Causation and Perception

Abstract

More ink has probably been spilt in philosophy over the concept of causality than any other single concept. For Hume, for example, the causal relationship was a habit of expectancy, for Kant a conceptual category and for Maine de Biran a feeling of subjective effort. In recent years under the influence of phenomenology some writers, in particular the Gestalt psychologists and the Belgian psychologist Michotte,¹ have argued that we have a direct perception of causality much in the same way as we perceive shape and movement. Michotte gives the example of a knife cutting a slice of bread. We do not, he says, just see two independent movements, the advance of the knife and the cutting of the bread; we have a specific causal impression of the two movements as essentially and temporally coordinated, forming a continuous process in which one is productive of changes in the other.