Causation and perception

pp. 121-127

in: Wolfe Mays, Whitehead's philosophy of science and metaphysics, Berlin, Springer, 1977

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.