Aristotle argued that it is useful to think in terms of four causes:
1. Of what a thing is made, also called the material cause. Clay is the material cause of a brick. Steel, rubber, and plastic are part of the material cause of a car.
2. How something is made, also called the efficient cause. The efficient cause is billiard-ball causality, the action that brings something into being. It is the gathering and firing of clay to make a brick. The workers on an assembly line are the efficient cause of a car.
3. What a thing is, also called the formal cause. The formal cause is the essence, idea, or plan of a thing. The essence of a brick is that it is an expression of an idea of the right size, shape, and strength of an object needed for building. The engineer’s design is the formal cause of a car.
4. Why a thing is, the sake for which a thing is done, also called the final cause. The final cause of a brick is to make a wall. The final cause of a car is that it helps you get from here to there.
Can you give more examples of analyzing things with the four causes? A: Here are 15 examples that aren't in the book.
Chess
Final: Chess To win, to have fun, to exercise your mind.
Material: The board and pieces.
Formal: The rules of the game.
Efficient: Seeing the whole board.
Jazz
Final: Self expression, fun, to make a buck.
Material: Skill and musical instruments.
Formal: European harmony fused with African rhythm.
Efficient: Improvisation
Quantification
Final: To simplify complex phenomena to the point where the mind can grasp them, because said Leonardo da Vinci, “No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.”
Material: Logic and mathematics.
Formal: The rules that numbers play by.
Efficient: Map the numbers to the world within the rules that numbers play by.
Universities
Final: According to Don Michael Randel, former president of the University of Chicago, universities are in the truth-and-beauty business.
Material: The human mind, books, laboratories, buildings, endowments, and so on. President Randel again, “The job of leadership in this environment is to try to figure out what might constitute truth and beauty at any given point and then to align our resources in such a way as to maximize our production of them.” Research and teaching.
Virology
Final: To help people by fighting the viruses that ail them.
Material: Electron microscopes, guinea pigs, and, most important, the talent of the researchers.
Formal: Conjectures and refutations, which is having the researchers generate ideas as to the nature of viruses and using experimentation to weed out the ideas that data disproves.
Efficient: Conduct research.
Yoga
Final: Harmony.
Material: Mind and body.
Formal: An eight-step process that moves from ethical living to spiritual liberation.
Efficient: Concentration.
Zhou Enlai, China’s foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. He is widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s great statesmen.
Final: He wanted what was best for China.
Material: He had an unlimited ability to focus on details.
Formal: Pragmatism, the art of compromise.
Efficient: He was likeable, persuasive, and he worked very, very hard.
Herbert Simon’sSciences of the Artificial
Final: To bridge C.P. Snow’s two cultures of the sciences and the arts, p. 138.
Material: The argument: Science = to think clearly about. Artificial = artifact = interface between the inner workings of a system (constraints) and the environment (parameters) in which the system is trying to achieve some goal (function). Start by thinking in terms of goals, e.g., the goal, purpose, or function of a clock is to tell time. If you are in a sunny environment, then a stick in the middle of a numbered wheel suffices. If you are on a rolling ship, then you need something more complex, such as Harrison’s clocks. Goals and inner environments are often simple, while the environment is often complex. An ant going from here to there on a rock-strewn beech takes a serpentine path, not because the goal or the ant’s thought processes are complex, but because the environment (reality) is. Therefore, environment molds all else. In any case, the inner touches the outer in very few places so your description of inner, outer, and artifact can be very parsimonious. The key to good design is to shield the inner from the outer (Harrison’s clocks worked no matter what was happening out there). Good design is also hierarchical; that is complex systems are composed of levels of artifacts.
Formal: By creating a curriculum that teaches the commonalities between engineering, business, education, the arts, music, and so on, the essence of which is design, p. 166.
Efficient: (aka, why the book often strikes readers as convoluted)
- He anticipates arguments against his position, e.g., simulation really can lead to new insights, p. 13.
- He anticipates where the reader might go off track and deals with potential blind allies, e.g., imperative v. declarative logic, p. 115.
- He goes to great lengths to support his position.
- He seeks to be very precise with his language, which means he uses technical definitions (jargon), such as Substantive (how a system adjusts to its environment) and Procedural (how a system knows how to adjust to its environment) Rationality, that are new to the reader and therefore difficult to follow, pp. 25-27. And,constraints describe the inner while parametersdescribe the outer, p. 117.
- He has such striking insights sprinkled throughout the text (I call them dazzlers) that the reader can go several pages before he realizes that he’s lost the trail, because still thinking about:
- That logic can proceed from the middle of an argument to the argument’s consequences and only then back to its premises, p. 16, ft. 13.
- That there is a competition between elaboration (the gathering of knowledge) and compression (turning it into a theory), p. 92.
- That the cost of a search is not a function of the size of the search space, but of the standards set by the searcher, p. 120.
- That you get a very different result depending on if you start from the inside and work out or the outside and work in, p. 121 & 130.
- That there is a difference between a state description (“A circle is the locus of all points equidistant from give point”) and a process description (“To construct a circle, rotate a compass with one arm fixed until the other arm had returned to its starting point”) and that human problem-solving is to turn blueprints (state descriptions) into recipes (process descriptions), pp. 210-211.
Economics (quoting fromFreakonomics)
Final: “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work – whereas economics represents how it actually does work.”
Material: “Economics is above all a science of measurement.”
Formal: Figure out the role of incentives. Who benefits and how from a transaction?
Efficient: Putting the following fundamental ideas to work: “Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. … The conventional wisdom is often wrong. … Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes. … ‘Experts’ – from criminologists to real-estate agents – use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. … Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.”
War
The material cause is men and material. The efficient cause is troop movements. The formal cause is the battle plan. The final cause is the ideal for which you fight, such as Freedom or defense of your homeland.
Frederick Douglass
Final: The abolition of slavery.
Material: His experience as a slave.
Formal: The understanding that preaching to people about right and wrong does not work as well as showing them that he is a person, just like they are, and that nobody should suffer as he suffered.
Efficient: Oratorical and literary brilliance.
Karate
Final: Being physically fit. Self defense.
Material: Muscles, particularly quick twitch.
Formal: Kinetic linking. A good martial artist can deliver ten times more force per square inch than a good boxer not just because the blow is more concentrated, but because the martial artist uses the combined strength and, much more important, speed (because damage increases proportionally with mass, but geometrically with velocity) of pushing his arm, shoving his shoulder, pivoting his hips, locking his legs, and shifting his body forward. Each factor adds a little to the force of the blow. In combination, they add a lot.
Efficient: Practice, practice, practice.
Dieting
Final: To become healthy, to live long enough to see your grandchildren grow up, so on.
Formal: Eat less and exercise more.
Material: A balanced diet.
Efficient: The self discipline to make it so.
Winning Awards
A project I did showing the return on investment of corporate training won half a dozen awards. I caused the awards to be won with this line of thought:
Final: Should I apply? Is it worth it? What will we get out of winning?
Formal: What would the ideal application for this award look like? What could we write that would guarantee that we would win?
Material: What do we have to work with? What have we done, especially in light of the ideal application, that makes us worthy of winning?
Efficient: Write the application in such a way that it is sound (logically solid), round (covers everything they ask for) and has a gimmick (has some neat feature, such as a picture or a sound bite, that they will want to use when they make their press announcement).
Xenophobia
Material: The belief that different is threatening and therefore bad.
Final: Me and my kind are better than you and your kind so I feel better about myself.
Formal: The opposite of individualism. Individualism recognizes each person as unique. Therefore, everybody will be somewhat strange to everybody else. With xenophobia there is the belief that one group is the same (self) and another group is different (other).
Efficient: A choice on the part of the xenophobe to be xenophobic.