David Hume's Problem of Causation

[Dragohunter]

Hume correctly explains that Humans do not know the 'Necessary Connetion' between objects and thus do not know the relationship between cause and effect. This quite simply is the Problem of Causation - that until we know 'what exists' and the 'necessary connexions' between these things that exist, then it is impossible for Humanity to have certainty of knowledge. This then leads to the further Problem of Induction, for if we do not know the a priori cause of events then we have no Principles from which to logically deduce our conclusions. We are left simply observing that one event follows another and seems connected, but we do not know how or why, thus we must depend upon repeated observation (Induction) to determine the Laws of Nature (the current state of Modern Physics) and hence tacitly assuming (without reason) that the future is like the past. (It is simply a habit of thinking to connect two events which seem to occur in conjunction and necessarily assumes that the future will be like the past)

When one event continually follows after another, most people think that a connection between the two events makes the second event follow from the first (post hoc ergo propter hoc). Hume challenged this belief in the first book of his Treatise on Human Nature and later in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. He noted that although we do perceive the one event following the other, we do not perceive any necessary connection between the two. And according to his skeptical epistemology, we can only trust the knowledge that we acquire from our perceptions. Hume asserted that our idea of causation consists of little more than expectation for certain events to result after other events that precede them. "We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoined together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the objects acquire an union in the imagination." We cannot actually say that one event caused another. All we know for sure is that one event is correlated to another. For this Hume coined the term 'constant conjunction'. That is, when we see that one event always 'causes' another, what we are really seeing is that one event has always been 'constantly conjoined' to the other. As a consequence, we have no reason to believe that one caused the other, or that they will continue to be 'constantly conjoined' in the future . The reason we do believe in cause and effect is not because cause and effect are the actual way of nature; we believe because of the psychological habits of human nature.

Such a lean conception robs causation of all its force, and some later Humeans like Bertrand Russell have dismissed the notion of causation altogether as something akin to superstition. But this defies common sense, thereby creating the problem of causation – what justifies our belief in a causal connection and what kind of connection can we have knowledge of? – a problem which has no accepted solution. Hume held that we (and other animals) have an instinctive belief in causation based on the development of habits in our nervous system, a belief that we cannot eliminate, but which we cannot prove true through any argument, deductive or inductive, just as is the case with regard to our belief in the reality of the external world.

Source.

No then, this all sounds ridiculous but it hasn't been logically defeated at all for the past 250 years. What are your thoughts on this?

Edited June 25, 2008 by Saru
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