In spiraling causality A may cause B but B may cause C and so on, eventually returning to A. Spiraling causality is thus sequential as each event is a reaction to the one prior to it. One interesting example I found of this was the Cold War. An initial aggressive act triggers a response which then leads to further responses that eventually spiral back to the beginning and an ultimate resolution of the situation. I think it's very easy to confuse spiral causality with cyclical causality, but the main differences is that spiraling causality spirals. That may sound over simplified but it's accurate. There is a clear beginning and all effects spiral outward from that and usually return to the beginning, or at least to some sort of clear resolution, but do not overlap or repeat themselves.
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smg/Website/UCP/causal/causal_types.html
Wow. Thanks Julia. I never knew this had a proper name! We talk about this in addictions all the time using the paradigm of spiral causality. We find that the last "rung" or portion of the spiral at the bottom is death or brain death and the very top is self actualization. Although as purveyors of the behavioral health profession we hope that people never see the very bottom rung we are always trying to get them closer to the top. With the irony of course that we are not at the top either!
ReplyDeleteI never knew about Spiral Causality, and I am glad you had described it in the way you did. I wonder if fractals could depict spiral causality? There is an example of spiral causality that I found on Youtube-It illustrates the spiraling of events within a video store, each effecting one another, and at the very end, reaching the point in the beginning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTM60wHC3wo
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this post, I thought of the slippery slope fallacy and how easy it is for one to justify the fallacy by using spiral causality incorrectly. The fallacy happens when ther is no logical implication from one event to the next.
ReplyDelete