Humean Ideas

When the BBC held their Greatest Philosopher vote last year, there was only one possible choice for me: David Hume. Plato, Descartes, Kant? You can keep them; Hume’s the chap for me.

In the end, the Marxist vote kept Hume from his rightful place at the top of the poll, but he did come in second; not bad for a man who never held an academic post, and whose work was shunned by the prevailing orthodoxy of the day. His virtues, however, have been appreciated down the intervening centuries by many in the western philosophical tradition. They include a great clarity of thought and word, and a biting wit—in my view, his is the greatest employment of scholarly irony.

Hume’s response to the sceptical challenge can be seen as deeply pragmatic. We cannot truly believe the sceptic, and although our knowledge may be built on somewhat shaky foundations—the classic example being his demonstration of the impossibility of a proof for induction—we carry on regardless, because we can do nothing else. In effect, we shrug our shoulders and get on with it.

All this is well and good, but despite my admiration for Hume’s work, his theory of ideas and impressions is problematic. Obviously in a trivial sense everything begins with experience, because from the beginning we are experiencing. However, this should not count against the existence of a priori knowledge, such as that of mathematics or logic. The important thing about such knowledge is that it is independent of any particular set of experiences.

This problem, in fact, could be seen as the motivation behind Kant’s theory about the faculty of intuition: our mathematical intuitions are the impressions that our mathematical ideas are formed from.

Now, go and see what other people think about the second chapter of Hume’s first Enquiry.

4 responses

Do Hume’s claims ever preclude a priori knowledge? He may suggest that we only have the capacity to think about mathematical concepts a posteriori, but perhaps he leaves room for some a priori component of knowledge.

Grant him that the impressions we recombine in order to form new ideas are dependent on experience. But the act of recombination might well be the result of an a priori ability. Does this constitute knowledge? Maybe.

If not, then the denial of any a priori knowledge shouldn’t necessarily be held against Hume. His view - along with that of other empiricists - would probably be that the burden of proof is on those who do believe mathematical knowledge to be a priori, Kant amongst them.

~ the apprentice #

This is a good point, and one that perhaps I didn’t address terribly clearly. As I pointed out above, it’s generally accepted that the essence of a prioricity is its independence of experience; a priori knowledge isn’t dependent on any particular set of experiences, even though the reasoning that leads to it will always be accompanied by experience.

Hume doesn’t disagree with this; he distinguishes between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact”. In section 4 of the first Enquiry he writes

[Relations of Ideas] are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is any where existent in the universe.

So, Hume seems to hold that relations of ideas are truth-apt and necessary, and are amenable to what he calls “demonstrative reasoning”. All of which sounds very much like a prioricity to me. The question which I was attempting to ask was, if ideas are copies of impressions, and truths of mathematics and logic are “discoverable by the mere operation of thought”, are there impressions which mathematical ideas are copies of, or does Hume simply not mean his theory to apply to that class of “objects of human reason”?

~ Benedict #

In my last go-round at university, I decided to major in philosophy. I came across Hume in a first year epistemology class. I was struck by Hume’s Problem of Induction and I thought it one of the coolest problems ever. For years I would say in any conversation tangentially related (and barely masking my pride), that Hume was my most favouritest philosopher ever.

That is, til I discovered that he was a racist of the first order. I was mortified. How embarrassing (at least for me, a black man). I wondered how many people I told about him actually knew that unfortunate fact. I decided the number was probably precious few, but still.

So hard for me to separate the ideas from the person. What a web.

~ Charles Follymacher #

Yes, it came up when I was doing some reading about him last month. The Enlightenment thinkers were certainly advanced for their time, but many—probably all—of them held at least some beliefs that many of us today would find abhorrent. Voltaire, for example, viewed the Turks in a less than favourable light, and that Jefferson kept slaves still incites debate.

~ Benedict #