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17
Approaching What-, How- and Why-Questions
Using a Medical Example
Alejandro Sobrino and Cristina Puente
17.1
Introduction
Aristotle distinguished in [2] and [1] four types of causes:
•
Material cause, involving the physical matter of which something is made; that
is, the mass of which it consists.
•
Formal cause, focusing on the way that a thing is intended and planned to be.
•
Efficient cause, quoted as “the primary source of the change or rest”; the prior
movement or the source energy that triggers the final effect.
•
Final cause, i.e., the end, goal or aim that a process leads to. The final cause is
the teleology (from the Greek
telos
) that something is supposed to serve.
The Aristotelian view of causality traditionally offered a frame to provide answers
to causal What- or Why-questions.
In effect, Aristotle's typology serves to answer
What
-and
For-what
questions.
For example, in the presence of a statue, we can ask the following questions, which
would correspond to the types of cases aforementioned:
•
'
What
is it made from?' It is made of metal (material cause);
•
'
What
is its form?' A man in a praying attitude (formal cause);
•
'
What
produced it?' The sculptor (efficient cause);
•
'
For what
purpose?' To pay tribute to a virtuous person (final cause).
But Aristotle's typology enables to answer
why
-questions as well. Efficient causes
seem to be appropriate for this task. In this paper we are inspired by this view.
Aristotle's efficient cause is intended as a way of performing explanations. Ex-
planations are usually related to why-questions. A typical - although not academic -
way to provide an explanation is to distinguish the components involved in a process
identifying the first cause or impulse and the final effect or result. In the aforemen-
tioned example, the sculptor is who acted in the first place, but 'the sculptor' is not
a reasonable answer to a why-q as
Why the statue was made?
