Phil 212
Lecture 20: Hume on Causation.
§1. Pre-cursors.
1. Why is causation important for Hume?
a. General philosophical interest:
i. Metaphysical: What is the nature of causation, i.e. what are the relata,
what is the nature of the relation between them, etc?
ii. Epistemological: how, if at all, do we have knowledge of causation,
e.g. how can I know that if Socrates drinks hemlock he will for
certain die at some point in the future?
b. Internal to Hume’s system: Hume thinks that causation, along with
resemblance, contiguity in time and place, is a principle of association. It
helps to group ideas together. For instance, upon seeing Socrates ingest
Hemlock we have the idea of his death.
2. Recall the distinction between matters of fact and relations of idea. Earlier in the
Enquiry Hume has shown that causal inferences are not due to reasoning concerning
relations between ideas. We can conceive of the possibility of the cue striking the cue
ball and the cue ball not moving. So, no reasoning concerning the idea of these two
events can show that they are causally related. This is meant to show that causal
truths, if any, cannot, contra the Rationalists, be discovered by reason.
Conclusion: if there is knowledge of causation it must come from experience.
§2. Section VII
1. Hume complains “The chief obstacle…to our improvement in the moral or
metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms.”p350
The most obscure and uncertain of these are of power, force, energy or necessary
connection.
2. Copy Principle: “all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other
words, that it is impossible for us to think of anything, which we have not
antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses.”p350
3. We have the idea of a necessary connection. Produce the impression!!!
Note: Hume takes the standard conception of causation to involve the idea that a) causes and
effects are distinct events b) the relations between both events is a necessitation relation, e.g.
the occurrence of one necessitates the occurrence of the other.
§3. First Possible Source: External
An Argument
1. For any particular instance of cause and effect, to have the impression that one is the
cause of the other, one must be able to discover some quality “which binds the effect
to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other.”p351
2. We only have impressions of the sensible qualities of matter…. i.e. shape, size, etc.
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3. The sensible qualities of matter are not evidence of power or energy or cause.
4. Hence, there is no impression of causal power or necessary connection in any single
particular instance of cause and effect.
5. Hence, the idea of a necessary connection cannot come from an impression of a
single particular instance of cause and effect.
Note: Hume assumes there is an intimate relationship between causal power and necessary
connections. Recall our discussion of a virtus dormitiva explanation and Boyle’s/Galileo’s
worries.
Observation: All we discover when we examine our impressions is that one event does follow
from another. We do not discover the quality that ‘binds’ events together.
“The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an
uninterrupted succession; but the power or force, which actuates the whole machine, is
entirely concealed from us, and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of
body.”p352
§4. Second Possible Source: Internal
Hume considers the possibility that the idea is derived from reflection on the operations of
our own mind, i.e. copied from an internal impression. He considers both the case of
volition and contemplation.
A. We derive the idea from being aware of internal events causing external events.
e.g. I will to move my arm and my arm moves.
a. Hume worries that we do not experience the power or mean by which
the will moves the body.
i. We do not know by what power the soul moves the body.
ii. We cannot move all organs by the will, e.g. the liver.
iii. We do not move our limbs directly. We move our muscles,
nerves, etc. This produces movement in our limbs. We are not at
all aware how they produce movement.
Observation: All reflection of the will shows is that one event, an act of will, is followed by
another, a particular act. For example, we experience the will willing to move the arm. We
then see the arm being moved. We do not experience the relationship between these two
events.
B. We derive the idea from being aware of internal events causing internal events. I
summon up the idea of a donkey.
a. Again Hume worries that we do not experience the power by which the
cause produces the effect.
i. We do not know the power by which the soul could produce an
idea.
ii. We do not know why we have power over ideas but not other
‘internal events’ such as our passions.
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iii. We do not know why there is such variation between say a sick
person and a healthy person.
Conclusion: mankind “supposes that, in all these cases, they perceive the very force or energy
of the cause, by which it is connected with its effect, and is forever infallible in its
operation…. [but] we only learn by experience the frequent conjunction of objects, without
being ever able to comprehend anything like connection between them.” p356-357
§5. God.
1. Hume considers occasionalism, i.e. it is not a power in nature that binds causes to
effect. Rather, it is the volition of a Supreme Being “who wills that such particular
objects should forever be conjoined with each other.”p357
But:
a. We could never know the existence of such a divine power by experience.
b. We are ignorant of how God would operate on itself or on a body.
§6. Hume’s Positive Proposal
1. Are our ideas of cause and effect, causal power and necessary connection all
meaningless, because there are no impressions from which they can be derived?
2. NO. When we have experienced two events conjoined numerous times, there is
some new impression that is developed. It is in this impression that we can derive
some idea of causal power and necessary connection. What is this new impression?
3. After we experience many similar instances of similar events conjoined over and over
again, when we experience a similar first event, by habit, we feel that a certain second
event will follow it—the mind anticipates and forms the idea of the second event,
before it occurs. This feeling is the impression from which we derive the idea of a
necessary connection.
“This connection, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the
imagination from one object to its usual attendant is the sentiment or impression from
which we form the idea of power or necessary connection.”p361
Hume offers two definitions of cause:
1) “we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the
objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second.”p362
2) “an object followed by another, and whose appearance always conveys the thought
to that other.”p362
Conclusion: causation is taken to reduce to the non-causal relations of spatiotemporal
contiguity, succession and regularity between cause and effect.
c causes e iff
1) c is spatiotemporally contiguous to e
2) e succeeds c in time
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3) All events of type C (i.e. events that are like c) are regularly followed by (or
are constantly conjoined with events of type E (i.e. events like e)
§7. Consequences
Recall the two general philosophical questions about causation above.
Metaphysics: On the standard interpretation of Hume, Hume is denying that there are any
necessary connections in reality. That is, he is denying that there are real causes, as
traditionally construed, in reality.
Epistemology: Hume is denying that we can know the causes, as traditionally construed, in
reality. All I can know is that events of certain types regularly follow events of other types.
§8. Aristotle’s Last Word.
1. Aristotle’s theory of causality is very different. He distinguishes four different types
of causes, formal, final, efficient, material.
2. Hume claims that the two sides of the ‘causal’ relation are logically distinct events
separated by temporal succession. Not so for Aristotle. For instance, the formal
cause and what it is cause of are not two logically distinct events. The form of
Socrates and Socrates are not obviously logically distinct.
3. Even for efficient causation, causation does not relate two logically distinct events.
Rather there is one event, a change, which we experience in its totality. The sculptor
sculpting is just one event.
4. It is part of Hume’s general project to show that truths about causality (if there are
any) are not derived from reason, i.e. they are not known a-priori. But it is a general
feature of Aristotelian science that the definition (or analysis) of P must also cite the
explanation of why P occurs, e.g. a lunar eclipse. So there is no possibility of grasping
the idea of P without knowing what causes it.
S.O’C
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