Experience and Inference

Hume sees two classes of perception: thoughts and impressions. Impressions are the stronger perceptions we get firsthand as we experience the world. Thoughts are derived from those.

Resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect are the principles we use to link together different thoughts and perceptions.  Among the things humans reason about, there are Relations of Ideas, such as mathematics and logic, and Matters of Fact. The second is such that the contrary will never imply a contradiction. We can reason for example that the sun will rise tomorrow morning because it has always risen in the morning. But if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a contradiction.  Most of what we know is derived from experience and inference through cause and effect. When we see things often enough, we form a belief about such things. Even in man’s unlimited power of imagination, any fiction or vision is just a repackaging of things we know. But we distinguish between fiction as something we can imagine, but know isn’t true, and things we can imagine and accept as true based on correspondence with reality. While we accept that the contrary of matters of fact wouldn’t be impossible, we form a probability of occurrence with enough experience.

Hume reasons that all life is determined by a series of causes and effects. We grant free will in the choice of actions, but understand things follow naturally one from another.

Against Religious Arguments

His chapter on miracles essentially states that given the uniformity of our experience about nature, it is more probable that miracles don’t occur. When we reason through an event we can’t make sense of, the most probably thing to believe is that some forces acted to effect the outcome in a way we don’t typically expect.

Of course, this is true, but the very definition of a miracle is something that breaks the laws of nature. Certainly, if one selects probability, the weight of normal natural occurrence will always be stronger, since nature is what happens ‘every time’. This attempts to define miracles out of existence. It grants justification to disbelieve, but can’t tell us whether the miracle was true or not.

 He also throws in a claim that no miracle has ever had sufficient testimony of men of “unquestioned good-sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.”

But qualifiers like “unquestioned good-sense” would eliminate anyone who thought an event was a miracle, since undoubtedly, he would say good sense requires believing only in nature.  Sounds like the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Hume was, by the way…. a Scotsman.

He also argues against intelligent design (at least from a good God) on the principle of determinism as well. The argument is that given God started the causal chain, which has led to all the evil in the world, then God would be responsible for the evil, and not the people, who are mere actors doing their inevitable part.  I don’t know if he ever considered a position like middle knowledge, in which any counterfactual world would still involve human sin. He could fault God for creating the world, but it’s not clear a world could have existed that wouldn’t have included the amount of evil this one has.

The Limits of Skepticism

Hume finishes with the limits of skepticism. The traditional way of seeing the world is to accept an external reality apart from our perceptions. But philosophy teaches us we can only access the world through our personal perceptions. However, that position also cuts the philosopher off from the intelligible qualities of matter, until only an inexplicable something remains that he can find no reasonable justification to believe.  Hume concludes that excessive skepticism is useless, but properly applied skepticism would limit enquiries to what falls within human understanding. 

Summary

Overall, I enjoyed the book. Even if I don’t accept everything, it’s worthwhile to read things that challenge viewpoints. I also use this blog space to rewrite what I’ve read in an attempt to understand it better.

I’m reading these works on my own. I don’t have any teachers guiding me through the salient points, so I do my best to understand them on my own. Summarizing what I’ve read is the best way for me to do that. To be honest, while I have a few people in my life who I can convince to sit with me on occasion and talk about this stuff, most just glaze over. Talking about it would probably be better than, or at least complimentary to, writing, because there is some give and take, and ideas can be questioned. But both writing and talking furnish the opportunity to condense the ideas into more concise formations in my mind. I always enjoy reading what others have to say as well.