Comunicação | 5º Congresso Internacional da Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia, 14-16 de setembro de 2023, Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Évora

Causal cognition is so pervasive, and essential to the subsistence of human lives or societies that David Hume argues that nature has “implanted in us an instinct, which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects; though we are ignorant of those powers and forces, on which this regular course and succession of objects totally depends”  ​(Hume, 1748)​. 

This communication discusses Hume’s causal instinct as a schematic system for causal cognition embedded in our cognitive system, and as part of the conceptual structuring system of language ​(Brandt, 2020; Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Langacker, 1991, 2000; Talmy, 2003b)​.  

Human organisms code inner and outer situations or events into neural maps for homeostatic purposes ​(Damasio, 2003; Damasio & Carvalho, 2013)​, and human bodies also create secondary and schematic maps of those first order maps and merge them into neural schemas for action or motor behavior ​(Arbib, 1999; Aziz-Zadeh & Damasio, 2008; Jeannerod, 1999)​.  Neural mappings code causal as causal meanings that can be enacted through synchronous coactivation of neural mappings or patterns ​(Kraft et al., 2009; Pöppel, 1994, 2009)​ and traduced into symbolic, grammatical, and diagrammatical units for reasoning or causal narration ​(Brandt, 2020; Talmy, 2000, 2003b)​, or other intentional actions ​(Bergen et al., 2003; Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Talmy, 2003a)​.  

Rephrasing Hume’s claim, nature implants the causal instinct in us as a semantic network of categories or a cluster concept tuned by evolution, and linguistic usage to circumscribe causal relations between individual events or constitutive constraints (determinism, locality, stability, symmetry, conservation laws). This hypothesis is tested against two major questions: what does realism about causation means? What relation may hold between the cluster concept of causation and the causal structure of the world (isomorphism, Identity, analogy)? 

Keywords: cause, causation, causal constraint, causal cognition. 

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