1 David Hume's Representational Theory of Knowledge

on Humes most formidable contemporary critic Jim needs very little by way of introduction to philosophy students read perhaps more than introduction though he was a man of of consequence in his own time and indeed internationally he had a profound effect on significant figures in the American Revolutionary period routinely citing works by read indeed even early Supreme Court cases where the decisions would refer to reads inquiry we don't have supreme courts that refer to that sort of literature any longer I think they generally refer to Time magazine now or something like it read also had a significant influence on education in France where his works were very well known as best we can tell he had no personal acquaintance with Hume and in fact when Reid completed his inquiry before he had it published he wanted Hume to comment on it and so the question was how he could get Hume to read the work he wanted to be sure that he faithfully represented Humes position on these key matters they did have a friend in common Hugh Blair and we'd prevailed upon Blair to send me manuscript to Hume whereupon Hume returned it unopened with a note to this effect I've always believed that Presbyterian ministers should spend their time troubling each other and should leave philosophy to philosophers undaunted we got back to Blair and Blair got back to human said Davy boy I think you'd better read this and Hume did read it and he wrote back quite in a quite complimentary way to read revealingly he said if there was any probably work that he he thought he didn't understand it would be that section that read refers to as the geometry of visibles about which I will have a good deal to say later in in this course that indeed was the part that one would have hoped Hume would have read quite carefully it's a section of Reid's inquiry in which he anticipates Romani and geometry by seventy-five years well Reid writes back to Hume after Humes comments arrived and if you want the spirit of the Enlightenment I think the closing lines of Reid's letter to Hume might might say at all he says in conclusion this is very nearly a perfect quote I believe quote and although we here at Aberdeen sir are all good Christian men we would prefer your company to that of Saint Athanasius himself and we fear that if you were to write no further in metaphysics we would have nothing to talk about at all so you see it didn't come to blows it didn't come to swords and pistols Reid stuck to his guns and late in life published two collections of essays largely amplifying what appeared in the 1764 inquiry now what about Humes final appraisal of read in the last collection of essays that would be edited by Humes own hand in the last year of his life 1776 he sends these off with a cover letter to his publisher strand and he says I believe with these emendations I have answered all of the objections of dr. Reid and that silly Beattie now he's referring to James Beattie who did a disquisition on truth which was a two-fisted assault on on him it was quite in temperate really it's not philosophically deep the way reads inquiry is as best we can tell BT wrote this because the powers that be within Scottish Presbyterian site circles were not entirely happy with how gently reads criticism worked and they thought maybe something more substantial was required here and so BT ruthless BT was quite famous in his own time in part for a very long poem called the minstrel so appreciated by George the fourth that the word was George the fourth would give Beatty a living in London George the fourth instead gave Biddy of living in Scotland as the King said because that's where all my heretics are if you ever see a quite famous painting of BT's executed by Joshua Reynolds Beatty is holding his book under his arm and behind him are the gates of hell his treatise on truth saving us from that fate and atop the great gates of Hell the two escutcheons if you look at them carefully this is generally not noticed well who are they Voltaire and Hume and Rhett Reynolds Reynolds and Hume were friends so this is obviously a sporting kind of cartoon as for Hume if you turn to the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy on me on the internet you will learn that Hume is quote the most important philosopher ever to write in English close quote and I I think that's quite apt he is the most significant writer in in philosophy in the Anglophone his disciples both declared and implicit number some of the great figures in speaking philosophy not least of whom would be John Stuart Mill for example now this could not have been predicted at the outset Hume followed his older brother to the University of Edinburgh before Hume self had reached the age of 12 his mother describing him as quote wake minded Scottish for what the English probably would call clever and what in my country we would refer to as really smart but but he went off there with a primary interest I should think in in classics he had already befriended Cicero in in Cicero's own language and so when he got out of Edinburgh there was some question about what he was going to do with the rest of his life his family was comfortable but it was not affluent he was urged to try law school and his powers of discernment were evident even at that time and he judged himself not to be quite suited to that life but if you think that's bad he did get a job working for a Bristol sugar merchant we could have told David that wasn't going to last very long he started supporting himself as a tutor and then thinking that a change of scenery might help he went off to France and in fact there's something quite coincidental it's a wonderful irony actually the treatise was drafted in in France when he was 25 years old the great treatise and where was he doing the writing in the little village of la flesche which a century earlier featured that very famous Jesuit Colin attended by many notables including Descartes I find it wonderfully ironic and coincidental but his Hume anything bought Descartes it must be something about the flesh I'm thinking of going there myself might get a good a good ideas must have the same effect on philosophical thinking that Lourdes has in case you have paralysis or something like that little flesh so he writes the treatise he brings it back to to England in in 1737 and it's published by 1739 and he describes it as something stillborn at birth Hebrew he he laments the fact that no one has taken notice of it here I think he's he's being unnecessarily modest it was noticed indeed it was it was very carefully noticed it's a great work it's not cited that frequently it's a young person's work it'll be years later that he cuts it down tailors that refines it more and publishes it as a series of essays inquiries into the nature of human understanding in important respects it's inspired by by Locke and in significant respects as with Locke it is a transparent rejection of rationalistic modes of philosophizing such as the mode made famous by Descartes himself now I might have you turn to the passage taken from Descartes discourse on method which provides a clear encapsulation of how Descartes thought philosophical issues should be pursued what's the model the model is geometry the problem with geometry of course is that at the level of abstraction it gives you absolutely certain and in bibble truths but no way of establishing the reality of that about which these truthful propositions are advanced that is you can go through the entire body of Euclidean geometry and all of the axioms and theorems hang together perfectly without there be any being any basis upon which to know in the ontological sense that there are for example rectilinear triangles or circles or spheres so Descartes sees the geometric mode of analysis as a mode of analysis that provides us with clear and distinct ideas and now the question is how you apply this mode of analysis to the facts of the real world to what what is actually and materially palpable but I say the method is a rationalistic deductive method where the object is to arrive at understanding so clear so distinct that it would be virtually contradictory not to accept them it's essentially a logical mode of analysis now if you take a look at the second part of the passages taken from the discourse on method this is quite interesting he says now why have philosophers often failed to have their understandings reach to the level of the transcendent I can establish to my own satisfaction that there is a perfect being God in just the way that in geometry I can establish with certainty that there is a perfect circle that is to say I can cognize perfection though I can't see it in reality it is an instanced in actual things and the reason philosophers can never rise higher than the ordinary data of perception is because they think that's all there is and he says in this they're following the school man now you know what school men is school men is shorthand for medieval Aristotelian x' well what is the maxim of the school man against which Descartes is complaining even rallying nihilist in intellect to quote known for where it incensed ooh nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses do you see wideness in his new essays will say in response to that nisi intellectus apes accept the intellect itself except the organizing mind itself but what I find wonderfully ironic again in in this part of Descartes when you turn to Locke and Hume they are committing their epistemology to the evidence of sense that they are much more inclined to be saying things like nothing's in the mind which does not first begin in the senses so in a manner of speaking Descartes might judge his successors Locke and then more remotely Hume as very much in the tradition of the school men of the medieval Aristotelian in fact lark actually charges Thomas Aquinas with that phrase me who asked in intellect etc you can't find that in Thomas Aquinas though it is a feature of not quite sure in whom you would find that perhaps boy don't try googling that one has a long history within the intellectual history of Catholic teaching I wish I had more time for this but it to some extent starts with Augustine once Augustine had defeated his own heretical leanings he then took it upon himself do battle with heretics and of course one of the heretical claims was that everything's Christians everything Christians say about God is utter twattle because they attribute to God attributes that are so beyond the range of possible experience as to be mythic there isn't any aspect of perfection infinity everlasting nature it's a you none of this you can't know anything about things like that because you because even if they were the case you would lack the perceptual apparatus to have access to it and what do we see Augustine doing with that Augustine says no wait a minute Fisk there's a mistake here you want to say that the limit of cognition is set by the limit of perception but that's not so he said every person has no trouble perceiving a four-sided figure all of whose sides are equal and subtended by 90 degrees everyone can not only perceive it but can conceive of it right I call it a square now no one can perceive achillea God that's a thousand sided figure viewed at any distance at all a thousand sided figure will look like a circle because it's beyond the resolving power of the visual system but everyone in this room surely can conceive of a thousand sided figure therefore we are able to form correct cognitions of that which is imperceptible and so our cognitive our cognitions are not limited by our perceptions the next time that example is used it's used by Descartes without attribution and it's exactly that example I would say after 25 years of Georgetown I know how sinister this Jesuit education can be they must have planted this stuff pretty pretty deep in Cartesian brain tissue so now the the debt to Locke is acknowledged by Jim and the debt is is is it is a considerable one if you now turn to the sections from Locke's essay concerning the human understanding he answers in a word how the mind is furnished with ideas he says by experience that's it that's it the mind is furnished by experience no matter how complex the idea might be it is finally resolved Alinta more elemental ideas and those ideas are resolvable into elementary sensations now what's impelling Locke's thinking here I I don't want to be glib on this but the clock ticks Locke is an older and absolutely devoted friend of Isaac Newton's Locke is a fellow of the Royal Society he's he's a doctor he's a good doctor in fact he did a diagnosis on Shaftesbury that was life-saving and led to a successful surgical procedure over which Locke presided not a surgeon but as consulting physician Locke is understanding himself to be within the community of scientists he's learned his science from very good sources like Boyle walk on the high street you'll see a little plaque acknowledging both of them one way of understand our sesay concerning human understanding is a Newtonian theory of mind now what do we know about the world of reality as Boyle and Newton would have it well ultimately it's a corpuscular world that is to say if you had the the perceptual resources sufficient unto the task you would understand that no matter how reality presents itself it is finally reducible to a corpuscular substrate we might say today a subatomic substrate do you see now that isn't something to which we have perceptual access but those corpuscles in the physical domain match up with the way Locke wants sensations to match up with in the domain of consciousness elementary sensations being in a manner of speaking corpus alike and they can be pulled together just as the corpuscular world of material objects can be pulled together to form ever more complex and ultimately visible palpable ensembles in the Newtonian world this happens by way of gravity in the mental world there's probably some similar sort of process that pulls these things together some kind of associate process not not addressed directly by Locke something he's quite prepared quote to leave to the anatomist close quote Locke however goes out on a limb to the extent that one thinks it's going out on a limb when he says as a faithful authentic Christian person but it's certainly within the powers of an omnipotent creator if that creator saw fit to give thought to matter he could do it thinking matter in fact it's something of a heresy to argue that this would not be possible for God to do now I do hear some resonances in in that argument when Descartes was finished with his discourse he wanted it read and criticized by all the right people the Nexus the intellectual Nexus on the European continent around which all the right people could be assembled - his father Mersenne and so Descartes asks father Marcin can you get this read by all the right people Marcin agrees to be one of the readers and he lines up a few others two of whom are quite notable Hobbs you've heard of and Pierre Gassendi who probably had as highest standing in 17th century philosophical intellectual circles as any other figure of the time you don't hear that much about him now very much responsible for a revival of atomistic thinking the an ontology based on what today we call a kind of particle physics etc and those those criticisms advanced by those pulled together by Marcin and then de cartes reply to those criticisms are all published they're available in the Cambridge University Press series on on Descartes edited by Cottingham but you can hear echoes of Gassendi because the Gassendi who's talking about the mental realm itself being reducible to a congress of his father Pierre Gassendi sensing no incompatibility between the claims of faith and the possibility that a an omnipotent and omniscient being surely could I mean if in six days you could put the whole damn thing together there is an eighth reason why he couldn't put a thought or two into an apple if he chose Thoth you say no contradiction at all between the notion of mentation and potentialities inherent in matter what do we call that for you today neuro philosophy is innocent some other hybrid sort of thing neuro neuro philosophy interesting I hope to be gone before we - aid to much else now what Hume promises in this work even in the subtitle of the treatise it's a scientific approach he's going to put the mental moral world remember moral the 18th century includes what we'd refer to as mental as well he's going to put this on a firm scientific base which means that he's going to follow the method established by bacon and Newton the experimental method now it's going to be one of the burdens of my lecture next week to give voice to Reid's convincing argument that Hume did no such thing it will be Reid's argument that what Hume actually did which is what Locke did which is what just about everyone in the history of philosophy has done is sit in an armchair and reflect on the operations of his own mind and as best as he could tell about those operations then quite heroically extending those operations to nothing less than the entire human race and whatever you might want to say about that venture it certainly is not Baconian and Newtonian Newton didn't give us Newton's world by way of introspection he had a telescope you know what you want you know he looked out see projected light against the walls in his room and showed that you could break up white light into the spectrum you know about that do you know if he used the numbers as he recorded them you don't get the spectrum it was a typo or a graphic or something he got the length from the pinhole in the window to the wall he wrote it down wrong so if you try to replicate the study exactly you'd say he must have cooked the books but it is just you know he just scribbled now there's something else about Newton that I do feel constrained to mention you know there there are three characteristic ways of labelling great thinkers you can do it by way of a kind of viciousness an intentional libel you can do it by way of ignorance you you just don't understand the thing and so you start imputing to somebody things he had no intention of saying and you can do it by brevity and of course anyone who lectures on great figures in the history of five years knows that he's perpetrating libels and the question is how severe are they going to be and will there be enough time to correct them well when Newton finally had to explain at the most fundamental level how the Newtonian world should be understood he makes this distinction he says understand but with respect to the work on gravitation I have unearthed and carefully I have unearthed the walls by which gravity operates but I have not identified what has gravity working the way it does I have not unearthed the cause of gravity only the laws that arise from it so he's making a distinction between a genuine causal account and what we would in science refer to as a functional account he goes on in the Principia suppose what you really are desperate for is that ultimate causal account - what does Newton refer at that point if that's your aim you would have to consult the plan of the creator of all that is to say at the end the Newtonian explanation is quite as chilly illogical as anything you find in Aristotle and in fact he cites Aristotle you you have to look at the ends and purposes served by some orderly feature of reality if you want the ultimate causal account and so he's already acknowledging that the ultimate causal account is not in the province of experimental science it's something else this as I say is is something on which libel becomes almost inevitable but if I look at you and say therefore read the Principia and I'm not sure that it be especially helpful some of you will do that it is great literature now what is it the 17th century the world of Galileo and and Locke and Newton what is it they getting rid of at least as it pertains to philosophy of mind as we would refer to it today well I think I can convey what what an older view was with which the 17th century would become increasingly impatient here's a challenge to you when you go home tonight ask you chum this question try to pick someone who isn't a philosophy student pick someone in science if you can here's the question if you sit down tonight and have a hamburger now that thing began as a cow and after it gets into you it becomes you but is all the countess is gone now that's one hell of a trick when you think about it and it's a trick that's repeated over and over again for example the cow ate a lot of grass which somehow became cow like the cow became you how do you do that sort of thing now if you're sitting with some biology student you know you're gonna get some Windex position of the Krebs cycle and metabolism of Kabul - no but here's the root question you start it look here I'm sure that there's a lot of biochemistry going on but here's my question Harriet two days ago this thing was moving and it had a tail now it's reading Proust and I want to know how this is done now now the way the world and the patrimony of Aristotle and centuries of development out of that tradition dealt with these things was in terms of something called the substantial form of something the substantial form of man is a rational animal etc etc now the idea the root idea is that where something is a fundamental formal principle whatever it absorbs into itself is then governed by that principle with certain contingencies surrounding the entire operation and those contingencies are numerous and various so that for example birds normally fly unless fish are aquatic unless so so you end up with an account that is likely to vary species by species and indeed you might end up with a substantial form account that varies even within a species it must we can say the substantial form of man is as a rational animal how do we account for loonatics well you see his followers of those days and so you know you you know need subsidiary theoretical break account for every departure from the sub step that this gets rather tedious at a certain point if you think they had image trials you can get rid of this in one fell swoop by declaring that there is nothing but homogeneity across the entire range of things what kind of homogeneity particulate corpuscular atomic and that everything after that simply requires various combinations of the fundamental ingredient you get rid of all of the entelechy of Leiden it's the substantial form the you get rid of all of that voguing a different concept and that different concept is the concept of mechanism what is at what mechanism that takes particulate nature and by the law governed machinery of the physical world makes things it makes things like we make clocks if you reduce a clock to everything that's in a clock you'll get Springs first do you see but you can carry on that reduction indefinitely do you want to say that over and against all of the the structural micro structural composition of clocks there's some super ordinate thing that is a clock no the clock is just a particular configuration of matter it could just as well have been a coach or teapot depending upon how the operative machinery fashions the thing once applied to what we are pleased to call mental life what's the mechanism well the human mechanism is that we start off with simple sensations that's the ultimate grounding of everything I assure of which we are capable and and out of that substrate out of that realm of impressions of sense and impressions of reflection where impressions of sense refer to our contact with the external world by way of the senses and impressions of reflection being the access we have to the inner workings of our own system out of that comes the entire panoply of the thinkable and even when it comes to such things as unicorns unicorns don't exist in the sense of there being unicorns but unicorns can be fashioned out of the sensory perceptual ingredients that include horns horse like things etc all you need is a mechanism capable of pulling all this together well what will that mechanism be it will be in Hume now the laws of Association the tendency of any ideational or perceptual component to be joined together with other such components increases with the frequency with which the two occur together in time and place the principle of contiguity but closer they are together in space the more likely it is that that one of them presented will give rise to the thought of the other the more frequently the two occur together in time don't more likely it at any future time isn't a ssin of one will excite an experience or expectation of the other and then cause an effect two events are become joined in experience the constant conjunction principle then indeed on future occasions the presentation of one inevitably leads to the expectation of the other and this is largely a statistical operation because in fact given the contingencies of the real world just about anything could adventitious Li come to be associated in time and place with something else it could be it has a lot to do with how we're made up and how our perceptual processes work and this is why Hume says famously and even infamously so you see quote anything might be the cause of anything but is if those conditions of contiguity cause and effect repetition resemblance if those core principles of Association are satisfied then you've got a causal picture that's the picture you will have of causation and causation as it is knowable causes as we refer to causes are exhausted by those events now there'll be a separate lecture on human causation and Reid's critique of it but you see what a momentous claim misses if you take the entire business of science to be unearthing the causes of things and it turns out that causality itself is just one of those things that mental apparatus comes to forge based on experience do we end up with a brutal form of subjectivism and on that hume scholarship varies is humor skeptic about causes in fact or is he merely a sceptic about our ability to get outside the box of our experiences and understand causality in some way other than his account and on that the literature is quite wholesomely and attractively divided invitingly divided I shall get into some of that I mentioned before class that I in one interview a few years back I was asked if I could have supper with with any three people who would they be and I said well an evening with Contin Hume going at it would be absolutely irresistible and me interviewer she said well who would the third person be and I said well at the end of the night I'd then want to turn to Aristotle and say okay who's right so that's now when he says and this is in the handout all the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into impressions and ideas he wants to make clear but what does vary is the force and vivacity of these impressions those the ideas that we form turn out to be copies of the impressions that the external and internal world ache on those organs capable of being influenced by them so what sort of a picture is he giving us well here's an external world that impinges on our organs of sense for example now you don't have clicking fingers inside your head now so this is something going on out here you have access to it in virtue of the fact that you have auditory apparatus it's a very complex picture the human wouldn't have known all the details there very well worked out today so the sound has to get through a little curved duct referred to as the external auditory meatus and it's going to reach an eardrum which begins to vibrate it's a very thin membrane it's a nearly perfect impedance matching device which means the energy you capture on the inside of it almost perfectly matches what impinged on the outside of it very little loss in transmission and that's that's the patterns of fluid vibrations in the and in the cochlea and there's a long hinged membrane called the basilar membrane so as the fluids are oscillating the membrane beats up and down and along the length of that membrane a little hair cells which behave as if they were piezo resistive crystals which means they give you an electrical DC response proportional to the diformation do you see so as the membrane whips this way there's more stretch and pitch is laid out eventually along that you get the picture don't you and then only you're hearing something well look at what the mediation is between this and you're here so so you do not have access to the external world you have a means by which to represent something taking place in the external world but as you can never get out of that box and answer the question well what would it be like if I had no means of mediation and recording and representing you are essentially in the thrall of those mediational processes are you following me in other words you don't Elodie you see a presentation of reality and the question then is how good or represent is it and what standard is to be invoked in an attempt to determine how good that representation is illness fight with is that the simplest of sensations it might be something like this listen it's ever to figure as an idea in the mind it will do so in virtue of their beings copy made of the peripheral sensory event now copied more shall we say centrally so the idea is a copy of the sense the famous human copy principle it grounds very much of humans epistemology and read will have justice bushing of a copy being made of a sensation and what evidence would we be adduced to support a proposition sort so we've got causality to deal with we have representation ISM to deal with what's going to oppose representation ISM Thomas reads realist account what is it I see when I look at the external world listen carefully I want you to look at me when I say this what is it I see I'm we look at the external world I see what's there and what a horrible state I'd be in if it were any different quote even the lowly caterpillar will crawl across a thousand leaves until it finds the one that's right for its diet we look quote faint images that take place in our thinking and reasoning impressions and ideas may be either simple or complex the latter of just enlarged versions of the former achieved by way of the laws of Association now later in his inquiry he says by the term impression I mean that all of our more lively perceptions when we hear or see or love or hate or desire or will an impression is just the more lively of the perceptions see so the difference between a tiger actually coming at you and the idea of a tiger is just a matter of the liveliness of the impression and as you might guess Reid will have some fun with that also who ends up supper that night depends on which philosophy he has attached himself to if he's not a realist I would not sell him life insurance and then finally Hume says with a plumb we may prosecute this inquiry to whatever length we please where we shall always find that every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression now I want to read that to you so that you don't leave with the impression that Hume is had all tentative about this it is the linchpin of his epistemology carrying on those who would assert that this position is not universally true nor without exception have only one and that an easy method of refuting it that is by producing an idea which in their opinion is not derived from this source now suppose I say all right square root of minus one well and that's where Hugh makes a distinction between matters of fact and simply the meaning of terms the relational meaning of terms so when it comes to abstract mathematical propositions these have to satisfy a kind of internal logic they do not refer to events in me in the external world they are not matters of fact if there's one thing we can be damn sure of its that the square root of minus 1 is not a fact in the sense of something accessible to the senses now one other qualification that I do want to bring to your attention which is again a gift of locks and helps us understand the distinction that Hume once to make between matters of fact and simply the relations among ideas Locke says yes he's told us that I answer in a word from experience but Locke actually says we have three sources of knowledge there are some things we know says Locke this is from the essay concerning the human understanding there are some things we know we know them to be true necessarily and certainly true and we know this without reflection such as up is not down black is not white two things cannot simultaneous ayman simultaneously be and not be now that mode of knowledge he refers to as intuitive and he attributes this to what he refers to somewhat Delphic lee as quote an original act of the mind there are some things which we know to be necessarily and universally true but we don't know them immediately we know them by a kind of demonstration of which the celebrated example would be Euclidean geometry as it happens the area of a square is uniquely determined by the length of the diagonal drawn through it not only is this not immediately known there are even as we meet whole graduating classes from famous American universities whose students in the top half of the graduating class would have a lot of trouble establishing that the area of a square is uniquely determined by the length of the diagonal drawn through it no one in England of course that form of knowledge Locke refers to as demonstrative now with respect to the facts of the world the sorts of things that science deals with that's where he answers in a word from experience and that mode of knowledge is what he refers to as perceptive so there are intuitive demonstrative and perceptive modes of knowing so if you hit Hume with something like the square root of minus one that's going to come under the Lockean category of demonstrative knowledge it's it's simply a relational concept involving relations between unobstructed ideas but on what really matters is is there a carriage outside and have the horses been fed and so forth you you don't you don't establish that demonstrative Lee you certainly don't know it intuitively what do you have to do you have to go outside and check and when you've done so by the way have you actually learned what a horse really is or have you only learned how whatever that thing is it represents self in your mind as a such-and-such and that'll be the topic we take up when realism meets representations do you have any questions we don't have a lot of time are you all happy beginning of term yes but percept the the Lockean perceptive the things that you actually experience at the level of perception yes oh it can pre-select yet surely well no what's being copied as to the sensation not something in the external world now you can presuppose there must be something out there causing the sensation but that's quite different from the ontological claim and I know what what its nature is all you know is the effect it has on your senses I give you a quick illustration of this is where permitted I go into the garden at home and we have yellow roses and they're very pretty and some of them are still in bloom by the way and I will occasionally find in our garden a funny be as much taken by the yellow rose as I am now I see a yellow rose because my visual system begins with a photochemistry that responds with peak sensitivity in the wavelength band that centers on 555 milli micro ins which most normally sighted people will describe as yellow 50 500 angstroms if you come from that side of the street the peak sensitivity of the visual system of the honeybee is in the ultraviolet so the honeybee cannot see my yellow and I can't see whatever it is they know this raises no doubt about whether there is something being looked at in the garden what it does say is that the apparatus I and the honeybee bring to bear on whatever that thing is will result in a representation that reflects my and the honeybees visual systems and neither I nor the honeybee can get out of that box to establish what the thing really is just in case there were nothing sensing it at all what it really is my contemporary lights would be some particle buzz of one sort or another so you you can be a realist ontologically in arguing that for there to be a sensation there must be something out there causing it but a representational list when it comes to identifying what it is you could possibly know about it capito yes yes that's hume at his skeptical when he gets to be particularly Geordi nose tweaking that Hume skepticism is what many many find when they declare Hume to be an absolute skeptics the Germans thought he was a skeptic the count who was awakened from dogmatic slumbers by by Hume almost certainly read read his Hume from commands translation ha maan was one of the aesthetically romantically [ __ ] gente German ha humus a friend of Kant's but he couldn't stand this logic chopping stuff and so forth ha maan said when when I see a logically tight argument I react to it the way of well great the way a well-bred girl reads a love letter he sort of a shouldn't say things like that c'mon refers to Hume as that attic philosopher he just sees him doing sort of Greek skepticism all all over again humor is a multi he's a great writer but he admits of a variety of interpretations Hume scholarship is alive and well there's still a question about whether Hume is skeptical about causation as we talk about causation my own view which is entirely without authority not entirely but it's close to being entirely because Humes not here to answer for himself I think what Hume was attempting to do is is what he tells us in the subtitle of the treatise I think he was trying to reduce the realm of the mental to a kind of experimental science and therefore what the account is is an account of how we develop causal concepts I think it would have been quite a different story had Hume committed himself to some sort of philosophy of physics where the question is not how we arrived at causal concepts but what the nature of causation is and so the side of the street I work says that I don't know whether he was skeptical about causes or enough but he certainly was skeptical about our causal concepts matching up with something in the external world that actually is causality and he wasn't skeptical about that he just said you can't do that so the Doughty Scots there are a lot of fun Jim's a wonderful writer you'll love reads inquiry it's witty it's it's economical it's generous it's wise he's my sort of guy

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Epistemology, John Locke, Empiricism, History of Philosophy, Realism, Skepticism, Theory of Perception, Philosophy of Perception, Indirect Realism, Humean, Theory of Knowledge, Representationalism, Dualism, Ontology, Metaphysics, 18th Century Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Descartes, Perception, Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenalism, Idealism, Subject-Object, Representative Realism, Naive Realism, Cartesian, Newton, Reductionism, External World, Associationism

Id: A4xXeM9LSX0

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 06 2014