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Causality and Agency: A Refutation of Hume*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Martin Gerwin
Martin Gerwin
Affiliation:
St. John's College, University of Manitoba
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Extract

In Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume examines the idea of necessary connection, which, he observes, forms an indispensable part of our idea of cause and effect. He concludes:

The idea of necessity arises from some impression. There is no impression convey'd by our senses, which can give rise to that idea. It must, therefore, by deriv'd from some internal impression, or impression of reflexion. There is no internal impression which has any relation to the present business, but that propensity, which custom produces, to pass from an object to the idea of its usual attendant. This therefore is the essence of necessity. Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from causes to effects and from effects to causes, according to their experienced union.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 3 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1987

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References

1 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 1.3. §2, 75–77.Google Scholar Cf. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Introduction by Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 7.1, 62–63.Google Scholar When I cite the Treatise, I shall frequently give parallel references to the Enquiry which will, I believe, indicate that Hume had not changed his mind on the matters in question when he wrote the later work.

2 Treatise, 1.3.§14, 165–166. Cf. Enquiry, 7.2, 73–76.

3 Some scholars believe that Hume did not intend to make this negative ontological claim, but only the sceptical claim that we can form no adequate idea of the “secret powers” by which natural causes produce their effects. See Smith, Norman Kemp, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941), 391–399,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wright, John P., The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Minneapolis: MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983),Google Scholarpassim. If Kemp Smith and Wright are correct in their reading of Hume, then my quarrel is not with Hume's ontology, but only with his scepticism. I have elected to take Hume literally when he says that necessity does not exist in objects. Thus, as I see it, Hume is committed to the view that the secret powers of things are ultimately reducible to de facto regularities in the behaviour of their basic constituents. On such a view, the special status we rightly accord to what we take to be lawful causal regularities will have to be accounted for by the inductive warrant we possess for believing that there never have been or would be any exceptions to those particular regularities. This reading of Hume is in accord with the interpretation offered by Beauchamp, Tom and Rosenberg, Alexander in Hume and the Problem of Causation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 6–12, 92, 96–98, 115–118 and 139–156Google Scholar.

4 Treatise, 1.1.§1, 1–4. Cf. Enquiry, 2, 17–22.

5 Treatise, 1.3.§2, 77. Cf. Enquiry, 7.1, 63.

6 Flew, Antony, “Can an Effect Precede its Cause?” II, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 28 (1954), 49–50Google Scholar.

7 Enquiry, 7.1, 66.

8 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, Introduction by Brody, Baruch A. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 270Google Scholar.

9 Treatise, Appendix, 632–633. Cf. Enquiry, 7.1, 62–67.

10 Treatise, 1.1.§2, 7–8.

11 See Moore, G. E., Ethics (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 88Google ScholarPubMed.

12 Cf. Brown, Donald, Action (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Brown, however, uses the term “natural agent” in a sense which excludes human beings.

13 Wright, Georg Henrik von, “On the Logic and Epistemology of the Causal Relation", in Suppes, Patrick et al., eds., Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science 4, Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Bucharest, 1971 (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1973), 306–307Google Scholar. Re-printed in Ernest Sosa, ed., Causation and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 108–109. See also Wright's, vonExplanation and Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 69–82Google Scholar.

14 Moliere, Le Malade Imaginaire, troisième intermède.

15 Mackie, J. L., The Cement of the Universe, paperback edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), ix. Mackie's own terms are “factual", “conceptual”, and “epistemic”CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See Lewis, David, Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), chap. 4Google Scholar; also Lewis's, new book On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985)Google Scholar.

17 See especially Popper, Karl, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations” (1953) and “Three Views concerning Human Knowledge” (1956), in Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 33–65 and 97–119Google Scholar.

18 Flew, Antony, Review of The Cement of the Universe by Mackie, J. L., Philosophical Books 16 (1975), 4Google Scholar.

19 Salmon, Wesley, “Theoretical Explanation”, in Korner, S., ed., Explanation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 131Google Scholar.

20 Enquiry, 7.2, 74.

21 Cf. Treatise, 1.3.§14, 167.

22 Piaget, Jean, The Child's Construction of Reality, tr. Cook, Margaret (London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 225.Google Scholar See also Piaget's, The Child's Conception of Physical Causality, tr. Gabain, Marjorie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930)Google Scholar and The Origin of Intelligence in the Child, tr. Cook, Margaret (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953)Google Scholar.