Question about Philosophy of Mind - Behaviorism?

Question

Could someone please explain the meaning of contingent in the following proposition relating to behaviorism:

"Causal connections are essentially contingent"

What does this mean, exactly?

Answer 1

Its a relation that is conditional. Its a cause dependent, and hence ceases by the absence of the cause(s).

Answer 2

"Causal connections are essentially possible"

Answer 3

Contingent implies that things could have been otherwise - 'that it ain't necessarily so'.

The idea here is that because causes and their effects are not *logically* necessary, they need not be that way and therefore are not necessary in the real world.

This is a bizzarre extension of an argument from Descartes, trying to deduce something about the real world from purely logical statements, and given what we know about science in the modern world it should have died out long ago. But for some reason it lives on, mostly with philosophers who are trying to find philosophical difficulties that don't actually exist.

For example, take Newton's laws of motion. A philosopher of this sort would say that they aren't necessarily true (meaning roughly that there could exist worlds in which they don't hold), and draw some conclusions about whether they are true or not. This is completely bonkers, because physics is at least as true as most philosophy.

I hope you are reading some sort of historical overview of behaviourism, and not something that purports to be a good argument!