Causation: The Why Beneath The What

Kevin Gray: If we think about it, most of our daily conversations invoke causation, at least informally. We often say things like "I dropped by this store instead of my usual place because I needed to go to the laundry and it was on the way" or "I always buy chocolate ice cream because that's what my kids like." First, to get started, can you give us nontechnical definitions of causation and causal analysis? Tyler VanderWeele: Well, it turns out that there a number of different contexts in which words like "cause" and "because" are used. Aristotle, in his Physics and again in his Metaphysics, distinguished between what he viewed as four different types of causes: material causes, formal causes, efficient causes, and final causes.