Existence and Knowledge

Existence and Knowledge

Humean Causation Reconsidered

Document Type : Research Article

Author
Amir Ehsan Karbasizadeh
Assistant Professor of Iranian Wisdom and Philosophy Research Institute
Abstract
In this paper, I will try to give a brief account of what Hume noticed about causation.  The upshot of Hume's theory is that cause and effect are "constantly conjoined." Regular sequences of events of one type all followed by events of the other type. The Humean then 
analyzes causation as derivative on such regular sequences. What are fundamental to causation are the general regularities. A particular sequence is causal by virtue of being an instance of a general pattern: c causes e on this occasion because on lots and lots of other occasions (in fact on all), when events like c occur, they are followed by events like e. I will show that this approach rests on two fundamental dogmas which I dub ontological Supervenience and Epistemological Reduction respectively. At the end, I will summarize the main objections to these dogmas.
Keywords
Causation
Regularities
Constant Conjunction
Ontological Supervenience

منابع‌

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