Causality
how one process influences another
Causality is an influence by which one event, process, state, or subject (i.e., a cause) contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (i.e., an effect) where the cause is at least partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is at least partly dependent on the cause. The cause of something may also be described as the reason behind the event or process.
In general, a process can have multiple causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future. Thus, the distinction between cause and effect either follows from or else provides the distinction between past and future. While the former viewpoint is more prevalent in physics, some writers have held that causality is metaphysically prior to notions of time and space. Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses. As such, it is a basic concept, and one might expect it to be more apt as an explanation of other concepts of progression than as something to be explained by yet more fundamental ideas. The concept is like those of agency and efficacy. For this reason, a leap of intuition may be needed to grasp it.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q179289. The Library of Congress control number is sh85021459. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Causality” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.