Everything that you wanted to know about Hume but were too afraid to ask

Hey everyone,

Since this is our farewell to Hume week, I'm posting one final recap of what we've looked at so far. Be sure to familiarize yourselves with all these arguments - they will be useful for impending exams, essays, etc.

See you in tutorial - please bring your questions or anything else that isn't unclear.

Have fun :)

Clara

HUME:
Empiricism as criticism.

Key Terms You Should Know:

Empiricism
Epistemology
Ideas
Impressions
Causality
Sense perception
A priori
Synthetic
Analytic
Necessity
Ontology
Metaphysics
Natural belief

Empiricists attacked natural law theory through an “epistemological” analysis whereby the empiricists concluded that we cannot have the normative insight that natural law theory proposes.

REASON

Rationalist philosophers appealed to REASON to describe what is possible for us to know. The problem with this is that precisely what "REASON" meant for them was unclear. Hume is responding to this unclarity.

Hume was an empiricist in an epistemological sense. For him there were only TWO types of knowledge:

1. That founded on experience (sense perception)
2. That founded on conventionally designed rules about the relationships between concepts such as we find in math and logic, according to empiricist interpretation.

We CANNOT have knowledge that goes beyond these 2 types of cognition – therefore we CANNOT have knowledge about what we can’t experience (think: Plato’s forms/objective norms, God, etc.)

This theory therefore has ethical/religious implications, but also scientific ones, as Hume’s theory says that there is NO CORE in the natural sciences (i.e. causality) that is ABOVE possible doubt.

ORIGIN OF KNOWLEDGE:

Hume distinguishes between IDEAS and IMPRESSIONS

IMPRESSIONS:
-Strong and vivid perceptions that include immediate sense perceptions (colours, tastes) and direct psychological experiences (hate, joy, love).
-Impressions can be either external (related to external world) or internal (related to your mental or emotional states)
-We combine and order our impressions in various ways to create our ideas.

IDEAS
-Mental images based on (internal and external) impressions
-Ideas CANNOT arise WITHOUT preceding impressions
-Can include, for example, the idea of a house, a fundamental law, a geometric pattern, etc.

So, what counts as knowledge?

The boundaries of knowledge are found between the ideas that CAN be traced back to our impressions and those that CANNOT.

Question: can all the elements of a given idea be traced back to impressions? If so, then it is an appropriate idea; if not, it is not appropriate and therefore untenable/unacceptable.

Hume’s attack of causality is an attack on metaphysics (i.e. for Hume, there is no “material” or “spiritual” substance which causes things).

For Hume, mathematical ideas reveal NOTHING about reality. They only illuminate the relationship between concepts. Therefore, they are said to be ANALYTIC. Math is therefore not a question about correspondence with internal or external impressions, but only about logical relations between concepts. (This is called a NOMINALIST interpretation of mathematical concepts).

The ideas of SCIENCE, on the other hand, CAN be traced back to impressions; they are therefore SYNTHETIC because they DO reveal something about reality. Synthetic ideas can largely (but not always – see argument vs. causality) be traced back to impressions.

Metaphysical ideas CLAIM to reveal aspects of reality, although they CANNOT be traced back only to internal/external impressions. Hume follows Berkeley in his attack on the idea of a material substance: our sense impressions derive only from the various SENSIBLE properties. We DO NOT SENSE any material substance that supposedly lies behind these impressions. For example, we experience a table by having visual, tactile, aural impressions of it – but we NEVER experience any underlying “something” that carries these impressions. Nor do we experience a substance “behind” properties we experience. Therefore the idea of a material substance is untenable.

CRITIQUE OF KNOWLEDGE: THE NOTION OF CAUSALITY

When we have observed innumerable times how billiard balls affect each other by mechanical forces, we might claim that from this experience we can KNOW how the balls will act in the future – that is, that we can detect laws of causal connections.

Laws of connection between cause and effect tell us what effect NECESSARILY will take place if some cause occurs. (If A then B).

Hume wants to know whether on his empiricist theory of knowledge whether we can KNOW such causal laws.

When we talk about CAUSES, says Hume, we think:

1. That something FOLLOWS something else
2. That there is CONTACT between two phenomena
3. That what happens after this contact happens NECESSARILY

Therefore for Hume the CONCEPT OF CAUSE has the following characteristics:

1. Succession
2. Contact
3. Necessity

But how do we KNOW this?

Remember that knowledge: that which is rooted in EXPERIENCE.

1. Succession: can be SEEN – therefore it is KNOWLEDGE because it’s based on
experience
2. Contact: also can be SEEN and therefore knowledge.
3. Necessity: CANNOT be SEEN. All we have knowledge of is a CONSTANT REPETITION
between 2 events. But no experience tells us what will happen by NECESSITY. Therefore we have NO KNOWLEDGE of necessity.

OBJECTION to Hume: the constant repetition factor can allow us to induce a necessary causal connection. We infer that the same effect will follow the same cause, and therefore that this must always be the case.

Hume’s RESPONSE: we KNOW only what we have EXPERIENCED. But we have NOT experienced ALL CASES past and present, and we have no experience of the future. Therefore we cannot say we KNOW that something will happen in the future.

Hume does NOT say that there is NOT a necessary connection b/t cause and effect. What he says is that we cannot KNOW any such necessity. Hume’s thesis is therefore EPISTEMOLGOICAL, not ONTOLOGICAL. Hume also does not say that we shouldn’t EXPECT balls to act the same way in the future – it’s just that we can’t KNOW they will. Again, his point is EPISTEMOLOGICAL (concerned with differentiating between different kinds of KNOWLEDGE).

Two Ways of Gaining Knowledge:

1. Direct experience: we have knowledge of what we experience DIRECTLY. But one
experience doesn’t tell us that causal connections MUST come into force; knowledge gained through direct experience therefore has NO bearing on the future.
2. Induction: if, on the basis of a FINITE number of direct experiences we claim that
something MUST happen in the future. we’re saying MORE than we can KNOW.

Note: LOGIC is 100% certain b/c we define terms.

Direct experiences might not happen as we expect them to; that is, we can IMAGINE that things will turn out differently than we expect. New experiences might show us that our expectations were erroneous. Experimental truths tell us about the world.

There are only 2 forms of knowledge:

1. Logical knowledge: about the relationship between concepts; not about the world; 100% certain.
2. Experimental knowledge: based on simple sense impressions; external and internal;
about the world; not 100% certain.

For Hume, causality is composed of the following components: succession, contact, and necessity WITH repetition.

If this conception of causality is to represent KNOWLEDGE of the world, ALL its components must stem from experience. But as we have seen, this is NOT the case for necessity. The idea of necessity cannot stem from simple sense impressions. Inductive inference does not lead to genuine knowledge.

So…how we can we have a conception of causality that contains a component that does not represent knowledge in an empiricist sense?

Because of our PSYCHOLOGY! That is, when we see events happen in the same way again and again, we form EXPECTATIONS or BELIEFS that the same process will happen in the future as well. EXPECTATION is what creates an idea of necessity in reference to causal connections.

Applied to natural science, this means that there is no rational reason to think that universal laws must apply to the future as well as the past – we have no rational intuition that gives us access to necessary principles in nature, (and no access to universal moral norms.)

IN CONCLUSION

Soooo…

We may conclude that:

1. What we know about causal relations is based on experience (sense perception)
2. From this source of knowledge, we cannot KNOW that causal connections happen with NECESSITY because we cannot perceive the necessity.
3. Nor can we KNOW (that is, know with certainty) whether observed conditions in the past will also apply to the future.

At this point Hume introduces the concept of NATURAL BELIEF (or common practical knowledge), which we use to order the world and events around us in such a way that we can get along quite well in life – even if reason and what we can “KNOW” aren’t as much help as earlier philosophers thought.

Note: All this doesn’t mean that Hume things science is a waste of time – rather, Hume believes in a stepwise and self-correcting progression in the experimental sciences.