Reference no: EM133401262

Case: Hume was a defender of empiricism. This is the view that our knowledge and understanding of the world comes entirely from experience. Although earlier philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Leibniz, thought that some of our knowledge of the world is a priori, is available to us prior to experience by pure reasoning, empiricists like Hume were skeptical that we had any ideas or knowledge of the world that does not come from experience. Hume held a particularly stringent form of empiricism in which all of our ideas, the concepts we have that structure our thoughts and what we can know, are built up out of copies of simple sense impressions. For example, we can form the idea of a blue thing or a square thing, of a loud thing or a soft thing, because we have sense impressions of these kinds. The simple ideas (of blueness or squareness, loudness or softness) are copies our minds make of these basic sense impressions. For Hume, it is not that we cannot form ideas of things we haven't actually seen with our eyes, or heard or smelled or tasted or felt. We can, but any new ideas we form must ultimately be complex ideas built up out of the ideas of things we have already experienced. For example, we can easily come to have the idea of a unicorn, even though no one has ever seen one, by combining the ideas of things we have seen, a horse and a horn. One can easily have the idea of a one-mile-wide golden sphere as well even if one hasn't ever seen one of those, by combining the simple ideas of goldness and roundness
and being one mile wide.

If this form of empiricism is appealing to you as it was to Hume, then you might start to worry, as he did, about how one could ever form the idea of a causal relation between objects. Surely we can perceive objects and events and if we want to talk in Hume's way, we can say we form sense impressions of them, but do we ever directly perceive the causal relations between objects and events? Is there a sense impression that we form of a causing itself? To take a silly example, say your friend sits across a table from you and quickly drinks a pint of beer. He then becomes red in the face and stumbles around drunk. This is a clear case of causation if anything is: his drinking causes his redness and stumbling. But although you may perceive his drinking and perceive as well his subsequent redness and stumbling, do you perceive the causal link between the drinking and the redness and stumbling? What would that even look like? But then if Hume is right and all of our ideas are built up out of simpler ideas copied from sense impressions we've had, then how is it possible for us to ever have the idea of the causal relation linking the drinking and the redness and stumbling?

A key part of the trouble the concept of causation makes for the empiricist is that causation is typically thought of as a necessary connection between events. Effects seem to be events that follow as a matter of necessity from their causes. An effect doesn't just follow a cause - it has to follow, once the cause occurs. If your friend quickly drinks a pint of beer, then if this drinking is a cause of his subsequent redness and stumbling, it is a sure thing, the universe guarantees, that he will get red and stumble around once he drinks the beer.2 But although we may perceive the effect to follow the cause, it is hard to see how we may perceive it following the cause with necessity, as the cause really making the effect happen rather than simply happening before it. There is a lively historical debate about what exactly Hume thought here and whether he thought that causes indeed must be events that necessitate their effects. Those philosophers who think that Hume held on to this position have called the view about causation they think he held 'skeptical realism' - this is the view that although causal relations really do exist in our world and they are necessary connections between events, we can't really understand this notion of causation and so the nature of causal relations will always be out of our cognitive reach. We can only predict with likelihood which events will follow which; we can't see the hidden or 'secret' connections between what happens.

A far more common position one finds among historians of philosophy however is that Hume ended up rejecting the idea that causation is a necessary connection between events. Instead he found a way in which our concept of causation may arise out of a combination of simpler ideas derived from sense impressions. Since there is no problem with our observing how one event may follow another, one might use such complex ideas of one event following another to build up to a concept of causation. A natural thought is that one may view our idea that one type of event is the cause of another type of event as constituted by our idea of the regular succession of events of these kinds. If an event of a given kind follows another in just one case, we might not view the sequence as indicating a causal link, but if this happens regularly (that is, time after time, again and again), then this would seem to suggest that what we are seeing is a case of causation. Returning to the previous example, we may have observed the quick drinking of a pint of beer to be followed by redness and stumbling not just in this one circumstance, but also in several instances in the past; that redness and stumbling follows drinking with regularity. If so, we may infer from this that quickly drinking pints of beer is a cause of redness and stumbling.

This suggests an empiricist analysis of the concept of causation. An event of A-type (say a drinking) is a cause of an event of type B (say a stumbling) just in case events that are As are regularly followed by events that are Bs. This understanding of the concept of causation involves replacing the idea of causation as a necessary connection with the more empiricist-friendly idea of causation as the regular succession of events. This is a simple version of the regularity theory of causation. Hume is often thought to be the first regularity theorist of causation. To say that a particular event a is the cause of another particular event b, on this view, is to say that these events a and b both occur, a is an A-type of event, b is a B-type of event, and A-type events are regularly followed by B-type events. If this is on the right track, one might wonder why or how it is that anyone ever thought that causes necessitated their effects in the first place. How did we ever get confused into thinking we have the idea of necessary connections between events? Where did this idea come from? To answer this question, Hume proposed that after we see a regular sequence of events - an event of type-B again and again following an event of type-A, our mind comes to be led to have the expectation, when first observing an A-type event, that a B-type event is about to occur. This impression we have, this feeling upon experiencing one event that another is about to occur, is where we get the idea of something like a necessary connection between events. We mistakenly think this impression in our minds corresponds to some external necessitating force between the events themselves.

Please consider the following:

Copying Ideas from Experiences

Question: Do you agree with Hume that we do not directly observe the causal relations between events? What sort of examples might suggest otherwise? Besides causation, what are some other cases of concepts that we seem to have that do not seem to be built up out of ideas copied from sense impressions?