To quote Feldman's Epistemology, Causal Theory is "...when a fact in the world leads to a belief in that fact, it is a case of knowledge (82)." The only difference between Causal Theory and TAK is the replacement of a causal connection for justification.
Objections to this theory include Knowing Generalizations, such as all men are mortal (Feldman 84) which are beliefs which stem from particular instances, as it is impossible to be familiar with every member of the human race, thus it is impossible to know in the sense of Causal Theory.
Overdertermination Cases serve as another objection to the Causal Theory. If you know deer like to eat from your garbage and wake up one morning and see your garbage can knocked over and deer standing around you assume they in fact did eat out of your garbage yet again, but in fact it was a bear which picked through the garbage. In this case the causal chain failed you.
Another objection for the Causal Theory stems from believing in a causal chain without a good reason. Again using your garbage as an example, you know that both deer and bears eat out of the garbage can. You wake up one morning and see the garbage can knocked over and food crumbs all over. You just decide it was the deer who ate the garbage, and though you are correct this time you had no good reason to discount the bear's possible hand in this situation. Yes, there is a causal connection, but it is not strong enough.
Nice concise summary of the Causal Theory. Can I get an example? [to complete Familiarity...]
ReplyDeleteGood discussions of the objections. Note that for the last one, it's not that the causal connection isn't 'strong' enough, it's that the causal chain you use to justify is only accidentally correct. So, it's strong enough; it's just that you had no reason to know that.
[Familiarity for the objections.] (You could try to work on a response, here, to get Competence...)