ABSTRACT
The belief expressed by Quine’s famous quip that ‘the Humean condition is also the human condition’ is one that as yet shows little sign of relaxing its grip on mainstream analytic epistemology and philosophy of science, despite various recent developments which would seem to point in a radically different direction.1 That is to say, the agenda of current debatewith regard to issues of causal explanation still tends to be set by those familiar kinds of sceptical (e.g. positivist or empiricist) argument that take a lead from Hume in denying the existence – or at any rate the knowability – of real-world operative causal forces, powers, or dispositions in nature. Of course there is a crucial distinction to be drawn between full-strength ontological and scaled-down epistemological versions of the sceptic’s claim. On the one hand are ranged those old-guard ‘orthodox’ Humeans (by now perhaps rather few) who would reject any realist of objectivist notion of causality, while on the other can be found subscribers to the lately ascendant, more moderate or revisionist view.2 According to this we can have no demonstrative proof or knowledge of physical causes even though, by the same token, we have no good reason to deny that they exist and exert their various capacities or powers quite apart from our knowledge (or lack of it) concerning them. Thus scepticism is held within decent, scientifically reputable bounds and can also be made out to comply with the single most basic tenet of philosophic realism, that is, the objectivist claim that truth might always exceed the scope and limits of humanly attainable proof or verification.
