1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
Hume did not believe that we can reasonably say more about causation than that there is a constant conjunction of cause and effect.
Comment by diogenesthehopeful at 30/08/2024 at 16:38 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
My point exactly. If you believe determinism doesn't need causality then we are at an impasse. The cause doesn't come through the fact side of Hume's fork. It comes through the *relation of ideas* side of his fork. That means it is nothing more than logic. However the determinist exclaims, "Oh no. We know the "cause" is empirically discerned or it comes down from Mt Olympus via the laws of physics". There was no third law of motion until Newton said so and even though Newton was awesome, he wasn't Zeus. "Zeus" put the causality into the formalism (the math) because he made inferences based on the constant conjunction that he Kepler and Galileo saw. Inference is just a logical conclusion. The conclusions were deterministic but at the end of the day a deterministic map doesn't necessitate a deterministic territory. As it turned out the motion of Mercury doesn't exactly follow Newtonian physics. So that conjunction isn't as constant as Newton assumed it was when **he wrote** his laws.