Abstract
The philosophical analysis of causality, like many other epistemological and metaphysical questions, relies heavily, and more or less explicitly, on the concept of mind and of mental activity. For example, Hume’s claims that Causal relations are supervenient upon causal laws and non-causal states of affairs, that perception of a singular Causal relation between two events is impossible without inference from a previously experienced regularity of relations between similar events; and that we cannot have synthetic a priori inferences of relations between cause and effect, rely explicitly on an associationist theory of mind and on the psychological empirical knowledge of his times. In fact, he sometimes challenges critics to show cases of the perception of singular Causal relations without previous experience, and cases of a priori inferences of the connection between cause and effect.
The present chapter is a new version of Viale R. (1999). Causal Cognition and Causal Realism, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 13, n. 2. With kind permissions from Taylor & Francis Group (http://www.tandfonline.com).
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Notes
- 1.
On the contrary my previous data and argument show that the primitive concept of causation, or necessity1, stems from necessity2, i.e. from the possibility of early causal perception based on innate a priori inference of a connection between cause and effect.
- 2.
The inverting lenses are lenses worn over the eyes that invert the orientation of all visual information relative to the body’s tactile and moto systems. They turn the visual world upside down. Subjects in these experiments gradually manage to recoordinate their vision with the rest of their sensory and motor systems so that the illusion of being in an upside down world fades away in about a week.
- 3.
Since the the acoustic character of an utterance underdetermines its structural description the parser must have access to a lot of background theory. That is for example the property of being a noun has no acoustic correspondent. Therefore the parser should rely on the knowledge of which words in the language are nouns.
- 4.
René Magritte expressed this problem in many paintings. His painting (1929) about a pipe with the caption “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” is better than many books of philosophy.
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Viale, R. (2013). Cognitive Reasons for Causal Realism . In: Methodological Cognitivism. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40216-6_3
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