Читать книгу Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition) - Thomas J. Hickey - Страница 70

Cause and effect are ontological categories, which in science can be described by tested and nonfalsified nontruth-functional hypothetical-conditional statements thus having the status of laws. The nontruth-functional hypothetical-conditional statement claiming a causal dependency is an empirical universal statement. It is therefore never proved and is always vulnerable to future falsification. But ontological relativity means that a statement’s empirical adequacy warrants belief in its ontological claim of causality, even if the relation is stochastic. Nonfalsification does not make the statement affirm merely a Humean constant conjunction. When in the progress of science a causal claim is empirically falsified by empirical testing, it is made evident thereby that the causality claim is less adequately true and thus less realistic than previously hypothesized.