ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the main responses to Hume's interrogation of our concept of causation, as well as some responses that are less popular, but no less interesting, and perhaps no less important either. Causation is not logic, and even if deductive steps occur in obtaining causal knowledge, the overall process is not one of deductive inquiry, of the kind that produces mathematical knowledge. And a regularity analysis of causation is one which, whatever other bells and whistles are added, identifies causation with regularity. The reason for the lack of philosophical enthusiasm for Mackie's INUS analysis arises from general pessimism about the whole project of analysis causation in terms of regularities. The simple answer is derived from Lewis's semantic theory for counterfactuals. A counterfactual theory of causation is one which attempts to analyse causation using counterfactuals. Suppose epidemiologists see an association between cigarette-smoking with a range of negative health outcomes in a large cohort study.
