ABSTRACT
David Hume (1711–1776) was critical of any theory that holds that causes somehow "produce" their effects. He maintained that if we need to understand "productive efficacy" before we can understand "causation," then we must remain ignorant of causes and effects. Hume's "official position" fails as a theory of causal relatedness. It is false that every de facto constant sequential conjunction is a causal relation. Hume held that the mind, having experienced a correlation, anticipates the occurrence of an effect event upon presentation of an associated cause event. This anticipation is the source of our conviction that a necessary connectedness undergirds the correlation. The subjective version of the regularity view stipulates that a causal relation is a three-term relation. Lastly, Hume unpacked "causal relation" as a contrary-to-fact conditional claim. That Hume assigned these several meanings to "causal relation" complicates efforts to extract a consistent statement of his philosophy. Hume invoked disparate meanings of "cause" in his discussions of philosophical issues.
