Causation and Explanation
Stathis PsillosSözler ve Alıntılar
Ideas are nothing but “faint images” of impressions “in thinking and reasoning” (T: 1).
There is no place for necessity in nature.
Michael Tooley (1987: 246), on the other hand, calls causal realism the anti-reductive view that “the truth-values of causal statements are not, in general, logically determined by non-causal facts”.
Hume says, very explicitly, what he does find in a case where two events are related as cause and effect: contiguity, priority and constant conjunction.
No impression in, no ideas out
One major constraint of Hume’s account of causation is his empiri-cist epistemology. The cornerstone of this epistemology is the thought that “all our ideas, or weak perceptions, are derived from our impressions, or strong perceptions, and that we can never think of any thing we have not seen without us, or felt in our own minds” (A: 647–8; cf. also T, 4).
The trouble with causation is, as Hume pointed out, that there is no evident way of distinguishing it from mere invariable succession. (Quine 1974: 5)
In nature one thing just happens after another. Cause and effect have their place only in our imaginative arrangements and extensions of these primary facts. (Ayer 1963: 183)