A History of Philosophy | 47 Hume: Do We Know What's Real?

we we want this afternoon to turn from david hume's theory of ideas and to the application of his theory of knowledge and belief so I'm in titling this do we know what's real why believe to get the knowledge and the belief into it and as you can see there are a whole series of topics Vord he addresses in this connection but in order to make sure we are clear on his theory about knowledge you can hardly call it a theory of knowledge since he doesn't claim we have it but theory about knowledge come back to the line of thought that he sets forth in section 4 of The Inquirer you can outline it in terms of five questions in fact he enumerates these five questions in the second part of it what is the nature of reasoning about matters of fact and keep in mind that he is distinguishing matters of fact from relations of ideas relations of ideas which are analytic judgments with the logical form of a equals a they are for things like definitions tautologies mathematics but he's asking now about reasoning concerning matters of fact factual statements it'll be true and false all false about something and because he's an empiricist obviously this will be empirical knowledge and his answer is that reasoning about matters of fact is in terms of cause effect relations and that becomes pretty evident once you come back to the representational theory of knowledge which says that we are conscious of ideas and impressions impressions and ideas those together comprise perceptions which represent to us realities of various sorts extra mental realities okay and knowledge of matters of fact will be the sort that involve ideas predicated one of the other either by virtue of their logical relationships or by virtue of their factual relationships so he's asking how we know about factual relationships matters of fact and his his answer to that is that cause-effect relations are involved because if we're going to know anything about things beyond present experience present experience being the present content of the consciousness present perceptions if we're going to know anything beyond present experience external realities it must be by arguing from the experience as the effect to external things as the cause cause effect relations that's the way Descartes argued the existence of God meditation three that's the way John Locke argued not only the existence of God but of material bodies matter that's the way Berkeley argue the existence of God cause of passive ideas you think so how do we know matters of fact beyond present experience by cause-effect relations all right so the second question then what's the foundation of reasoning about cause and effect and for an empiricist the answer has to be experience and you begin to see what's going to be happening because in our experience we do not have any immediate awareness of causal connections of the force exerted by the cause in producing an effect we're only aware of uniformed is there's an antecedent is followed by a consequent with some sort of regularity that he calls constant conjunctions so two things can be associated in our thinking in our experience but we don't know of any causal connection between we only know the uniformity the conjunction so then we gain that from experience but then you get a further rider what's the foundation of reasoning from experience well obviously to reason beyond experience its cause effect you've got a circular argument and the outcome is skepticism about matters of fact beyond present experience grande him is representational theory of knowledge okay that the immediate object of our awareness is just ideas mental six grand in that and it sounds like his skepticism follows which is why next week we'll be looking at Scottish realism which rejects that theory of ideas rejects the representational view and maintains we have a direct awareness of material bodies of causal force and so forth but his skepticism follows very naturally and the fourth question accordingly is how then do we acquire beliefs because it's an obvious that we don't acquire beliefs by giving a cent to a weight of positive evidence as John Locke had said you proportion your beliefs to the evidence but if there's no causal evidence as such how do we acquire our beliefs and his answer in simplest form is to say it's a psychological habit that's induced by repeated occurrences we're so accustomed to in the morning at getting light that we say sure we can make predictions about it getting right and it'll be a little earlier tomorrow morning than it was this one it's rather delighted to observe last night once in a while I come out of other reflections and observe and I was I'm very delighted to observe that about 5:30 last night it was still almost light we're getting there you think we can make predictions but this is more a psychological habit we are so conditioned by the regularities of experience that we expect and their two habit that customary frame of mind is what he calls police but that leads to a fifth question if we come up with such beliefs if they're not caused by something external but if it's just a psychological habit well hunt there are other things that we come up with imaginatively fictions that our minds fabricate how do we know that these are not fictions things that we spontaneously come to believe and his answer there goes back to the distinction he drew in relationship to the theory of ideas that all ideas are brought into being as a result of impressions and he maintains that the impression associated with a belief it's very different from the impression associated with a fiction yes a belief itself is an impression what I'm aware of when I say I believe is a forceful and steady impression that's his way of putting it oh he's so sometimes forceful and vivacious but particularly talking of belief he says forceful and steady doesn't come and go it's for stated persistent and it's the force of the impression which distinguishes belief from how vivid for the moment maybe your impression of my fairy giraffe with butterfly wings sitting on the sill in my office you know that that doesn't have the the force your belief that I'm sitting in the office that is to say you can be realistic about the fairy giraffe carving that's there but not about the reality of it being a fairy trap so there's that distinction between belief and fiction that's important you can think of this in terms of Plato's divided line if you like you see where Plato had talked of knowledge is distinct from belief knowledge by dialectic knowledge by reasoning let's call it demonstration because that's the way Locke calls it demonstrative knowledge dialectic leads to intuitive knowledge yes now what you have is down here perceptual beliefs perceptual beliefs and what Plato speaks of is illusion of what now Hume is talking of as fiction in effect what Hume is telling us is that we have no intuitive knowledge of matters of fact you think we have no demonstrative knowledge of matters of facts but only of logical relationships in other words we have no knowledge of matters of fact beyond present experience so he eliminates as it were the top half of Plato's divide in line in his skepticism and he's only concern now is to make the distinction between the two levels in the legitimate belief and fiction so we've come a long way since Plato all right now that's the the line of thought and be sure that you you grasp this this emphasis on belief we we talk of probabilities he has that little section on probability and if you read it carefully he's saying in effect that probability increases belief how come because what probability amounts to is repeated occasions which reinforce them in habit they strengthen the steadiness and forcefulness of the impression so he's not talking of statistical probability in that section but simply of psychological probability expectation and he he goes at this very very steadily and there is one passage on 307 that I think it he says this and this seems to reach beyond human sieved as a skeptic in a significant way there is the very bottom of 307 there is a kind of pre-established harmony that's interesting that's Lyman stern there's a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas and though the powers and forces by which the form our nature is governed be wholly unknown to us yet our thoughts and conceptions still we find go on in the same train with the other work of nature custom is that principle by which this correspondence has been affected yeah we simply adjust by virtual of what repeated behavioral reinforcement the correspondence has been affected so necessary to the subsistence of our species and the regulation of our conduct in every circumstance and occurrence of human life custom is then the great guide of life now Joseph Butler the same general period end of the 18th century we'll be talking a little about him next week Joseph Butler was wrestling likewise with this kind of issue and he said and it became sort of a classic dictum in English thought from that time on probability is the guide of life probability is the guide of love Nancy Hume isn't satisfied with that not satisfied of that yeah probability helps but it just reinforces mental habit it seems a butler was trying to say that we make choices decisions about what to affirm what didn't I and we can be guided in those choices and decisions but the probabilities that we calculate not him not here you don't calculate probabilities you feel it's the feeling that is the kind of life and he comes back to that on issue after issue issue after issue you may know that may have noticed if you've gotten to the end of the inquiry that he calls his skepticism a mitigated skepticism not absolute but mitigated its mitigated because we do have knowledge of relations of ideas and so the skepticism is limited to matters of fact not all just knowledge of matters of fact it's applicable then to what is not capable of demonstrative knowledge and what you cannot demonstrate is facts that are contingent that is to say if it's not necessary logically necessary but contingent well how can you demonstrate that follows with logical necessity the best you have empirical generalizations which enable you to anticipate and you have to say enable you to anticipate because all you know is the uniform it is of experience up to this point you can't afford a firm the uniformity of nature endlessly into the future with any logical sir so Hume skepticism and his theory of belief and this becomes the basis for whether we can know anything about reality knowledge of its relations of ideas there are two kinds yeah you see mathematics begins with axioms and definitions rather than empirical generalizations well not if they're axioms if they're postulates yes but not if they're axioms and he was working in a day when Euclidian geometry was believed to have axiomatic first principles we don't have non-euclidean geometries yet now when that arises this has to change somewhat because mathematics is dealing with immaterial entities no it's dealing with ideas the idea of - the idea of three logically together give you the idea of five mathematics according to human is not about real things it's about melodical relationships between number concepts geometrical concepts so forth no no you're saying that it has to do with ideas you don't know whether the real world is like that as a matter of fact not in his sense of real no real has to do with what is what has extra mental reality maybe I should add this this footnote that you begin to see that there are different views of the status of mathematics and of mathematical entities you see Hume is maintaining that mathematics is a purely logical discipline concerned only with logical for logical relationships its entities are simply ideas nothing more he's a nominalist in the sense that our mathematical ideas labeled with names words do not have a refer to abstract ideas in the conceptualist sense nor to real universe Matan accent' but just two collections of similar particulars that general ideas that's all when we get to current we will see that current thinks that mathematics has to do with a realm of abstract ideas Kant is more the conceptualist and of course you're going to get those who are realists in mathematics as well and when we get to Whitehead we'll find a Whitehead is one of those in other words you find the three major theories about universals applied in the philosophy of mathematics realism conceptualism nominalism and all three of them are represented in philosophy of mathematics today any math majors run into that a bit in foundations I think foundations of math not yet ok ok now let's turn our attention shall we to the discussion of what there is that we know and the the first case is that of material bodies things in the external physical world and this like the belief in substance is not something that can be proven we don't have any cause-effect knowledge it's something which is simply taken for granted we assume it it's a matter of belief now human self seems to believe in the existence of material substances material bonds simply because the experience is so steady get that input that impression forceful and steady so consistent coherent in our experience the belief is readily elicited causal power I probably don't need to say much more you'll notice in his chapter on necessity he points out that we have no knowledge of any causal connection in the mind-body relationship no knowledge of it in the relationship between God as creator and this earth this creation nature he is however inclined to believe that there is causal force but this is simply a concession to mental habit we rarely assume that it's there in the material world he talks a little bit about the occasional list of view that God is the only causal power and so causes everything and regards that as a belief that's well pretty wild that is to say there is not any habitual experience that induces such a belief he doesn't find it particularly forceful so a more common sense belief in causal power is appropriate but inasmuch as he refuses to accept the reality of mind as substance he doesn't have mental causation to talk about mental causation and so he is not too inclined to take positively the power of mind over body even though we habitually talk that way liberty and necessity free will come into focus and there are two lines of thought that he has here one that comes through most clearly in the inquiry is the more simple necessary connections causal necessity we don't know all we know is constant conjunction so the person who is a necessity Rhian and says that all human choices and actions are causally determined the necessity Rhian is in reality only talking about constant conjunctions that's all he can logically ofoh regularity there may be some constant conjunction between will and action between what you decide and what you do but you don't know any causal connection so the necessity Rhian really is not affirming necessity but only regularity now by the same token the libertarian who asserts freedom of the will the libertarian is trying to deny that there is causal necessity well that's fine because nobody can really assert it but the libertarian is perfectly happy to say that there is regularity and constant conjunction between acts of will and what you do so what's the quarrel between the two well the only dispute you see is whether you call causation necessity or uniformity it's a cement achill debate about the meaning of the word causation well I don't think that's ever terminated the debate and I suppose Hume would say because people are induced to believe things by certain habits now in the treatise he comes up the question of free will in a little bit different way if you want to look this up it's in book three part one the term will the term will refer simply to an impression which I feel when I give rise to some new physical movement or some new mental perception in other words when I decide I'm going to when I decide yeah when I decide I'm going to walk around to here I'm aware of a certain impression you see in the chain of conscious events an impression that moving around is the thing I'm going to do but it's merely an impression a feeling a feeling that's involved in the stream of conscious events and similarly when I stop to think of say what my wife might decide to make for dinner tonight now I'm initiating a chain of thought well there is a gain a feeling an impression of start thinking about this yes a so there is nothing more to will than a kind of impression of starting something going in the mind or in over an action now there's uniformity enough between that impression of we call will and the resultant change or action Tomatoes make us think that it really causes something to happen and because we're not aware of Enda seed and causes of that impression we think that act of will is free because we're not aware of any uniform causes of course it may be that I get a certain feeling in the pit of my stomach and relate afternoon which comes in constant conjunction with starting to think about what's for dinner but causal connection no I'm not aware of any and so I think it's free the way humans behave constant conjunctions between motive and action characteristics general ways in which adolescents behave and the same with human beings generally there's a predictability about the characteristic behaviors actions ways of thinking that different age levels he says and I'm curious because he wrote that when he was still in his twenties he was pretty observant he didn't have books on developmental psychology to refer to but the uniform it is he finds everywhere we only think that the will is free yeah because we experience no antecedent force all we actually experience is a spontaneous kind of impression we don't experience indifference between alternatives that we were had they decide no what we experience normally is a spontaneous initiative and that uniformity of things is what normally incites belief in necessity in any case the uniformity is of human behavior can appropriately be extended to this aspect of human behavior so there is much more reason to believe in determinism than there is to believe in in determinism and he turns out as a soft determinist all we know is constant conjunctions though it seems natural and natural is the word he likes in the course of nature it seems a natural outcome of those concert actions that we believe in necessity so that's that's his other thing in book three of the dice a book three yeah in the treatise he deals a great length with emotions and passions and his point is that the the will is guided governed apparently but guided by passion emotion not by reason now traditional views of free will have said yes the will can be guided by reason you remember Descartes if we refrain from affirming until we know enough you see so that freedom of the will is tied to the assertion that the will is free enough to be guided by reason and now Hume rejects that quite plainly reason does not provide moral direction the reason does not direct the will it's the passions that direct the will it's the patients that direct the will so when we get to his ethics this discussion of freedom of the will becomes crucial in how he's going to develop for his some moral theory okay any any comment fair we talked about mind last time you remember in illustrating what he's doing mind it turns out is nothing but a succession of ideas nothing but a bundle of perceptions appearing and disappearing is on a theater stage Yuriko we have no knowledge of any other basis before or a personal identity and that obviously is going to affect his thinking about immortality the traditional view of immortality in his day thanks to Descartes was that if the mind the soul is an immaterial substance and entity that is independent and functions independently of the body there is capable of existing independently of the body so immortality is logically possible not so human because he doesn't think that way about mind he has an essay that was published in 1717 though apparently it was written earlier an essay on the immortality of the soul in which he takes this up he says some at the outset that by the mere light of Reason it's difficult to prove the immortality of the soul the arguments commonly derived either from metaphysical topics or moral topics or from the physical nature of things and then he goes on to discuss the arguments but he says in reality it is the gospel and the gospel alone that has brought life and immortality to light and of course the Hume scholars think that maybe tongue-in-cheek in as much as his own belief is something he religious belief is something he never aired ventilated even on his deathbed at the end of the essay he says nothing could set in full alight the infinite obligation which men kind has to divine revelation since we find that no other medium could ascertain this great and important truths immortality of the soul well what does he say about the arguments well the metaphysical argument is from the concept of substance and you know what he thinks about the concept of substance there's no logical basis for it there is nothing in impressions and simple ideas that can give rise to the concept of something I know not what so it's a confused idea and so there can be no a priori reasoning related to that concept no causal arguments related in the concept the moral argument for immortality namely that goodness moral goodness in this life will of a necessity be rewarded in a life hereafter implies the goodness of God attributes of God that empirically are unknown we have no matters of fact knowledge about God's arteries by empirical means and so there is no logical possibility of a moral argument for the existence of God and by purely philosophical means and the argument from the physical world is usually an argument by analogy namely that as the body goes to sleep and wakes up so eventually we all fall asleep to awake later well his point is obvious that in the physical world of nature if you want an analogy nothing is perpetual everything is perishable so the idea of an undying immortality is contrary to any analogy so says he death in the end is unavoidable but the human species couldn't be preserved if nature hadn't inspired within us enough version towards death and it's that impression that of version that we feel towards death which induces belief in immortality wishful thinking well that's human immortality now keep in mind that he's not denying the existence of material bodies skepticism says we don't know he believes there are material bodies he's not denying the existence of causal connections skepticism says we don't know he himself seems to believe there are causal connections he isn't denying freedom of the will he's simply saying that all of that we have empirically conspires to induce belief rather in causal necessity he's not denying the existence of mind he just doesn't see any way to know it and doesn't see any reason any psychological process by which we could believe it he's not denying immortality he sees psychological basis for belief in immortality but we can't prove it rationally notice that all these beliefs are based on impressions yes a on a psychology of belief rather than on the logic of evidence an argument okay let me pause their comment sounds like the same refrain virtually on each one doesn't it okay alright look at miracles this is one of the very well-known topics for Hume it was a live issue in his day with the rise of deism of course denying miracles it was made particularly an issue by virtue of the mechanistic science with its emphasis on a rigid kind of causal mechanism throughout the whole of creation which a miracle would in some way interfere with and what Hume does has really become the point of reference for discussion of miracles ever since in philosophy of religion in apologetics and all the rest classic point of reference his definition of a miracle is significant a miracle is a violation of natural law a miracle is a violation of natural law and that sounds like a perfectly understandable perfectly legitimate definition granted the science of the day so that you can see the kind of reasoning that might be involved if you understand natural law in terms of mechanistic science that vast causal machine of the cosmos in which everything is determined by uniformly operating forces that can be mathematically followed then to speak of a miracle as a violation of natural law begins to make sense but what do you mean by natural law by a law of nature do you mean the operation of causal necessities or do you mean simply the experience of uniform Innes that's the issue now some people who try to respond to Hume assume the first assume that when Hume is talking of a violation of natural law he's talking of a violation of calls on assessment and so the question is whether there are any chinks involved in the causal machinery to allow an external causal force to come in to intrude to suspend existing forces I don't think that's what Hume is talking about because that's not his view of natural law yes he I'm inclined to think that he's speaking of miracle as a violation of natural law in the sense of a violation of yet the uniformity and and that I think is how the argument in this section goes now of course uniformity is tend to induce belief in necessity and he's inclined to believe in necessity so he'll have a predisposition against miracles but he's he cannot say that a miracle is logically impossible the problem is not whether a miracle is logically possible in a world of uniforms the question is whether it's believable so the view of natural law as a matter of causal necessity ability argues really the impossibility of a miracle whereas the question of uniformity is poses the unbelievab ility of a miracle it's a tremendously important distinction those who try to respond to the first interpretation but it's impossible have of course to argue that natural law is not inviolable and they can do that either by asserting the greater power of God or by disagreeing with the view of natural law as being a rigid on penetrable system of causal forces so that you get other views of natural law developing later on tour the earth much more to the effect that natural laws simple laws are simply empirical generalizations humanly formulated so on and so forth conventional ways of describing natural uniformity so that some of the responses to the first really try and push you down to the second and I guess I'm inclined to think there's no need to push him there because he's there already now what does he say though taking the second thing what is he saying well his concern is with the believability of miracles for the simple reason that no evidence can be sufficiently steady and forceful to produce belief in to produce the habit that is belief is he custom and have it is only induced by repeated uniform it is gained at the game but if a miracle is an exception it doesn't come with uniformly so how can the exception induce belief the problem is the believability and to make his point he talks about the way in which witnesses who report a miracle tend to offer contradictory evidence so that even their testimony about a single miracle or a rash of miracles does not have the steadiness the forcefulness that is needed to produce belief so unbelievable says Hume it would take a miracle to create belief in miracles say something of force and velocity otherwise don't get to produce belief there are things that can happen that are not normally believable it would take a miracle to produce belief in miracles well it's it's an interesting passage there's this one a classic kind of response to this that's a little bit amusing goes back to 1819 an English writer by the name of Richard Whateley published an essay called some historical doubts concerning Napoleon Bonaparte now I said 1819 when Bonaparte was a prisoner on the island of was it el buro st. helens then well it was one other - Elba I think it was when he was a prisoner empirically verifiable Wheatley argues this way all sorts of the most extraordinary exploits are attributed to this man Napoleon that he marched his army to the very gates of Moscow with unsurpassed victories all along the way cetera etcetera etcetera now is this believable never heard the likes of it before or since what about the witnesses the testimony well it comes from soldiers who have drifted back and found their way back who obviously have a vested interest in being believed they're untrained observers they come back from this far corner of the earth superstitious obviously and they expect us to believe what is there there to induce glitch obviously what Whateley is doing is building a scenario that is not only oriented towards Napoleon but towards the miracles of Jesus yes and the point of the piece of satire is is simply that there is something wrong with Humes canons of historical evidence because nobody doubts that Napoleon are Bonaparte existed and did all that it is a unsurpassed thing never happened before likely no one will again so there must be something wrong with the canons of belief the criteria for how belief is induced so Whateley lifted at that what he's really doing is questioning Humes epistemology is empirical evidence including second-hand evidence from other observers is empirical evidences limited in regards to belief as him suggests okay that's any question comment alright existence of God existence of God in addition to the section in the inquiry on divine providence he has two other works of great significance on belief in God one is his dialogues concerning natural religion I put these titles on the board last time his dialogues concerning natural religion and the other is his natural history of religion the first the dialogues deals with the logic that is to say with attempts at demonstrative knowledge of the existence of God the second deals not with the logic but with the psychology D Mia and firo those three Klien fees argues empirically wants to argue from empirical evidence cosmological teleological arguments to a matter-of-fact conclusion d mia is something of a playtest with a priori arguments from the relation of ideas the good God who still thinks that God is really ineffable beyond experience beyond thought something of a mystic so it's really the mystical presence of God that's his final line the third is final who is skeptical of both and claims that in any case belief in God makes no practical difference if all you've got is belief in some sort of first calls or perfect being apart from something more than simply belief in God it's quite independent of morality makes no ethical difference in the process he points out that the empirical arguments cosmological teleological seem to depend on analogies and so they try to say that the cause must be like the effect analogous to the effect well Hugh makes a lot of fun of that since there's so much vegetative existence on this earth does that mean God is gonna be like a cosmic cabbage you say but in any case the most you would get is some sort of entropy morphic deity by analogy to the highest kind of existence on the earth as far as demure is concerned the argument is simply that relations of ideas get us nowhere on matters of fact which you would expect it's difficult to know just where Humes at in that obviously some of his skepticism comes out in Philo it is his view that simply believing that the proposition God exists is true makes no moral difference to people in the light of what he said about cause and effect on the human that's certainly the case ideas don't cause anything it's impressions that produce results but on the other hand there are places where he places in his writings generally way he seems to be closer to clean things as if he finds some weight to the force of that sort of thing on leaf now he has another little work about the same time called the skeptic in which he says that natural religion alone cannot long activate the mind we have to find some method of affecting the imagination there must be something historical as well as philosophical about the divinity you know that sounds as if he's saying that natural religion without some historical act of God is not going to elicit belief which is of course what some Calvinists say anyway the belief in God without the coming of Christ isn't logically possible I'm convinced they're right but that's what they say and he was raised in a Scottish Presbyterian background in the natural history of religion on the other hand he argues that there is a gradual historical development of belief from an early parlor theism that belief because of the constancy of various things towards a monotheism that arises when there is contemplation of nature and it's organized unity the trouble is that monotheism becomes an idea without the compelling power of the polytheistic deities around you all the time and so he's not quite sure beyond saying that there is a psychological process at work in the history of religions and his work there may have encouraged the development of the study of the history of religions and the evolution of religion which in but let's pick it up next time and see what you want

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Length: 64min 35sec (3875 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2015