The Criterion for Priority and Posteriority in Analytical Causality and the Ways of How to Discover It

As one foremost philosophical issue, causality has been open to discussion by the philosophers since the beginning of philosophical thinking. The prima facie meaning of causality amidst those discussions might occur to the mind is external causation. In external causality, the existence of a cause is separate from that of effect. However, in another account of causation known as analytical causality, cause and effect have one identical instance i.e. the causal relation is between two different aspects of one identical thing. One main question as to analytical causality is that how and by what criterion we can distinguish one aspect as the cause and the other as the effect. Principally, how we can discern the causal priority and posteriority? Were this question not answered duly, one might confuse the instance of the cause with that of the effect. In the course of his effort, the author goes to analytically examine the criterion for causality in analytical causation. For this matter, he proposes two ways for discovering such a criterion: mutual implication and semantic comprehensiveness. He then goes on to study a few samples to show that his mechanism works well and in the end by proposing an incorrect sample demonstrates the root of error in the preceding literature when their authors came to determine instances of cause and effect.