So. I know.
Okay. So let's try and go a bit deeper, understanding what's going on in Hume's discussion of causation.
And I'm going to mention here a, uh, if you like, a competing view which has been quite popular in recent years.
In the last 20 years or so, there's been quite a fashion known as the new HUME and the new humans, notably John Wright, Edward Craig Galen Strawson.
They want to say that HUME believes in a kind of causation that goes beyond the two definitions.
As I've been explaining. HUME, I take it that these two definitions are intended to capture all that we can legitimately mean by causation.
But according to the new humans, there's something more. And HUME believes that there's something more in objects.
Incidentally, Peter Cale is also somewhat in the new human camp, though he takes a rather more agnostic line on whether he actually is a believer.
That's why I haven't mentioned him here, but there are quite a few others as well.
Donna Livingston and Janet Broughton.
It's been quite a trend in recent years towards interpreting HUME in such a way
that his two definitions are not really intended to specify what causation is,
but rather something like all that we can know of it. Now the main argument, I think,
that has pushed people in this direction to suggest that HUME thinks there is something more to causation than is in his two definitions is to do,
I think, with the extent to which HUME is committed to causal science.
So the assumption has been that if HUME is a real believer in causation, then he must be a believer in real causes.
And real causes we all know are more than his two definitions.
I think that's wrong. I think HUME does think that a real cause is just what his two definitions say.
But I'll argue for that shortly.
If you come across the term sceptical realism that's often used for this point of view realism because the claim is that
there is something to causation going beyond the two definitions typically described in terms of a priori inference,
the thought is this when a cause is be.
A has some property. We have no grasp of it at all.
We, we have no impression of this property, but we suppose that there is some property in a which is such that if we knew of it,
we would be able to infer that B would follow a priori.
That's what a real cause is, a real necessity.
It's a kind of logical necessity in there. But it's beyond our grasp.
So it's sceptical realism because it's realist about that kind of necessity,
but sceptical in the sense that it denies that we have any real grasp of what that kind of thing would be.
So what I want to do now is, first of all, make clear that there is something to the case that the new humans have put in,
that one ought to recognise that HUME is very much committed to causation.
In other words, the impetus behind that view, I think,
is absolutely correct and has provided a useful corrective to those who are inclined to say, Well, HUME isn't really a believer in causation.
He clearly is a believer in causation. And he's a believer in causal science.
So for particular points, I'm going to go through here.
First of all, HUME says that causation is the basis of all empirical inference.
He proposes rules by which to judge of causes and effects.
He talks of secret powers. And he advocates a search for hidden causes.
So let's go through those quickly. Okay.
So first of all, in the argument concerning induction.
Absolutely clear.
The only connection or relation of objects which can lead us beyond the immediate impressions of our memory and senses is that of cause and effect,
perhaps even more clearly in the inquiry. So he's considered view.
All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect.
So if HUME thinks we ever can infer anything beyond what we immediately perceive.
It's got to be on the basis of causation. Immediately after the section on the idea of necessary connection in one 315.
It's called Rules by Which to Judge of causes and effects.
We get this? Since therefore it is possible for all objects to become causes or effects to each other.
It may be proper to fix some general rules by which we may know when they really also.
Now, that seems strange if you think he isn't a believer in causation.
He's just given these two definitions of cause. Terms of constant conjunction and inference.
And now he's saying, well, let us sort out some rules by which we can judge when things really are causes and effects.
The problem is that what we experience in nature often involves compounded causes and compounded effects.
Separating out exactly what's the cause of what can be quite difficult.
So he gives some rules in this section designed to facilitate that.
Again, it's hardly the sort of thing you do if you don't believe that causal reasoning makes any sense.
In the inquiry, particularly, HUME talks about secret powers.
And I think these quotations are the sorts of things that make people most inclined to go towards new humanism.
He talks about the secret powers of bodies, those powers and principles on which the influence of objects entirely depends.
That kind of thing. He seems to talk as though he thinks that powers and forces are genuine things in objects.
How does that square with his analysis of causation?
Now. He clearly thinks that necessity or power is an essential component of the idea of a cause.
And he says this repeatedly, According to my definitions, necessity makes an essential part of causation.
And I mentioned two other passages from the treatise there, which say the same kind of thing.
Again, in the inquiry, necessity may be defined two ways conformable to the two definitions, of course, of which it makes an essential part.
So. There's no way that you can say that HUME is a believer in causation, but not say that he's a believer in necessity.
Here he is saying necessity is an absolutely essential part of causation.
So if causal reasoning is the foundation of all, our reasoning concerning matter of fact and necessity is an essential part of our notion of cause.
It looks like. Q must in some sense, take necessity seriously?
He also advocates a search for hidden causes.
So here's a passage which is in the treatise, but it's actually copied more or less exactly in the inquiry in section eight.
And here he's saying that the layman may find that things act erratically and just says, oh, sometimes the causes work, sometimes they don't.
But philosophers who know better.
In other words, natural scientists try to find underlying hidden causes, which will explain why things work on some occasions and not on others.
And lo and behold, they're successful.
Normally when they do that, they do actually find the hidden explanation that they're looking for in terms of other causes.
Okay. So those are the sorts of points that can be made.
And I think they're very strong points to show that HUME is a serious believer in causation.
Somebody who wants to say he's just rejecting the notion of cause or indeed rejecting the notion of causal necessity, I think is simply wrong.
What I want to challenge is the presumption that this implies causal realism.
In any sense, that goes beyond his two definitions.
I do not think it does. So here are three points that can be made to substantiate that.
First of all, I'm going to say a little bit about Berkeley. Um, then I'm going to talk a bit about the argument.
I'm just going to review the argument that we've already seen in detail.
And then I'm going to show you a footnote, which I think is also rather significant.
So first of all, Berkeley. So Berkeley famously is an instrumentalist.
Remember, he thinks that objects in the world have no causal power.
Whatever. When we see one billiard ball hitting another and the other one moving, actually what's happening?
What's really happening there is that God is creating impressions in our mind as of billiard balls.
Moreover, God is carefully orchestrating it so that the apparent motion of the billiard balls all fits in beautifully with Newtonian mechanics.
And Berkeley says it's absolutely fine in those circumstances to do science, to talk about physical objects as causes to assign powers.
Things like, you know, the gravitational force proportional to the mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
There's really no such thing as gravitational force. There's really just God pulling all the strings, making sure things work in a certain way.
But doing all the mechanics is absolutely fine.
We can do science, even though what we're identifying as forces in objects are not really forces in objects.
Now, if Berkeley can do it. HUME Can do it.
And the passage here, which is taken from the first inquiry, though there are some of the words in the production to the treaties.
As I've noted there, that passage is very reminiscent of the Barkley and passage.
He's saying that science is a matter of resolving the particular effects that we observe into a few general causes.
It's all about systematised action, and that notion of science can go perfectly well for an instrumentalist.
We've looked at the argument of one 314, and I just want to draw attention to some points concerning that argument.
First of all, it's structured entirely around the copy principle. HUME sets out to find the impression from which the idea is derived.
That's why one 314 is set up as it is.
It's entirely a quest for an impression which will generate the idea.
Moreover, he's absolutely clear that the copy principle is a tool for deciding questions of meaning.
And I've given one passage there, just example, one from the treatise, one from the abstract, one from the inquiry.
Moreover, he says that that's what he's doing, that he's trying to find out what causal terms mean,
and again, quotations from the treatise, the abstract and the inquiry.
When he identifies the impression of necessary connection and he observes that it's a subjective impression.
It's in the mind, as it were, rather than objects.
He explicitly draws the apparently anti realist implication when he says necessity is something that's in the mind, not in objects.
That's entirely consistent with what he's been doing.
He's looking for the impression that's going to explain the meaning of the idea of necessary connection.
He finds it. It's in minds, not in objects. And he draws the conclusion that necessity means something that's in minds, not in objects.
And then he gives two definitions of calls which incorporate precisely that anti realist perspective.
Notice anti realist in terms of denying the existence of anything beyond the two definitions.
So the whole structure of Hume's argument seems precisely designed to deny that there is anything beyond the two definitions.
When we talk about necessity or power.
What about those passages in the inquiry where HUME talks about powers in objects that may seem a little bit puzzling?
Well, claims Lord Keynes.
Henry HUME, who was a distant cousin of Hume's actually, and something of a mentor of his when he started off at Edinburgh University in 1751,
came published essays on the principles of morality in natural religion.
And he quoted Hume's references to powers in the inquiry against him.
So, Keynes said, against HUME.
Look, here you are talking about powers, and yet you are drawing the conclusion that there is no such thing as power in objects.
So you are inconsistent.
Now claims particularly cited the first three sentences of the 16th paragraph of Section four of the inquiry that had been published in 1748.
In the 1750 edition, HUME added a footnote to the following sentence.
The word power is here, used in a loose and popular sense.
The more accurate explication of it would give additional evidence to this argument.
See Section seven. So what I think is going on here is this.
Keynes and HUME knew each other well. They swapped manuscripts prior to publication.
In fact, Combs advised HUME not to publish the inquiry because he thought it was too dangerous.
It had anti-religious stuff in it. I think Cain's put this objection to HUME.
He said, Look, you're inconsistent. Look at this paragraph, paragraph 16.
You are referring to hidden powers in objects that's inconsistent with your own conclusion about necessary connection in Section seven.
So he even puts a footnote in and says, When I refer to powers in objects,
bear in mind this has to be interpreted in the light of my discussion of the idea of necessary connection.
That's coming later in Section seven. So actually I think that footnote gives tremendously strong evidence,
given the circumstantial connection between the the point at which claims was criticising him and the point at which the footnote was inserted.
Besides which, I think there's another much simpler explanation for why HUME puts all this stuff about powers in the inquiry.
In the treatise, Hume's idea of causation is actually a pretty crude one.
He puts it nearly all in terms of one object being followed by another A, followed by B,
or if you look at the rules by which to judge of causes and effect, it gets a little bit more complicated.
You know, A is followed by B, but only when C is present and not when D is present.
It's that kind of thing. Now in the inquiry.
HUME has realised that that's not the way scientific causation works.
When you calculate the motion of billiard balls or the motion of planets,
you do not simply do it in terms of one kind of one kind of event, followed by another kind of event.
Rather what you do, you attribute forces to the objects.
For example, gravitational forces between planets, between planets and the sun, between the moon and the earth.
You calculate the overall force and then you predict the motion on the basis of that using the laws of motion.
So he's realised that science works in terms of forces, not in terms of just one event followed by another.
And in the inquiry, that kind of talk is quite prominent.
But it's very striking that he talks about such things twice in footnotes to section seven of the inquiry, that of the idea of necessary connection.
And I think he's precisely making the point there that this sort of talk of forces is entirely consistent with his account of necessary connection.
He's not when he talks about powers and forces, all he means to talk about is uniformity is in the object.
Uniformity is in the events. How they happen. Systematise ation.
Nothing metaphysically deeper than his two definitions can encompass.
Okay. Let's come back to those two definitions. Why two definitions?
One of them is based on regular succession. One of them is based on the mind's tendency to infer a common objection.
Against whom is that? The two don't seem to coincide. Okay.
You could have a followed by B repeatedly. And reliably without anyone ever knowing of it.
And if nobody knew about it, then nobody would infer B from A so the second definition wouldn't apply.
On the other hand, I might be followed by be quite a lot of the time and somebody observes that.
But it might be that often isn't followed by me as well. But maybe that isn't observed.
So somebody mistakenly infers be from a, in which case it looks like the second definition applies, but not the first.
So there's a problem. We've got two definitions, but they don't seem to be so extensive.
They don't apply to the same things. Now.
I think the way to make sense of the definitions, again, this is controversial.
There are a lot of different discussions of the two definitions.
Different scholars have different views as to how they should be interpreted.
I've got some references on the website. Two things to read about this.
My own view about it is this roughly, I don't think we should think of the definitions as intended to specify necessary and sufficient conditions.
Remember, HUME has a genetic. Understanding of meaning.
In order to understand what necessary connection means, what the idea means, we have to understand where it comes from.
The impression. Now, that's a very different notion of meaning from one that's couched in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
So I suggest that what's going on is that the second definition is specifying
sort of something like paradigm conditions in which that impression arises.
When A is followed by B again and again, you see and A you find yourself inferring A B don't you?
There you are. Having found yourself making that inference, you now know what the essence of necessity is.
It's to do with inferring that you from with one thing, following from another consequent reality.
But nothing in Hume's theory requires that having got that idea, you should only apply it to the cases in which it naturally arises.
And I think the point of the first definition and the rules by which to judge, of course,
is in effect is to say, this is how you should systematise the application of that idea.
So you get the idea from the paradigm case where you find yourself drawing that inference.
But then if you're systematic, you apply it elsewhere.
Whenever you find a constant conjunction. Now that makes the two definitions complementary.
They're not conflicting. They're doing different jobs, and I think it makes pretty good sense.
The second definition identifies the idea. The first gives you a criterion for applying it.
Now, interestingly, in the moral inquiry, this is something to which Don Garrett drew attention.
And I think it's very insightful in the moral inquiry, you get two definitions of virtue or personal merit, and they seem to be very similar.
That is the. The relation between them is very similar to the relation between the two definitions of course.
So personal merit consists all together in the possession of mental qualities, useful or agreeable to the person, himself or to others.
And then he refers back to that as a definition.
My hypothesis defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator, the pleasing sentiment of approbation.
Now. How do we square that?
But what Kim is doing here, and it's very clear from his discussion he's saying that moral ideas arise from a particular kind of impression,
the impression of a generalised moral approval.
Now, unless you've actually felt that unless you've experienced moral approval,
you won't even know what people are talking about when they express it.
I'm sorry this thing is. Can I stop it? Right.
Thank you. Shall I just stop?
So unless you've experienced that impression of moral approval, you won't even know what people mean when they talk about it.
But once you've got that impression and hence got the idea, you can then examine the occasions that prompted.
And if you do that in a systematic way, if you look at how people apply the notion of moral approval,
you'll find that there is a system to it that we standardly apply it in cases where people have qualities that are useful or agreeable,
either to themselves or to others. So that is the analysis of personal merit or virtue that HUME gives.
And then he actually applies it critically.
He says, look at the monkish virtues in celibacy, mortification, self-denial, humility, fasting, solitude, all these sorts of things.
And he says, actually, these aren't virtues.
They've been described as virtues, but they're not because they're not useful or agreeable to oneself or others.
So it's a similar kind of things with the discussion of causation.
You get an idea, either the idea of personal merit or the idea of one thing following from another.
But then you systematise the application of it so that you draw up general rules about when is the right time to apply it.
And that corresponds to the first definition in each case.
Now notice that that understanding does tell strongly in the direction of a fairly traditional understanding of HUME,
and he realised in the sense of denying anything beyond the two definitions.
We're reading, in a sense, reading necessity into the world rather than reading it off the world,
just as in a sense we read moral virtue into things rather than reading it off them.
That doesn't mean that we're irrational in doing that. It doesn't mean we're making a mistake.
But the crucial point is it's our system authorisation of the application of the idea that's doing the work here.
It's not that we're getting better at observing moral virtue in the world.
We're getting better at applying that concept to the world.
So it's in which by applying the concept in this way,
we raise a new creation by gilding or staining natural objects with the colours borrowed from internal sentiment.
HUME There is talking about morality, but something not far from that seems to be going on in the case of causation.