Member Of Species

@Meaningness "The fact that 5*5=25 and the fact that the room is 5x5 meters, together, cause the room to be 25 square meters."

@MemberOfSpecies Oh… weird… “Cause” seems an exceptionally vague and problematic notion, but fwiw on the whole I’d say that isn’t causal.

@Meaningness I guess I'm trying to figure out whether there's a principled reason for saying such things aren't causal.

@MemberOfSpecies Main intuition of “cause” is counterfactuals, and there isn’t a possible world in which 5x5!=25

@Meaningness "If 5x5 had been 26, this 5x5 room would have been 26 square meters" doesn't make zero sense to me.

@MemberOfSpecies but in any case, in the standard (Kripke) formulation, all mathematical facts are the same in all possible worlds.

@Meaningness This feels like sweeping the problem under the rug. We have uncertainty about mathematical facts with conditional structure.

@MemberOfSpecies causality is normally taken as an objective fact, not an epistemic state.