Hume on Causation | David Hume and the Causal Principle

Hume on Causation | David Hume and the Causal Principle

Is causation the cement of the universe?

Many thinkers believe it is.

Before Hume, many philosophers accepted the Causal Principle that something cannot come from nothing.

[This was the subject of the video prior to the last video in this sequence.]

They believed with Descartes, for example, as many people do today that, if individual x causes individual y, the x must have as least as much reality as y.

Hume is a much more radical thinker than any of his great predecessors in the Western philosophic tradition.

That tradition began with the pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides. Philosophy took an ethical turn with Socrates.

Plato was the first great philosopher in the sense that he asked and attempted to answer all the fundamental questions. He was one of Socrates’s students.

Aristotle was the next great philosopher. He was one of Plato’s students and he, too, asked and attempted to answer all the fundamental questions.

Later, the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus attempted to reconcile the claims of both Plato and Aristotle.

The greatest thinkers in the middle ages were Augustine, who was as much influenced by Plotinus as by Paul, and Aquinas, who was heavily indebted to Aristotle as well as to the Christian theological tradition.

Again, Descartes was the Father of Modern Western Philosophy. There were three “continental rationalists” altogether with Spinoza and Leibniz being the other two.

There were the three “British empiricists” Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and they were followed by the great German thinkers Kant and Hegel.

Of the great philosophers just mentioned, in my judgment Hume belongs in the top six (along with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel).

For example, his reaction to the statement that x causes y would be not only to examine the nature of causation but also to question the nature of the individuals x and y!

“The identity that we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one, established by the mind, not a peculiar nature belonging to what we’re talking about” (from A Treatise of Human Nature). Wow!

With respect to causality, the subject matter of our experience is a sequence of forms (objects, things). It’s the evidence we have for all beliefs about the world that are not merely “relations of ideas” (such as, for example, rectangularity is a shape, yellow is a color, or 2 + 3 = 5).

What’s the evidence for the Causal Principle?

It’s not a necessarily true proposition like a relation of ideas. If it’s true, it must only be contingently true (and, so, possibly false).

It amounts only to the claim that our experience of the world must have a certain structure.

How, though, is it possible to know before experience what its structure must be? It’s not.

Are there emergent qualities? Hume’s answer: look and see. That’s a matter for scientists, not for philosophers sitting in their armchairs.

In other words, emergent qualities may exist. Therefore, the Causal Principle should be rejected. It’s too strong.

Even if there have never been any emergent qualities, there could be: “We can at least conceive a change in the course of nature; which sufficiently proves, that such a change is not absolutely impossible.”

What do we actually experience when we experience causal connections?

Take an example. Suppose that we are together and I slap my hand down on a table so that you hear a sound.

Suppose I do it repeatedly. There’s a sound following each slap.

If this kind of connection of event types were to recur for years, you’d naturally think something like slaps cause sounds.

You might come to think of it as a necessary connection. However, that would be a mistake.

It’s just a psychological association that you’ve drawn between two types of events.

Yes, you’d be shocked if the next time I slapped the table there was no sound.

However, that’s perfectly conceivable (thinkable, intelligible), which shows that the connection between those two types of events is not necessary.

In this way, for Hume causal connections are just psychological connections between events of different types.

Causation is a constant conjunction of event types.

That’s all there is to it.

However psychologically secure, the Causal Principle should be discarded.

If you want to know what causes what, look to experience rather than to logic or reason.

If it’s not immediately apparent to you how, by itself, this undermines the medieval worldview, it will become apparent in the next videos.

Be well . . .

Dr. Dennis E. Bradford