Premise 1: Our idea of causation seems to be the idea of necessary connection. We can then refine our first causal relationship to plausible be that event A under proper conditions will cause event B necessarily under proper conditions.īut Hume moves against this claim of necessary connection with a simple argument under the empiricist assumption: One might retort that if I glue the stationary billiard ball to the pool table, then it won’t acquire motion after the strike, is it still necessary? But now I can say that the glue caused the stationary billiard ball to not acquire motion.
A necessary connection between two events, in case, means that event A is sufficient for event B. That is, even before the moving ball strikes the stationary billiard ball, we can confidently expect that the stationary ball will acquire motion after the strike. We believe that a causal connection between two objects (especially in this case) is a necessary connection. In this example, we say that one billiard ball has caused another to move. Finally, the moment after the striking takes place, the stationary billiard ball suddenly acquires a motion. We then observe that the moving billiard ball strikes the stationary billiard ball.
Hume gives the famous example of observing a billiard ball moving towards another stationary billiard ball. When we assume all our ideas originate from experience, it follows that our idea of causation must also have an empirical basis. Naturally, an attempt to study causation from this point of view would demands that we observe instances of causal relationships. For Hume, before our first sensory experience as babies, we were essentially blank slates waiting for contents to fill our mind. I plan to devote the rest of this article to explicate his theory and note some salient problems raised against it.Īs a renowned thinker in the empiricist tradition, Hume assumes all human knowledge comes from information perceived by the senses. His regularity theory of causation set the foundation for subsequent study on this topic and remains influential today. Even though a considerable amount of scientific contributions in studying physical phenomena use the concept of causation, the study of causality in general as a substantial relationship in itself is, to this day, a contentious problem for academics.ĭavid Hume, an 18th-century philosopher in the classic empiricist tradition, was particularly influential in the discussion of causation. To put it in simple terms, we want to investigate what exactly is causality, and we care about whether or not it exists. Philosophers who investigate the nature of causality are interested in the unique metaphysical link between one object and another(or one event or another). But what exactly is causation? When we ask ourselves this substantial question, we often fail to clarify the concept of causation in terms of anything else. Knowing things are causally related usually enables us to have reliable expectations. We use causation when we predict future events. To bring about change in our lives or to work towards our goals, we reason in causal relationships to ensure our actions are efficient and achieve our intended ends. We explain almost everything around us in various forms of causal relationships. It is just a fact that we appeal to causation as if it is common sense.