Monday, January 28, 2008
Hume's Enquiry poses a very radical skeptical problem: We are inclined to accept his premise that all our simple ideas come from impressions (feelings, perceptions), and that all other thoughts are memories or recombinations of these. It also seems fair to say that our understanding of matters of fact depends crucially on relations of cause and effect. However, we cannot discover causal relationships in our impressions -- no matter how hard we try, the best we can get is a constant conjunction of events that we infer (rather than perceive) to be causally related. It seems to follow that we have no direct perception of causality, and hence no knowledge of it as such. But if we never know about causal relationships, can we really be said to know much of anything about the world of our experience (other than the bare fact that we experience it)?
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I would personally like to see a creature with the ability to perceive causality directly.
In lieu of that, perhaps the best-foot-forward approach to understanding causal relationships (based on what predictions we can make about cause and effect and how well such predictions match up to experience) would work best, allowing us to build an understanding of the world in that fashion, with appropriate humility for our limitation, while not allowing said limitations to discourage our curiosity (natural or not) along the way.
Double post was due to spelling mishaps, by the way. Apologies.
Interesting suggestion -- can we even imagine a creature that could sense causal relationships directly?
I suppose if causality is a product of the interanimation of "strings" (existing in "collapsed" dimensions), some multidimensional creature, existing at the level of those strings, might directly perceive what we refer to as causality.
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