Humean Regularity

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Metaphysics

Overview

Hume's target is the idea, common to both rationalist philosophy and ordinary intuition, that a cause somehow makes its effect happen — that striking necessitates breaking the way a proof necessitates its conclusion. He looked for that necessary connection in experience and never found it: we observe one billiard ball strike another and the second move, repeatedly, but never observe the striking producing the motion, only the succession of the two. What the mind adds after enough repetitions is an expectation formed by habit, not a further fact about the world.

Causal Powers rejects exactly this limit to what a pattern of events can show, holding that objects have dispositions grounded in their natures — a fragile glass really is disposed to break — that hold whether or not the disposition is ever exercised or repeated. The dispute is over whether causation is a regularity we come to expect or a power the world has independently of our expecting it.

Position on

• The Nature of Causation

Held by traditions

• British Empiricism

  This is Hume's view: the idea of necessary connection comes not from anything observed in the objects but from the mind's habit of expecting the usual effect once it has seen two kinds of event constantly joined.

  Question scope: The Nature of Causation

Rival positions

• Causal Powers

  Question scope: The Nature of Causation

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Regularity and Inferential Theories of Causation
• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.3.14
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, §VII