Many people are inherently smart enough to realize that there is almost no point or purpose in having one’s own individual language (the exception being when one is designing something unique). The purpose of a language is to communicate and thus one must read the language of the other person and speak in the other person’s language. That is often done poorly and at times, in a more decadent over-ripe societies, individuals attempt to insist on using their own invented language so as to force others into their own mindset. That is not to say that every insistence is merely an ego battle, but such situations arise far more often in over-ripe societies wherein the youth no longer find significant soul or purpose.
What becomes common, community, or national languages is the end result of negotiations between those attempting to use language properly for communication and those attempting to force their own mindsets onto others using language as a manipulative tool.
Hume said that there is no knowledge or epistemology of causality by reason / rationality but only by experience. So according to Hume cause and effects can not be discovered by mere reason / rationality but merely by experience. He said that there is no knowledge or epistemology by reason / rationality / a priori.
True.
We can observe the collision of two billiard balls, but without seeing their result we cannot know the outcome.
The moving ball could bounce; transfer all energy to ball 2; both balls can move. or they might turn into a bowl of petunias.
It is only by the constant conjunction of observed objects that predictions can be made about the PROBABLY result.
But ultimately you can’t get there with reason alone. Obviously once you know the ‘laws’ of nature you can predict with reason, but all that stems from observations.
Historically this was a counter thrust to the French Rationalists, particularly Descartes who thought all you had to do with sit in an oven and think it through.
Hume’s thinking on this was massively significant. It moved the emphasis from divine to empirical explanations.
Definitional Logic requires no experience with physical reality while yielding the total truth of it. But because of the limits of human intelligence, it is certainly wise and needful to test deductions with careful observations (aka Science). The observations in themselves DO NOT reveal truth. They merely reveal enough evidence to possibly confirm truth … or possibly disguise it further (such as the speed of light issues).
Truth is only ever known through Definitional Logic.
…although at times aberrantly believed through instincts, hopes, fears, prophets, and/or ordained authorities.
Hume was certainly no logician. Kant came a little closer, but as stated prior, missed a crucial target (the cause of causality and induction).
Yes, that’s right. Hume was a diplomat, and, although he was also a philosopher of the Occidental Enlightenment, he was not a good logician, not a good rationalist, and thus not a good proponent of the Enlightenment. According tu Hume thinking is not more than a function, for example in order to link / join / connect, to shift / convert / permute, to widen / extend / expand, or to cut / shrink / reduce what the senses and experience liver. So according to Hume thinking (logic, rationality, …, thus just the characteristics of the Occidental Enlightenment) is less important than senses and experience; according to Hume thinking is merely a slave of senses and experience.
Yes. And that is what has been promoted in the post-enlightenment era of anti-intelligence and anti-science. The effort became one of destroying the “Tower of Babel”; confuse their language, disease their children, defame their prophets, blind their minds, and confiscate their wealth.
But this time, technology got loose. With technology even stupid, diseased, and blind people can still make progress. Toward what, they only imagine.
All the items that you attack Hume on are exactly the qualities which lifted Europe from the tyranny of ‘reason’ without evidence, to a new dawn of empirical reality.