Abstract

Humean accounts of law are at the same time accounts of causation. Accordingly, since laws of nature are nothing but contingent cosmic regularities, to be a cause is just to be an instance of such a law. It follows from this view that it is logically impossible that there be causally related events which are not law-governed. Any particular cause-effect pair instantiates some law of nature, where the law is understood as a regularity. The regularity itself may be understood phenomenalistically, that is, as holding between sense impressions, or realistically, that is, as holding between objective events or event-types. These days even empiricists are realists to some extent, so I will eschew the radically empiricist version and assume that when a Humean talks about regularities, he is referring to objective events, states or processes in nature, not to his subjective experiences.