Hume on Causation, Belief and the Uniformity of Nature

Belief and Uniformity of Nature

Therefore, we form beliefs by custom or habit, and we tend to believe we can predict what will happen. We assume that concrete expectations about future events will be produced by the same causes that produced similar events in the past. The principle of belief and the principle of uniformity of nature: we anticipate events because we are convinced that the future will proceed like the past. But this is not true. We can never know what will happen in the future because we have no direct experience of it. We can say that something has happened in the past, and if it happens again our degree of confidence increases, but we can never have absolute certainty that the same will occur again. If we believe the future will behave as the past (the principle of uniformity), we are implicitly accepting causality. If we join the principle of uniformity of nature to habit or custom, we arrive at the foundation of the principle of causation: the belief that the future will behave like the past.

The belief: It is an idea associated with an impression, and a sense that education and repeated experience reinforce it. Belief is a feeling that inclines us to prefer one thing over another, but it is not an act of pure rationality.

Metaphysics and Criticisms of Causation

Metaphysics: Criticisms of the principle of causation: if anyone can find an idea's corresponding impression, that idea can be meaningful. By contrast, if there is no corresponding impression, the idea lacks empirical support and should be considered a metaphysical idea without clear content. Hume asks us to see that many traditional philosophical ideas (essence, existence, etc.) lack such empirical content and so are problematic.

The causality or cause-and-effect relationship is a relation that the human mind constructs between two events. What critical analysis needs is the link between cause and effect: are the cause and its effects necessarily united? Traditional metaphysics claims there is a real connecting link between cause and effect. Hume was critical of the notion of a necessary connection between cause and effect: instead, he analyzed causality as grounded in habit and repeated conjunction.

Knowledge of nature is a matter of fact, where we are guided only by experience. Because the future has not yet occurred, we have no absolute certainty about what will happen. Our mind makes us believe there is a necessary connection between cause and effect, but this idea is not a property of things themselves. If we believe in necessity it is because we are accustomed to see two events conjoined in the past and presume they will be the same in the future. Hume never intended to discard the concept of causation entirely; rather, he sought to explain what that idea means and how it developed in our minds.