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Singular Causation and Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Gürol Irzik
Gürol Irzik*
Affiliation:
Bogaziçi University
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Extract

Humean accounts of law are at the same time accounts of causation. Accordingly, since laws of nature are nothing but contingent cosmic regularities, to be a cause is just to be an instance of such a law. It follows from this view that it is logically impossible that there be causally related events which are not law-governed. Any particular cause-effect pair instantiates some law of nature, where the law is understood as a regularity. The regularity itself may be understood phenomenalistically, that is, as holding between sense impressions, or realistically, that is, as holding between objective events or event-types. These days even empiricists are realists to some extent, so I will eschew the radically empiricist version and assume that when a Humean talks about regularities, he is referring to objective events, states or processes in nature, not to his subjective experiences.

Type
Part IX. Belief, Cause and Induction
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 537 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

I wish to thank Arda Denkel for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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