Hume Was Wrong

ok, this was a post i made in a different thread, but i felt that the topic justifies its own discussion. Hume’s criticism of causality is famous, perhaps one of the most well-known arguments in philosophy. further, i believe that he was completely wrong in his assessment of causality, but not because what he SAID was wrong, necessarily-- its because what he said was NOT a statement about causality itself… i will just quote my original passage here, for simplicity sake, and leave it at that.

any Hume experts or people who are partial to his ideas, please feel free to comment on my critique of his criticism here. this just came to me while thinking about his argument, and it seems pretty obvious to me now, after realising it:

hume did not get it right.

there is a difference between rejecting that “the sun will rise tomorrow” BECAUSE it has always risen (Hume’s view), and knowing that if the sun DOES NOT rise tomorrow, that it did not do so for a reason, which, speaking of the reason itself, is of the same nature as the reasons why the sun has so risen thus far (i.e. physical causality).

there are reasons to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. there are also reason why the sun has always risen. there are also reasons why the sun might NOT rise tomorrow, and if this is the case, then these reasons become THE REASONS governing the motion of the sun… regardless, there are still reasons in each case: Hume makes no argument against the possibility of the universality of reasons– he merely says “this one reason (past occurence) is not a good enough reason in itself”; and in that he is right, but it is a far cry from a disproof of all causality!

just because we understand that “the ONLY reason to believe a future event X will occur is because X has occurred in the past” is wrong, does not mean that causality itself is disproven.

these are two completely different things.

i would also add here, as an addition to my original post, that in addressing Hume’s further argument that you can always divide the cause-effect relationship into lesser and further causes and effects, and therefore causality is meaningless, is also incorrect. the idea that physical reality or time are infinitely divisible was an idea popular in the past, when Hume lived, because they lacked the modern technology that we now have to understand what the limits of time and space are. BUT, we now know that there ARE LIMITS (see Planck). so, the argument against cause-effect relations that Hume makes (i.e. that they are always further divisible and therefore unquantifiable) is also wrong.

well… feel free to comment on these, all you Hume experts out there, thanks.

I will leave full analysis to IMP because frankly he is the man in regards to Hume’s philosophy.
I am just a lowly amateur in this area compared to IMP.

I suspect your error is this idea of the sun rising tomorrow is this, he says we take it upon
HABIT to think the sun will rise tomorrow, it has nothing to do with cause and effect, it has
to do with our thinking that the sun will come up because that is what we are used to, we have
a habit of thinking the sun will come up tomorrow. Now it may come up or may not, but we have
no way of knowing if it will or not. force of habit suggest that it will come up, but it is only habit
in thinking that it will come up. that I believe is Hume’s argument. Cause and effect is more about
our thinking that it must or must not come than about actual cause and effect. We mistake cause
and effect with force of habit. Now IMP may correct me and believe me, I bow down to anything
he says about hume.

Kropotkin

All arguments are circular, and thus end in meaninglessnesslessness. Therefore 3xG is incorrect.

Sarcasm aside though, 3xG is correct.

Good evening Three Times:
I agree with Peter and you might find Imp quite formidable. Personally I agree, if for different reasons, that Hume got many things wrong, but consider my reply as the Devil’s Advocate.

— there is a difference between rejecting that “the sun will rise tomorrow” BECAUSE it has always risen (Hume’s view), and knowing that if the sun DOES NOT rise tomorrow, that it did not do so for a reason, which, speaking of the reason itself, is of the same nature as the reasons why the sun has so risen thus far (i.e. physical causality).
O- Hume’s point is that we do not experience, hence the scandal of empiricism, physical causality. We experience one event and then a second event following that, but we do not experience the necessity for one to follow the other, or that the first is actually the cause of the second.
Hume did not deny that we allocate causes to events, but that these causes were not directly experienced but constructed, conjoined by our minds and secondly that reason could not pin-point an inevitable outcome from an event as long as the opposite did not involve a contradiction. The sun, therefore, could rise or not tomorrow; we don’t have any certainty that it will. And then if we ask why will it rise or not, we may speak of reasons of how it may rise or not but where do we obtain these reasons when there is no reason for certainty? Reasons are obtained after the fact, according to empiricism, relying of deduction and animal faith to reach the conclusions that there are reasons for the sun rising or not. In the end the central issue I see in Hume is the nature of causality. His work was anthropological, a study of man and how he comes to hold X or Y belief, and in the case of causality his veredict is that what we have is psychological causality rather than physical causality.

but we DO actually experience the necessity of causality, every day. science shows us HOW and WHY one event MUST follow another event… we see the physical material MECHANISMS which generate deterministic natural laws all the time, because we can understand WHY these laws act upon physical entities as they do.

the rejection of causality as mere “observance of a pattern” was perhaps justified in the past, but today, with the advent of modern science and technology, to make such an argument is absurd. we see every day that one event WILL lead to another; just imagine all the causal chains that allow my pressing a key on my keyboard to create letters on the monitor; its amazing. and not only do we have this overwhelming empirical evidence, but we CREATED computers BECAUSE we understand causality; we understand that if we put a circuit here, a transistor here, a power supply here, etc etc etc etc etc, then the key WILL, it MUST, create letters on the monitor when pressed. this “must” is deterministic because of our scientific understanding of the natural laws, which entail across all situations universally (where they are applicable at all).

for example, we KNOW that if i drop something, it will fall. this is not a “co-incidence” that we merely derive from observing the past: it is the knowledge of gravity, how gravity works between objects, what its force is in mathematical terms, and how kinetic force operated, that grants us this certainty.

its true that hume did not “directly experience” the inherent causality of events, because he lived in a time without advanced science and technology-- cultural situations are very important to keep in mind. we, however, have the benefit of living in a time of scientific and physical understanding of reality, to a degree where we can KNOW how and why events MUST occur as they do. causality is not just a co-incidence or a “chance” affair that may have been otherwise-- causality it a truism. and, even if an event failed to follow another event as we thought causality would have dictated, we know that this failure happened FOR A REASON, and usually, we can determine what that reason was.

I’ve always found the Hume argument against cause and effect a bit otherwordly, now it seems even weirder -
it seems like he suggests that, in terms of cause and effect, one sunrise is caused by another one having been observed the previous day.

I hope I have misunderstood him.

well, the point which has been raised, that hume was mainly making a psychological observation, is relevant here also. it is true that sometimes (not all of the time, however, and that is important!) we assume causality where there is only co-incidence or repetition (attribution errors and corrolation-causality errors are two examples of this); hume, however, takes this psychological fact that man operates by heuristics of utility, and translates it into an attack upon physical causality itself, or rather into an attack on the IDEA of causality if not necessarily causality itself.

it is meaningful to look at causality and say “sometimes, i think that this event caused that event, only because i observe a temporal similarity or co-incidence between them”, and that this does not necessarily mean that there IS a causal link between the two events, but this PSYCHOLOGICAL understanding of human perception and reasoning cannot be extended to apply to EVERY and ALL instances of recognition of causal links. for instance, science operates by very exactly and intricately examining and understanding the nuances of causal links between events: science is the quest for the LAWS, the RELATIONS OF PROCESS between events, i.e. the causality itself which links them. this is of a very different type of observance than ancient man seeing the sun rise every day and concluding that it MUST rise.

the scientist has valid and justified reason, provability, for his causal statement; the ancient man does not. this is the fundamental difference. hume saw the world as the ancient man, and concluded that there was no scientific point of view… but there is. the fact that we can accurately and very deepy delve into causal links, natural laws, and reproduce them successfully enough to accomplish incredible feats on a daily basis (the internet itself is one such amazing feat of causal reproduction), is evidence enough for the efficacy and justification in belief that causality entails: that an event which causes another event, which is linked to it via a process of natural force interactions (electromagnetism, gravity, nuclear forces, quantum-level forces) MUST HAVE caused this secondary event, by virtue of the universality of these natural forces themselves.

science has explained causality in terms of forces. the 4 basic forces of our universe, along with quantum-level forces (partially within and partially exterior to the strong and weak nuclear forces) generate causality in the sense that events operating via these processes produce other events out of a necessity of interaction. the forces within event 1 interact with the forces of event 2, via an additional meta- or extra-force relationship between the local forces, and this produces DETERMINISTIC MOVEMENT— that IS causality.

as i said, hume may be forgiven for his flaw, due to his historical situation, but we cannot be so forgiven for choosing to ignore the demonstrable nature of causality as natural force-interactions of necessity (i.e. of “could not have done otherwise”).

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=161795

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=146591

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=141712

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=150275

viewtopic.php?t=142468

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=155426

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=150459

just a few of the better threads about hume/causality/free will

-Imp

thanks for the list, but if youd care to summarize…

science does not predict the future any better than ms cleo…

the claim that the future must be like the past because of the past begs the question…

because of all these previous “scientific” experiments, we can conclude that previously this occurred- not that this will or must occur in the future as that begs the question…

-Imp

i think all of modern scientific progress, which is predicated on KNOWING that “when i do action X in context Y, effect Z will occur”, would beg to differ.

if science were no better than ms cleo, a computer could not be invented, because the innumerable processes of production and innovation, which are predicated upon SUCCESSFULLY predicting future events, could never happen.

of course; if you read my OP or subsequent commentary, you would see that i agree with this statement.

hume, however, fails to explain why this is the only mechanism generating human understanding of causality… hume falsely extrapolates his claim to a universal status encompassing all possible understandings of the nature of causal interaction, which is mistaken, because his statement is no such thing.

it does not beg the question to say “the law of electromagnetism indicates that a proton and an electron, under these specific conditions, WILL combine to form a hydrogen atom”.

what hume failed to see was that, while it is true that past occurence is not a definitive way to infer causality, there are OTHER MEANS BY WHICH CAUSALITY CAN BE INFERRED, and explained, i.e. the natural laws of physics, which derive their causal nature via mathematical certainty of non-contradiction.

when you sum 2x + 2x you get 4x, no matter what x is, and ONLY when x = x across both sides of the equation. this is an example of causality, which is not based on past occurence. it is an impossibility to imagine that 2x + 2x could be anything other than 4x.

mathematical proofs, indeed they are PROOFS, are what the physical laws of nature derive from (or rather, our understanding of such); and the physical laws of nature are what causality derive from. so, clearly, causality can be derived from by more means than just “that happened yesterday, so it must happen again today too!”

hume assumed necessity where it was not-- he assumed his idea of a limitation on causality was the only possible understanding of causality, and therefore a limit on ALL understandings of causality. that was his mistake.

read the links…

-Imp

Let me get this straight. Hume’s line of reasoning as I now understand it:

-We see the sun rise today.
-We induce from this that it will rise again tomorrow.
-This induction is false,
-Therefore, belief in cause and effect is unfounded.

Did he really think this?

What Hume was arguing against was the necessity of causation. He was arguing against Causation.

If Causation obtains everywhere and for all time, then there must be (or have been) something like God.

not exactly…

we habitually believe from the previous conjunction of events a thought that it will rise again tomorrow when there is no evidence for the future event…

this induction begs the question and is false…

and yes, he believed (proved) the belief in cause and effect is unfounded but he continued to live as if it were founded (as everyone does)…

-Imp

And this is a central point of Hume - the fallacy of induction. My post speaks to his motive (which many people don’t care about). Imp’s speaks to his results.

To say that Hume disproves causation is correct, for he vanquished the proof.

The beauty of Hume’s argument is that it is essentially a reductio ad absurdum argument. If we look at the cause of a ball bouncing, we can calculate that the ball will bounce based on known properties of the ball. We can analyze those properties in ever increasing specificity, going down to the properties of the materials, and then the properties of the molecules that make up the materials, and the properties of the atoms that make up the molecules, and the subatomic particles that make up the atoms…etc etc etc…

The point that Hume is making, in a more modern statement of his essential argument, is that at the lowest level of our predictive ability, we still have to accept that things react in a certain way “Just because”. We really can’t justify this assertion, and if we could based on factors affecting whatever it is we’re examining, then we just push the problem back one step further.

The lowest levels of our reasoning about cause and effect are still based on induction.

Furthermore, justification for believing higher levels of organization will react a certain way is based on the belief that the smallest parts are going to act as predicted, which makes justification for beliefs about higher levels of organization inferences from premises that are not necessarily true.

The main argument against Hume’s ideas seems to be that the behavior of the lowest levels of particles is remarkably consistent, and that that has allowed us to use our predictive abilities to make use of properties of forces and materials that simply wouldn’t work without consistency, but this argument does not invalidate Hume’s point. He never said that things weren’t remarkably consistent, just that we can’t really claim to know why, and therefor must based everything off of induction, which is inherently imprecise.

sigh… and we were having such a rational discussion, too…

DR - Armitage wrote:

Now, think of this in terms of Descartes. The way he claimed how we can know.

Hume’s is an argument against certainty.

Exactly. At the lowest levels of our knowledge, there are still things we must simply take on faith without being certain why they work, and if we are uncertain as to the principles behind their functioning, we cannot logically claim that they will always function like that, no matter how many times we see them do it. We can never be 100% certain of any outcome.