7. Causation, cause and effect, stimulus response
Causal thinking (the idea that one action causes another): We are all familiar with this approach to reality for one major reason, IT WORKS!
Almost universally, humans consider that the world functions as a result of cause and effect. Whenever you do something (say, you aim to hit a nail with your hammer but you hit yourself on the thumb instead),
There is a result (your finger hurts and you feel pain).The word
'because' expresses this reasoning. A good exercise would be to count the number of times you use the word because in a day. Then you will see how common this way of thinking has become.Any time we try to explain something to someone, we use the word because. In fact, you could try explaining something to a friend without using the word because - see if you can do it!
In physics, cause and effect is one of the basic laws: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Also in physics, this is expressed in the law of inertia, which states that something in motion will tend to stay in motion until something else acts upon in to stop that motion (in other words, until something causes it to stop).
In the Social Sciences, the behaviorists (see Pavlov, Skinner) built an entire psychology on the idea that every stimulus results in a response. Pavlov's dogs salivated when the time came to prepare their food. Skinner's pigeons learned behaviors by receiving either positive or negative reinforcement (electric shocks). The behaviorists extended this idea to human beings, believing that all human behavior could be conditioned. In other words, that people could be trained to act in certain ways, without their knowledge, simply by manipulating their environment.
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