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What Can Causal Claims Mean?

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How can Hume account for the meaning of causal claims? The causal realist, I argue, is, on Hume's view, saying something nonsensical. I argue that both realist and agnostic interpretations of Hume are inconsistent with his view of language and intentionality. But what then accounts for this illusion of meaning? And even when we use causal terms in accordance with Hume’s definitions, we seem merely to be making disguised self-reports. I argue that Hume’s view is not as implausible as it sounds by exploring his conception of language.

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Notes

  1. References to Hume’s Treatise (2000) are in the following form: book.part.section.paragraph. References to the Enquiry give the section and paragraph number.

  2. See Stanford (2002). What follows is not quite what Stanford calls ‘the choice,’ since that it is a choice between meaninglessness or acquiescence in Hume’s own replacement for Causal talk. I think the situation is more complex.

  3. e.g., T 1.1.7: 21; 1.1.7: 23; 1.3.14: 162; see also Enquiry (2006) Part IV.

  4. In discussing the possibility of a relative idea of the external world, Daniel Flage (1981) offers an intriguing account of how one can seem to have a relative idea when none is to be had.

  5. For a statement of the traditional view, see Locke (1975), III.vii.

  6. One worry here is what content to give to this idea of necessity, so construed. Indeed, Stroud thinks that, as a simple idea, the idea of necessity cannot be characterized other than as that relation we take to hold between events: our idea of necessity, he writes, “will simply be an idea of whatever it is we ascribe to the relation between two events when we believe them to be causally or necessarily connected” (86).

  7. As Stanford (2002) persuasively argues.

  8. See Winkler (1991) on eighteenth century uses of ‘suppose.’

  9. Thanks to an anonymous referee for making me see the necessity of making this absolutely clear.

  10. Note that, as Winkler shows, the operative notion of contradiction is not the formal contemporary notion but the mentalistic notion of contradiction as intuitively introspectible repugnance or incompatibility. So my talk of incoherence and Hume’s talk of self-contradiction need not be incompatible.

  11. As Blackburn (1993) has noted.

  12. This won’t work, of course, since the idea of causation that Hume thinks we do have is one that connects perceptions that have been conjoined in previous experience. The external world (construed as the realist does), however, is by hypothesis not an object of perception. For a much more thorough treatment of these issues, see Flage (1981).

  13. Broughton (1987), 235, also quoted in Winkler (1991).

  14. See Winkler (1991), 543.

  15. See Robison (1976). Robison is an early defender of the ‘new Hume,’ though he focuses on the external world rather than causation.

  16. Again, I am not arguing that the position is incoherent tout court; simply that it cannot be Hume’s.

  17. See 1.4.3.9: “[W]e may observe a gradation of three opinions, that rise above each other, as the persons, who form them, acquire new degrees of reason and knowledge.”

  18. See Garrett (1997), chapter five.

  19. For more on Hume’s views on language, see my (2006).

References

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Ott, W. What Can Causal Claims Mean?. Philosophia 37, 459–470 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9167-z

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