David Hume Research Paper

Why History Matters: Associations and Causal Judgment in Hume and
Cognitive Science

Mark Collier
University of Minnesota, Morris

Abstract: It is commonly thought that Hume endorses the claim that causal cognition can be fully explained in terms of nothing but custom and habit. Associative learning does, of course, play a major role in the cognitive psychology of the Treatise. But Hume recognizes that associations cannot provide a complete account of causal thought. If human beings lacked the capacity to reflect on rules for judging causes and effects, then we could not (as we do) distinguish between accidental and genuine regularities, and
Hume could not (as he does) carry out his science of human nature. One might reply that
Hume would have learned to associate A events (i.e., cases where we observe constant conjunctions) and E events (i.e., cases where we make causal attributions). But he could never have moved to the second step of the investigation and discovered the deeper regularity (A+X→ E) that explains why we make the attributions that we do. Indeed, we might pose this as a general paradox about radical associationism: if human cognition was governed solely by the laws of association, then nobody could discover that this was the case.
The trouble arises from the self-reflexive nature of Hume’s science of human nature. Hume must rely upon his own faculties in order to study human cognition. But we can now see that this imposes constraints on what he can say about the operations of the human mind; in particular, he cannot make substantive claims that would undermine his capacity to carry out his investigations. If the laws of association were presented as a

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complete account of human cognition, however, it would violate this condition. Hume cannot therefore combine these two aspects of his Newtonian project – something has to give. In the end, what gives is the thesis that associations provide a
It seems that a slight modification in associative learning theory is all that is required in order to explain sophisticated causal reasoning.

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But associationism is not out of the woods yet. Recent causal learning experiments have presented a serious challenge to the associative approach (see De
Houwer, Beckers, and Vandorpe, 2005, for an overview). For example, De Houwer and
Beckers (2002) performed an experiment in which subjects were required to solve recursive backwards blocking tasks. Subjects were initially presented with trials in which A+B were followed by E and subsequently shown trials in which B+C were succeeded by E. In the final stage of the experiment, subjects were split into two groups: one group was presented with trials in which A was followed by E, and the other was shown trials in which A was not followed by E. The crucial result was that subjects in the former group were much more likely to judge that C, but not B, is a genuine cause of
E. De Houwer and Beckers maintain that this result cannot be explained in terms of conditioning models, including those that incorporate absent cues (p. 149). These