Causation — Conception, common sense and scientific notion, plurality of causes

Your bike skids on a monsoon-wet Andheri road and you go down. Ask your friend why, and she says “the rain caused it.” Ask an engineer, and she refuses to stop there — she wants the tyre tread, your speed, the camber of the road, the film of oil under the water, everything, before she will use the word “cause” at all. Both of you used the same four-letter word for two different jobs. Logic – II asks you to see that gap clearly, because the moment you open a law book you will find courts using the first kind of cause and calling it a rule of law.

In two minutes

A cause means the one condition you would change to fix a problem for the common man, and the entire set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the scientist — and knowing which one a question wants is half the answer.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Logic – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.