Hume: A Very Short Introduction by Alfred Ayer

Author:Alfred Ayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2000-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Cause and Effect

No element of Hume’s philosophy has had a greater and more lasting influence than his theory of causality. It has been frequently attacked, and frequently misunderstood. Not all the misunderstanding should be put down to the ill-will of Hume’s critics. To some extent he courted it, though I agree with F. P. Ramsey, whose own theory, as set out in one of the Last Papers of The Foundations of Mathematics, is basically akin to Hume’s, that Hume ‘gave his readers credit for more intelligence than they display in their literal interpretations’. I shall argue that while Hume is vulnerable on many points of detail, partly because of his misguided insistence on tracing ideas to their origin, and partly because of his tendency to oversimplify the facts, his fundamental tenets not only admit of no answer but thoroughly deserve to carry conviction.

The first point to make clear is that when Hume speaks of ‘the relation of cause and effect’ he uses the term in a wider and looser sense than is now current. Whereas we are accustomed to distinguish between causal and functional laws, or between causal and statistical laws, or between events which are directly related as cause and effect and those which are related as the effects of a common cause or through their joint derivation from some overriding theory, Hume’s usage is such that any lawlike connection between matters of fact is characterized as causal. It is true that when he puts probability on a scale of evidence in which the first place is taken by knowledge, defined as ‘the assurance arising from the comparison of ideas’, and the second by ‘proof’, where the result of a causal argument is accepted without any of the uncertainty which attends probability (T 124), he goes on to distinguish the probability which is founded on chance from that which arises from causes; but there is no inconsistency here, since he maintains ‘that there must always be a mixture of causes among the chances, in order to be the foundation of any reasoning’ (T 126), and the very fact that he makes no provision for statistical laws except as probabilities founded on causes confirms the point that I have been making. Hume’s usage can indeed be criticized as favouring the neglect of important distinctions, or even the adoption of an unsatisfactory account of probability, but we shall see that its defects do not vitiate the development of his essential argument.

Another unusual feature of Hume’s terminology is that he most frequently speaks of the relation of causality as holding between objects, and indeed so defines it, though he is normally represented as taking it to be a relation between events. This emendation does him no disservice, as his references to objects in this connection can easily be rephrased as references to events, and his inclusion of mental elements, like feelings and volitions, among causes and effects is some justification for it. My own opinion is that his intentions are best

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