Monday, April 14, 2008

Hume on Causality Pt. II: The Problem of Induction

Given the considerations in my last post, it seems evident that there must be something wrong with how we make inferences concerning cause and effect. If what we call 'cause' is really just "an object, followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second"(Hume, VII pt. II), then it seems that our idea of causality is not one produced by knowledge, but actually by habit or custom. What we really mean, then, when we say that something causes something else, is that in the past, it has always been the case that one event follows another. We do not actually have knowledge of what it is in the one event/object that "causes" the other event or object to happen. That is, we are ignorant of the force or power which compels one event to follow another. Our reasoning, if any, proceeds in this manner of induction:

Premise 1. At time q event A was accompanied by event B.
Premise 2. At time r event A was accompanied by event B.
Premise 3. At time s event A was accompanied by event B
Premise 4. At time t event A was accompanied by event B.

CONCLUSION: Event A causes event B.

Hume points out that we would never infer the conclusion after only one instance of the above happening. If we only observed it once, we would say only that events A and B were conjoined in our experience. But because we experience a constant conjunction of event A and B, we infer that there is some type of connection between them, which we call causality. We do not see this connection, nor do we know what it is.

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