Causality

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) charged Kant with showing the absurd result that all sequence is consequence. As he noted, the tones of a musical composition follow each other in a certain objective order and yet it would be absurd to say that they follow each other according to the law of causality. This has also been a major objection to Hume's views. Hume left the metaphysics of causality behind, but like Kant, he ended up with a loose notion of causality. On the one hand, it seems that there can be causality without regularity. This is the case of the so-called singular causality, where one event causes another to happen without this particular (singular) sequence of events falling under a regularity. On the other hand, there can be regularity without causality. There are cases in which events regularly follow each other (like the night always follows the day) without being the cause of each other. Once more, the metaphysical and the epistemological issues of causality come to the fore. We might not be able to know that a sequence of events is causal unless we see it repeat itself many times. But this does not imply that, metaphysically speaking, causality consists in regular sequence. On the Humean view, whether or not a sequence of events is causal depends on things that happen elsewhere and elsewhen in the universe, and in particular on whether or not this particular sequence instantiates a regularity. The Humean view may be entitled the Regularity View of Causality. But an opposite view that became prominent in the twentieth century, due mostly to the work of Curt John Ducasse (1881–1969), is that what makes a sequence of events causal is something that happens there and then: a local tie between the cause and the effect, or an intrinsic feature of the particular sequence. Ducasse's (1968) single-difference account, roughly that an event c causes an event e if and only if c was the last—or, the only—difference in e's environment before e occurred, takes causality to link individual events independently of any regular association that there may or may not be between events like the cause and events like the effect. Causality, non-Humeans argue, is essentially singular: a matter of this causing that.

Most advocates of singular causation argue that, contra Hume, causality is observable. A central claim is that causal relations are embodied in language by causal verbs, such as "to bend," "to corrode," "to push," "to break," and so on. So, we are told, when one asserts that, for instance, the vase broke after being struck with a hammer, by the very use of the verb "to break," one makes a causal claim, and one has thereby directly perceived the vase being caused to break. Elizabeth Anscombe (b. 1919) argued that since our language is infested with causal verbs, there is no mystery in the claim that we directly perceive causings: when we learn to report such things as pushings, pullings, breakings, and the like from having observed them, we have thereby learned to report causings from having observed them.