Week 12: Hume!

Here are some central quotations from the David Hume selection, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.  Use them in answering the following questions:  Can you spell out what his argument is?  Is it a good argument?  What is the significance of his argument?  How does it relate to the discussions that we have had of ‘truth’, and how we can know it, in documentaries?

Believe it or not, this argument, or set of arguments, and their implications have had a huge effect on philosophy from the 18^th century onward!

•  ‘Every one will readily allow, that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and when he afterwards recalls to his memory this sensation, or anticipates it by his imagination. These faculties may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses; but they never can entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment…  The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.’  (1)

•  ‘All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.  Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic; and in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain…  Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their certainty and evidence.’  (3)

•  ‘It may, therefore, be a subject worthy of curiosity, to enquire what is the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence and matter of fact, beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the records of our memory…  If we would satisfy ourselves, therefore, concerning the nature of that evidence, which assures us of matters of fact, we must enquire how we arrive at the knowledge of cause and effect.’  (4)

•  ‘But the same truth may not appear, at first sight, to have the same evidence with regard to events, which have become familiar to us from our first appearance in the world…  We are apt to imagine that we could discover these effects by the mere operation of our reason, without experience.’  (5)

•  The mind ‘must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination.  For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it.  A stone or piece of metal raised into the air, and left without any support, immediately falls: but to consider the matter a priori, is there anything we discover in this situation which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion, in the stone or metal?’  (5)

•  ‘But if we still carry on our sifting humour, and ask, What is the foundation of all

conclusions from experience? this implies a new question, which may be of more difficult solution and explication.  Philosophers, that give themselves airs of superior wisdom and sufficiency, have a hard task when they encounter persons of inquisitive dispositions, who push them from every corner to which they retreat, and who are sure at last to bring them to some dangerous dilemma.’  (6)

•  ‘In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past experience. Their secret nature, and consequently all their effects and influence, may change, without any change in their sensible qualities.’  (7)

•  ‘And it is certain we here advance a very intelligible proposition at least, if not a true one, when we assert that, after the constant conjunction of two objects – heat and flame, for instance, weight and solidity – we are determined by custom alone to expect the one from the appearance of the other…  No man, having seen only one body move after being impelled by another, could infer that every other body will move after a like impulse.  All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.’  (9-10)