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Hume Argues Reason Cannot Prove Cause and Effect

We never observe causation itself, Hume says, only one event following another

On the timeline · around 1748 · The High EnlightenmentThe High EnlightenmentReform and CritiqueHume Argues Reason Cannot Prove Cause and Effect173517401745175017551760

Quick facts

Author
David Hume
Work
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Published
1748
Key idea
Causation as habit, not logical necessity

What happened

David Hume laid out his mature empiricism in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748 as a more accessible reworking of his earlier Treatise of Human Nature. Hume divided everything the mind can consider into relations of ideas, truths like mathematics that hold by definition, and matters of fact, claims about the world that depend on experience. He argued that our belief in cause and effect, that fire causes heat or bread nourishes, rests entirely on habit built from repeated observation, not on any logical necessity we can perceive or prove. We never actually observe one event forcing another to happen; we only observe one event followed by another, over and over, until we expect the pattern to continue.

Why it matters

Hume's argument meant that even science's basic assumption, that the future will resemble the past, cannot be proven by reason alone. Immanuel Kant later said reading Hume woke him from his "dogmatic slumber" and pushed him to write the Critique of Pure Reason to answer the challenge.

How we know

The Enquiry survives in Hume's original text; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Hume traces his account of impressions, ideas, and causation to it and to the Treatise.

Sources

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