Stuff that David Hume Didn't Prove

Hume never disproved cause and effect - he showed that predictions made by induction were not certain - he showed that we can’t generalise cause and effect.

Hume didn’t show that there was no logical connection between cause and effect - he showed that it was merely a logical connection, and not a real one.

He didn’t tell us we could not trust our senses, he showed that we must trust them, for trust is all we have.

He didn’t disavow the events we think we see, he showed us that there is only one event, and that when we seperate it into descrete events, we are analysing. So all we have is an analytical truth, not an empirical one.

Hume didn’t show that the present vanishes as we experience it, he showed that cause and effect were matters of history, and not windows to the future.

Hume demonstrated not that morality is impossible, but that it is a device for living in an uncertain world.

Note: things Nietzsche did - he gave Hume what Hume could not give himself - a way forward.

He showed that a noun represents a greater degree of abstraction than a verb does - the world is in motion, it is only an event, it is the “philosopher” who seeks to petrify it into objects. Had Hume thought with verbs instead of nouns, he would be closer to Nietzsche. But it took Nietzsche to do this - Hume was already so far ahead of his time, we could ask no more of him.

Rare form faust,

still mauling over your ‘certainty’ post. You certainly fortified it with some strong duck tape qualifiers…but, still looking. And now we have this… A fun read.

Unless Hume was demonstrating his argument from a third person perspective, which would be inline with the nature of his discourse, then it becomes words used as transitive verbage.

Hume did not anywhere show “truths”, as that would require ascertaining absolutes, which would have been contradictory to the initial premise.

This doesn’t even qualify as sensible. To Hume there is the event, the observer and the cognition displayed as analysis from an inductive, (falsifiable), premise. Cause and effect are not connected in any manner to Hume, except by induction of an interceding agent.

Nietschze was a genetic aberrant, physiologically doomed to the abyss.

Mastriani - I will respond the part of your post that I understand.

F -About Nietzsche you have said nothing. That one was easy.

M - “Unless Hume was demonstrating his argument from a third person perspective, which would be inline with the nature of his discourse, then it becomes words used as transitive verbage.”

F -Sorry, I have no idea what that means.

M - “Hume did not anywhere show ‘truths’, as that would require ascertaining absolutes, which would have been contradictory to the initial premise.”

F - You won’t catch me talking about absolutes, either. Couldn’t agree more.

F -“Hume didn’t show that there was no logical connection between cause and effect - he showed that it was merely a logical connection, and not a real one.”

M - “This doesn’t even qualify as sensible. To Hume there is the event, the observer and the cognition displayed as analysis from an inductive, (falsifiable), premise. Cause and effect are not connected in any manner to Hume, except by induction of an interceding agent.”

F - Yes - we are the interceding agent. Logic is our invention. We intercede with an analysis, which we employ logic for. Still on the same page, I think.

You are correct sir, easy. There is nothing of value to state, coming from a genetic aberrant.

Event, observer, cognition. Three instances, or person’s, thus the possibility of transitive case verb usage. Not necessarily was Hume using nouns, dependent upon his position of usage.

Truth is an absolute. Using the word “truth”, irrespective of manner, elicits definition of an absolute.

Entirely in disagreement with Hume’s proposition. As we create the induction, and introduce the agent, falsifiably, we do not change the event. We are not an intercedent, we are an obfucator from historical perspective. This is clearly Hume’s point. The observer does not change the nature of the event, (present tense activity) nor do any aphorisms with regards to the event. The event remains unchanged, and only the observer’s perception is affected, (post tense translationary activity).

Mast - you are confusing truth with Truth. Logic assumes truth values, not Absolute Truth. This is a perfectly legitimate and commonly-understood usage.

Please don’t take me too literally when I talk about nouns and verbs. I was waxing a bit poetic there. I meant it metaphorically. Hume talked a lot about objects and about a mechanism for C & E. He was talking within his zeitgeist, for which I do not fault him. He was speaking to generations to come, I readily concede.

We do not change the event, except that we name it. We abstract a meaning, which is to say we perform an abstraction. This is a post-Humean analysis. But then again, I am a post-Humean.

I am not trying to state what Hume would say he did, but what really happened.

agreed.

-Imp

Imp - what a surprise to find you here!

Again, I am not attempting to rehash what Hume actually claimed, but what he was successful in claiming. And what he was not, ultimately.

Cause and effect is not only derived from scientific reasoning, scientific reasoning depends upon it. Hume delivers, in all instances, a deductive argument. Bang! Done! The scientific method does not take the guesswork out of understanding observations, it directs it. This must be seen through Russellian eyes, if I may.

Cause and effect is a form of implication. That’s all it is. Hume showed that implication is always, invariably, contingent - he just said it another way. He actually sought to show that implication is susceptible to infinite regress. Thus it can never be true, but it can be valid. But that does not mean that it does not exist - it means that it has no basis in truth. But truth is not the basis of implication - in Hume’s time, that was a novel idea. I am not attempting to redress the epistemic ramifications of Hume - surely, Imp, you know that by now.

Hume established that the connection between logic and truth (logic and the real world) is born of habit. This should not surprise, as this was his implicit goal (it’s just not explicit in the Treatise). But Hume did even more - he showed that induction is not logic at all. He actually did more than you give him credit for.

Trust is for everybody. Trust in Truth is for metaphysicians.

Analytical truths do not tell us about the world - I am not in disagreement on this. Thusly, Hume did not battle effectively against logic - he talked around it. Remember the historical milieu. But we do not have to fear what Hume had to fear. Nietzsche took the heat for that, ultimately.

I realise that it does not seem it, but I do not disagree with you as far as Hume’s effect on epistemology, which was his focus. This is a rephrasing of Hume in language that I believe, if examined closely, is a more coherent and useful rendition of Hume in light of Nietzsche.

I remain unconvinced that it should be modified - Hume saw the psychological falsity of induction, logic, and cause and effect. Nietzsche saw the psychological truth of it. And gave Hume traction.

Logic is not real, and can therefore not be falsified.

ps. Imp, I did not pick the title for this thread to ensure that you would read it. Honest.

Data

Bolded words represent the common idea of the idea.

Portent

It will take several hundred years before it is realized that ideas such as Hume’s plunged the world into tool oriented dark age.

SubPortent

It may never be discovered.

Harbinger - you are half-right. We see knowledge as a tool, now, and Hume gets a lot of the credit. LIkewise, logic is now a tool, and not a Golden Shaft of Enlightenment. Again, Hume looms large. But darkness is preferable to being blinded by Heavenly Light.

In short - some of us already realise this - and so realise our debt to Hume.

sandy, by the way - there is a direct connection between this post and the “certainty” one. Imp - maybe seeing that connection will help you to see that I do not mean to undo Hume, but to redo him.

Data

1. half-right: Incorrect reading of the Portent; it is totally correct.

2. tool: Incorrect use of the word tool in the Portent by faust.

The word was meant to mean mechanism. Since Hume, the world has placed more importance on the size and shape of a phone than obvious cause/effect in social and human behavior.

Portent

See previous portent.

Harby - now you’re all-the-way wrong. The size and shape of a phone affects social behavior vis a vis phones. You may have missed this, but Nokia and Verizon have not.

Data

1. Harby: Attempt to reduce Portent via child-like speech.

2. Nokia and Verizon have not: comic misdirection.

Portent

An aspect of a dark age is the lack of knowledge that one is in, and confidence, that one is not in a dark age.

I read all the threads on this board… I respond to the ones that I find interesting…

-Imp

Oh yeah, I forgot you read all of them.

I am not going to try to outquote you. I’ve already had to stamp out the joint.

Either Hume is, or you are, merely incorrect here. You cannot claim both that C & E is incorrect reasoning and that it is not reasoning at all. What we call deductive reasoning is implication. Which is the same as cause and effect. They are the same thing - cause and effect is another name for implication. Hume takes cause and effect to be two different things - it is not. It is an operation, a relation. A logical one, even if it has no basis in actual fact. It is a truth-function, even if it is not truth.

Russell - “the traditional view was that, among true propositions, some were necessary…In fact, however, there was never any clear account of what was added to truth by the conception of necessity”.

That’s the prize that Hume was after.

Hume claimed it was habit because implication opened the doors to metaphysics, even to (gasp) God. But you are correct - my argument revolves around implication.

You are correct that logic can be rendered as true, and now I understand that point better. That was Hume’s mission - to ensure that nothing that logic produces could be rendered as true.

If A then B. That’s a simple implication. Hume uses implications just like this in his argument. But this is never true unless the particulars are true - this is just the form of an argument. It is not an argument for anything. When an implication is generalised, it has predictive power. Or the genralisation is useless. Hume shows that the generalisation is useless, but not that the form is.

Induction is useless, strictly speaking, for predictions because there is no connection between the premises and the “conclusion”. No connection at all. In deductive reasoning, there is this connection - the form holds, logic withstands Hume. Hume uses deductive reasoning to make his case. It’s necessary connection with the world does not withstand Hume. This was monumental, and could not be done without deductive reasoning - by Hume, anyway.

This is pretty much out of Tarski, who writes about logic as scientific method - logic for scientists. I don’t have it on hand, but he states that equivalence, which is the goal of any deductive argument (a tautology resultant of the argument) is called a relation of consequence. “If and only if” - each tern is a necessary and sufficient condition of the other. This is cause and effect in the strong sense that Hume uses - not in any subsequent rendition by Hume’s apologists or detractors. The one billiard ball is necessary and sufficient to move the other. But every tautology can be stated as an implication.

And every term must be previously accepted as a fact - and only accepted. Logic no longer speaks of necessary truths. Only rationalists and the religious do.

Hume was sure that there was such a thing as psychological causality - what causes us to believe in C & E? Even if we are wrong, he says that habit, repeated impression causes this mistake. Psychological causality - in error, yes. Nietzsche simply was not troubled by this.

If Hume proved that C & E was a myth, then Nietzsche set about to write myths.

Which is clearly what he did.

Imp - let me put this another way. Induction can be seen as reckoning probablities. But probabilities can only be reckoned in a closed system - within a set we already know all the members of. We cannot figure probabilities if we don’t know all the possibilites. Hume shows that, with billiard balls, we cannot know all the possibilities - all of the billiard games have not been played yet. Induction is useless for these kinds of predictions. It will help us narrow the range of possibilites - that’s what “probabilites” means. But that’s all it can do. It is not logic, it is not strictly mathematics, it is more like, well, gambling. He who tries to reduce gambling to mathematics loses big.

Induction can masquerade as a priori knowledge - if it worked. It is only a paper moon, as it turns out.

Deductive reasoning always looks backwards, however - the premises are already accepted as true - in induction, we don’t even know all the premises. Deductive reasoning can explain the past - can put the present in terms of the past. But Hume cannot show that the seven ball did not cause the eight ball to move - only that we cannot rely on that relation to recur. The eight ball did move - Hume’s task was to show that we cannot infer that it will happen again.

This does not mean that he has abondoned his empiricist past - he cannot claim full scepticism, radical scepticism, but only epistemic scepticism. Put another way, he demolishes constant (necessary) conjunction, but not all conjunction. Each conjuction must be taken at a time, and as part of an open-ended set. We can see conjunctions - Hume relies on this. We cannot see an ontology to conjunction. It is ontology that Hume is after.

No two events are the same event. No cause is the same as another cause. There is, after all, just one event. We break this up into little events, but wish to retain a regulating factor - a mitigating factor - constancy amid change. This could only be God, and Hume knew it.

Again - why faust is a good advert for not taking drugs - You ask him for a thread on the connections between Nietzsche and Russell (I, for one, struggle to imagine two more opposed philosophers in term of aims, techniques, arguments and politics/ethics) and what does he give you? A thread on the connections between Hume and Nietzsche, with a Russellian tone. Bloody infuriating, these hippy geniuses…

we agree on that part to be sure…

only be god? no, the regulating factor for hume, nietzsche, and for that matter protagoras, was man himself.

-Imp

Imp - you are correct - my only point is that Hume destroys induction. To say that deductive reasoning only looks backwards is not to discredit deductive reasoning, but to describe its use. That is my point - the form holds. There is a connection in past events - Hume will tell you that he had made such observations repeatedly. He cannot disavow the connection, he depends upon it. Conjunction is a logical term, a logical operation. Look it up. He has nothing to say without it. Deductive reasoning describes the past connection. You are thinking in Hume’s terms, which is not required to understand him, if he is still relevant.

Hume thought of explanations differently than we do today, or than we need to. He fought against the notion that they were ultimately explanatory. He fought against the motive for the scientific method. Which was to show that we live in an orderly Universe.

Nietzsche is wholly descriptive in his arguments. Wholly post-Humean in that way. Deduction is not an explanation, it is a description. Hume destroyed motive, but not logic. Nietzsche re-instated motive as the psychological fact that it is.

Tarski is not playing with definitions at all. This is simple mathematics. Every logician, every mathematician, will see this. Hume did not discredit mathematics. He did not know that deductive logic and mathematics was the same. We do.

And you are wrong about scientists. They will tell you that is if x happens, y will probably happen. You know this. Hume lived in a different world - one of more scientific certainty. We understand science better now, and so should understand Hume better.

Conjunctions of past events are not worthless to analytical reasoning - this is where you err - analytical reasoning is only concerned with definitions, only concerned with conjunctions that have already happened.

Man is the regulating factor, yes. It was man who invented God.

saitd - you just arent’ seeing it - this is the running start that I need - Hume to Nietzsche - but now I am bringing in the logicians. Russell and Tarski. Part and parcel. This might be the very thread. We’ll see if I need to bring in the big guns. So far, I don’t think so. But stay tuned…