ABSTRACT
You may also have some beliefs about the nature of Hume’s basic arguments for the four theses, as follows. His argument for Thesis 1 has something to do with the fact that on first observing, say, the white billiard ball making contact with the black (event a) one cannot predict that the black will move (event b); and it also has something to do with the (allegedly) obvious phenomenological fact that, no matter how hard you look, all you will really see is a happening and then b happening: you don’t see any third thing that somehow joins a and b together. Hume’s argument for Thesis 2 is a broadly empiricist argument: since sensory experience delivers no ‘impression’ of necessary connection ‘in the objects’, we have no reason to believe in, or perhaps cannot so much as form an idea of, mind-independent necessary connections. Hence – given that causal claims (‘the contact of the white caused the black to move’) are often true, or at least we generally believe them to be true – we need a concept of causation that does not appeal to mysterious necessary connections. The theory of causation that Hume thinks will do the trick is given by Thesis 3: Hume is, to borrow an expression of David Armstrong’s, a naïve regularity theorist about causation. And the argument for Thesis 4 is that any attempt to justify inductive inference – inference from the observed to the unobserved – is circular and hence begs the question against the inductive sceptic.
