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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori, but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other.
1 E 27. ‘T n’ and ‘E n’ refer to page n in the L. A. Selby-Bigge editions of A Treatise of Human Nature or An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. P. H. Nidditch's revised editions (Oxford University Press; Treatise, 2nd edition, 1978; Enquiry, 3rd edition, 1975) preserve the Selby-Bigge paginations for the texts of the Treatise, 1–639, and the Enquiry, 1–165.Google Scholar
2 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.Google Scholar
3 E 27.
4 E 28.
5 E 29–30.
6 In this century, philosophers who find connections between the a priori and causality hold a variety of views. In a passage where C. D. Broad says that several propositions are ‘prima facie self-evident’ such as ‘Every change must have a cause’ or ‘The cause of any change contains a change as an essential factor,’ he does not use the phrase ‘a priori’ (Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1933, 232). Brand Blanshard nevertheless attributes to Broad, with approval, the view that ‘we know a priori several propositions that apply to the causation of changes generally’ (Reason and Analysis, La Salle: Open Court, 1962, 466–7). In this essay, I do not claim that any general causal principles can be known a priori. Neither do I claim that there is some sort of irreducible causal necessity. (See R. Harre and E. H. Madden, Causal Powers, Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975, for a defence of ‘natural necessity.’) On my view, what makes an a priori causal inference causal is not the character of the logical relations between the parts, but the character of the parts that are logically related.
7 Galen, Strawson, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
8 E 32–3.
9 T 161.
10 E 63.
11 Strawson, 110. Strawson uses the capitalized word ‘Causation’ to indicate something–different from mere regularity–about the fundamental nature of the world in virtue of which the world is regular in its behaviour' (Strawson, 84 ).
12 Op. cit. 113.Google Scholar
13 Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.Google Scholar
14 Op. cit. 46.Google Scholar
15 King, Edward J. is the author of a book with this title and the subtitle An Introduction to Chemical Kinetics and Reaction Mechanisms (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1964).Google Scholar
16 Strawson, 113, quoted above.
17 From a speech by Philo in Part VI of the Dialogues Concerning \ Natural Religion. Philo virtually repeats this passage in Part IX.Google Scholar
18 I wrote the first version of this essay at the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina) while receiving support from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue a project entitled ‘Causation and Mechanism.’ I thank both institutions. I also thank the philosophers who discussed a version of the essay at a meeting of the ‘Triangle Unethical Society.’