ABSTRACT

My aim is to question, and to provide the outline of an alternative to, one major component in the views of Hume and his followers on causation. A typical expression of the component in question is given by Ramsey: I

The world, or rather that part of it with which we are acquainted, exhibits as we must all agree a good deal of regularity of succession. I contend that over and above that it exhibits no feature called causal necessity, but that we make sentences called causal laws from which (Le. having made which) we proceed to actions and propositions connected with them in a certain way, and say that a fact asserted in a proposition which is an instance of a causal law is a case of causal necessity.