David Hume and causality

hi I'm dr. Jeremy Neil and I'm a professor of philosophy at Houston Baptist University I want to talk today about David Hume and his views on the subject of causality so David Hume was a Scottish philosopher who lived in the 18th century he was a man of the Enlightenment his dates are 1711 to 1776 and being a man of that era he was certainly wrapped up in many of the intellectual trends surrounding the explosion of science and at the scientific method now Hume was a bit of an iconoclast and a critic of the received tradition and one way in which he criticized the tradition was by means of what he liked to term The Skeptical philosophy a famous criticism that he offers in the inquiry on human understanding is the critique of causality that he developed so I take it that most of us just go through life rather unreflective Lee thinking that causality exists and that some things cause other things to happen so for instance if you're playing the table game of pool or billiards and you strike the cue ball and the cue ball strikes the eight ball and the eight ball goes in the corner pocket and you think to yourself rather unreflective Lee the cue ball in striking the eight ball is causing the eight ball to move toward the corner pocket at least that's what I would think unreflective Lee and the vast majority of us never really inspect this at any further length but Hume famously said well think about this a little bit more closely all that your experience has really delivered for you is the idea that the cue ball has moved and struck the eight ball we'll call that idea a and then idea idea be that the eight ball has then subsequently moved and proceeded toward the corner pocket so Humes critique then was really all our experience has delivered for us is the existence of two ideas which have customarily come to be conjoined with each other the cue ball striking the eight ball is idea a and then idea B the eight ball moving toward the corner pocket two ideas that are for all we know could be unrelated but that have always customarily occurred in the past and Hume thinks that what our mind has done is a hit it has in fact added something to this experience it has added the belief that event a or idea a is causing event B or idea B it has added to experience the idea that the cue ball is what is making the eight-ball move but really all that the experience gives us is just the habitual occurrence of these different events so experience for all we know might in fact be giving us deliverances of things that are not connected to each other now Hume doesn't really believe that the cue ball is not causing the eight-ball to move I take it that in practice he would behave just as we all would he would behave as though the cue ball is what is causing the eight-ball to move but Humes philosophical point I think is a very important one and that is that we cannot assume that we can know what is going on with any kind of certainty in a jumping to the causal conclusions that we characteristically tend to jump to in observing phenomena like the cue ball striking the eight ball and the eight ball moving toward the corner pocket so Hume questions the idea of causality as it was received in the tradition in place of causality as most of us understand it in a common sense ordinary sort of way Hume substituted the idea of customary conjunction he thinks that that's the way we should define causality that's what we should think of causality as being is just the customary conjunction of different events they have always cared Stickley occurred alongside each other before and that's the way we think of them or should think of them in terms of causality according to Hume so this is a rather counterintuitive and skeptical approach to causality but it's an interesting understanding of it and opened up the field for many centuries to come after him to further fruitful philosophical inquiry

Channel: JS Neill

Views: 13,895

Keywords: David Hume, causation, causality, enlightenment

Id: vJW0uJQn-48

Length: 4min 52sec (292 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 21 2014