Causal laws and the foundations of natural science

Abstract

In the Transcendental Analytic Kant develops a characteristically striking - and at the same time characteristically elusive - conception of the causal relation. Thus, for example, in a preliminary section (13) to the transcendental deduction Kant introduces the problem by remarking that, with respect to the concept of cause, “it is a priori not clear why appearances should contain something of this kind” (A 90 / B 122); for, as far as sensibility is concerned, “everything could be situated in such disorder that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing offered itself that suggested a rule of synthesis - and thus would correspond to the concept of cause and effect - so that this concept would therefore be entirely empty, null, and without meaning” (A 90 / B 123). A memorable paragraph then follows: If one thought to extricate oneself from the difficulty of this investigation by saying that experience unceasingly offers examples of such rule-governedness of appearances, which [examples] provide sufficient inducement for abstracting the concept of cause therefrom and thereby simultaneously prove the objective reality of such a concept, then one is failing to observe that the concept of cause can absolutely not arise in this way. Rather, it must either be grounded completely a priori in the understanding or be entirely abandoned as a mere chimera. For this concept positively requires that something A be such that something else B follow from it necessarily and in accordance with an absolutely universal rule . Appearances certainly provide cases in which a rule is possible according to which something customarily occurs, but never that the result is necessary . To the synthesis of cause and effect there consequently also belongs a dignity that one absolutely cannot express empirically: namely, that the effect is not merely joined to the cause, but rather is posited through it and results from it. The strict universality of the rule is certainly not a property of empirical rules, which, through induction, can possess nothing but comparative universality: i.e., extended utility. Thus, the use of the pure concepts of the understanding would be entirely altered if one wanted to treat them only as empirical products. (A 91-2 / B 123-4)

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