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David Hume coined a sceptical, reductionist viewpoint on causality that inspired the logical-positivist definition of empirical law that "is a regularity or universal generalization of the form 'All Cs are Es' or, whenever C, then E". [1]
Followers and interpreters of Hume have sometimes used Hume's dictum as the metaphysical foundation of Hume's theory of causation. On this view, there cannot be any causal relation in a robust sense since this would involve one event necessitating another event, the possibility of which is denied by Hume's dictum. [8] [9]
According to Hume, we reason inductively by associating constantly conjoined events. It is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation. At least three interpretations of Hume's theory of causation are represented in the literature: [87] the logical positivist; the sceptical realist; and; the quasi-realist.
David Hume, a Scottish thinker of the Enlightenment era, is the philosopher most often associated with induction. His formulation of the problem of induction can be found in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, §4. Here, Hume introduces his famous distinction between "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact".
The philosopher David Hume used the phrase frequently in his discussion of the limits of empiricism to explain our ideas of causation and inference.In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume proposed that the origin of our knowledge of necessary connections arises out of observation of the constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances ...
Hume and the Problem of Causation is a book written by Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg, published in 1981 by Oxford University Press. Beauchamp and Rosenberg developed a single interpretation of David Hume ’s view on the nature of causation that rests on all of his works, and defended it against historical and contemporary objections.
Hume's strong empiricism, as in Hume's fork as well as Hume's problem of induction, was taken as a threat to Newton's theory of motion. Immanuel Kant responded with his Transcendental Idealism in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attributed to the mind a causal role in sensory experience by the mind's aligning the environmental input by arranging those sense data into the experience ...
Hume's introduction presents the idea of placing all science and philosophy on a novel foundation: namely, an empirical investigation into human psychology.He begins by acknowledging "that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings [i.e., any complicated and difficult argumentation]", a prejudice formed in reaction to "the present imperfect condition of the sciences" (including the ...