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Workshop Hume-Kant -
UNICAMP, Campinas, 3 a 6 de maio de 2010 The
relation between the general maxim of causality and the principle of
uniformity in Hume’s theory of knowledge ABSTRACT: When Hume, in the Treatise
on Human Nature, began his examination of the relation of cause and
effect, in particular, of the idea of necessary connection which is its
essential constituent, he identified two preliminary questions that should
guide his research: (1) For what reason
we pronounce it necessary that every thing whose existence has a beginning
should also have a cause and (2) Why
we conclude that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects? (1.3.2, 14-15) Hume
observes that our belief in these principles can result neither from an
intuitive grasp of its truth nor from a reasoning that could establish them
by demonstrative means. In particular, with respect to the first, Hume
examines and rejects some arguments with which Locke, Hobbes and Clarke tried
to demonstrate it, and suggests, by exclusion, that the belief that we place
on it can only come from experience. Somewhat surprisingly, however, Hume
does not proceed to show how that derivation of experience could be made, but
proposes instead to move directly to an examination of the second principle,
saying that, “perhaps, be found in the end, that the same answer will
serve for both questions” (1.3.3, 9). Hume's answer to the second
question is well known, but the first question is never answered in the rest
of the Treatise, and it is even
doubtful that it could be, which would explain why Hume has simply chosen to
remove any mention of it when he recompiled his theses on causation in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.
Given this situation, an interesting
question that naturally arises is to investigate the relations of logical or
conceptual implication between these two principles. Hume seems to have
thought that an answer to (2) would also be sufficient to provide an answer
to (1). Henry Allison, in his turn, argued (in Custom and Reason in Hume, p. 94-97) that the two questions are
logically independent. My proposal here is to try to show that there is
indeed a logical dependency between them, but the implication is, rather,
from (1) to (2). If accepted, this result may be particularly interesting for
an interpretation of the scope of the so-called “Kant's reply to
Hume” in the Second Analogy of Experience, which is structured as a
proof of the a priori character of
(1), but whose implications for (2) remain controversial. |
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