Hume

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Introduction to David Hume

Historical Context

David Hume was born in Edinburgh, he attended Edinburgh University at the age of 11 and had completed his first great philosophical work by the time he was 25. His family were landowner and farmers, though not what would have been considered wealthy. His six-volume history of England made is reputation as an historian, and he settled down, travelling between the family farm and Edinburgh to a comfortable life as an established academic and man of letters. Hume was considered by many of his contemporaries as a dangerous man.

Religious and Scientific Changes

Like Descartes, Hume was writing during the Reformation and science was becoming more prominent. Hume was difficult as he was sceptical and critical and had a reputation for being an atheist. led to him being banned about writing about Christianity by the Church. Like Descartes, he wanted to find out: what knowledge is; how knowledge is acquired; if knowledge claims can be justified.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Hume wanted to provide a science of human nature. He had earlier stated that his ambition was to be 'the Newton of the Moral Sciences'. As the new scientific way of understanding the world came more popular, Isaac Newton had suggested that 'moral science'. Hume wondered if it could be carried out using the same scientific method that Newton had used in carrying out his science. This method is an empiricist method. The starting point for this kind of science is very careful observation. Hume's aim was to discover laws of human perception, desire, feeling, belief, and reasoning. His starting point is empiricism and how whether or not we could scientifically prove how humans acquire knowledge.

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Aims and Methods

Aims:

to show how to discover a science of human understanding

to overcome skepticism through empiricism.

Hume is actually carrying out psychology. In order to given an account of the functioning of the mind - of the operation if the human understanding - Hume needs first to give an account of the contents of the mind. All of the mind's processes - sensing, feeling, reasoning, etc. - have to be about something; some content of the thinking is required. Hume describes all of these mental contents - all of the contents of thinking or feeling - as 'perceptions'. It is important to stress that this is not what Hume means by 'perceptions' - for Hume a perception is an entity and not a process. When Hume talks about perception he is talking about a think in our minds, not how we see or acquire a thing in our minds.

Hume opens Section 2 of the Enquiries by making an important distinction:

'Everyone will readily allow, that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels pain of excessive hear, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and when he afterwards recalls to his memory this sensation, or anticipates it by his imagination.'

What this means is that there is a contrast here between what is in your mind when it happens first and when you remember when the thing happened. For example, you put your hand into a fire and what you remember when you put you hand in the fire are 2 completely different things or putting your hand in a fire is different to imagining putting your hand in a fire.

The same goes for 'the pleasure of moderate warmth'. Remembering the pleasure of laying on a beach in the Mediterranean, or imagining it just isn't the same as actually doing it. We can then make the following distinctions:

first we have perceptions arising from our senses

the memory of these perceptions is a copy of the original

the imagination can provide a weaker recreation of the original

Then conclude:

perceptions arising from the senses are much stronger and more vivid

remembering and imagining perceptions is a much weaker, less vivid experience

"The utmost we say of them, even when they operate with greatest vigour, is that they represent their object in so lively a manner, that we could almost say we feel or see. But, except the mind be disordered by disease or madness, they never can arrive at such a pitch of vivacity, as to render these perceptions altogether undistinguishable."

So we have more lively and vivacious 'perceptions', and less lively and vivacious 'perceptions'. The less lively and vivacious ones - those which result from the operation of the memory or the imagination - will just never be as lively and vivacious as the 'perceptions' of the senses. It might be that someone who is unbalanced mentally might be able to imagine things with great intensity - including pain. However, even if it is possible for someone who is in that condition to conjure up or hallucinate about experience this could result in an extreme emotional response, even then would the imagined perception be as strong as 'the real thing'?

"The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation"

It marks a clear division between perceptions of real things, and the operations of our imagination. Hume points out that this applies to every kind of perception. Another example that he gives is that of the difference between a man who is feeling anger, and a man who merely imagines being angry.

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Hume's Types of Knowledge

Hume drew knowledge into distinctions: ideas and impressions.

"So we can divide the mind's perceptions into two classes, on the basis of their different degrees of force and liveliness. The less forcible and lively are commonly called 'thoughts' or 'ideas'. The others have no name in our language or in most others, presumably because we don't need a general label for them except when we are doing philosophy. Let us, then, take the liberty of calling them 'impressions', using that word in a slightly unusual sense. By the term 'impression', then, I mean all our more lively perceptions when we hear or see or feel or love or hate or desire or will. These are to be distinguished from ideas, which are the fainter perceptions of which we are conscious when we reflect on 'look in-wards at' our 'impressions'."

Impressions:

experience

vivid and immediate 'perceptions'

come from senses

can be immediate feelings like anger, pain, jealousy, and guilt

strong

Ideas:

remembering/imagining an impression

less lively and immediate

they are formed from remembering or imagining the original impression

weak

Ideas tend to diminish and lose their force, faces, people, events that were once strong ideas in our minds gradually fade. Ideas then are things that might vary in clarity and strength

Wax Example

Hume used the term impression as he would likely have had his own personal stamp. He would heat a piece of sealing wax, pour on the paper, then stamp the molten wax. This would leave an impression in the wax. The stamp impresses itself in the wax, so that there is now something in the wax which resembles the stamp. Similarly, the world outside the mind impresses itself on the mind when I look at it, or listen to it, etc. So we take up impressions based on the operation of our senses, which in turn gives rise to ideas - memories - of what happened.

Outward and Inward Impressions

Outward Impressions

sensations caused by the senses interacting with the external world e.g. the sensation of heat on your skin when it is sunny or the taste of chocolate on your tongue

Inward Impressions

the immediate emotional responses to our experience

there is a difference between experiencing love in the moment and our recollections or memories of it e.g. anger or shock

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Simple and Complex Ideas

Hume recognises the seemingly limitless power of the human imagination:

"To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects. And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion."

The imagination is capable of great creativity, we only have to think about films we have seen, television programs or books we have read which have involved fantastic creations. There is just one limitation which Hume recognises here - one thing which the imagination can't do:

"What never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is anything beyond the powers of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction."

An 'absolute contradiction' arises where we have both a property and its complete opposite. For example, the following two statements are absolutely contradictory: the book is red, the book is not red. If we try to imagine an object that is both completely red and at the same time completely not red, we can't do it. Is this the only restriction on the operation of the imagination? Hume thinks not. If we consider how the imagination operates in creating ideas, we will, he suggests, find a very important further limitation on its operation. Hume identifies four things that the imagination does - four ways in which it can arrive at its ideas:

compounding - here the imagination takes two or more ideas from the memory and puts them together to create a new idea

transposing - to 'transpose' is to change the position of a thing. I can imagine the kinds of monsters which are in science fiction films - or classical literature - by transposing the parts of animals on to human beings

augmenting - to 'augment' is to increase. My imagination has no difficulty in arriving at an idea of a mouse which is the size of a tall building, for example

diminishing - is the opposite of augmenting, U can easily have the idea of a tiny elephant - or of an elephant with a barely audible 'trumpet'

With this we can create an impression of things that do not exist. Such as:

the golden mountain - we have an impression in our minds based upon the experience of seeing a mountain and we have the idea of the memory - what we can then do is put these two things together to create a golden mountain

the virtuous horse - I have an idea of a horse in my memory having before seen a horse. I have an idea of virtue in my mind having seen someone be virtuous - or for that matter being virtuous myself. This makes it possible to 'create' something in my imagination that I have never experienced - a virtuous horse

If Hume is right, then we have a complete account of the operation of the imagination. To see how this account points out an important limitation on the imagination, we need first to reflect on what exactly the imagination is doing. This argument really means that there are two different kinds of ideas. From this we can see that the imagination has limits. We need to have material to work with to imagine, our material only comes through our experience.

"The imagination is:... really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience."

Simple Ideas

these are the results of impressions creating memories - the memory is a copy of the original impression. These are (as we have seen them) less vivid and lively than the original and may fade away over time

Complex Ideas

these are made up of one or more simple ideas that have been worked upon - they have been compounded, transposed, augmented, or diminished by the imagination. Complex ideas are not simply copies of impressions as simple ideas are - and my bear little resemblance to any actual experience

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The Copy Principle

In the Treatise, Hume offers this 'general proposition', usually called the Copy Principle, as his "first principle... in the science of human nature." The Copy Principle is "all our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent." This means that all our ideas and concepts ultimately come from experiences. The mind is empty until experience imprints idea's onto it. This involves a rejection of innate ideas, which some rationalists support. The argument he uses to establish are:

there needs to be a one-to-one relationship between simple ideas and impressions

he can't prove this universally, but he is confident to challenge anyone to produce a simple impression without a corresponding idea or a simple idea without a simple impression

he concludes that there is a constant connection between simple impressions and ideas

the constant connection is universal and can't be left up to chance

simple impressions must always come first, then we can have simple ideas e.g. if you want to give a child an idea of the taste of pineapple, you give her a piece of pineapple to eat. When you do, you are giving her an impression of the pineapples taste. You never go the other way round. His other case involves a person born blind, who won't have ideas of colour because he won't when the relevant impression has been denied through malfunctioning senses or the absence of relevant experiences or absence due to species limitations have impressions of colour.

In conclusion, there are no ideas without impressions. According to Hume, all of our ideas come from experience. Every idea is either a simple idea - a copy of an earlier impression which is now in the memory - or it is a complex idea, in which case the imagination has created it, using as raw materials the simple ideas stored in the memory. In either case, every simple idea has its origin in experience.

Hume uses two arguments to support:

the Idea of God

when the relevant impression has been denied through malfunctioning senses or the absence of relevant experiences due to species limitations

1st Argument: An Inductive argument and the example of God

The idea of God, which is a complex idea, one may think of other simple ideas that they can combine to describe this idea. For instance, the idea of God is derived from ideas of all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing and those sub-ideas came from the simple ideas of love, power, and knowledge.

2nd Argument: When the relevant impression has been denied

Example 1: malfunctioning senses - if a man can't have some kind of sensation because there is something wrong with his eyes, ears, etc., he will never be found to have corresponding ideas. A blind man can't form an idea of colours, or a deaf man an idea of sounds.

Example 2: absence of relevant experience whether outward or inward the same is true for someone who has never experienced an object that will give a certain kind of sensation: 'a Laplander or African American has no notion of the taste of win because he has never had the sensation of tasting wine... A gentle person can't form any idea of determined revenge or cruelty; nor can a selfish one easily conceive the heights of friendships and generosity.' A less racist example of this is that a person who has never had the sensation of drinking Irn-Bru cannot have an idea of what it tastes like, except comparing it to another thing, which will never be accurate or that a selfish person cannot experience genuine friendship or generosity.

Example 3: absence due to species limitations, non-human beings may have many senses of which we cannot imagine, because the ideas of them have never been introduced to us in the only way in which an idea can get into the mind, namely through actual feeling and sensation. For example, bees can sense the magnetic field of the earth and seahorses can see a larger colour spectrum than humans can.

P1 - We have perceptions, which are either impressions or ideas

P2 - Perceptions from impressions are stronger and more vivid than perceptions from ideas

P3 - There is nothing in an idea that does not derive from an impression

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C - Ideas are dependant on impressions

Like any good scientists, Hume then tries to test his theory to show that his theory can stand the empirical method. This is when Hume created the 'Missing Shade of Blue'.

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Missing Shade of Blue

The existence of the idea of a missing shade of blue contradicts Hume's Copy Principle, that simple ideas all derive from antecedent simple impressions. Hume dismisses this 'exception' as unimportant. Why then does he mention it, and, what point is he trying to make?

"Suppose... a person... perfectly well acquianted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue... which it has never been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac'd before him, descending, gradually from the deepest to the lightest... he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other... I ask whether 'tis possible for him... to... raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho' it had never been convey'd to him by his senses?"

It can be put into the following premises:

argues that each shade results from a distinct impression just as different colours result from different impressions

imagines someone who has seen every shade except one

all the shades seen by the man are arranged in order from darkest to lightest

questions whether such a man could imagine the missing shade

Hume claims that such a man can imagine the missing shade. Hume claims that the example is 'singular'

He then makes 2 claims. The first claim is that it is obvious that he will notice a blank in the place where the missing shade should go. In the original Hume doesn't mention specific colours. He says, "If this should be denied, it is possible, by the continual gradation of shades, to run a colour insensibly into what is most remote from it; and if you will not allow any of the means to be different, you cannot, without absurdity, deny the extremes to be the same." The second claim was can he fill the blank from his own imagination, calling up in his mind the idea of that particular shade, even though it has never been conveyed to him by his senses? Most people would agree that could. The conclusion is that this seems to show that simple ideas are not always, in every instance, derived from corresponding impressions. Hume then ends the counter example by explaining that it falls to undermine the general claim. Still, the example is so singular that it is hardly worth noticing, and on its own it isn't good enough reason for us to alter our general maxim.

Problems with the Missing Shade of Blue

It is problematic because it goes against the principle of empiricism, that to know something you need to experience it first.

The first problem is that by mentioning this Hume might have disproved his entire theory of ideas, which must have a basis in impressions we have experienced. He states that it is a singular example. We could say that we could do the same for a missing pitch is a scale, or in the sweetness or sourness of food, anything we tend to put on a scale, we can imagine something we haven't experienced.

The second problem is the Hume doesn't believe in innate ideas but this example would seem to suggest the existence of innate ideas. Hume's theory claims that all ideas are based on prior impressions. The example should be impossible if his theory is true but the fact we can have an idea of something without knowing opens the door to innate ideas.

The third problem is that the example arguably opens the door to rationalism. What is most problematic is that Hume could have countered the problem of the missing shade of blue very easily using complex ideas and the argument of empiricism would still have strengths against rationalism.

The first counter argument is Hume could have said that this shade is a complex idea compounded from two others but however doesn't. Hume is genuinely trying to come up with a science of man and is exploring the only objection he can think of to his theory. A good scientist will offer counter arguments and alternatives to prove the strength of their theory. Hume is just being a good scientist.

The second counter argument is that Hume was aiming for a big and comprehensive picture with his theory of knowledge. Given the relatively insignificant role that this kind of example plays in our acquisition of knowledge (even if it is extended), Hume was right to say that it does not undermine his theory. Hume should have accepted that any counter example to an 'all' claim disproves the claim.

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Hume's Fork

In the next section of the Enquiry, Hume turns his attention to how we come to have knowledge, and again his account is going to be an empiricist one. He tries to distinguish Matters of Fact from Ideas (to essentially establish what is true and what is false). To have knowledge is to have justified true belief. Hume has his own terminology for the distinction between a priori (he refers to as Relations of Ideas - we can know these through intuition/demonstration) and a posteriori (he refers to as Matters of Fact).

Relations of Ideas

Relations of Ideas are, like matters of fact, statements. Every statement asserts a relationship between two or more ideas. If we limit ourselves to statements with only two ideas, then we can see how this works:

A. the cat sat on the mat - asserts a relationship between the cat and the mat

B. all triangles are three sided figures - asserts a relationship between triangularity and three sidedness

These will always be types of knowledge which are self-evidently true. This means the claim justifies itself. We can just think about it to know it's true:

anything that has shape has size

either it is a Wednesday or it isn't

nothing can be bigger than itself

an object can't be bigger than the sum of all its parts

However, while these will always be 'intuitively certain' (an axiom). Not all are; some Relations of Ideas are 'demonstratively certain' (theorem).

Matters of Fact

As Hume points out, Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic deal in knowledge which, if not intuitively certain, is demonstratively certain. It is a statement, the truth of which can only be established a posteriori. Some claim it is demonstratively certain when it is one which can be worked our using reasoning e.g. Pythagoras' theorem. Necessary truths are propositions that could not possibly be false and is true is every possible world. An example of a truth that many philosophers take to be necessary in this sense is: 2 + 2 = 4.

The distinction between Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact is usually referred to as Hume's fork. As we have just seen, relations of ideas 'are discoverable by the mere operation of thought.' As Hume points out, when we come to consider matters of fact, they are 'not ascertained in the same manner.' If any statement was neither of the two on the fork then it should be classed as metaphysical nonsense and not knowledge. Anything which falls into this category should be 'cast unto the flames'.