Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I remember an econometrics textbook discussing a causal relationship between two variables. I had to reread the passage because I had not previously seen the word “causal,” and initially read it as casual. Later, I was not entirely surprised when a fellow student was bewildered by the same passage (without resolving it).
Now, my question is this: Does the misunderstood concept—“casual relationship” in place of “causal relationship”—constitute an eggcorn?
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Joe, I don’t think that the use of ‘casual’ for ‘causal’ is an eggcorn, but I do think that it is weirdly common, especially in scientific and philosophical writing. The two words are polar opposites in meaning, the former implying a random, chance connection between events and the other a necessary one. I suspect that this is a meme that is spreading through iatrogenic contact; the perps think that ‘casual’ is etymologically connected to ‘causal’, which it is not—it’s related to case, not cause. I found this post of yours after running into another instance of a casual mechanism in the biological literature today.
Biological Reviews
The previous lack of a clear synthesis of this theory, its assumptions and predictions may have hindered research into the casual mechanisms underlying species–energy relationships.
The sources of war
The unit of analysis reflects to a great degree the independent variable that is selected in the theorization of a particular casual relationship. As the purpose of theory is to explain a casual relationship and describe a casual mechanism using the casual variables, it is natural that the unit of analysis be the starting point for a classification of realist theories.
Balkan mortality rates
When data were discussed at the beginning of this paper, it was stated that the individual data to discuss the casual mechanism are missing … In such circumstances any effort to try and find a casual mechanism for deciding on the influence of different factors to mortality pattern, is limited.
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The eggcornish imagery that I could offer is this; Say, one has two distinct physical measurements—say height and weight of various people—and one goes to correlate these two quantities; one will find that weight generally increases with height, but if one were to plot the two quantities against each other—as a scatter plot—the data wouldn’t fall perfectly on a straight line and so, one might think that such a correlation is “casual” rather than strict and conforming to that straight line.
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