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With Hume, the big idea of empiricism, that all our knowledge is based on experience, reaches perhaps a final set of extreme conclusions.
Locke thought there was a material world, which could sensibly be studied. He thought there were people, and he thought you could prove the existence of God. Though perhaps he develops and plays with some dangerous weapons, he doesn't use them to destroy anything that hadn't been terminally undermined by earlier or other writers.
Berkeley looked at from one perspective used the empiricist armoury to wound. From that perspective he exploited the empiricist challenge that we could find no plausible source for human knowledge except in human sense experience to cast doubt on the existence of a world beyond sense.
It is true that this was not quite Berkeley's own perspective. All he was denying, thought Berkeley, was the unknowable , impenetrable, unintelligible world that was conjured up by the sophistry of what he thought of as Lockean notions of 'substance', the idea that though we could know nothing of it there was out there a quality-less, Something-we-know-not-what.
But Berkeley was fighting his resourceful battle on beha lf of an old idea: God. He was horrified by the dynamic towards scepticism - a scepticism above all about God - which he saw implicit in the developing empiricist tradition.
With Hume, Berkeley's fears are realized, as the thorough scepticism he feared achieves clear and trenchant articulation.
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Some internet resources An excellent web edition of Hume's Enquiry has been developed by Peter Millican, who also offers an authoritative guide to the commentary literature.
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Hume wields the weapons of empiricism to show :-
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1711-1776 Published his philosophical masterpiece - his Treatise of Human Nature - when he was 26. Admitted to Edinburgh University when he was twelve, but left without graduating. What put him off was 'an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning.' Spent part of his career in Paris as a diplomat, but most of it in Edinburgh. Brought back Jean-Jaques Rousseau on one occasion, as an act of friendship, but was not well repaid. Renowned in his lifetime and for a long period afterward as a historian: author of A History of Great Britain. |
As an empiricist Hume needed to know how the concept of causality was rooted in experience.
What is our idea of causality?
Think of some examples.
Hume says the idea of a cause seems to be the idea of two things being connected, such that if one happens, so does the other.
He refers to this as a 'necessary connection'.
But if this is what we mean to assert when we say A causes B - that there is a connection between the two, such that one pulls the other along with it - then, says Hume, we can never have any proper grounds for making such an assertion.
For an empiricist, we would be justified in asserting that two things were causally connected if the connection could be observed. - if the connection were the object of sensory perception of some mode. Hume's objection is that we can never have any perceptual grounds for a claim that two things are necessarily connected.
Notice that at this point he is not saying: we have no concept of necessary connection. He is saying we can never apply the concept to the world revealed by sense.
Locke would have said: how did we acquire the idea of a cause? From what idea or ideas of sense?
Hume answers that question, as I shall make clear. But here he is asking a different one.
He asks: when are we warranted in asserting that two things are necessarily connected? And he answers: never.
All we can observe as we study a pair of events is that at most they always go together.
Hume says it must therefore be on the basis of observing such constant conjunctions that we assert causal relationships.
The constant conjunctions do not warrant our assertion of necessary connection.
It is Hume's thesis that we see the constant conjunction and move to the conclusion that there must be a necessary connection. This movement from the observation to the conclusion that there is a necessary connection is a matter of psychology, in Hume's view. There is no warrant for the move. It is not justified in logic. It is a logically unjustified leap.
| Is there an echo of Malebranche in Hume's suggestion that just because one event always follows another doesn't mean they are 'directly connected'? |
We have said that all that can be observed among events are constant conjunctions. When we identify a constant conjunction we leap to the conclusion that the two events are necessarily connected.
But what exactly is it to say two events are 'necessarily connected'?
Hume answers this by interpreting the question in a Lockean way. To understand what a word means we need to think of the idea it stands for, and to ask what gave rise to that idea.
This is because words stand for ideas, and the meaning of a word is the idea it stands for. To make clear an idea, all that can be done is to explain where it comes from, or how it is made up.
So we can ask the Lockean question: What is the origin of our idea of necessary connection?
Hume says it comes about in the following way:
It comes, he says, from a habit.
Take an example of a perceived constant conjunction: One ball rolls up, comes into contact with another: and the other moves off.
Whenever I see one ball moving up to another and coming into contact with it, I see the other moving off.
I constantly seeing B immediately after seeing A.
This regular experience results in the following: my mind, when it sees A moves of itself to the thought of B.
It doesn't wait for the sight of B.
It moves on its own to the thought of B.
If I introspect on this activity of the mind, I see an association between two ideas, the idea of A and the idea of B.
It is this which gives me the idea of necessary connection.
Hume is suggesting a sort of projection.
Our minds move from one idea to another. We introspect on this. Then we think: the world is like that. One thing leads onto another.
Our belief in causality is a projection onto the world of a habit of our minds.
'Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another; but he would not be able to discover anything farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect ... nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of anything beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses.
Suppose, again, that he has acquired more experience, and has lived so long in the world as to have observed familiar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together; what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance of the other. Yet he has not, by all his experience, acquired any idea or knowledge of the secret power by which the one object produces the other; nor is it by any process of reasoning, he is engaged to draw this inference. But still he finds himself determined to draw it: and though he should be convinced that his understanding has no part in the operation, he would nevertheless continue in the same course of thinking. There is some other principle which determines him to form such a conclusion. This principle is Custom or Habit.'
Hume, Enquiry, V, I
What are the implications for the denial of the reality of causality?
Immense.
One way of putting it is that everything that happens is 'contingent'. All events, as Hume puts it, are 'loose' and 'unconnected'.
If events are so, if there are no real connections between things, no degree of experience can lead us to know anything about the future.
We may have observed the sun to rise on a daily basis for a very long while, but if there are no connections between things, none of that carries any implications for the future.
Tomorrow it may rise, and it may not. We have no basis whatever for thinking that one of these is more likely than the other.
'It is constantly supposed, that there is a connection between present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely spurious.' Hume, Enquiry, IV, 1.
We often speak of 'laws of nature'.
If there are such things as laws of nature, then Hume's view of causality implies that they do not reflect real connections between things.
They may express regularities - constant conjunctions - but if they do we cannot think of those regularities as rooted in anything. They are just regularities. They are simply patterns.
Think of the laws which express the movements of the heavenly bodies. These express regularities, patterns. Can we imagine these regularities not springing from anything - as mere regularities?
This enables him for one thing to pour scorn on the way in which miracles are used in religious thought. A miracle is something which is ordinarily impossible, something which involves the breach of a law of nature. There is no such thing as impossible for Hume. Any evidence for a miracle is evidence against the validity of the law which allegedly is being broken. We consider Hume's argument against the argument for the existence of God based on Miracles later.
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Related to Hume's view of causality is a modern account called the 'regularity' analysis. Here is a 'standard' formulation: 'If c is a cause of e, there must be types or kinds of events, F and G, such that c is of kind F, e is of kind G, and events of kind F are regularly followed by events of kind G.' Audi's dictionary, article on 'Causation'. But note: it has been argued that Hume's view is certainly not a version of this - see Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion, Oxford, 1989, OUP.
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One way in which the difficulty of interpreting Hume comes out is in the fact that there are passages in Hume which seem, in spite of all that I have said above, to commit him very clearly to the view that there are forces or powers behind the appearances of things. See Enquiry IV, II.
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