I’m curious to know what progress you think Hume made. I’m a big fan of Hume the observer of human behavior, Hume the proto-economist, and Hume the critic of religion; I’m less enthusiastic about what you might call Hume’s purely philosophical work (problem of induction and so on).
That is being generous to Hume, I think. The counterfactual account in Hume is an afterthought to the first of his two (incompatible) definitions of causation in the Enquiry:
Similar objects are always conjoined with similar. Of this we have experience. Suitably to this experience, therefore, we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.
As far as I know, this is the only place where Hume offers a counterfactual account of causation, and in doing so, he confuses a counterfactual account with a regularity account. Not promising. Many, many people have tried to find a coherent theory of causation in Hume’s writings: he’s a regularity theorist, he’s a projectivist, he’s a skeptical realist, he’s a counterfactual theorist, he’s an interventionist, he’s an inferentialist … or so various interpreters say. On and on. I think all these attempts at interpreting Hume have been failures. There is no Humean theory to find because Hume didn’t offer a coherent account of causation.
I agree that Hume was not thinking coherently about causality, but the credit for the counterfactual definition still ought to go to him, imo. Are you aware of an earlier attempt along these lines?
That question raises a bunch of interpretive difficulties. You will find the expression sine qua non, which literally means “without which not,” in some medieval writings about causation. For example, Aquinas rejects mere sine qua non causality as an adequate account of how the sacraments effect grace. In legal contexts today, that same expression denotes a simple counterfactual test for causation—the “but for” test. One might try to interpret the phrase as meaning “indispensable” when Aquinas and other medievals use it and then deflate “indispensable” of its counterfactual content. However, if “indispensable” is supposed to lack counterfactual significance, then the same non-counterfactual reading could, I think, be taken with respect to that passage in Hume. I don’t know if the idea shows up earlier. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it does.
I’m curious to know what progress you think Hume made. I’m a big fan of Hume the observer of human behavior, Hume the proto-economist, and Hume the critic of religion; I’m less enthusiastic about what you might call Hume’s purely philosophical work (problem of induction and so on).
Hume was the first to come up with a counterfactual definition of causality, I think.
That is being generous to Hume, I think. The counterfactual account in Hume is an afterthought to the first of his two (incompatible) definitions of causation in the Enquiry:
As far as I know, this is the only place where Hume offers a counterfactual account of causation, and in doing so, he confuses a counterfactual account with a regularity account. Not promising. Many, many people have tried to find a coherent theory of causation in Hume’s writings: he’s a regularity theorist, he’s a projectivist, he’s a skeptical realist, he’s a counterfactual theorist, he’s an interventionist, he’s an inferentialist … or so various interpreters say. On and on. I think all these attempts at interpreting Hume have been failures. There is no Humean theory to find because Hume didn’t offer a coherent account of causation.
I agree that Hume was not thinking coherently about causality, but the credit for the counterfactual definition still ought to go to him, imo. Are you aware of an earlier attempt along these lines?
That question raises a bunch of interpretive difficulties. You will find the expression sine qua non, which literally means “without which not,” in some medieval writings about causation. For example, Aquinas rejects mere sine qua non causality as an adequate account of how the sacraments effect grace. In legal contexts today, that same expression denotes a simple counterfactual test for causation—the “but for” test. One might try to interpret the phrase as meaning “indispensable” when Aquinas and other medievals use it and then deflate “indispensable” of its counterfactual content. However, if “indispensable” is supposed to lack counterfactual significance, then the same non-counterfactual reading could, I think, be taken with respect to that passage in Hume. I don’t know if the idea shows up earlier. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it does.