David Hume – An Introduction

A very basic introduction to David Hume written for Grade 12 Philosophy Class

David Hume’s Life

• Born April 26, 1711 in a tenement in Edinburg. Father died just after 2nd birthday
• Started attending the university of Edinburg at the age of 12 – at this time it was normal to start university at 14
• Worked in the Philosophical fields of Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, and Metaethics.
• Greatly influenced future Philosophy and provided many tools for questioning certain modes of thought.
• Died from some form of abdominal cancer in 1776

Hume and Empiricism

• David Hume was an Empiricist in the sense that he believed the constituents of our thought come from experience, and a Skeptic because he still thought that we cannot have causal knowledge of the external world.
• The Copy Principle – the constituents of our thoughts come from experience. Even math requires the prerequisite of quantity that comes from isolating parts of experience
• Hume calls all the contents of the mind perceptions, which he then splits into impressions and ideas. Impressions are the content of sense experience like colour and sound, whereas ideas are a product of the intellect (although impressions are primary to ideas).

Ideas and Hume’s Fork

• Hume speaks of simple ideas and complex ideas – we take simple ideas that come from impressions such as blue or circle, and we then create complex ideas such as a blue circle. Any complex idea can be traced back to its constituent impressions.  Complex ideas require reflection.
• Hume’s Fork: the division of all possible objects of knowledge into relations of ideas and matters of fact (of the actual world).  A matter of fact is a causal interpretation of our experiences, such as interpreting your perception of a mirror as a reflection of yourself, as opposed to a clone of yourself elaborately mimicking you.  A relation of ideas is logically relating / comparing ideas, such as “all bachelors are unmarried” and “2+ 2 = 4”
• One cannot coherently deny a true relation between ideas, as they are true by nature of their directly observable content, but one can coherently deny a matter of fact given by impressions.  This distinction was high jacked by Kant and popularized as Analytic – true by definition – vs. Synthetic – true by nature of the actual world.

Epistemology of Causation

• Hume says that we do not truly perceive causation. We are given instances of impressions, and via observation of resemblance and consistency over time, the mind fills in the gaps with the notion of cause and effect. When we see billiard balls collide with each other, we see instances of impressions, and the mind then fills in the gaps deciding that the billiard ball coming in contact with the other billiard balls made them disperse.
• This problem then leads to Hume’s famous Problem of Induction. Induction is an inference from past observations, ie. Insofar, the sun has rose every morning, therefore it will rise tomorrow morning.

The Problem of Induction

• Since we do not directly perceive causation, there is no logical necessity to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that dogs will not meow, and that jumping off high surfaces will cause injury.
• Due to Hume’s Copy Principle, we have no concept of causation besides the constant conjunction – the instance of two or more events occurring at the same time – because nothing is given besides the impressions.
• Science relies on induction. Science is the causal interpretation of impressions.

The Whiteheadian Response to Causal Skepticism – Prehension

• The Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead constructed a theory of perception that is mostly in opposition to Hume’s causal skepticism, called prehension.
• A historically dominating view of perception has been Representationalism – that our perceptions are mere representations of reality, and that the perceiver and the perceived are numerically distinct (called the subject object dichotomy, popularized by Kant’s noumena-phenomena divide).
• Prehension is the direct INGRESSION of reality into oneself and changing oneself. The perceived actually becomes a part of the perceiver. For Whitehead, all causation is a matter of prehension.  Any identifiable process is purely composed of a) a series of prehensions, and b) a creative reaction to said prehensions.
• So in perceiving a billiard ball colliding with other billiard balls, we not only have instances of impression (perception in the mode of presentational immediacy), but we also directly prehend the causal information (perception in the mode of causal efficacy; more subtle).
• Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy doesn’t give very reliable knowledge of the actual world (the nature of a certain instance of sense impressions can be misinterpreted) whereas perception in the mode of causal efficacy gives more hard facts of causal relations in a more subtle sense.

Bundle Theory

• David Hume claimed that any object is merely a bundle of properties with no underlying substance
• The Bundle Theory of Self says that the self is just a bundle of properties
• The merits of bundle theory lie in the fact that it seems very difficult to conceive of there being an inherent object / substance stripped of any properties.

Humes Guillotine

• This problem is in regards to moral epistemology and points out that you can not derive an “ought” from an “is”.
• Hume discovered that people often derived “ought: statements from “is” statements, despite their fundamentally different nature.
• For example: an abortion results in the death of an individual, but there is no transition to a moral obligation, which must been shown to come to a prescription, otherwise there is only descriptive terms.
• “Because we evolved X, we ought to be X” – just because we evolved X, does not mean that X is obligatory
• Hume’s Guillotine rejects all moral systems grounded in metaphysical description which provides issues for many different ethical theories such as Naturalistic Ethics, Divine Command Theory, Social Contract Theory, and more.
• It seems that any ethical system must start from a certain description and try to derive a prescription thereof, considering that all we have access to is descriptions, therefore how can Hume’s Guillotine ever be overcome?