ABSTRACT
Hume tells us that there is no such thing as natural necessity.Whatwe call causality, he says, is a reification of our own subjective expectations regarding constant conjunctions. We expect that things that have come after other things in the past will continue to do so in the present and on into the future; “causality” is simply a misnomer for the feeling of anticipation that we experience in our encounters with the familiar. Doing away with the idea of natural necessity – an ontological move, albeit one forced upon Hume by his epistemology – ushers in the problem of induction. On what grounds, Hume and philosophers since have asked, may we justify predictions (fire, ceteris paribus, will burn paper next time too) and/or generalizations (fire always burns paper) if there are no necessary connections between things?
