Probability and Causality: Why Hume and Indeterminism Don't Mix

Abstract

A basic assumption of this paper is that things and events have causal capacities: in virtue of the properties they possess, they have the power to bring about other events or states. If you want to bring about a certain outcome, it is a good idea to introduce something with the appropriate capacity. The Humean tradition downplays capacities, and conceives of them as no more than misleading ways of referring to lawlike regularities. We want to reverse this idea: it is better to think of lawlike regularities as misleading ways of referring to the exercise of capacities. If we try to tailor our causal claims to match the regularities we see in nature, we will miss a good deal of the causal structure. Much recent discussion of probabilistic causality may be seen as a neo-Humean attempt to explain probabilistic capacities as, in a way, reducible to probabilistic regularities. Causality is supposed to be a relation between events, a relation which holds in virtue of the empirically distinguishable properties that events have; the relation consists in, or at least is marked by, the regular association of these properties. For Hume the association needed to be universal; nowadays a probabilistic association of the right sort will do. This does not work, we want to argue, and the reason is that the right sort of connections between-capacities and properties do not exist. Capacities are carried by properties. That is, you cannot have the capacity without having one of the right properties. But the same property can carry mixed capacities, and so the true complexity of the situation cannot be revealed by the associations of properties. This is what we hope to show here.

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