Who Were the Sea Peoples?

and general causal laws are derived from them: "I maintain that the Hume programme has things upside down... Singular causal claims are primary. This is true into senses. First, they are a necessary ingredient in the methods we used to establish generic causal claims. Even the methods that test causal laws by looking for regularities will not work unless some singular causal information is filled in first. Second, the regularities themselves play a secondary role in establishing a causal law. They are just evidence -- and only one kind of evidence is that -- that certain kinds of singular causal fact have happened." -- Nancy Cartwright, Nature's Capacities and Their Measurement , p. 2

"The question of causation lies outside of statistics." -- Michael Starbird Contra Hume, our idea of causation stems directly from our experience of acting in the world. Look at the monkey above: he is not puzzling over causation. He knows that if he smashes the nut with the rock, he will cause it to yield its delectable innards. The problems of causation dealt with in statistics are problems of detecting causation when the link between cause and effect is obscure. And then statistics can only provide evidence of causation, and never demonstrate it. There has been a strong correlation between which conference wins the Super Bowl and how stocks do that year . But nobody whatsoever believed for a minute that Super Bowl results were causing stock price movements, despite an 80% success rate in prediction. We only feel confident we really have identified "the cause" of something when we can grasp the causal mechanism involved. And causal mechanisms are som...

has pretty obvious problems, doesn't it? If it were really just "constant conjunction" that led us to posit causes, everyone would believe that the buying of summer fashions caused the hot weather that follows, right?