An epiphenomenon (plural: epiphenomena) is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon. The word has two senses: one that connotes known causation and one that connotes absence of causation or reservation of judgment about it.
An epiphenomenon (plural: epiphenomena) is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon. The word has two senses: one that connotes known causation and one that connotes absence of causation or reservation of judgment about it.
==Examples== ===Metaphysics=== In the philosophy of causality, an epiphenomenon is any effect of a cause apart from the effect under primary consideration. In situations in which an event of interest is caused by (or, is said to be caused by) an event , which also causes (or, is said to cause) an event , then is an epiphenomenon. The problem of epiphenomena is often a counterexample to theories of causation. For example, take a simplified Lewisian counterfactual analysis of causation that the meaning of propositions about causal relationships between two events and can be explained in terms of counterfactual conditionals of the form "if had not occurred then would not have occurred". Suppose that causes and that has an epiphenomenon . We then have that if had not occurred, then would not have occurred, either. But then according to the counterfactual analysis of causation, the proposition that there is a causal dependence of on is true; that is, on this view, caused . Since this is not in line with how we ordinarily speak about causation (we would not say that caused ), a counterfactual analysis seems to be insufficient.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).