Hume and Thick Connexions

Abstract

Recently there has been a pronounced shift in the interpretation of Hume on causation. The previous weight of opinion took him to be a Positivist, but the new view is that he is a Sceptical Realist.' I hold no brief for the Positivist view. But I believe it needs replacing by something slightly different, and that at best it shows an error of taste to make Sceptical Realism a fundamental factor in the interpretation of Hume. Let us call any concept of one event producing another, or being necessarily a cause or consequence of another, but which involves something beyond the concept of regular succession a notion of the dependence of one event on another. Then on the Positivist account, Hume believes that no thick notion is intelligible. On the Positivist view there is very little that we can ever understand and mean by a causal connexion between events. All we can understand and properly mean by talk of causation is that events fall into certain regular patterns, and the Positivist interpretation is that Hume offered this as a reductive definition of causation. This is the famous regularity theory, summed up in the 'philosophical' definition of 'an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second'.' The sceptical realist view denies that Hume offered any such reduction or analysis of the notion of causation. It takes seriously the many passages in which Hume appears to allow that we are talking of some thick notion of dependence of one event on another, going beyond regular succession. It takes it that Hume acknowledges that there is some such thick relation, even if it will be one about whose nature and extent we are doomed to