A Brief Summary and Refutation of Hume's "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding"
A Minor Refutation of Radical Empiricism
This is a piece I wrote for a class this semester, I am currently working on a really great project that I know you all will enjoy, and that should be done soon. Until then hopefully this can hold you over! God bless and have a happy New Year!
Core to Hume’s in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is Hume’s dilemma to connect ideas and reality. Hume thinks there are three main principles that govern the connection of ideas; Resemblance, Contiguity, and Cause and Effect. The example Hume gives for to demonstrate the meanings of these categories is thus, “A picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original. (Resemblance) The Mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others (Contiguity), and if we think of a would, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain that follows from it (Cause and Effect)”. From here Hume divides all human enquiries into a greater schema, which directly teaches Cause and Effect, this schema being the dichotomy of Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact. Hume puts all Euclidian geometry, algebra and arithmetic into the class of Relations of Ideas because something like 2+2=4 or y=mx+b is just a proposition that expresses relationships between the figures. On the other hand, Hume introduced Matters of Fact, if I say “the sun will rise tomorrow” it is as much an observable Matter of Fact as saying “the sun will not rise tomorrow” in this way there is no law of non-contradiction present because it doesn’t exist in the logic of the sentence but in the empirical proof meaning that the things that are empirically false can never actually be conceived. Importantly, Hume also believes that all Matters of Fact are founded upon Cause and Effect “And here [in examples Hume gave] it is constantly supposed that there is a connection between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious”. Relations of Ideas can exist a priori while Matters of Fact must have an observable Cause and Effect.
When it comes to Cause and Effect, Hume thinks Cause and Effect can only be determined by experiences, and that we can only know what we know of the experience by comparing the similarities of experience. Once someone has compared enough experiences, they develop a Custom or Habit that governs their lives. Hume continues to shore up this epistemological chain, recognizing the potential infinite regress in it by introducing another factor, that of Belief. Belief for Hume requires an object being presented to the memory or senses which by custom allows an individual to conceive of a concept, so that when the thing itself is not actually present it can still be believed in because of the Custom which experienced it or compared it in contiguity or in resemblance to another thing.
I do not think the addition of Belief or Custom to Hume’s philosophy solves the infinite regress issue that Hume has. The first issue I have with Hume is that much of his own philosophy is built upon imaginative presuppositions, especially the Thoughts vs Impressions dichotomy by focusing on logically simple objects such as his example of a “Gold Mountain” in which, he avoids taking into account any form of ontological argumentation using imagination while explicitly relying upon it in the sense that he assumes all empirical inputs prove ontological realities(they both do and don’t but it’s very complex and beside the point) “but as it is impossible that this faculty of imagination can ever, of itself reach belief, it is evident that belief consists not in the peculiar nature or order of ideas but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind” Hume’s whole system is contradictory, belief can allow you to use your memory to make A resemble B without ever empirically knowing B.
Furthermore, Hume waltzes over the counterargument that easily disproves his system but uses similar logic; that being Anselm’s ontological argument. In rejecting that ontological arguments(and a priori logic) are valid simply on the basis of his assumed system, Hume falls into a contradiction where it should be impossible for ontological arguments and certain advanced mathematical systems to even exist in the first place. In order for Anslem’s argument to even exist with a single valid premise, even if it’s the weakest one; Anselm necessarily had to conceive of a Greatest Conceivable Being in the first place which disproves Hume’s entire project, regardless of Anselm’s argument being right or not. Another disproof using mathematics is the contemporary concept of infinity. In order for the current understanding of infinity to even exist as an idea it has to violate all the principles of the Relation of Ideas because an infinity would still be an infinite monad without relation to the numbers that exist in the infinite; infinity is still infinity with or without 1, even the categories Hume uses here are very poorly defined and self defeating.
The mathematical counter-example used above also brings us to another major error in the Matter of Fact and Relations of Ideas distinction. I in my mind have the concept of one-ness and two-ness as a Relation of Ideas. When I pick up two sticks I am not experiencing two-ness but in some way the definitional attributes of two-ness are empirically manifest before me, because the sticks are not the same stick, they are two sticks. If Hume is right, that is impossible, two-ness or 2 cannot exist empirically in the sticks in any manner, not in the sense that it can be learned from the sticks nor that I can apply it to the sticks, and yet I can. Two-ness is dissimilar to and exists in my mind before the two sticks, even as a baby because an infant even from conception knows that it is not its mother. The problem Hume has here is so massively significant it cannot be understated and he doesn’t seem to be aware of it. This argument on sticks, gets to an even greater point; If Hume actually believed any of this why’d he write it down in a book to communicate it to us? A book is about as close as you can get to an a priori method of communication. If the Relations of Ideas found in a book (words, concepts, logic, knowledge, etc.) are incapable of expressing true empirical realities and are not evidence for them, then why did Hume write any of this? Even if one tries to justify the book and that which is within it as a belief or cause/effect that teaches a Matter of Fact, that would leave us with the troubling dilemma that all non-fiction books have default positive truth values or that truth values are based off the life of the author, which we the reader would also have to have empirical evidence of. If Hume is right, short of actually being David Hume, there is no way to prove beyond a doubt that he is right. Ultimately Hume to me sounds like a guy who just got really obsessed with the idea of empiricism and found a lot of ways to reword saying the same thing over and over again, even the concept of Belief that he ends this discussion with has almost the exact same definition as Impression, which he began the book with.
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Bibliography:
Hume, David, and Eric Steinberg. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ; with a Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh ; and an Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature. Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.