The Scottish philosopher, born in 1711 in the capital Edinburgh, played a major role in the development of empiric philosophy. The empiricists put sensory perception first, and David Hume elaborated on Isaac Newton, who also belongs to the empiricists. Hume is also very skeptical about science and the methods they use and makes findings that scientists and philosophers cannot refute to this day.
Empiricism vs speculation
David Hume is (after Isaac Newton) a fervent supporter of sensory perception, empiricism. Empiricists believe that you can only make well-founded and objective scientific statements, provided they have been tested through sensory perception (empiricism). Everything else is pure speculation. Speculation should not be rejected in the first place, but at the very least it should not be accepted as ‘true’.
Rejections
Flowing from empiricism, Hume rejects a number of things, including God. Although he did not completely rule out God and therefore belongs to the agnostics (those who believe that science must prove whether God exists, but do not rule out God until then), he believed that no one can know whether God exists. After all, we have never been able to perceive God with our senses. Hume also says that the claim that God is perfected, and approaching perfection, is only speculative. After all, the world is proof that God exists, but at the same time the world as we know it contains not only love but also hatred, disasters and any other imperfections. The self, the objective existence of logical necessity, causality and validity of inductive knowledge itself are also wholly or partially rejected by Hume.
An ambiguous goal
Hume’s philosophy seems ambiguous. On the one hand, his ambiguous philosophy is destructive, and on the other hand, it is constructive.
- Destructive – ridding science of all falsehoods based on intuition rather than empiricism.
- Constructive – creating new science. The human nature.
Methodical doubting
Hume’s masterpiece, ‘Treatise on Human Nature’, is based on Isaac Newton’s description of the physical world through the laws of mechanics. He wanted to do something similar. A study of the psychology of experience in the hope of finding general principles. Hume failed in this because his taxonomy (ordering and ranking of available knowledge) of ‘impressions and ideas’ is derived from the much criticized Cartesian model. The Cartesian model is also called methodical doubt, the systematic doubting of all findings. Hume is a testament to the power that logical criticism can exert. Modern philosophers still struggle with this.
According to Hume, we never experience our own self, but we are the continuous chain of experiences. The self is therefore an illusion, we are a series of perceptual experiences. ”I am nothing but a package of perceptions”. Hume says in this vein that the force that forces one event to follow another, causality, is also never experienced in sense impressions. The experience is a chain of consecutive events. The assumption that the previous event (cause) leads to a certain consequence is based on human expectation, projected onto reality. According to Hume, there is no justification for this.
Building skepticism
Hume is even more skeptical. This is evident in his criticism of inductive reasoning (the process by which we make generalizations after observing a number of similar cases). An example from contemporary reality; if you only knew immigrants who exhibit criminal behavior, you could reason inductively and say ”all immigrants are criminal” . Or the example Hume himself gives. If you only see white swans passing by, and no black ones, you can come to the conclusion that ‘all swans are white’ . This seems fair, but these conclusions go beyond the knowledge of empirics and are therefore not logically justified. After all, we know that not all immigrants are criminals, and that black swans have been found in Australia. Regularity is not logical, even if people reason that way.
A struggle for science
To this day, scientists still try to fight through inductive reasoning. After all, all scientific laws consist of generalizations that arise from man’s inductive reasoning. This still preoccupies modern philosophers of science. Karl Popper comes closest to justifying induction.