Today’s class is about Kant’s reply to Hume. Kant said that his project was motivated by a desire to answer Hume. Here is the answer.
The question is whether we are capable of having the experiences that we do without having a concept of causation. In Kant’s lingo, that is necessary for us to make what he calls “judgments of experience” rather than “judgments of perception.” The former have what he calls “objective validity” while the latter have only “subjective validity.”
To put the distinction in more concrete terms, a judgment of experience is a judgment that is universal in two ways. First, it is about what all objects do. If I think “the orange ball caused the blue one to move,” a judgment of experience is something like “any ball in this situation would cause a ball like that to move, the orange ball is such a ball, so the blue one is going to move.” Second, a judgment of experience is universal because it is about what anyone should think (Kant [1783] 2019, 739). By contrast, a judgment of perception is limited to how things seem to you. And such judgments, Kant says, cannot go beyond the immediate objects that provoke them, in this case, the orange and blue balls.
We looked at two examples that he gave. To save time, I made a handout; the text of that handout is reproduced below.
We asked two questions about each passage:
Why does Kant think the examples show that the relevant experiences cannot be had without a concept of causation?
How would Hume analyze these examples? He would, presumably, try to describe the experiences without causal concepts. His theory, after all, is that we get the idea of a cause only after the repetition (“constant conjunction”) of similar events. Our experience of the events never changes, we just acquire the idea that the one caused the other after enough repetitions.
(The quoted passages are taken from a different translation than the one in our textbook. I included references to pages in the textbook after each quotation; they are the ones with the 2019 date.)
“Now before a judgment of experience can arise from a judgment of perception, it is first required: that the perception be subsumed under a concept of the understanding of this kind; e.g., the air belongs under the concept of cause, which determines the judgment about the air as hypothetical with respect to expansion.1 This expansion is thereby represented not as belonging merely to my perception of the air in my state of perception or in several of my states or in the state of others, but as necessarily belonging to it, and the judgment: the air is elastic, becomes universally valid and thereby for the first time a judgment of experience, because certain judgments occur beforehand, which subsume the intuition of the air under the concept of cause and effect, and thereby determine the perceptions not merely with respect to each other in my subject, but with respect to the form of judging in general (here, the hypothetical), and in this way make the empirical judgment universally valid.” (Kant [1783] 2002, 301/95); (Kant [1783] 2019, 739)
“For having a try at Hume’s problematic concept (this, his crux metaphysicorum), namely the concept of cause, there is first given to me a priori, by means of logic: the form of a conditioned judgment in general, that is, the use of a given cognition as ground and another as consequent. It is, however, possible that in perception a rule of relation will be found, which says this: that a certain appearance is constantly followed by another (though not the reverse); and this is a case for me to use hypothetical judgment and, e.g., to say: If a body is illuminated by the sun for long enough, then it becomes warm. Here there is of course not yet a necessity of connection, hence not yet the concept of cause. But I continue on, and say: if the above proposition, which is merely a subjective connection of perceptions, is to be a proposition of experience, then it must be regarded as necessarily and universally valid. But a proposition of this sort would be: The sun through its light is the cause of the warmth. The foregoing empirical rule is now regarded as a law, and indeed as valid not merely of appearances, but of them on behalf of a possible experience, which requires universally and therefore necessarily valid rules. I therefore have quite good insight into the concept of cause, as a concept that necessarily belongs to the mere form of experience, and into its possibility as a synthetic unification of perceptions in a consciousness in general; but I have no insight at all into the possibility of a thing in general as a cause, and that indeed because the concept of cause indicates a condition that in no way attaches to things, but only to experience, namely, that experience can be an objectively valid cognition of appearances and their sequence in time only insofar as the antecedent appearance can be connected with the subsequent one according to the rule of hypothetical judgments.” (Kant [1783] 2002, 312/105); (Kant [1783] 2019, 745–46)
Several people took the end of the last passage to show that there is not a significant difference between Kant and Hume. Both treat causation as a product of our minds rather than something we discover in external objects and events.
Kant, of course, thought that his view was significantly different. But it is fair to ask whether that is actually so.
(This footnote is part of Kant’s text – mjg) “To have a more easily understood example, consider the following: If the sun shines on the stone, it becomes warm. This judgment is a mere judgment of perception and contains no necessity, however often I and others also have perceived this; the perceptions are only usually found so conjoined. But if I say: the sun warms the stone, then beyond the perception is added the understanding’s concept of cause, which connects necessarily the concept of sunshine with that of heat, and the synthetic judgment becomes necessarily universally valid, hence objective, and changes from a perception into experience.”↩︎
There was a handout for this class: 28.KantCausation.handout.html