Rain taps softly against the leaded windows of the Senior Common Room at St. Anselm’s. A small coal fire struggles with academic dignity in the grate. Professor Quillibrace sits perfectly still beneath a portrait of an eighteenth-century theologian who appears to disapprove of causality on principle. Mr Blottisham has spread several sheets of notes across the table in the confident manner of a man about to solve metaphysics permanently. Miss Elowen Stray watches the rain distort the courtyard outside.
Blottisham: Right. I believe I’ve finally identified the central philosophical problem.
Quillibrace: Without enthusiasm. How grave.
Blottisham: Causes. Either they’re real things in the world, or they’re merely descriptions we impose on events. And if they are real, we then have the further problem of explaining how they produce effects.
Stray: Ah. So first we reify causation, and then we wonder how the reified object functions.
Blottisham: I wouldn’t put it quite so cynically.
Quillibrace: That is because Miss Stray has already done the work for you.
Blottisham: Surely the issue is genuine. Things happen because other things happen. Strike a match, you get flame. Push an object, it moves. Cause and effect.
Quillibrace: Certainly. The regularities are real enough.
Blottisham: Then causes are real.
Quillibrace: You have moved rather quickly from structured regularity to ontological furniture.
Blottisham: Well, what else could causation be?
Stray: Perhaps not a thing at all.
Blottisham: But then it becomes “just description,” which seems equally absurd. If causation is only language, why does the world behave so reliably?
Quillibrace: Observe the framing. You are being offered a binary:
- either causation exists objectively “in the world”
- or it is merely descriptive
And because the distinction feels exhaustive, the argument begins to wobble immediately.
Blottisham: Isn’t it exhaustive?
Quillibrace: No. It depends on a hidden assumption—that causation is the sort of thing which must either exist or not exist as an entity.
Stray: As though “cause” were a kind of object one might locate between events.
Blottisham: Not literally between them.
Quillibrace: Metaphorically, however, you are furnishing reality with tiny bureaucratic connectors.
Blottisham: Fine. But events are connected somehow.
Quillibrace: Naturally. The difficulty begins when one imagines the connection as an additional thing requiring explanation.
Stray: Especially once events themselves have already been artificially separated.
Blottisham: Artificially?
Stray: We carve continuous processes into discrete units—“cause” here, “effect” there—and then ask what bridges the gap.
Quillibrace: Precisely. We segment the process and then invent a mysterious glue.
Blottisham: But surely there is something making causes produce effects.
Quillibrace: And now we arrive at the second distortion.
Blottisham: That sounds unfairly tidy.
Quillibrace: Philosophy is often untidy because it mistakes its own projections for discoveries.
Stray: The two questions are actually the same structural error viewed from different angles.
Blottisham: How so?
Stray: The first asks:
“Is causation real or descriptive?”
The second asks:
“What makes causation work?”
But both assume causation is some kind of entity.
Quillibrace: Exactly. One debates its ontological status; the other demands its internal mechanism.
Blottisham: Then what’s the actual distortion?
Quillibrace: Several, working together.
First, reification. Cause becomes a thing.
Second, symmetrisation. “World” and “description” are treated as separable domains standing opposite one another.
Third, segmentation. Continuous processes are broken into discrete events and then externally reconnected.
Fourth, collapse of constraint into event. The structured conditions under which events occur are confused with the events themselves.
Blottisham: You make it sound as though causation evaporates entirely.
Quillibrace: On the contrary. It ceases to be mystical and becomes intelligible.
Stray: Within relational ontology, causation isn’t an entity or force. It’s a relation of constraint across instantiation.
Blottisham: Meaning?
Quillibrace: Systems instantiate structured relations under constraint. These constraints organise what transformations are possible.
What we call “causal relations” are stable patterns within this structured unfolding.
Blottisham: So causes don’t produce effects?
Quillibrace: Not in the sense your question requires.
Blottisham: But something must make the flame appear after the match is struck.
Quillibrace: The system’s relational organisation under constraint makes that transformation stable and reproducible.
Blottisham: That sounds suspiciously like causation in disguise.
Quillibrace: Naturally. We are not abolishing causal description. We are refusing to mythologise it.
Stray: Cause and effect are positions within an ongoing process, not separate entities connected by hidden power.
Quillibrace: Exactly. The “production” of effects is not an additional event occurring behind the process.
It is the process viewed relationally.
Blottisham: So there’s no mysterious causal force pushing reality along?
Quillibrace: Only if one insists on treating regularity itself as insufficiently dramatic.
The fire gives a small collapse inward. Rain continues at a scholarly tempo.
Blottisham: Let me see if I understand.
The original questions depend on:
- treating causation as a thing
- separating world from description
- segmenting continuous processes into discrete events
- imagining an external connector between them
- assuming regularity requires an additional hidden mechanism
Quillibrace: Very good. Miss Stray, note the historic occasion.
Stray: Writing. “Blottisham briefly aligned with structure before returning to metaphysics.”
Blottisham: Irritating.
Quillibrace: Accurate.
Stray: And once those assumptions are withdrawn, the questions lose their structure.
Blottisham: But causation still matters operationally.
Quillibrace: Of course. We predict, intervene, explain.
Stray: The usefulness is real. The mistake is converting usefulness into ontology.
Quillibrace: Indeed. The more indispensable a conceptual structure becomes, the stronger the temptation to imagine it as a substance.
Blottisham: So causation is neither “just description” nor a hidden force.
Quillibrace: Correct.
Stray: It is a relational structure through which constraint and instantiation become intelligible together.
Blottisham: Hm.
A pause.
Blottisham: I confess I rather liked the idea of tiny causal engines hidden inside reality.
Quillibrace: Naturally. Humanity has always preferred machinery to structure. Machinery feels reassuringly theatrical.
Stray: Whereas relational constraint lacks the courtesy to look like a thing.
Quillibrace: Which is why philosophy keeps trying to turn it into one.
Outside, the rain continues reorganising the courtyard into temporary causal demonstrations.
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