Which is the correct theory—the first paragraph or the second?
There is plenty of evidence that human notions of causality are influenced by human concerns, but it doesn’t add up to the conclusion that there is no causality in the territory. The comparison with ontology is apt: just because tables and chairs are human level ontology, doesn’t mean that there’s no quark level ontology to the universe.
What would it even mean to say a theory of causality is “correct” here? We’re talking about what makes sense to apply the term causality to, and there’s matter of correctness at that level, only of usefulness to some purpose. It’s only after we have some systematized way of framing a question that we can ask if something is correct within that system.
Correctness as opposed to usefulness would be correspondence to reality.
There’s a general problem of how to establish correspondence, a problem which applies to many things other than causality. You can’t infer that something corresponds just because it is useful, but you also can’t infer that something does not correspond just because it is useful—“in the map” does not imply “not in the territory”.
Which is the correct theory—the first paragraph or the second?
There is plenty of evidence that human notions of causality are influenced by human concerns, but it doesn’t add up to the conclusion that there is no causality in the territory. The comparison with ontology is apt: just because tables and chairs are human level ontology, doesn’t mean that there’s no quark level ontology to the universe.
What would it even mean to say a theory of causality is “correct” here? We’re talking about what makes sense to apply the term causality to, and there’s matter of correctness at that level, only of usefulness to some purpose. It’s only after we have some systematized way of framing a question that we can ask if something is correct within that system.
Correctness as opposed to usefulness would be correspondence to reality.
There’s a general problem of how to establish correspondence, a problem which applies to many things other than causality. You can’t infer that something corresponds just because it is useful, but you also can’t infer that something does not correspond just because it is useful—“in the map” does not imply “not in the territory”.