisition and imprisoned for defending the heliocentric theory of the world. But while all that was going on, Galileo also managed to quietly engineer the most profound revolution that science has ever known.

SLIDE 14: TITLE PAGE OF DISCORSI

This revolution, expounded in his 1638 book "Discorsi" published in Leyden, far from Rome, consists of two Maxims:

SLIDE 15: THE GALILEAN REVOLUTION

ONE, description first, explanation second-that is, the how precedes the why; and TWO, description is carried out in the language of mathematics; namely, equations. Ask not, said Galileo, whether an object falls because it is pulled from below or pushed from above.

SLIDE 16: INCLINED PLAIN EXPERIMENT

Ask how well you can predict the time it takes for the object to travel a certain distance, and how that time will vary from object to object, and as the angle of the track changes. Moreover, said Galileo, do not attempt to answer such questions in the qualitative and slippery nuances of human language; say it in the form of mathematical equations.

SLIDE 17: GALILEAN EQUATION d=t2

It is hard for us to appreciate today how strange that idea sounded in 1638, barely 50 years after the introduction of algebraic notation by Vieta. To proclaim algebra the UNIVERSAL language of science, would sound today like proclaiming Esperanto the language of economics. Why would Nature agree to speak Algebra? of all languages? But you can't argue with success. The distance traveled by an object turned out indeed to be proportional to the square of the time.

SLIDE 18: GALILEAN BEAMS (MANUSCRIPT, Discorsi, 1638)

Even more successful than predicting outcomes of experiments were the computational aspects of algebraic equations. They enabled engineers, for the first time in history, to ask "how to" questions, in addition to "what if" questions. In addition to asking: "What if we narrow the beam, will it carry the load?" They began to ask more difficult questions: "How to shape the beam so that it WILL carry the load?" This was made possible by the availability of methods for solving equations. The algebraic machinery does not discriminate among variables; instead of predicting behavior in terms of parameters, we can turn things around and solve for the parameters, in terms of the desired behavior.

Let us concentrate now on Galileo's first maxim, "description first explanation second", because that idea was taken very seriously by the scientists, and changed the character of science from speculative to empirical.


SLIDE 19: SNELL'S LAW (FROM DESCARTE'S DIOPTRICS, 1637)

Physics became flooded with empirical laws that were extremely useful. Snell law, Hookes law, Ohm's law, and Joule's law are examples of purely empirical generalizations that were discovered and used much before they were explained by more fundamental principles.

SLIDE 20: HOOKE'S LAW (1678)

Philosophers, however, were reluctant to give up the idea of causal explanation, and continued to search for the origin and justification of those successful Galilean equations. For example, Descartes ascribed cause to ETERNAL TRUTH. Liebnitz made cause a SELF-EVIDENT LOGICAL LAW.

SLIDE 21: DAVID HUME (PORTRAIT)

Finally, about one hundred years after Galileo, a Scottish philosopher by the name of David Hume carried Galileo's first maxim to an extreme.

Continue with Part 1b