Abstract

At the close of his account of causality in the Treatise, Hume acknowledges that he had to adopt the “seemingly preposterous method” of examining the causal inference prior to analyzing the causal relation since the relation “depends so much on the inference” (T 169). This dependence emerges in his two definitions of ‘cause’ (T 169–170) which, he concedes, seem “extraneous” to the causal relation. In this paper, I try to do what Hume did not do but could have done: fully describe the causal relation so as to reach its core. That core is what I call “existential dependence,” the fact that one “object” exists because another exists. It turns out that Hume’s “preposterous method” is correct since existential dependence is what I call a “distributive” relation, a kind of conjunction that can be represented only by means of certain inferences. This makes existential dependence seem mysterious, but the mystery disappears if we interpret this dependence as probability, something that is comprehensible only through inferences. The key consequence of all of this is that we need to distinguish between the kind of causality that conforms to Hume’s two definitions of ‘cause’ and the kind of causality our causal inferences designate.