Monday, December 23, 2013

Causality, Induction, Deduction

Wittgenstein's phrase "causal nexus", in #5.136 of the Tractatus, continues and amplifies a profound confusion in the Humean tradition of the concept of Causality.  For, as the text surrounding that phrase indicates, there are two nexuses in Hume's original formulation--1. Past Constant Conjunction and 2. Inference from Past to Future--the latter of which is often ignored, by others.  But, the denial that the Future necessarily repeats the Past does not entail that some Past event was a continuous process governed by Necessity, i. e. that the 'conjuncts' are the product of a previous Disjunctive analysis of an originally continuous process.  For example, from the uncertainty that swinging a hammer at some glass will break, it does not follow that a completed actual breaking of glass by swinging a hammer at it was, in fact, constituted by a contingent concatenation of two originally distinct moments.  So, as is typical in the Atomist-Empiricist tradition, Wittgenstein does not consider that while the 'Logic' governing tenseless general Causal Propositions might be Inductive, that of Past Singular ones may be Deductive, i. e. he ignores that the inference from Present to Past is as dubious as that from Past to Future.

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