Monday, April 14, 2008

Hume on Causality Part III: Implications for Science

Given the considerations in my last two posts, we can ask questions of major consequence. The first is: what, then, given a new understanding of how we make inferences concerning causality, are the implications for science? What kind of certainty can we really furnish? Can we really say that we know that one event will follow another simply because it always has in the past? An this brings us back to one of Hume's initial questions: What reason (if we say that we indeed do know that one event will follow another because of past experiences) do we have for believing that the future will be like the past? It does not seem like we have any real reasons other than our deeply-implanted beliefs which are a result of custom and habit.

Here is the big question for science: What is a law?
A law is supposed to be a rule that dictates how nature behaves. A law is supposed to give us certainty in knowing how one body willact in a given situation. But given Hume's considerations, it seems like a law is more like a description of our past experience. Saying that something is a law of nature might be similar to saying "Well, physical bodies have behaved in such and such manner in the past without fail, so much so that we conclude that they will always behave in this way". Here is the killer for realists about scientific laws: Are the words "law" and "causality" really just useful fictions for describing our experience of the world? Maybe these words do not refer to anything that really exists out there in the physical world- maybe they are just useful terms to help us express what we are trying to say when it comes to explaining scientific theories.

3 comments:

Sandy Rizzo said...

great post Dan.

Anonymous said...

I don't get why there has to be a pattern. So yeah, they are just useful in describing our past.

Safi's Blog said...

I think a law is just an expression of past experiences that we have. We use this to formulate an opinion regarding future events. But is argument is flawed because this implies that that specific law will be applicable in every given situation, when the person who has declared that law can't possibly perform every single experiment that is necessary to prove that laws validity.