Hume on Causality and Probability
Although Hume is an empiricist, he sees how our empirical understanding of the world is full of misrepresentations of reality. To use Kant’s terms, Hume, in An Enquiry of Human Understanding (1748), often attempts to show the discrepancies between phenomena and noumena.
In sections IV and VII, Hume establishes how our impression of subsequent events misleads us into believing in necessary causation: that there is, in fact, something that exists that we call “cause”.
Our understanding of cause and effect comes entirely from experience. We find ourselves associating one event with another because of habitual experience with an object or event. We do not use a priori reasoning in our understanding of cause and effect because it is impossible for reason alone to factor in all the physical and metaphysical circumstances and conditions.
Hume uses gunpowder as an example of this. We did not use reason alone to conclude that gunpowder explodes, we did so a posteriori: by experiencing (directly or indirectly) the explosion of gunpowder multiple times.
Every event is distinct from every other event and the fact that certain events follow other certain events is purely arbitrary according to Hume. Therefore An event cannot be found through its “cause” or through any other event.
Experience gives us the impression that we can predict what is to come after a particular event, but because the happening of events is arbitrary (to Hume), we cannot correctly make the assumption of what event is to follow.
Just because we are accustomed to lightning following thunder, does not mean that lightning will follow thunder necessarily in the present or future. The sequentiality of these two events does not necessarily mean that one causes the other, our experience, however, usually incorrectly drives us to think in this way.
To accept these truths leads to the conclusion that the entire concept of “cause and effect” or causality, as most normally conceptualize it is misguided.
Because each and every event is arbitrary, there is not necessarily a connection between two events. Two events may be “conjoined” but it is only our conjecturing imagination that drives us to think of one event causing another.
In this regard, Hume takes the age-old phrase “correlation does not imply causation” to its natural conclusion.
In section VI, Hume explains our perception of probability. Just like the concept previously mentioned in this paper, a faulty empirical understanding is responsible for our flawed impression of probability.
We tend to think that experiments with probability are representational of true probability but this is not the case. There is no way to truly have a representational sample to accurately predict what will happen. Even if there were, there is no guarantee that something unforeseen will not happen.
Because Hume is even open to the possibility of a suspension of natural law at any given moment, there is no guarantee that anyone can accurately predict anything. (To Hume, the laws of nature seem to be understood as the regularities of the past experienced by us and projected into the present and future). The probabilities that we create are imaginary and are not created through rationality but through empirical induction that is driven by our feelings.
Please consider following me on Medium and YouTube for more articles and videos.
If you plan on using Amazon.com to make a purchase, please consider using my Amazon Affiliate Link.
