ABSTRACT

There can be no doubt that the Humean conception of causality and its linear descendant, the Regularity Theory, must be wrong. To accept either of these doctrines is to be forced in the long run to admit the irrationality of science and to acknowledge the impossibility of accounting for the common-sense view of the world. Why has the Humean point of view continued over many centuries to attract adherents among intelligent men? The answer must surely lie in there being certain assumptions in the Humean way of thinking whose full range of consequences have never been fully examined. Just as the tiniest error in navigation may lead to a landfall even on the wrong continent, so the acceptance of apparently innocuous principles can lead to doctrines which, if accepted, would render intellectual life as we practise it, and the world as we conceive it, impossible. But for some of those for whom the Regularity Theory and its associated doctrines in philosophical logic and the philosophy of science make up an attractive point of view, these dire consequences hold no terrors. For them the construction of a conceptual system capable of accommodating the actual intellectual practices of science, and in which the known character of the world can be satisfactorily and systematically described, are not reasonable ambitions. To such a one this book can offer little. But if an adherent of the Regularity Theory and its siblings is troubled by the continual revelation of disparities between what that theory claims ought to be the case in science and nature, and what actually obtains, then we are confident that in joining us he has nothing to lose but his dogmatic scales.