luvluv

Okay, Phillip Johnson in his new book The Right Questions was discussing the arguments of Hume. He asked, (essentially):

Is there any CAUSE for Hume's denying causation?

If there is a cause for his denial of causality, then it is self-refuting.

If there is no cause for his denial, then he is merely speaking nonsense and there is no reason to take him seriously.

Anybody buy this?

Luiseach

Scepticism in relation to causal links could be seen, on one level at least, to have helped to improve the rigour and precision of scientific enquiry throughout the 19th century and beyond.

How can we dismiss his thinking?

Any direct links to the study?

Sounds interesting.

[Edited to add] lol @ 'horse puckey'

Dominus Paradoxum

No, that's not a very good argument. The bare fact that he has a reason for disbelieving in causality is not self refuting, for a reason need not necessate. If you want to see a really good critical examination of Hume's philosophy, I would reccomend Thomas Hill Green's "Introduction to Hume and Locke".

xoc

It's a bit of question of semantics I'd say. When speaking of human decisions and thinking, we often use either the word "reason" or "cause" interchangibly. Reason has the connotation of use of a rational principle while "cause" can refer to mere physical law. But still this difference may not be so distinct; "The bat caused the ball to fly"; or "The reason the ball flew is because he hit it." Causation moves from apparent necessity in the case of the ball flying to possibility in views of the "free will" of people- that is if Hume voices the argument against causation he must have a cause/reason to do so; by translating "cause" into reason a bit of a sleight-of-hand maneauver is pulled; a subtle inference that causation and Reason are bound together and cannot be seperated. It infers that denying causality is inherently irrational, as we cannot think "reasonably" about any action in the world without inferring causality. In spite of this sleight-of-hand maneauver it may still be a justified argument.

My vote is that it aint' "horse-puckey." You cannot make any kind of sense of the world if you entirely deny causality, although giving it an "absolute status" (denying the freedom to make choices etc.) also makes nonsense of the world.

jpbrooks

Hello luvluv!

(I don't have time right now to get into a lengthy discussion on this matter, but briefly...)

while I normally have few objections to the basic thrust of Phillip Johnson's arguments, I tend to agree with the other posters above that Johnson, in this particular argument, appears to blur the distinction between the definitions of cause and (justifying) reason.
Depending on one's stance on the "Free will"/Determinism issue, there may be a "justifying reason" for denying causality even if no "outside forces" can be identified as the cause of that denial.

Perhaps a way to argue against the denial of causality that avoids this problem would be to emphasize that the assumption of causality is implicit in every act of communicating information, since any medium of communication must exist in the physical universe. And that (therefore) any absolute denial of causality would be inconsistent.

SlateGreySky

I think I would tend to agree with Dominus Paradoxum on this point, but I may be confused as to Hume's aims: I didn't think that Hume's point was really to deny causality as a tool of explanation, but just to deny that it is a deduceable metaphysical fact. I always thought that Hume just meant to point out that causality does not follow from logical first principles (as many, I suppose, had taken it to do).

To that end, it seems to me that Johnson's question is somewhat question-begging of itself, for if we ascribe a cause (with any actual existence of its own) for Hume's arguments against causation, haven't we already implicitly denied, a priori, Hume's whole point in arguing against causation?

Someone help me out here . . . I feel the horse puckey gathering beneath my feet as I type this . . .

Tyler Durden

This is nothing but a classical strawman since Hume does not "deny causation." Most counterarguments against philosophers rely on a bad understanding of the said philosopher, and this is no exception. By rigorous adherence to empirical principles, Hume analyzed the conception of causality, and he concluded that there is no "necessary connexion" which is the idea that a cause necessarily produces its effect.

This is a misleading statement, since, again, Hume is not "denying" causality, but rather reinterpreting it as a characteristic of the empirical nature of man, and is proposed against the suppositions of the rival thinkers of his day, the theologians and the rationalists who thought it was self-evident. Hume argues that due to our psychological inclination to associate different experiences, we infer causality as a pattern of nature. Yet it is not a legitimate inference of deduction.

If there is no cause to take this false representation seriously, then there is no cause to take this witless argument seriously.

Vorkosigan

• Hume argues that due to our psychological inclination to associate different experiences, we infer causality as a pattern of nature. Yet it is not a legitimate inference of deduction.

<clapping> An excellent description.....

Vorkosigan