ABSTRACT
Psychology is concerned more with how people understand causation, how they perceive causal relations, make causal inferences and attributions, and so on. There are close links between the study of action and causation in psychology and philosophy. Philosophical ideas and theories have been taken as models for psychological hypotheses: psychologists have supposed, in effect, that people’s understanding of causation might resemble that enshrined in some philosophical theory, and have designed empirical tests of the supposition. Regularity theories generally analyse causation in terms of empirical associations between events. A different type of modification to constant conjunction is the idea of analysing causation in probabilistic terms. D. Hume argued that if there were only particular conjunctions, then one could never form the idea of cause and effect. Hume’s radical empiricism entailed that he was unable to say anything about the actual nature of causes. Few philosophers subscribe to Hume’s regularity theory because it is overinclusive.
