Blackwell Reference Online

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In its early years, psychology was a branch of philosophy. Issues in philosophy motivated many of the issues addressed by early psychologists. The philosophical roots of psychology continue to be evident in psychological research on causal understanding, and on causal reasoning or explanation. Furthermore, in both disciplines, approaches to causal reasoning have been bound up with approaches to scientific inquiry, and this makes sense. One of the main aims of science is to identify the causes of phenomena. In both philosophy and psychology, as descriptions of scientific inquiry have changed, approaches to causal reasoning have followed suit. The shift over time can be seen with respect to three themes. First, early philosophical approaches argued that, ultimately, causation could be reduced to the Humean indices. The Humean view of causation (at least as interpreted by psychological researchers) is that we have no actual evidence for causation. Rather, we come to infer that event X causes event Y when the two events are characterized by what are termed “Humean” indices: X is temporally prior to Y, is contiguous with it in time and in space, and the contiguity is regular. For Hume, causation is an inference that we draw from these indices (Hume, 1973). Second, early philosophical approaches also treated the Humean indices as formal, or content-free, or content-independent. That is, ... log in or subscribe to read full text