Kant, Hume and causality

Abstract

Kant's answer to Hume is seen to comprise the following: agreement with Hume that causal connection cannot be inferred from experience; moving beyond Hume in making causal conceptions presuppositions of experience (where “experience” has the full force of “scientific knowledge”, and not merely its minimal meaning of spatio-temporal representations in appearance); distinguishing causality from other, more basic presuppositions of experience (where experience is tacitly defined in terms less strong than those associated with the advance to scientific knowledge). Not only is causality aVerknuepfung, rather than aBedingung, thereby relegating it to a lower level of generality, but its presence in the table of categories simply signifies the possibility of its application at any time, not the necessity for a universally valid interpretation of temporal succession as given in the manifold, a specification that is only introduced after the schematism, in the Analogies of experience. Furthermore, unlike e.g. the transcendental unity of apperception, cause involves regulative, not constitutive (or demonstrable) principles. Failure to recognize all of this has created unnecessary controversy concerning the relative merits of Kant's response to the problem of justifying induction.