The Reality of Causes in a World of Instrumental Laws

Abstract

Empiricists are notoriously suspicious of causes. They have not been equally wary of laws. Hume set the tradition when he replaced causal facts with facts about generalizations. Modern empiricists do the same. But nowadays Hume's generalizations are the laws and equations of high level scientific theories. On current accounts, there may be some question about where the laws of our fundamental theories get their necessity, but it is no question that these laws are the core of modern science. Bertrand Russell is well known for this view: “The law of gravitation will illustrate what occurs in any exact science … . Certain differential equations can be found, which hold at every instant for every particle of the system … . But there is nothing that could be properly called “cause” and nothing that could be properly called “effect” in such a system.”