On the reality of causes: A response to ned lewbow

There are three basic attitudes towards causation. Radical emp-iricists have aspired to dispose of causation-talk entirely. Causes and effects are unobservable and non-reducible to numbers and logic. In the infamous concluding remark of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume (1975/1777: 165) declared that only reasoning in terms of numbers and logic, and claims based on experience, can be valid. Any book exhibiting neither should be “put to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Whereas Hume did not necessarily realise that he was committing his own philosophical book to flames, some 20th century positivists took the paradox of Hume’s declaration seriously. They invented new metaphors to explain the task of philosophy, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “ladders that can be used only once” and Moritz Schlick’s “rebuilding our ship on the open sea.