My reading of Hume is that, although we might be confident in
practice that a particular (causal) relationship exists, there is no
logical reason to assume that, because the universe has been
governed by consistent relationships in the past, it will continue
to do so in the future. Unfortunately, my knowledge of Hume and his
times is limited - I have just looked him up in Wikipedia "a strong
empiricist, he argued against the
existence of innate ideas,
concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they
directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and
lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas," which
are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental
behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for
example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction"
of causes and effects."
I think this implies (please correct me) that our ontologies are the
consequence of our experience, and that this may be part of the
arguments of the time about whether the real is defined by ideas,
and the world illustrates the real, or whether the real is defined
by the world and ideas follow from our observation of the world. It
was about the same time that Berkeley asked whether, if a tree fell
in a forest and no-one heard it, would it still make a sound?
I tend rather to the view that our ontologies are the result of a
dialect between our current ontology (somewhat culturally derived)
and our experience (given the qualification that our experience is
couched in terms of our ontology). On the assumption that there is
an underlying physical reality (an objective set of causal
relations) then - in a sort of Newton-Raphson convergence -
eventually we should get an ontology from which we can infer the
results of future experience. However, this is a distinction of
methodology, and makes no difference to Hume's point. Once you
assume (reasonably) that there are underlying causal relationships,
the problem is then how to reliably uncover them.
Sean Barker, Bristol
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