Regularity Accounts Remko van der Pluijm; 307114 1/3

Regularity accounts
When we talk about causality, a number of people intuitively associate this with an underlying
mechanics what constitutes the relation between a cause and an effect. For example, when I say
that, after I let loose a ball, gravity caused the ball to drop, this would mean that there is an
underlying mechanic, either contained in nature or contained in the objects itself (i.e. mass), which
causes the ball to fall. However, a number of philosophers have denied that any sort of underlying
mechanism is what makes these causal relations happen. Instead, they insist that what makes a
causality a causality is nothing more than the regularity of a and b. Within this short essay, I'll
discuss the essentials of these so-called regularity accounts of causation via the accounts of Hume,
Mill and Mackie.

Hume: Causation as a Matter of Fact

The first of these philosophers, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, is most
famous for his account on causation. This account is strongly based on how Hume thinks we gather
information about the world. In his view, we can distinguish two types of knowledge, being
Relations of Ideas (RoI) and Matters of Fact (MoF)1. RoI is a form of knowledge which is
discovered by a thought process and therefore independent of the external world. Under this
category falls mathematical, logical and grammatical knowledge. With these forms of knowledge,
according to Hume, it is either “intuitively or demonstratively certain.”, meaning that we cannot
conceive of it's opposite without entering a contradiction. When we, for example, in Euclid
geometry state that a circle cannot have the same form as a square, the opposite, being that a circle
has the same form of a square, implies a contradiction.
MoF concerns knowledge regarding our experiences. The example given by Hume is regarding the
sun coming up. Although we would experience it as strange when the sun wouldn't come up
tomorrow, we reasonably cannot talk about a contradiction.
According to Hume, knowledge can be either a MoF or a RoI; there is no kind 'in between'. This
fact is actually essential in his account on causality, as our notion of causality also has to be either a
MoF or a RoI. What reason would we have to ascertain that causation is a RoI? Could we not
conceive of causal relations without creating a contradiction in the case of causal relations? Well,
we can certainly imagine a case in which a billiard ball is shot towards another and the one shot
comes to an immediate stop, not moving the other. According to Hume, we have therefore no
principle reason to assume that those billiard balls will follow in a (more or less) straight line.
Therefore, we have to conclude that causality is a Matter of Fact. Causality then becomes nothing
more than a regularity. We conceive these regularities as causal relations because of a 'trick' of the
mind. We've seen a lot of causal relations, and therefore grown accustomed to the thought that there
is something which gives us a feeling of ascertainment when we experience a causal relation.
Moreover, we cannot have a direct observation of a causal power other than its results, so we would
be in no position to assume a causal relation.2
Another aspect of Hume's thought about causality is that it only focusses on single causes. The first
billiard ball hits the second billiard ball, so the first billiard ball is the cause for the movement of the
second billiard ball, thereby neglecting the fact that the result would probably be a lot different if
either of the balls were glued to the surface.
Also, Hume doesn't seem able to distinguish between causal relations and mere regularities, where
the regularity is based on either an underlying cause on the first level underneath or even more
abstract causes. Imagine for instance that I go to work every morning on 8:00 AM. Furthermore,
imagine that the sun comes up at 8:00 AM. According to Hume's account of causality, the sun

1 Hume 1975, Sect. IV, Part I, p 25-26.

2 Ibid, Sect. V, Part I, P 42.
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coming up causes me to go to work. Clearly, this is due to an underlying mechanism, being that my
working hours start at 8:30 AM. This example is more or less equivalent to Mackie's example of the
factory hooters in Manchester causing the London workers leaving for work3. Mill deals with some
of these problems, but also has a number of his own.

Mill: Plurality of causes and the unconditionality demand

First of all, Mill agrees with Hume that we cannot know whether there is some underlying
mechanism, as it is with all regularity accounts. Even more strongly, for Mill it doesn't matter
whether there is some underlying cause. He is only interested in knowledge which can be gained by
experience and, as Mill states himself, “No such necessity [of a “mysterious and most powerful
tie”] exists for the purposes of the present inquiry, nor will any such doctrine be found in the
following pages. […] The Law of Causation, […] is but the familiar truth, that invariability of
succession is found by observation to obtain between every fact in nature and some other fact which
has preceded it”4.
There are a number of differences between Mill and Hume. First of all, he distinguishes between
states and events, the former being the more stable factors within the case of causality and the latter
the factor that has changed. When we for example look at a typical Dutch saying, ”the last drop that
made the bucket run over.”5, we say that one of the states involved is temperature, being influential
on the volume of the water already in the bucket and the maximum volume of the bucket. An event
is the last drop of water entering the bucket, as it introduces a change in the situation beforehand.
Second, Mill introduces the concept of a 'negative cause', a condition which must be absent instead
of present in order for the effect to happen. This is introduced by the example of a person dying by
eating poison. In this case, one of the 'negative causes' is a relevant antidote, because the person
wouldn't die when eating the poison when using the antidote in time.
Third, he introduces the concept of a plurality of causes. Mill recognises that there is not always
only one cause for an effect to happen. A radical temperature change by which the volume the water
has increases and at the same time the last drop is falling into the bucket, both can be seen as a
cause and both being events rather than states. Most of the time these multiple causes will consist of
a number of states and events, both positive and negative. For Mill then, a cause “[...] is the sum
total of the conditions, positive and negative taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every
description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows”6.
Fourth, and here it becomes really tricky, Mill acknowledges the problem that we cannot
differentiate between genuine causes and mere regularities. He describes this problem by referring
to the regularity of night following day and day following night. It is obvious that night isn't 'caused'
by day, although for Mill, this is implied by the standard regularity account. To solve this problem,
he introduces the restriction that causal relations not only have to be invariable, but also
unconditional. Unconditional here means being valid in past, present and future. Although this may
help solving the problem of the day causing the night, it also is a too strong standard, as it suggest
that we cannot speak of causes in cases where there is a possibility of (biological) evolution which
makes the cause invalid, although we would say that the concept of causation contains these
causes7. It isn't e.g. not inconceivable that we develop methods to attain 'human regeneration'8, but
still it would be strange to say that “chopping of an arm” isn't a real 'cause' for “unhealable damage
to the body”. Also, this would probably lead to unreasonably high demands to rightfully call
something a causal relation, as we would have to be able to predict in the future. However, it is

3 Mackie 1974, Ch. 3. See also Reiss (Forthcoming), p21.

4 Mill 1874, p236.
5 Dutch: De laatste druppel die de emmer deed overlopen.
6 Mill 1874, p241.
7 Reiss (Forthcoming), p17.
8 See e.g. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=regrowing-human-limbs
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important to note that Mill didn't experience the 'problem of induction' as a problem and therefore
he the above objection regarding the unreasonably high demand isn't relevant for him. For all Mill
is concerned, our experience shows that there are causal relations, even though this seems to be a
circular reasoning; one could say he is biting Hume's bullet.

Mackie: INUS conditions

Mackie sophisticated Mill's account based on our ordinary concepts and made a formal definition of
the regularity account of causation. He takes with him from Mill the thought that there can be plural
causes. He thereby adds another concept, being field. Where for Mill only events were really
important as a cause, Mackie sees that sometimes the environment can be essential. An example
from Reiss is the burning of a house because there was a match and a gas leak: although the match
is the cause of the fire and although the gas leak can be seen as a 'state', still, the burning of the
house could only occur when the gas leak would be there.
Secondly, Mackie adds that there can be multiple causes for the same effect. To continue with the
example of a burning house, I could also burn my house because of short-circuiting and the absence
of a safety fuse. Therefore, Mackie defines the full cause as the disjunct of these conjuncts within a
certain field. So, formally, this becomes9:

In F, all (AB¬C or DG¬H or JK¬L) are followed by P, and, in F, all P are preceded by (AB¬C or
DG¬H or JK¬L).

But how do we define A or B? Well, without one of them that particular conjunct will fail (if I lack
a match, there won't be a fire by lightening the gas), but it isn't said that there won't be a fire (one of
the other conjuncts in the disjunct could be fulfilled to cause the fire). He calls this an insufficient
but non-redundant part of an unnecesary but sufficient condition or INUS-condition.

But does this solve the problems as with Mill or Hume? Mackie himself acknowledges that it is
difficult to ensure that this definition only has cases of genuine causality. In other words, this
definition may have enough necessary conditions, but not enough to be sufficient. According to
Mackie, we seem to lack something he calls 'causal priority'. But as a regularity account doesn't
have any arguments to determine 'causal priority', this isn't a solution to this problem.

Objections regarding time ordering

There is one last objection I want to discuss. All regularity accounts seem to assume a form of time
ordering: first there is a cause and then there is an effect. But creating an account of causation
which excludes backward causation in principle can be metaphysically unsatisfying, especially
since there are some fields of theoretical physics in which backward causation is regarded as a
solution which isn't, although not undisputed, as of yet rejected. Taking this into account, this can be
a problem for the regularity account, as it needs temporal ordering to distinguish between cause and
effect.

9 Mackie 1974, p63.