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We are not apart from the causal world. We are very much a part of it. We are causal agents: we initiate causation and our actions have effects. We are also causal patients: things are done causally to us. We are therefore both causally active and passive. Just like everything else, we have no escape from the causal web of the world.
The Humean view is that we don’t experience causation directly at all. When one billiard ball hits another, we cannot see a causal connection between them, only a succession of events. Causal knowledge for Hume was inferred from seeing repeated instances of such sequences: constant conjunctions. Not everyone agrees with Hume on this. A number of philosophers, going back at least to Thomas Reid (1710–96), think that causation is something that can be seen directly.
Hume notes that an experience of regularity leads us to form an expectation about the future, which is at the root of his theory of causation.
Some of our notions, Wittgenstein said, could be thought of as family resemblance concepts. A family resemblance concept is one that groups together various different things on the basis of them having resemblances but where there isn’t a single essence they all have in common.
A philosopher’s error, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), is to assume that there must be a single essence to something just because we use one word for it.
Maybe there were a few exceptions but in general it seems clear enough that causation involves a degree of regularity, counterfactual dependence, or energy transference. The problem seems to be that for each theory there are one or two cases that don’t fit the pattern. But should we infer from this that all the theories are wrong? Could it be instead that we are expecting too much of a single theory?
There is an assumption that causation is just one thing and that it is our business to discover its essence. Might we challenge this assumption? We sometimes use a single word to classify many different things. Consider the example of being a mammal. There are many different things that we call mammals: a whale, a human, a cow. The differences between a whale and a human are significant. A non-mammal fish resembles a whale more than does a mammalian human. Perhaps causation similarly permits a wide diversity of particular instances that have different features. This is what the pluralist says.
Instead, perhaps we should think of reductionism as something like a working programme: something we are investigating to see how far we can go with it rather than asserting it to be a truth.
Now while many reductionists will be motivated by the scientific spirit, spurred on perhaps by some examples of apparently successful reduction in the sciences, reductionism remains a philosophical theory. It has no empirical proof.
Reductionism is the view that all higher-level phenomena are explained in terms of lower-level phenomena, some of which are basic.
So the difference between there being causation and there not being causation isn’t found just in the facts—about what actually happens—but in truths about what would have happened if things were different. Viewed this way, the theory sounds somewhat incredible. Causation seems to consist not in what there is, but in something that is not: something that is contrary to fact.
The counterfactual dependence view of causation is usually thought of as another Humean view of causation.
In looking for the cause, therefore, and in saying what it is for something to be a cause, the suggestion is that we should look for a difference maker.
Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) challenged the claim that necessity was a part of our notion of causation. To say that A caused B, she argued, was not the same as to say that A necessitated B. The latter would have to be some supplementary thesis.
Hume attacked necessity in causation and left in its place only pure contingency.
As Humeans insist, causation doesn’t involve necessity but allows complete contingency.