Assignment for week 6 (Feb 23)

 

Read Chapter 6 of How To Think About Weird Things.

 

The assigned reading from David Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding is as follows:

Sections IV, V (Part I), VII (Part II) and XII (Part III)  (Notice that Hume’s text is divided into 12 ‘sections’, numbered with Roman numerals from I to XII and that many of the sections are divided into two or three parts – also marked with Roman numerals.)

 

Several online versions are listed below.  I highly recommend the Bennett version of this text [#1 below] for its readability [relative to the original, that is!], but purists, masochists and intellectual athletes may prefer a version in Hume’s own words [#’s 2-4 below].

 

 You may want help making sense of Hume, so I’ve included links to a number of secondary sources below [#’s 5-9].  I also recommend a look at Professor William Uzgalis’ overview of the intellectual history of the early modern period at http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/stories.html and especially his account of the early modern philosophers’ worries about knowledge at http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/know.html. 

 

 

Resources for Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

 

1.      Jonathan Bennett’s modernized and simplified version of the text – http//www.woldww.net/classes/Principles_of_Inquiry/Bennett_Hume.htm

2.      An HTML version of the text - http://eserver.org/18th/hume-enquiry.html#1

3.       A more scholarly HTML version - http://www.etext.leeds.ac.uk/hume/ehu/ehupbsb.htm

4.       A plain text version – http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/philosophy/1700-1799/hume-enquiry-65.txt

5.      An interactive study guide developed by philosophers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee (in Scotland) - http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ddb/teaching/hume/enquiry/

6.      A study guide by Professor Gerald G. Massey of the University of Pittsburg - http://www.pitt.edu/~gmas/HUME_SG.htm

7.       Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Hume (fairly advanced) - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/

8.      G. J. Mattey's lectures on Hume at http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/phi023/HUMELEC.HTM

 

 

Some notes on the reading:

 

Our text (I mean How To Think About Weird Things) gives us a brief account of inductive reasoning on pp. 151-154.  But the authors have chosen to skim over some difficulties about these kinds of reasoning.  Supposing that we have some data, some information, how do we know what conclusions we are entitled to draw?  Some of the problems here have been lumped together under the label “the problem of induction.”  Basically the problem is that we want to generalize from some set of observed cases to conclusions about cases we have not (yet) observed.  In order to do this we seem to need to make some assumptions: that the future will resemble the past; that the observed cases are representative of the unobserved ones; that we understand what it is that the observed cases have in common, etc.    But how do we know that these assumptions are correct?

 

A classic discussion of this problem is found in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, especially Section IV.  In this section Hume argues in detail for the claim that no valid reasoning supports our tendency to draw inductive conclusions from our experience.  In Section V Hume claims that our tendency to reason in this way is just a habit, and that it is part of human nature to develop this habit. He also seems to think that we are lucky to be the kind of creature who develops this habit – it is a beneficial habit to have – but he does not seem to think that the habit is therefore justified or rational.   

 

Hume’s work also serves as a classic example of the philosophy known as empiricism.  Empiricism says that all knowledge of the world comes from sensory experience (observation and experiment).  This contrasts with rationalism.  Rationalism says that some knowledge of the world can be obtained by reasoning alone. 

 

Descartes was a rationalist.  We read the part of his Meditations wherein he used various skeptical arguments to demolish all his beliefs (leaving unscathed only his belief that he exists and that he is a thinking thing).  We did not go on to read the part wherein he tried to build up a secure structure of knowledge on this foundation.  There was a hint of his strategy, though, at the end of the second Meditation, in his discussion of the lump of wax.  He concluded from the fact that the wax remained the same thing even though its sensory qualities changed, that his senses were not a reliable guide to the nature of the wax.  The nature of the wax was discovered, rather, by his understanding (that is, by his rational faculty). In the third Meditation Descartes uses his rational faculties to ‘prove’, first that God exists (this is supposed to follow from several self-evident propositions) and then that his own rational faculties must be reliable whenever they are used within their proper limits (this is supposed to follow from the fact that God is – by definition – good, hence, not a deceiver, hence he would not have given His creatures an intrinsically defective rational faculty).  As Hume points out near the beginning of Section XII of the Inquiry, however, Descartes seems to be reasoning in a circle.  He has to use his rational faculties to prove that God exists, but only then does he have reason to believe that those faculties are reliable.

 

There are some terms and concepts it will be useful to learn in connection with these topics.  Hume uses the term “a priori.”  The opposite term is “a posteriori.”  These terms are used to distinguish truths that can be known by reasoning alone (a priori truths) from truths that require observation or experiment for their discovery (a posteriori truths).  (There are explanations of these terms in the interactive study guide to Hume linked above.)

 

It is characteristic of empiricism to insist that no fact about the world can be known a priori (only observation and experiment can tell us what the world is like).  So empiricists need to explain what a priori truths are about.  The usual story is that they are all ‘analytic’.  That is, they are true by virtue of the meanings of the words that compose them.  We know a priori that no bachelor is married, because “unmarried” is part of the definition of “bachelor.”  In a sense, then, a priori truths are not about anything, they simply reflect our determination to use words in a certain way.  So says the empiricist, anyway.  But rationalists characteristically deny this.  They want to say that reason can tell us something about the world, not just about our own words or concepts.  So rationalists hold on to the idea that some a priori truths are not analytic but synthetic.  A synthetic proposition is not true by virtue of the meanings of its component words.  A synthetic truth is one that gives us genuine information about the world.  The problem for rationalism is to explain how we can know that any such proposition is true without actually looking at the world, can know it just by thinking, can know it a priori.  Some of the propositions that rationalists have believed to be synthetic a priori truths are: that God exists; that every event has a cause; that substances are never destroyed; and many propositions of mathematics and geometry. 

 

Part I of Section IV of Hume’s Inquiry argues the empiricist case on this issue.  Then, at the end of the book he returns to the topic claiming, in a famous passage, that only quantity and number (i.e., mathematics) can be known a priori, that all matters of fact must be known through experience (experiment and observation), and that any claim to know other sorts of truth must be “sophistry and illusion.”  (End of Section XII)