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Humean Counterfactuals MARTIN BUNZL THERE IS NOTHING LIKE quoting Hume himself to support a non-Humean view of causation. And if one holds a sine qua non view of causation, there is no better passage to quote from the Humean corpus than the following: D+ [A cause is] an object, followed by another.., where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.' This passage has received attention from causal theorists of different stripes, many of whom have taken it to introduce an inconsistency. In this paper I want to examine the evidence for a view that renders the sine qua non interpretation plausible, yet benign from a Humean point of view. (Of course, by "Humean" I mean what is sometimes termed the constant-conjunction view of causation.) The argument I shall develop derives in large part from a textual comparison of a number of editions of the Enquiry. Hume appears to have defined causation in two ways in the Treatise:'~ [A cause is] an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are placed in a like relation of priority and contiguity to those objects, that resemble the latter. [A cause is] an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it in the imagination, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other. These definitions are repeated, with modifications, in the Enquiry. 3 D+ appears only once in the Humean corpus: Much of my thinking about this topic has been influenced by John Earman. David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 76 (emphasis omitted). A Treatise of Human Nature ed. L. A. Setby-Bigge 0888; reprint ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) , p. 172 (emphasis omitted). 3 pp. 76_77 . The major change between the formulations of the first two definitions in the Treatise and the Enquiry is that in the latter the requirement of spatial and temporal contiguity is no longer mentioned. [171] 172 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY D* We may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, where all objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.4 What we have come to know as An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding appeared in at least twelve different printings between I748 and I776. Yet D+ appears only beginning in 1756 with the publication of the third edition. 5 In the earlier editions the passage D* is truncated so that the sentence containing D+ is absent. D+ appears, then, to have been an emendation to the earlier editions of the Enquiry. (The third edition contains two other changes in Section 7: the essay is titled, "Of the Idea of Necessary Connection" instead of "Of the Idea of Power or Necessary Connection," and the tenth paragraph of the first part of the essay has been revised.) For contemporary sine qua non analysts it is tempting to read D+ as a clear statement of their view of causation. 6 On such a view, a (token) event c is viewed as a cause of a (token) event e if and only if c and e occurred and if c had not occurred, e would not have occurred. Part of the attractiveness of such approaches is their attempt to give an analysis of causal relations between tokens of events without relying on any claims about type-type relations . For such theorists, it is important to interpret D+ as constituting a counterfactual conditional analysis of tokens that remains agnostic about the question of contrast conjunctions between types of those tokens. One of the problems with such an interpretation of D+ is that it flies in the face of Hume's repeated caveats that causal inferences cannot be drawn straightforwardly on the basis of only one instance in which two events appear together. 7 Even so, the defender of the counterfactual interpretation of D+ might point...

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