Hume on necessary connection Notes for October 21

Main points

Before break, we went over Hume’s reasons for saying that our beliefs about cause and effect are not based on reason. We reach these beliefs through inductive inferences and these are not based on reason.

Today, we discussed his postive account of our beliefs about cause and effect. This was supposed to supply a “skeptical solution” to the problem he left us with. It’s certainly compatible with his skepticism. But is it a solution?

The main problem is that Hume didn’t do enough to explain how we distinguish between causal relations and mere correlations or coincidences.

This page was written by Michael Green for Problems of Philosophy, Philosophy 1, Fall 2009. It was posted October 21, 2009.
Name of website