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“ Causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experience”

- David Hume -

David Hume was the first philosopher to say something about cause and effect. It is

strange how philosophers before Hume didn’t say anything about cause and effect, and it’s such

an important concept in philosophy. According to Hume, cause and effect occur when one event

is being conjoined by another event. It is easy for us to determine the causes and effects of events

and we believe that we can discover them by reason. Hume begged to differ. The idea that

‘causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experience’ is very logical and

epistemic, which appears to be true.

John Locke suggested that our minds are ‘tabula rasa’ or blank s ltate. He said ‘nihil in

intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu’ meaning nothing exists in the mind that was not first in

the senses. One of the things we learn from senses is patterns. When one first discovers that ice is

slippery for example, he/she will know that if he/she stands on it he/she will slip. This experience

has come from patterns. The person has seen an object sliding on ice, then a person sliding on ice

and then a person falling. Throughout this experience, the person concludes that ice is slippery.

According to Hume “all laws of nature and all the operations of bodies without exception are

only known as experience”. We can connect experience with discovering causes and effects of 

events because a person needs experience of a specific event before predicting the effect of a

cause.

Our expectations of effects come from experience. For example, when I go to bed at

night and look at the ceiling, I see lights that the cars make from the street. So, whenever I hear a

sound of a car engine from long distance I expect to see lights on the ceiling in the next few

Marko Todorovski

Philosophy 11 IB

Period BFebruary 27, 2009

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seconds. My expectation comes from a pattern that I have been experiencing for a long time. The

lights from the car caused lights to appear on my ceiling. This is exactly what Hume meant by

discovering causes and effects by experience. David Hume believed that a person cannot predict

what will happen when a marble hits another marble if he/she doesn’t have any experience of 

two balls colliding. People may argue that a person may use reason to predict correctly but that’s

not what Hume wanted to say. We do use reason to predict the effects of the causes but only after 

we’ve experienced similar events. People use experience to discover causes and effects, and

reason, to predict.

It can be proven that people cannot use reason to predict outcome of causes. When I

throw an object I know that it will fall on the ground. And I know that gravity caused ithe fall

 because I’ve learned about it. However, if I were born in on a planet in which there is no gravity

and I didn’t know a thing about gravity, then there is no why I can use my reason to predict that

objects on Earth fall. Reason has to be combined with experience in order to be successful at

discovering causes and effects. This is why Hume said that it is experience that discovers causes

and effects not reason. Reason is just a tool being used for interpretations.

The concept of ‘cause and effect’ has been used efficiently in the world. Everything in

history is cause and effect and the subject history wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for causes and

effects. I noticed that philosophers in the past were more conserved with metaphysics and

looking for things beyond our mind that created the world. None of these could be proved nor 

fully explained. Expansion of epistemology on the other hand brings new discoveries about life,

which advances knowledge and technology. This is why David Hume and his concept of ‘cause

and effect’ are so important in world’s history.