2 - Hume's Legacy: Regularity, Counterfactual and Probabilistic Theories of Causation

Summary

Our examination of causation begins with the work of David Hume, whose regularity theory is perhaps the best-known philosophical theory of causation. Modern versions of that theory include the counterfactual account due to Lewis and the probabilistic theory due to Suppes. However, there are problems with these regularity accounts. First, the Humean deterministic accounts are rejected on the grounds that science yields examples of indeterministic causation; and second, the probabilistic accounts of causation, including Lewis's counterfactual probabilistic theory, are shown to fall to a well-directed example of chance-lowering causality. This paves the way for the examination of a putatively non-Humean theory – the transference theory – in Chapter 3.

HUME'S REGULARITY ACCOUNT

The usual starting place for contemporary discussions of causation is the work of David Hume. There are numerous reasons for this, even though his work is well over two hundred years old. Over that period Hume's analysis has stood as the foundation of empiricist work on causality, and even today his actual account remains a “live option” (for example, Beauchamp and Rosenberg 1981). Further, his views still delineate much of the field, with many of the issues involved in modern discussions arising from Hume's insights. For these reasons, it is a good place for the present investigation to begin.

It is possible to find in Hume's account both a conceptual analysis of our everyday notion of causation, and an empirical analysis of causation as it is “in the objects."