Welcome to this explosive topic on David Hume! David Hume is the third and final member of the eminent British empiricist philosophers of the the 17th century and one of the most important philosophers in the entire history of philosophy. Without being in any way sugary, David Hume seems to have been loved by everyone. In France, where he lived for several years, he was known as “le bon David” and in his native Edinburgh he was known as “Saint David.” The Edinburgh Street in which he lived is today called St. David’s Street. Today, David Hume is recognized as the most acute, if not the most perplexing of the British empiricists. So, join me as we embark on taking a closer look at the man and philosopher, David Hume.
“…commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” ~ David Hume
Intended learning outcomes
At the end of this topic, you should be able to:
- Explain the epistemological and metaphysical ideas of David Hume; and
- Cite specific contributions of David Hume to philosophy and various fields of endeavor.
Who is David Hume?
David Hume (1711-1776) is a Scottish philosopher who showed brilliance at such an early age. Some of his best works were written while he was very young: for eight years he labored at what is still generally regarded as his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), and he was still only 27 when it was published. No one took any notice of it. In his thirties he developed its ideas further and in what he hoped would be a more popular form; the results were published in two smaller volumes, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1758) and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Still no one took very much notice. At least during his time.
Relations of ideas
Hume’s philosophy began with a revival of Leibniz’s analytic – synthetic distinction, or in Hume’s words, a distinction between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact.” It will be recalled that analytic propositions are expressed by sentences:
- whose negation leads to a self-contradiction,
- that are a priori,
- that are true by definition, and therefore,
- are necessarily true.
Synthetic propositions are expressed by sentences that are the opposite of sentences expressing analytic propositions; that is, they are sentences:
- whose negation does not lead to a self-contradiction,
- that are a posteriori
- that are not true by definition, and
- when they are true, they are not necessarily true (they can be false).
Now, in accepting this distinction, Hume was admitting that there are such things as a priori necessary truths. It would seem that any empiricist who accepted such truths was jeopardizing the program of empiricism by recognizing the legitimacy of the rationalists’ dream, but Hume defused this situation by adding one more characteristic to the list of features of “relations of ideas.” He said that they are all “tautological.” Tautological propositions are statements which are redundant, repetitive, merely verbal truths that provide no new information about the world, only information about the meaning of words. Thus, given the conventions of the English language, it is certainly true that “all sisters are siblings,” but this statement tells us nothing about any particular sister that wasn’t already known by calling her a sister in the first place.
Similarly, anybody who really understands the concept “five” and the concepts “three,” “two,” and “plus” already knows that three plus two equals five. So the rationalistic dream of a complete description of reality that is a priori and necessarily true is a will-o’-the-wisp because a priori truths aren’t descriptions of anything, according to Hume. Only synthetic claims—“matters of fact”—can correctly describe reality, and these claims are necessarily a posteriori. Therefore, all true knowledge about the world must be based on observation. This is, of course, the central thesis of all empiricism.
What Hume was claiming was that there are basically only three categories of analysis. Any proposition whatsoever is either analytic, synthetic, or nonsense. Hume said:
“If we take in our hand any volume—of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number [i.e., analytical truths]? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence [i.e., synthetic truths]? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” ~ David Hume
There is, then, very clearly a “Humean method” of philosophizing. One takes any claim that one would like to test and asks a series of questions about that claim:
- Is it analytic? (This is determined by negating the sentence in which the claim is expressed. If the resultant negative sentence is a self-contradiction, then the original sentence is analytic.)
♣ YES (If the answer is YES, the claim is true but philosophically trivial.)
♣ NO (If the answer is NO, go to the next question.) - Is it synthetic? This question is posed by Hume in the following way: “When we entertain… any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but inquire, “from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion.”
In other words, question 2 can be answered affirmatively only if it is possible to trace its ideas back to sense data “impressions”. For example, all the ideas in the sentence “This stone is heavy” can be traced back to sense data; hence, it passes the empirical criterion of meaning.
But what if, in a particular case, the answer to question 2 is negative? That is, what if a particular idea cannot be traced to a sense impression? In that case, according to Hume, we must be dealing with vacuous ideas, that is to say, with nonsense.
Now, with Hume’s method in hand, if we turn to some of the traditional philosophical topics, such as God, world, and self, we arrive at some pretty startling conclusions. Let’s start with the sentence “God exists.” Is this proposition analytic?
- That is to ask, is its negation, “God does not exist” a self contradiction? Most people would answer no. Of course, some would answer yes—namely, all those defenders of the “ontological proof of God’s existence” (e.g., Anselm, Descartes, Spinoza), but Hume would respond to them by saying that if the sentence “God exists” is analytic, then it is tautological and tells us nothing about reality. The true sentence “A being whose existence is necessary would be one that necessarily exists” still doesn’t tell us whether there is a necessary being.
So if we assume that “God exists” is not analytic, the next question is, Is this proposition synthetic?
- Hume believed that it was impossible to trace the idea of God back to sense data. He said, “Our ideas reach no farther than our experience: We have no experience of divine attributes and operations; I need not conclude my syllogism. You can draw the inference yourself.”
So although Hume didn’t actually say so, his method seems to imply that the idea of God is vacuous and that statements about God are literally nonsense. Hume would stand before us as an unmitigated “sceptic.” A sceptic is a man who denies that we could be sure of anything, whether it be the existence of God, or of the external world, or of our own continuous selves, or indeed of any reliable connection between anything and anything else in the world of fact. Therefore, David Hume is neither a believer nor atheist, he is called “agnostic.” An agnostic is someone who holds that the existence of God or gods can neither be proved nor disproved.
What is a “cause?”
To those coming to philosophy for the first time it is not always obvious why causality is considered so important by philosophers. Causality is of fundamental interest to scientists too, incidentally. Let’s take the sentence “X causes Y,” where X and Y are both events. We’ll use Hume’s example: (X is the event of billiard ball A striking billiard ball B), and Y is the event of ball B moving after being struck.)
- Is the sentence “X causes Y” analytic? (That is to say, is the sentence “X does not cause Y” a self-contradiction? Obviously not, because it is perfectly possible to conceive of A striking B and B not moving.) The answer is NO.
- Is the sentence “X causes Y” synthetic? Now, it seems that the answer will be affirmative because there should be no difficulty in tracing back the idea of “cause” to sense data.
But Hume found a difficulty. When he analyzed the concept, he broke it down into three components:
- priority,
- contiguity, and
- necessary connection.
Priority (the fact that X precedes Y) can be traced to sense data. So can contiguity (the fact that X touches Y). But no matter how many times Hume observed ball A strike ball B, he could not find any necessary connection (the fact that if X happens, Y must happen), yet this was exactly what needed to be found if the concept of causality was to be sensible.
So the concept of “causality” proved to have the same status as “material substance” and “God.” This embarrassment has far reaching consequences. It means that whenever we say that event A causes event B, we are really only “reporting” our own expectation that A will be followed by B in the future. This statement expresses a psychological fact about us and not a fact about the world. But if we try to show the rational grounding of our expectation, we cannot do so. Even if A was followed by B innumerable times in the past, that does not justify our claim to know that it will do so again in the future. Hume did not, however, conclude that no causality exists in the world. He never doubted that objects and events stand in causal relations to each other, but he did doubt that an adequate philosophical account of causality was available.
Hume’s discovery has come to be known as the “problem of induction.” What makes us so certain that the future will behave like the past? If we answer, “because it has always done so in the past,” we are begging the question, because the real question is, “Must it do so in the future just because it has always done so in the past?” Nor can we appeal to the “laws of nature,” because then the question is, “What guarantees that the laws of nature will hold tomorrow?” There is no analytic or synthetic guarantee of the laws of nature. The concept of causality is one of the key ideas that are needed to understand the world. David Hume concluded that neither reason nor experience could justify the idea of “necessary connections,” which is the main component of the notion of causality.
“Hume’s fork” (the analytic-synthetic distinction) has equally disastrous results for the concept of self. There is no sense datum to which the concept can be traced. Far from finding the self to be the simple, indubitable, absolutely certain, eternal soul that Descartes had claimed it to be, Hume found, according to his method, that “there is no such idea” as “self.” The so-called self proves to be “a bundle or collection of different perceptions [. . . heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure . . .] which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
The legacy of David Hume
David Hume had consistently and vigorously followed the program of empiricism to its logical conclusion. David Hume believed he had shown that human life was incompatible with rationality and that human endeavors always extend beyond philosophical justification. Given that this is the situation, Hume advocated what he himself called “mitigated scepticism.” By this he means we should admit to ourselves that conclusive proof plays no part in human affairs outside mathematics. We do not really know anything: we have our expectations, but that is not the same thing as knowledge. Hume laid enormous stress on the distinction, already spelt out by Leibniz between what have since come to be called analytic and synthetic statements, and asserted that synthetic statements can never be known with certainty to be true. We should therefore not give house-room in our heads to Theories of Everything, whether in philosophy, politics, science, religion, or any other sphere; for if we cannot be certain of anything, how ridiculous it is to think we have the answer to everything! Vast, organized systems of belief are out for Hume. He believes we should hold our opinions and expectations diffidently, knowing them to be fallible, and should respect those of others. The whole temper of his philosophy is in this way modest, moderate, and tolerant, like his own character and life.
References
- Dorling Kindersley. (2011). The Philosophy Book. New York: DK Publishing.
- Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. (2008). From Socrates to Sartre and Beyond. New York: McGraw Hill Publishing.
- Palmer, Donald.(2006). Looking at philosophy:The unbearable heaviness of philosophy made lighter 4th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill Companies.
- Ramos, Christine Camela. (2004). Introduction to Philosophy. Manila: Rex Bookstore.
- Gaarder, Jostein. (2004). Sophie’s World. Great Britain: Phoenix House.
- http://www.plato.standford.edu