Hume on Causation

Hello all, 

I hope everyone had a great vacation!

I've decided this week to keep the comments on your quizzes to a minimum, and post up a brief explanation of what we were looking for in an answer here.  I've tried to make sure it covers all the main points, but if you have any questions about your answer specifically, then feel free to email me.  Overall, I would say that the quizzes were fairly well done, but there were a few finer points that didn't always come through in the answers.

The key to answering the question was in understanding Hume's idea of the nature of causation.  As many of you pointed out, simply seeing Event A followed closely by Event B, even if it is repeated time and time again, does not entail necessary causality. (Note: necessary) There is a certain degree of logic involved here that many of the answers did not quite pick up on.  For something to be necessarily the case (e.g., billiard ball Y hitting ball Z , causing it to move) it must be a logical necessity, not merely contingent.  Thinking about the billiard balls, regardless of how many times we see an event happen and regardless of how precise our physical explanation might be, the pattern of causation is still merely contingent.  

When we observe rules (of say, physics) , what we are doing is creating contingent explanations of how things happen.  This billiard ball will move as such, contingent on the fact that all conditions are the same, including the laws of nature being the same as we remember.  As far as we know, the laws of nature don't tend to change all that often.  In fact, so far as we know they never have, so this seems like a fairly reasonable assumption to make, and we do every day of our lives.  However, this is still just a contingent explanation.  There were a few of your answers that suggested that if we could arrange our billiard balls in exactly the same way, then we could posit a necessary connection between the cue ball striking the 8-ball, making it sink in the corner pocket.  Short of going into necessities and contingencies in the metaphysics of time, each time we set up the experiment we still have no justification for believing that the laws of nature are still the same as they were last week.  Rather, this is still simply an induction based on past events.

Most importantly, for Hume, understanding necessary causation through sense data is a confusion in and of itself, and thus never justified.  We can sense Event A and Event B, and recognize patterns in causation.  However, we cannot truly sense the cause, but rather simply sense the physical events A and B which we may notice are generally closely correlated.  

The idea of "sensing" necessary causation doesn't make...uh, sense.

JSY