A GENERAL INFLUENCE ON THOUGHT By: RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW

A GENERAL INFLUENCE ON THOUGHT
Presented by: RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW
Until very recently it could have been that most approaches to the philosophy of science were cognitive. This includes logical positivism, as nearly all of those who wrote about the nature of science would have been in agreement that science ought to be value-free. This had been a particular emphasis on the part of the first positivist, as it would be upon twentieth-century successors. Science, so it is  said, deals with facts, and facts and values and irreducibly distinct. Facts are objective, they are what we seek in our knowledge of the world. Values are subjective: They bear the mark of human interest, they are the radically individual products of feeling and desire. Fact and value cannot, therefore, be inferred from fact, fact ought not be influenced by value. There were philosophers, notably some in the Kantian tradition, who viewed the relation of the human individual to the universalist aspiration of difference rather differently. But the legacy of three centuries of largely empiricist reflection of the new sciences ushered in by Galilee Galileo (1564-1642), the Italian scientist whose distinction belongs to the history of physics and astronomy, rather than natural philosophy.
 The philosophical importance of Galilees science rests largely upon the following closely related achievements: (1) His stunning successful arguments against Aristotelean science, (2) his proofs that mathematics is applicable to the real world. (3) His conceptually powerful use of experiments, both actual and employed regulatively, (4) His treatment of causality, replacing appeal to hypothesized natural ends with a quest for efficient causes, and (5) his unwavering confidence in the new style of theorizing that would come to be known as mechanical explanation.
 A century later, the maxim that scientific knowledge is value-laded seems almost as entrenched as its opposite was earlier. It is supposed that between fact and value has been breached, and philosophers of science seem quite at home with the thought that science and value may be closely intertwined after all. What has happened to bring about such an apparently radical change? What is its implications for the objectivity of science, the prized characteristic that, from Platos time onwards, has been assumed to set off real knowledge (epistēmē) from mere opinion (doxa)? To answer these questions adequately, one would first have to know something of the reasons behind the decline of logical positivism, as, well as of the diversity of the philosophies of science that have succeeded it.
 More general, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science is burgeoning on several fronts. Contemporary philosophical reelecting about the mind - which has been quite intensive - has been influenced by this empirical inquiry, to the extent that the boundary lines between them are blurred in places.
 Nonetheless, the philosophy of mind at its core remains a branch of metaphysics, traditionally conceived. Philosophers continue to debate foundational issues in terms not radically different from those in vogue in previous eras. Many issues in the metaphysics of science hinge on the notion of causation. This notion is as important in science as it is in everyday thinking, and much scientific theorizing is concerned specifically to identify the causes of various phenomena. However, there is little philosophical agreement on what it is to say that one event is the cause of some other.
 Modern discussion of causation starts with the Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist David Hume (1711-76), who argued that causation is simply a matter for which he denies that we have innate ideas, that the causal relation is observably anything other than constant conjunction wherefore, that there are observable necessary connections anywhere, and that there is either an empirical or demonstrative proof for the assumptions that the future will resemble the past, and that every event has a cause. That is to say, that there is an irresolvable dispute between advocates of free-will and determinism, that extreme scepticism is coherent and that we can find the experiential source of our ideas of self-substance or God.
 According to Hume (1978), on event causes another if only if events of the type to which the first event belongs regularly occur in conjunctive events of the type to which the second event belongs. The formulation, however, leaves a number of questions open. Firstly, there is a problem of distinguishing genuine causal law from accidental regularities. Not all regularities are sufficient law-like to underpin causal relationships. Being that there  is a screw in my desk could well be constantly conjoined with being made of copper, without its being true that these screws are made of copper because they are in my desk. Secondly, the idea of constant conjunction does not give  a direction to causation. Causes need to be distinguished from effects. But knowing that A-type events are constantly conjoined with B-type events does not tell us which of A and B is the cause and which the effect, since constant conjunction is itself a symmetric relation. Thirdly, there is a problem about probabilistic causation. When we say that causes and effects are constantly conjoined, do we mean that the effects are always found with the causes, or is it enough that the causes make the effect probable?
 Many philosophers of science during the past century have preferred to talk about explanation than causation. According to the covering-law model of explanation, something is explained if it can be deduced from premises which include one or more laws. As applied to the explanation of particular events this implies that one particular event can be explained if it is linked by a law to some other particular event. However, while they are often treated as separate theories, the covering-law account of explanation is at bottom little more than a variant of Humes constant conjunction account of causation. This affinity shows up in the fact at the covering-law account faces essentially the same difficulties as Hume: (1) In appealing to deduction from laws, it needs to explain the difference between genuine laws and accidentally true regularities: (2) Its omission by effects, as well as effects by causes, after all, it is as easy to deduce the height of a flagpole from the length of its shadow and the law of optics: (3) Are the laws invoked in explanation required to be exceptionalness and deterministic, or is it acceptable say, to appeal to the merely probabilistic fact that smoking makes cancer more likely, in explaining why some particular person develops cancer?
 Nevertheless, one of the centrally obtainable achievements for which the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploitrated in the science. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explanations of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial concepts as fitness and biological function. By introducing teleological considerations, this account views beliefs as states with biological purpose and analyses their truth conditions specifically as those conditions that they are biologically supposed to covary with.
 A teleological theory of representation needs to be supplemental with a philosophical account of biological representation, generally a selectionism account of biological purpose, according to which item ‘F’ has purpose ‘G’ if and only if it is now present as a result of past selection by some process which favoured items with ‘G’. So then, a given belief type will have the purpose of covarying with ‘P’, say. If and only if some mechanism has selected it because it has covaried with ‘P’ the past.
 Along the same lines, teleological theory holds that r represents x if it is r’s unction to indicate (i.e., covary with) x, teleological theories are to be unlike or distinct in nature, form, or characteristics, so to be of unlike or opposite opinion depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps the most important distinction is that between historical theories of functions and a-historical theories. Historical theories individuate functional states (hence, contents) in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was learned, or the way it evolved. A historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate x only if the capacity to token r was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates x thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical states being a-historical) but lacking rs historical origins would not represent x according to historical theories.
 The American philosopher of mind (1935-) Jerry Alan Fodor, is known for a resolute realism about the nature of mental functioning, taking the analogy between thought and computation seriously. Fodor believes that mental representations should be conceived as individual states with their own identities and structures, like formulae transformed by processes of computation or thought. His views are frequently contrasted with those of holist s such as the American philosopher Herbert Donald Davidson (1917-2003), or instrumentalists about mental ascription, such as the British philosopher of logic and language, Eardley Anthony Michael Dummett (1925-). In recent years he has become a vocal critic of some of the aspirations of cognitive science.
 Nonetheless, a suggestion x extrapolating the solution of teleology is continually queried by points as owing to causation and content, and ultimately a fundamental appreciation is to be considered, is that: We suppose that theres a causal path from As to A’s and a causal path from B’s to A’s, and our problem is to find some difference between ‘B’ -caused A’s and ‘A’ -caused A’s in virtue of which the former but not the latter misrepresented. Perhaps, the two paths differ in their counter factual properties. In particular, in spite of the fact that, with minor exceptions or flaws expounded by the A’s and the B’s who participate in the giving cause in A’s in every bit as a matter to fact, perhaps can assume that only A’s willing cause A’s in - as one can say -, optimal circumstances. We could then hold that a symbol ‘x’ expresses its optimal property, viz., the property that would causally control its tokening in optimal circumstances. Correspondingly, when the tokening of a symbol is causally controlled by properties other than its optimal property, the tokens that eventuate are ipso facto wild.
 Suppose at the present time, that this story about optimal circumstances is proposed as part of a naturalized semantics for mental representations. In which case it is, of course, essential that it be possible to say that the optimal circumstances for tokening a mental representation are in terms that are not themselves either semantical or intentional. (It would not do, for x is exampled, to identify the optimal circumstances for tokening a symbol as those in which the tokens are true, that would be to assume precisely the sort of semantical notion that the theory is supposed to naturalize.) Befittingly, the suggestion - to put it in a nutshell - is that appeals to optimality should be buttressed by appeals to teleology: Optimal circumstances are the ones in which the mechanisms that mediate symbol tokening are functioning as they are supposed to. In the case of mental representations, these would be paradigmatically circumstances where the mechanisms of belief fixation are to prove adequately or sufficiently functioning as they are accepted or advanced as true or real on the basis of less than conclusive evidence.
 So, then: The teleologies of the cognitive mechanisms determine the optimal condition for belief fixation, and the optimal condition for belief fixation determines the content of beliefs. So the story goes.
 To put this objection in slightly other words: The teleology story perhaps strikes one as plausible in that it understands one normative notion - truth - in terms of another normative notion - optimality. But this appearance if it is spurious there is no guarantee that the kind of optimality that teleology reconstructs has much to do with the kind of optimality that the explication of truth requires. When mechanisms of repression are working optimally - when theyre working as theyre supposed to - what they deliver are likely to be falsehoods.
 Once, again, there is no obvious reason why coitions that are optimal for the tokening of one sort of mental symbol need be optimal for the tokening of other sorts. Perhaps the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs about very large objects, are different from the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs about very small ones, are different from the optimal conditions for fixing beliefs sights. But this raises the possibilities that if were to say which conditions are optimal for the fixation of a belief, well have to know what the content of the belief is - what it’s a belief about. Our explication of content would then require a notion of optimality, whose explication in turn requires a notion of content, and the resulting pile would clearly be unstable.
 Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘x’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘x’. Teleological theories differ, depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps the most important distinction is that between historical theories of functions: Historically, theories individuate functional states (hence, contents) in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was learned, or the way it evolved. A historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicates ‘x’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘x?’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from r (physical states being a-historical), but lacking rs historical origins would not represent x according to historical theories.
 Just as functional role theories hold that rs representing x is grounded in the functional role r has in the representing system, i.e., on the relations imposed by specified cognitive processes between r and other representations in the systems repertoire. Functional role theories take their cue from such common sense ideas as that people cannot believe that cats are furry if they do not know that cats are animals or that fur is like hair.
 That being said, that nowhere is the new period of collaboration between philosophy and other disciplines more evident than in the new subject of cognitive science. Cognitive science from its very beginning has been interdisciplinary in character, and is in effect the joint property of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science and anthropology. There are, therefore, a great variety of different research projects within cognitive science, but the central area of cognitive science, its hardcore ideology rests on the assumption that the mind is best viewed as analogous to a digital computer. The basic idea behind cognitive science is that recent developments in computer science and artificial intelligence have enormous importance for our conception of human beings. The basic inspiration for cognitive science went something like this: Human beings do information processing. Computers are designed precisely do information processing. Therefore, one way to study human cognition - perhaps the best way to study it - is to study it as a matter of computational information processing. Some cognitive scientists think that the computer is just a metaphor for the human mind: Others think that the mind is literally a computer program. But it is fair to say, that without the computational model there would not have been a cognitive science as we now understand it.
 In Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the first modern systematic presentation of empiricist epistemology, and as such had important implications for the natural sciences and for philosophy of science generally. Like his predecessor, Descartes, the English philosopher (1632-1704) John Locke began his account of knowledge from the conscious mind aware of ideas. Unlike Descartes, however, he was concerned not to build a system based on certainty, but to identify the mind’s scope and limits. The premise upon which Locke built his account, including his account of the natural sciences, is that the ideas which furnish the mind are all derived from experience. He thus, totally rejected any kind of innate knowledge. In this he consciously opposing Descartes, who had argued that it is possible to come to knowledge of fundamental truths about the natural world through reason alone. Descartes (1596-1650) had argued, that we can come to know the essential nature of both intends of mind and the subjective matter by pure reason. John Locke accepted Descartes measurable criterions of clear and distinct ideas as the basis for knowledge, but denied any source for them other than experience. It was information that came in and absorbed by the five senses (ideas of sensation) and ideas engendered from pure inner experiences (ideas of reflection) come as our building blocks of the understanding.
 Locke combined his commitment to the new way of ideas with the native espousal of the corpuscular philosophy of the Irish scientist (1627-92) Robert Boyle. This, in essence, was an acceptance of a revised, more sophisticated account of matter and its properties that had been advocated by the ancient atomists and recently supported by Galileo (1564-1642) and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). Boyle argued from theory and experiment that there were powerful reasons to justify some kind of corpuscular account of matter and its properties. He called the latter qualities, which he distinguished as primary and secondary - the distinction between primary and secondary qualities may be reached by two rather different routes: Either from the nature or essence of matter or from the nature and essence of experience, though practising these have tended to run together. The former considerations make the distinction seem like an a priori, or necessary, truth about the nature of matter, while the latter make it appears to be an empirical hypothesis -. Locke, too, accepted this account, arguing that the ideas we have of the primary qualities of bodies resemble those qualities as they are in the subject, whereas the ideas of the secondary qualities, such as colour, taste, and smell, do not resemble their causes in the object.
 There is no strong connection between acceptance of the primary-secondary quality distinction and Lockes empiricism and Descartes had also argued strongly for universal acceptance by natural philosophers, and Locke embraced it within his more comprehensive empirical philosophy. But Locke empiricism did have major implications for the natural sciences, as he well realized. His account begins with an analysis of experience. All ideas, he argues, are either simple or complex. Simple ideas are those like the red of a particular rose or the roundness of a snowball. Complicated and complex ideas, our ideas of the rose or the snowball, are combinations of simple ideas. We may create new complicated and complex ideas in our imagination - a parallelogram, for example. But simple ideas can never be created by us: We just have them or not, and characteristically they are caused, for example, the impact on our senses of rays of light or vibrations of sound in the air coming from a particular physical object. Since we cannot create simple ideas, and they are determined by our experience. Our knowledge is in a very strict uncompromising way limited. Besides, our experiences are always of the particular, never of the general. It is this particular simple idea or that particular complex idea that we apprehend. We never in that sense apprehend a universal truth about the natural world, but only particular instances. It follows from this that all claims to generality about that world - for example, all claims to identity what were then beginning to be called the laws of nature - must to that extent go beyond our experience and thus be less than certain.
 The Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist, (1711-76) David Hume, whose famous discussion appears in both his major philosophical works, the Treatise (1739) and the Enquiry(1777). The distinction is couched in terms of the concept of causality, so that where we are accustomed to talk of laws, Hume contends, involves three ideas:
  1. That there should be a regular concomitance between events
  Of the type of the cause and those of the type of the effect.
  2. That the cause event should be contiguous with the effect event.
  3. That the cause event should necessitate the effect event.
The tenets (1) and (2) occasion no differently for Hume, since he believes that there are patterns of sensory impressions un-problematically related to the idea of regularity concomitance and of contiguity. But the third requirement is deeply problematic, in that the idea of necessarily that figures in it seems to have no sensory impression correlated with it. However, carefully and attentively we scrutinize a causal process, we do not seem to observe anything that might be the observed correlate of the idea of necessity. We do not observe any kind of activity, power, or necessitation. All we ever observe is one event following another, which is logically independent of it. Nor is this necessity logical, since, as, Hume observes, one can jointly assert the existence of the cause and a denial of the existence of the effect, as specified in the causal statement or the law of nature, without contradiction. What, then, are we to make of the seemingly central notion of necessity that is deeply embedded in the very idea of causation, or lawfulness? To this query, Hume gives an ingenious and telling story. There is an impression corresponding to the idea of causal necessity, but it is a psychological phenomenon: Our exception that an even similar to those we have already observed to be correlated with the cause-type of events will come to be in this case too. Where does that impression come from? It is created as a kind of mental habit by the repeated experience of regular concomitance between events of the type of the effect and the occurring of event s of the type of the cause. And then, the impression that corresponds to the idea of regular concomitance - the law of nature then asserts nothing but the existence of the regular concomitance.
 At this point in our narrative, the question at once arises as to whether this factor of life in nature, thus interpreted, corresponds to anything that we observe in nature. All philosophy is an endeavour to obtain a self-consistent understanding of things observed. Thus, its development is guided in two ways, one is demand for coherent self-consistency, and the other is the elucidation of things observed. With our direct observations how are we to conduct such comparisons? Should we turn to science? No. There is no way in which the scientific endeavour can detect the aliveness of things: Its methodology rules out the possibility of such a finding. On this point, the English mathematician and philosopher (1861-1947) Alfred Whitehead, comments: That science can find no individual enjoyment in nature, as science can find no creativity in nature, it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of natural science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of physical science lies in the fact that such science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat - or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental.
 Whitehead claims that the methodology of science makes it blind to a fundamental aspect of reality, namely, the primacy of experience, it neglected half of the evidence. Working within Descartes dualistic framework reference, of matter and mind as separate and incommensurate, science limits itself to the study of objectivised phenomena, neglecting the subject and the mental events that are his or her experience.
 Both the adoption of the Cartesian paradigm and the neglect of mental events are reason enough to suspect blindness, but there is no need to rely on suspicions. This blindness is clearly evident. Scientific discoveries, impressive as they are, are fundamentally superficial. Science can express regularities observed in nature, but it cannot explain the reasons for their occurrence. Consider, for example, Newtons law of gravity. It shows that such apparently disparate phenomena as the falling of an apple and the revolution of the earth around the sun are aspects of the same regularity - gravity. According to this law the gravitational attraction between two objects deceases in proportion to the square of the distance between them. Why is that so? Newton could not provide an answer. Simpler still, why does space larger in extent or capacity than our asking of something about three dimensions? Why is time one-dimensional? Whitehead notes, None of these laws of nature gives the slightest evidence of necessity. They are [merely] the modes of procedure which within the scale of observation do in fact prevail.
 This analysis reveals that the capacity of science to fathom the depths of reality is limited. For example, if reality is, in fact, made up of discrete units, and these units have the fundamental character in being  the pulsing throbs of experience, then science may be in a position to discover the discreteness: But it has no access to the subjective side of nature since, as the Austrian physicist(1887-1961) Erin Schrödinger points out, we exclude the subject of cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. It follows that in order to find the elucidation of things observed in relation to the experiential or aliveness aspect, we cannot rely on science, we need to look elsewhere.
 If, instead of relying on science, we rely on our immediate observation of nature and of ourselves, we find, first, that this [i.e., Descartes] stark division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation. We find ourselves living within nature. Secondly, in that we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature, and thirdly, that we should reject the notion of idle wheels in the process of nature. Every factor which makes a difference, and that difference can only be expressed in terms of the individual character of that factor.
 Whitehead proceeds to analyse our experiences in general, and our observations of nature in particular, and ends up with mutual immanence as a central theme. This mutual immanence is obvious in the case of an experience, that, I am a part of the universe, and, since I experience the universe, the experienced universe is part of me. Whitehead gives an example, I am in the room, and the room is an item in my present experience. But my present experience is what I am now. A generalization of this relationship to the case of any actual occasions yields the conclusion that the world is included within the occasion in one sense, and the occasion is included in the world in another sense. The idea that each actual occasion appropriates its universe follows naturally from such considerations.
 The description of an actual entity as being a distinct unit is, therefore, only one part of the story. The other, complementary part is this: The very nature of each and every actual entity is one of interdependence with all the other actual entities in the universe. Each and every actual entity, one that has real and independent existence, its mastering in the series of actions, operations or motions involved in the accomplishment of an end, as, perhaps, this process of actuality as existing in or based on fact, the appropriate actualization as contained by its own existence in or of other actual entities  are sustained for creating or coming by way of addition perpetuate that of another reason to justify its position for being of belonging to one entity, out of them, including everything, is namely, itself.
 There are two general strategies for distinguishing laws from accidentally true generalizations. The first stands by Humes idea that causal connections are mere constant conjunctions, and then seeks to explain why some constant conjunctions are better than others. That is, this first strategy accepts the principle that causation involves nothing more than certain events always happening together with certain others, and then seeks to explain why some such patterns - the laws - matter more than others - the accidents -. The second strategy, by contrast, rejects the Humean presupposition that causation involves nothing more than chance occurrences or simple a haphazardly concurred. Instead it postulates a relationship that necessitation for which of being the cement that links events that are connected by law (like gravitation or the spacial equivalence principle), but not those events (like having a screw in my desk and being made of copper) that are only accidentally conjoined.
 There are a number of versions of the first Human strategy. The most successful, originally purported by the mathematician and philosopher F.P. Ramsey (1903-30), and later revived by David Lewis (1941-2002), who holds’ that laws are those true generalizations that can be fitted into an ideal system of knowledge. The thought is, that, the laws are those patterns that are somewhat explicated in terms of basic science, either as fundamental principles themselves, or as consequences of those principles, while accidents, although true, have no such explanation. Thus, All water at standard pressure boils at 1000 C is a consequence of the laws governing molecular bonding: Still the fact remains that the sum total of all the screws in my desk are copper is not part of the deductive structure of any satisfactory science. Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-30), neatly encapsulated this idea by saying that laws are consequences of those propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system.
 Advocates of the alternative non-Humean strategy object that the difference between laws and accidents is not a linguistic matter of deductive systematization, but rather a metaphysical contrast between the kind of links they report. They argue that there is a link in nature between being at 1000 C and boiling, but not between being in my desk and being made of copper, and that this is nothing to do with how the description of this link may fit into theories. According to the forthrights Australian D.M. Armstrong (1983), the most prominent defender of this view, the real difference between laws and accidentals, is simply that laws report relationships of natural necessitation, while accidents only report that two types of events happen to occur together.
 Armstrongs’ view may seem intuitively plausible, but it is arguable that the notion of necessitation simply restates the problem, than solving it. Armstrong says that necessitation involves something more than constant conjunction: If two events are related by necessitation, then it follows that they are constantly conjoined, but two events can be constantly conjoined without being related by necessitation, as when the constant conjunction is just a matter of an accident. So necessitation is a stronger relationship than constant conjunction. However, Armstrong and other defenders of this view say very little about what this extra strength amounts to, except that it distinguishes laws from accidents. Armstrongs’ critics argue that a satisfactory account of laws ought to cast more light than this on the nature of laws.
 Hume said that the earlier of two causally related events is always the cause, and the later effect. However, there are a number of objections to using the earlier-later arow of time to analyse the directional arrow of causation. For a start, it seems in principle, possible that some causes and effects could be simultaneous. That more, in the idea that time is directed from earlier to later itself stands in need of philosophical explanation - and one of the most popular explanations is that the idea of movement from earlier to later depends on the fact that cause-effect pairs always have a time, and explain earlier as the direction in which causes lie, and later as the direction of effects, that we will clearly need to find some account of the direction of causation which does not itself assume the direction of time.
 A number of such accounts have been proposed. David Lewis (1979) has argued that the asymmetry of causation derives from an asymmetric imbalance as ascertained by determination. The over-determination of present events by past events - consider a person who dies after simultaneously being shot and struck by lightning - is a very rare occurrence, by contrast, the multiple over-determination of present events by future events is absolutely normal. This is because the future, unlike the past, will always contain multiple traces of any present event. To use Lewis’s example, when the president presses the red button in the White House, the future effects do not only include the dispatch of nuclear missiles, but also the fingerprint on the button, his trembling, the further depletion of his gin bottle, the recording of the buttons click on tape, he emission of light waves bearing the image of his action through the window, the warnings of the wave from the passage often signal current, and so on, and so on, and on.
 Lewis relates this asymmetry of over-determination to the asymmetry of causation as follows. If we suppose the cause of a given effect to have been absent, then this implies the effect would have been absent too, since (apart from freak -like occurrence in the lightning-shooting case) there will not be any other causes left to fix the effect. By contrast, if we suppose a given effect of some cause to have been absent, this does not imply the cause would have been absent, for there are still all the other traces left to fix the causes. Lewis argues that these counterfactual considerations suffice to show why causes are different from effects.
 Other philosophers appeal to a probabilistic variant of Lewis’s asymmetry. Following, the philosopher of science and probability theorists, Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), they note that the different causes of any given type of effect are normally probabilistically independent of each other, by contrast, the different effects of any given type of cause are normally probabilistically correlated. For example, both obesity and high excitement can cause heart attacks, but this does not imply that fat people are more likely to get excited than thin ones: Its facts, that both lung cancer and nicotine-stained fingers can result from smoking does imply that lung cancer is more likely among people with nicotine-stained fingers. So this account distinguishes effects from causes by the fact that the former, but not the latter are probabilistically dependent on each other.
 However, there is another course of thought in philosophy of science, the tradition of negative or eliminative induction. From the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and in modern time the philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994), we have the idea of using logic to bring falsifying evidence to bear on hypotheses about what must universally be the case that many thinkers accept in essence his solution to the problem of demarcating proper science from its imitators, namely that the former results in genuinely falsifiable theories whereas the latter do not. Although falsely allowed many peoples objections to such ideologies as psychoanalysis and Marxism.
 Hume was interested in the processes by which we acquire knowledge: The processes of perceiving and thinking, of feeling and reasoning. He recognized that much of what we claim to know derives from other people secondhand, thirdhand or worse: Moreover, our perceptions and judgements can be distorted by many factors - by what we are studying, as well as by the very act of study itself, the main reason, however, behind his emphasis  on probabilities and those other measures of evidence on which life and action entirely depend is this: It is evident that all understanding concerning, matter of fact are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that we can never infer the existence of one object from another unless they are connected together, either mediately or immediately.
 When we apparently observe a whole sequence, say of one ball hitting another, what exactly do we observe? And in the much commoner cases, when we wonder about the unobserved causes or effects of the events we observe, what precisely are we doing?
 Hume recognized that a notion of must or necessity is a peculiar feature of causal relation, inference and principles, and challenges us to explain and justify the notion. He argued that there is no observable feature of events, nothing like a physical bond, which can be properly labelled the necessary connection between a given cause and its effect: Events simply are, they merely occur, and there is in must or ought about them. However, repeated experience of pairs of events sets up the habit of expectation in us, such that when one of the pair occurs we inescapably expect the other. This expectation makes us infer the unobserved cause or unobserved effect of the observed event, and we mistakenly project this mental inference onto the events themselves. There is no necessity observable in causal relations, all that can be observed is regular sequence, here is necessity in causal inferences, but only in the mind. Once we realize that causation is a relation between pairs of events. We also realize that often we are not present for the whole sequence e which we want to divide into cause and effect. Our understanding of the casual relation is thus intimately linked with the role of the causal inference cause only causal inferences entitle us to go beyond what is immediately present to the senses. But now two very important assumptions emerge behind the causal inference: The assumptions that like causes, in like circumstances, will always produce similar effects, and the assumption that the course of nature will continue uniformly the same - or, briefly that the future will resemble the past. Unfortunately, this last assumption lacks either empirical or a priori proof, that is, it can be conclusively established neither by experience nor by thought alone.
 Hume frequently endorsed a standard seventeenth-century view that all our ideas are ultimately traceable, by analysis, to sensory impressions of an internal or external kind. Accordingly, he claimed that all his theses are based on experience, understood as sensory awareness together with memory, since only experience establishes matters of fact. But is our belief that the future will resemble the past properly construed as a belief concerning only a mater of fact? As the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) remarked, earlier this century, the real problem that Hume rises are whether future futures will resemble future pasts, in the way that past futures really did resemble past pasts. Hume declares that if . . . the past may be no rule for the future, all experience become useless and can give rise to inference or conclusion. And yet, he held, the supposition cannot stem from innate ideas, since there are no innate ideas in his view nor can it obtain from any abstract formal reasoning. For one thing, the future can surprise us, and no formal reasoning seems able to embrace such contingencies: For another, even animals and unthinkable people conduct their lives as if they assume the future resembles the past: Dogs return for buried bones, children avoid a painful fire, and so forth. Hume is not deploring the fact that we have to conduct our lives on the basis of probabilities, and he is not saying that inductive reasoning could or should be avoided or rejected. Rather, he accepted inductive reasoning but tried to show that whereas formal reasoning of the kind associated with mathematics cannot establish or prove matters of fact, factual or inductive reasoning lacks the necessity and certainty associated with mathematics. His position, therefore clear; because every effect is a distinct event from its cause, only investigation can settle whether any two particular events are causally related: Causal inferences cannot be drawn with the force of logical necessity familiar to us from deductivity, but, although they lack such force, they should not be discarded. In the context of causation, inductive inferences are inescapable and invaluable. What, then, makes past experience the standard of our future judgement? The answer is custom, it is a brute psychological fact, without which even animal life of a simple kind would be more or less impossible. We are determined by custom to suppose the future conformable to the past (Hume, 1978), nevertheless, whenever we need to calculate likely events we must supplement and correct such custom by self-conscious reasoning.
 Nonetheless, the problem that the causal theory of reference will fail once it is recognized that all representations must occur under some aspect or that the extensioniality of causal relations is inadequate to capture the aspectual character of reference. The only kind of causation that could be adequate to the task of reference is intentional causal or mental causation, but the causal theory of reference cannot concede that ultimately reference is achieved by some met device, since the whole approach behind the causal theory was to try to eliminate the traditional mentalism of theories of reference and meaning in favour of objective causal relations in the world, though it is at present by far the most influential theory of reference, will prove to be a failure for these reasons.
 If mental states are identical with physical states, presumably the relevant physical states are various sorts of neural states. Our concepts of mental states such as thinking, sensing, and feeling are of course, different from our concepts of neural states, of whatever sort. But that is no problem for the identity theory. As J.J.C. Smart (1962), who first argued for the identity theory, emphasized, the requisite identities do not depend on understanding concepts of mental states or the meanings of mental terms. For ‘a’ to be the identical with ‘b’, ‘a’ and ‘b’ must have exactly the same properties, but the terms ‘a’ and ‘b’ need not mean the same. Its principal means by measure can be accorded within the indiscernibility being identical, is that, if ‘A’ is identical with ‘B’, then every property that ‘A’ has ‘B’, and vice versa. That, from time to time it is called the Leibniz s Law.