| 單元內容 |
CAUSE AND EFFECT
(CAUSATION)
Ⅰ. Cause and Effect (Causation)
Cause and effect (or simply causation) refers to a specific relationship between events in time. If you fail to look both ways before crossing a street and get hit by a car, the cause is failing to look and the effect is getting hit. If a doctor tells you that you have a broken leg from the accident, the broken leg is the effect of getting hit by the car, which is the cause. An event (in this case, the accident) can be both a cause and an effect of other events.
As a strategy of development, causation answers the question "Why did it happen?" You will find causation useful not only by itself but also combined with other strategies. It is often used with process because how something happened (process) is often related to why something happened (causation).
For many subjects--particularly those related to social and political matters--causes and effects are ambiguous or indistinct, leaving you unsure about the truth of the situation. Therefore, you must be very careful when you discuss causes and effects. For many subjects you also have the reactions of your reader to worry about because your analysis of a cause-and-effect relationship might be controversial, and your reader may not agree with you. For example, in discussions about causes and effects in certain social issues--such as crime or government spending--some readers may object to your analysis. Therefore, stance is very important in this strategy.
Recognizing the Signs of Causation
In order to identify and determine whether or not a cause-and-effect relationship is logical, you should look for certain signs. Two of the most common are:
The Sign of Association. Suppose you find two events, A and B, in association. Their being together could imply that A causes B, or vice versa. However, B must ordinarily occur whenever A does--otherwise you probably don't have a genuine cause-and-effect relationship. For instance, hair should bleach when a strong solution of peroxide is applied to it; the cook should burn his hand every time he touches a very hot skillet handle.
The Sign of Time-Sequence. If B comes after A in time, this fact may imply a causal relationship. If a student stays up all night studying, the fatigue he suffers the next day is an effect signaled by time. But determining time-sequence is so tricky that a special name has been given to the fallacy of misinterpreting it. The fallacy is called post hoc (short for post hoc, ergo propter hoc--"after this, therefore because of this"). You create the post hoc fallacy if you say that A causes B merely because B comes after A. In other words, if the 8:30 train comes after the 8:15 train, you cannot say that the earlier train "causes" the later one.
In brief, the signs of causation are no more than signs--they are not proofs. To avoid making fallacies in thinking about causation, you must take each sign and investigate it carefully. Never assume that a causal relationship exists until you find proof.
| One cause |
→ |
One effect |
| A strong head wind will cause the biker to gear down. |
| One cause |
→ |
Two or more effects |
A slight rise in the road causes increased pressure
on the pedal
so the biker gears down. |
| Two or more causes |
→ |
One effect |
Failing to gear down
while going uphill
or against a strong headwind |
can create |
serious knee problems. |
| Two or more causes |
→ |
Two or more effects |
| Short toe clips and a seat too high |
can cause |
serious knee problems and pain in the legs. |
The diagram above shows four types of cause-and-effect sequences that you should be aware of. (The examples support the thesis: Proper gearing and equipment may help a biker avoid leg and knee problems.)
In most situations, more than one cause or effect is involved. Drug addiction, for example, may have several causes, and these causes may have more than a single effect.
Following is an annotated cause-and-effect paper written by a student. Notice the writer's use of transitions, examples, and summary statements, making the cause-and-effect relationship clear.
| Definition of term
by negation |
Student-watchers have long identified a common type on campus--the "Joiner." I don't mean the woman who belongs to the band and the Pi Phis, and maybe in her junior year joins an accounting honorary. Nor do I mean the engineer who |
Question posed;
answered by
succeeding pars. |
belongs to a mere three organizations. Nothing so limiting works for the true joiner, who may belong to six or eight organizations, and who may pop up in student government as well. What makes joiners join? |
First cause,
supported by three
examples |
First, joiners like the limelight. Most of the groups they belong to are visible. On the dorm council they write petitions, or collect the petitions of others. In the marching band they perform before thousands of people. In fraternities, they are the treasurers who hound people for money and make long reports in meetings on the state of fraternal economy. |
| Transition
|
As these remarks imply, joiners like to run things. My sister is a joiner, and one can be sure that any group she belongs to, she is president or leader of it. If the group has no
important office to fill, she will run it by indirection, volunteering to do this or that job, writing any necessary letters or |
Summary
statement
explaining effect
of cause |
memos, being the first one at the meeting and the last to leave. Nojob is too small for her to take on cheerfully. By the end of the semester, any group she joins discovers that she has become its chief bottle-washer and major spokesman. She has fulfilled her desire to control events and people. |
| Last cause with
transition, finally |
Finally, joiners join because they must have something to do with themselves. They are usually hyperactive. Have you ever seen a joiner sitting alone, perhaps in the Union, just reading a book? Sam, on the men's side of my dorm, is a |
| Example |
Joiner; and for all the time I have known him, he has never been alone. People in the dorm say that Sam even goes to the bathroom with somebody. He belongs to eight organizations, |
| Surprise ending |
and will someday be president of the country--if he can just decide which political party to join. |
|
| Occasionally, it is necessary and rhetorically useful to organize a cause-and-effect essay or paragraph by introducing the effect first, then giving an explanation of the causes. Note how the writer in the following excerpt explains why the poor have more garbage than the rich.
| Effect |
... low-income neighborhoods in Tucson discard 86 percent more garbage per week per household than do high-income areas, and 40 percent more waste than medium-
income districts. There is a trick to that statistic. There are more people per household in low-income areas. But, even dividing on a per person basis, the poor produce more garbage than the middle class and only slightly less than the rich. |
| Question: why? |
Why? It's not so hard to figure out. The rich buy antiques, the poor buy and throw away cheap or used furniture. The rich give their old clothes to the "Goodwill," the poor buy them there, wear them out and throw them away. And it is the poor and the working people who discard most of the packaging waste. They are the ones who drink soft drinks and beer and eat low-cost canned vegetables and canned stews, fish sticks, |
| Causes |
pot pies, and T.V. dinners. And, if they eat out at all, it is at McDonalds or Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the packaging which that entails. It is the rich who have their food flown in fresh daily from Florida or Spain. It is the rich who eat in the fancy French restaurants with all those superb dishes prepared from scratch, sans packaging and san disposable dinner ware --Judd Alexander, "Truth and Consequences" |
Ⅱ. SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
CAUSE-AND-EFFECT PAPERS
When describing causation, remember this advice:
1. Investigate your subject thoroughly, either from your own firsthand knowledge or from research. Identifying the causes and effects in a subject that you know firsthand can be easy to do. Your dissatisfaction with your roommate, for instance, may be based on the fact that he won't do his share in keeping the apartment clean. The cause is his laziness or carelessness. The effect is your anger and frustration. But identifying the causes of pollution in Los Angeles is much more difficult because pollution is a complex problem, and without doing research, you will not know enough to write about the subject.
2. Qualify your generalizations carefully when you draw cause-and-effect relationships. Do not hesitate to use qualifiers such as "it seems to me," "it may be," or "the evidence points to." In most cause-and-effect relationships, you deal in probabilities rather than certainties, particularly when you get out of the realm of scientific subjects.
3. Be sure that your time-sequence is accurate and inclusive. This is especially true when you are explaining scientific causes and effects. You should present the chronology of the steps as they actually occur, and you should include every important link in the chain of events in order to ensure the accuracy of your paper. Here is an effective explanation of why Mexican jumping beans jump:
A simple explanation reveals the secret of the fascinating twisting, turning and jumping of the beans. Inside each bean is a tiny yellow caterpillar, the larvae of a small moth. How does it get there? The moth lays an egg in the flower of the spurge shrub. In time the eggs hatch and the larvae are said to work their way deep into the blossom, where they are eventually encased in the seeds.
The caterpillar devours a large part of the inside of the seed, so that it occupies about one-fifth of the interior of its little home. To move the bean, the caterpillar grasps the silken wall of the bean with its legs and vigorously snaps its body, striking its head against the other end of the bean and sending it this way or that. The bean may actually travel several inches at a time, or leap in the air. Some people call them bronco beans because of the way they jump.
A jumping bean may keep up its antics for as long as six months. Then the caterpillar finally emerges from its house and becomes a moth.
---"Why Mexican jumping Beans jump," Awake!
4. Separate "sufficient" from "contributory" causes. An event may contribute to a cause, but it will not be sufficient in itself to create an effect. Failing to add baking powder or soda to biscuit dough is sufficient cause for the dough's failure to rise. A contributory cause to the flat biscuits might be a distracting phone call you had just when you were about to add the leavening agent. However, it isn't the phone call that caused the biscuits to be flat, but rather your forgetting to add the soda or baking powder. So you separate the phone call (contributory cause) from the lack of leavening agent (sufficient cause).
5. Do not ignore immediate effects in a chain of multiple effects. Note this description of the multiple effects of the cholera organism:
For centuries, men had known that cholera was a fatal disease, and that it caused severe diarrhea, sometimes producing as many as thirty quarts of fluid a day. Men knew this, but they somehow assumed that the lethal effects of the disease were unrelated to the diarrhea; they searched for something else: an antidote, a drug, a way to kill the organism. It was not until modern times that cholera was recognized as a disease that killed through dehydration primarily; if you could replace a victim's water losses rapidly, he would survive the infection without other drugs or treatment.
---Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain
A diagram of this chain of cause and effect might look like this: Cholera organism
(first cause)
diarrhea (first immediate effect)
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