Causality and Imperfect Causality from Texts: a Frame for Causality in Social Sciences

The focus of this paper is the study of causality in both its crisp and approximate forms. Crisp causality is characterized by some properties and modalities and is related to semantic implications. This paper presents a program that extracts causal and conditional sentences with causal content from several texts. The examples extracted show that, even in scientific texts, causality can be imprecise or imperfect, as shown by the linguistic modifiers or the fuzzy quantifiers embedded in them. Quantum mechanics introduces imprecision in physics, but social sciences are the disciplines that show more circumstantial and imperfect links between cause and effect. In social sciences, there are two theoretical paradigms to understanding imperfect causality: (i) cause as an 'ideal type', from Weber, (ii) cause as a 'family resemblance predicate', from Anscombe, a follower of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Our work provides two short exemplifications of these paradigms using the causal or conditional sentences retrieved from texts of different genres.