Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [72]
This conclusion, however, seems to be too much to swallow. Most of us believe that there’s a difference between a true cause and effect and a mere coincidence. But what’s that difference? One likely candidate would be natural laws. One of the features we tend to include in our concept of cause, which seems to help us exclude explanations like coincidence, is law-guided uniformity . The principle of uniformity says that similar causes produce similar effects. A better way to put it is that changes or interactions between objects are governed by general laws so that every time an event of a certain type occurs, the laws dictate that effects of a certain type will follow.
So, in the Star Wars universe, the laws could be such that every time a Jedi desires to draw his lightsaber to his hand from across the room, the Force makes it happen. Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem because it doesn’t tell us why it happens, or what makes this law able to produce these kinds of interactions; only that in this kind of universe the laws make it happen. If one of the lessons we learned through Hume and Leibniz is that explaining how causes do their work is too difficult, then maybe we ought to think of causes and their effects as somehow correlated (we assume that the two events are related to each other, for example, whenever Darth Vader gets frustrated, another admiral bites the dust) in what seems to be a law-governed way and give up trying to figure out whether or how they are necessarily connected.
There are, however, two features of this suggestion that we ought to notice. First, the fact that we describe these causal interactions as law-governed presupposes that there’s some natural connection between certain events, so that whenever an event of one kind occurs, it’ll be followed by an event of another kind. And secondly, even if we thought that causes and effects were merely probabilistically related, so that whenever some kinds of events occur, then it’s likely that an event of a certain kind will follow, that still would presuppose that there’s a natural and law-governed connection between the events; otherwise, we wouldn’t have a reason to think of these events as causally related. But what evidence could we have of such a law-governed connection?
The obvious answer is that we have the evidence of a long train of past observations. Whenever Darth Vader exerts pressure on the throats of people, as many Imperial officers have discovered, they choke. And this happens every time Vader exerts pressure on their throats. So the cause of the choking is the pressure on the throat. So, we may infer, that next time Vader exerts pressure on someone’s throat, it will cause them to choke too. This appears to be a reasonable inference based on experience, and one that incompetent Imperial officers ought to keep in mind!
And if there are such law-governed connections, they would allow us to make accurate predictions based on past evidence. So the earmarks of a natural causal law include observations that whenever events of a certain type (Darth Vader willing the asphyxiation of an Imperial officer) occur, they’re followed by events of a certain type (the choking of the officer), and these observations will typically allow us to make accurate predictions of similar events employing the described conditions. Hume, however, argues that this kind of argument is deeply flawed. We can’t generalize from past experience that there’s a law-governed connection between events unless we use circular reasoning—that is, we assume the truth of what we want to prove in order to