Causal Reasoning

Aristotle‘s enumerative induction was a way of acquiring knowledge about what substances belong in what categories. In a Newtonian world in which there is only one material substance, induction is instead used for discovering connections between events. We assume that causal connections don’t exist between types of events that follow each other only once. There must be what philosopher David Hume called Constant Conjunction. Because dynamite explodes essentially every time you touch a match to it, we say that the match causes the explosion. We come to this conclusion by the same kind of inductive reasoning that prompts us to…