What Is Correlation And Causation

Tiffany Williams
29 September 2017
Causation vs. Correlation Does correlation mean causation? We are reminded on a daily basis that if we do not wear our seatbelt, we will die if we crash. This idea comes from the belief that if one wears a seatbelt they will be saved in the event of a crash. With that, I could say that wearing a seatbelt and surviving a crash are correlated so one must cause the other. However, there have been plenty of instances where people die in a crash while wearing a seatbelt. People tend to confuse correlation with causation because they simply try to justify why a situation happened based on what they think they have knowledge about but also because they do not fully understand causality. Both by definition and

The dictionary definition of knowledge is information acquired by a person through experience or education. Knowledge in the 21st century is viewed as a thought that is backed up by facts or evidence, therefore making this idea a very credible one to many. I believe that there is no such thing as knowledge, but rather justified true belief. The facts and the evidence used to amount to so called knowledge are just opinions of very educated people meaning they are falsifiable just like any other opinion. Edmund Gettier backs up this claim with, “it is possible for a person to be justified in a proposition that is in fact false” (109). On the other hand, a justified true belief is one that has plenty of evidence and reasons to believe that it is true, but it is also known that there could very well be evidence against this belief. A good example of justified true belief would be the principle of God. There is no way to know for a fact that the God people learn about and worship exists, for the fact that no one that is alive today has met God. However, as far as the other end of the argument goes there are reasons such as; reproduction, respiratory relationship between plants and humans, the urge to seek love, and many others to believe that God is alive and well today. If these ideas were facts that could be wholeheartedly

David Hume supported this claim by stating, “the first time a man saw the communication of motion by impulse, as by the shock of two billiard balls, he could not pronounce that the one event was connected: but only that it was conjoined with the other” (202). As I mentioned before, the main difference between causation and correlation is correlation is causation with an added component. It is very important to remember that with a correlation there could be other causes for the effect along with or totally separate from the most common approach. Using the example, I mentioned earlier, how cell phone waves relate to breast cancer. By doing more in-depth research, scientists found that microwaves from cell phones cause great damage to normal blood cells resulting in the nuclei breaking off into micronuclei fragments resulting in abnormal growth of the cells. Although, it seems as if this is the only logical explanation in a patient that stores her cell phone near her breasts, has no family history, or other predisposing factors, there could still be another reason for breast cancer suffering. There are also many ingredients in food that are known to cause the same effects on a person. If a person is eating cancer-causing food, and using a cancer-causing cell phone how can one isolate the cause of this? It truly is not possible, meaning