I have found that if students have an understanding of the problems of establishing Causality (Cause & Effect as a Knowledge Issue) they are able to analyse a wide range of RLS across various AoKs. Understanding this knowledge issue really unlocks lots of other areas of ToK.
Good reasons for teaching causality:
- Helps students to examine concepts such as truth, fact, objectivity, reality etc.
- Gives students robust evaluative perspectives for AoKs Natural and Human Sciences, History, and possibly Maths.
- Helps students to develop more abstract perspectives, particularly in relation to AoK The Arts, RKS, and IKS,
- Gets us out of the RLS focussed cul de sac.
I have often found that an RLS which leads to first order questions such as “how do we know whether X really happened ?” , or “should A have done B to C ?” can usefully be developed into a 2nd order KQ along the lines of “TWE can causality (or cause & effect) be established in AoK Y ?”, or some such variant of.
I would argue that there are 3 main elements to understanding the knowledge issues of Causality:
- Direction of Causation.
- Establishing Causality (multiple variables etc).
- Intention in Causality/unexpected consequences
Learning Process & Activities.
1. Direction of Causation.
Learning Outcomes:
A. Causes can often also be effects (& vv)
B: Causes can often be mistaken as effects (& vv)
Practical fun activity – Causal Clapping.
-Split your class into groups of 3 or 4 students.
Each group has to produce 1 single clap when ever they hear another group clap.
Build in some temporary delays between hearing the clap, and producing the next clap – I usually make the students play a game of scissors, paper, rock to decide who is going to produce the clap.
After you’ve played this for a few minutes ask the students to
– Identify the causes & the effects of the claps.
– What criteria would we use to establish whether something is a cause or an effect ?
Which is the cause, and which is the effect ?
Ask students to find examples from their Hexagon subjects in which the cause and the effect could be bi-directional ( and sometimes mutually inclusive). I have included some examples below:
Psychology: The correlation between Incidence of Depression and Unemployment.
Economics: Demand and Price in Veblen Goods.
Environmental Systems & Societies / Biology: Species Differentiation and Habitat biodiversity.
Establishing Causality.
Learning Outcomes:
- Causes are often multivariate.
- Causation could be socially constructed.
Practical fun activity – House of Cards.
Ask students to build the tallest, but most stable structure that they can out of cards. Time limit the activity. Once the cards are built ask them the following questions:
- What caused you to build the house ?
- What causes the cards to stay in place ?
- What are the effects of the House of Cards ? (does everything have to have an effect?).
Their answers to these questions should give multiple causes & effects, this could be a useful time to introduce Reductionism.
Now ask student to knock down the House of Cards.
The follow up questions are:
1. What caused the House of Cards to fall down ? (is it’s very existence a cause for its downfall ?)
2. How do we establish what caused the house to fall ? (can we come up with criteria ?).
3. Could any of these causes actually be effects ?
As they explore the answers they should start getting into issues of reductionism. This is where you can introduce the idea of causation being socially constructed (where we draw the line of acceptable reductionism is socially constructed).
Further arguments could be developed along the lines of the difficulty of measuring the strength of effect of a cause as it is very difficult to isolate individual causes.
Intention in Causality.
Learning Outcome: Even if causal factors can be established these causal factors often have unintended (& unpredictable) outcomes.
Practical Fun Activity.
- Making Rorschach Ink Blots. Give the students some sturdy paper and some acrylic paint. Ask them to fold the paper in half, making a good crease down the middle. Now open the paper back up, and squirt a blob of paint down one side. Now refold the paper, and give it a gentle squeeze around. Unfold the paper & leave the blot to dry. For pictorial instructions see this site.
Now make a gallery of the ink blots, and ask students to view each others ink blots, and write down what they see.
You will probably have students labelling each ink blot with a variety of different objects (e.g. bat, flower, explosion, etc etc).
The learning points are
a) the causal intention was not to create a bat, nor a flower etc yet that was the outcome. Sometimes causes can have quite unintended effects. When mapping backwards it can appear that these effects were intended at the causal stage.
b) The same blot is interpreted in very different ways by different people. As such in the real world, knowledge as an ‘effect’ can be interpreted in different ways by different people – link to perspective.
Students research a specific object or theory which has been created ‘unintentionally’ – the beauty of serendipity, some examples include:
- Discovery of Penicillin
- Microwave
- Velcro
- The Big Bang
- Teflon
- Sildenafil as an ED drug
Student Questions:
Was the object, or theory, truly serendipitous ? What are the arguments for and against a genuinely serendipitous process ? (link back to problems of causation).
Does the existence of apparently serendipitous processes suggest that knowledge is constructed or discovered ?
Extensions.
The extensions associated with causation are myriad, a few suggestions are:
Objectivity-Subjectivity: If watertight cause & effect is impossible to establish then can it be said that anything is wholly objective ?
Reductionism-Holism: does a strong causal framework undermine a holistic approach ?
Synergy-Atomisation: How can synergy be explained through a strong causal framework ?
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