it was man who invented descriptions as well… homo mensura
-Imp
Imp - you are ascribing unnecessary motives to…many things. Science seemed a religion to Hume, and the two were most definitely in cahoots in his day. Hume showed that we cannot make predictions with certainty. That was an issue then, it is not now, except among those who would still use science in service to religion - and we do know and agree on who those people are. He showed that we live in a Universe that has order only if we psychologically (logically) impose it - the order is not inherent in the Universe. Science has moved beyond Newton, and knows this, too. Hume was after the motives of the scientists he found around him. They called him an atheist - would that happen today? Would the scientific cimmunity notice?
I am not making a point about epistemology. I never am. And nothing I have said assails Hume’s effect on epistemology. I do not mean to suggest that Nietzsche used deduction - I was unlcear there, but only to a nitpicker like you. Or like me, for I would surely call anyone on something like this, as you know. Nietzsche used neither induction nor deduction. He used evidentiary argumentation - he talked like a lawyer.
Scientists may forget to include “probably”, but we needn’t. It is not an important feature of science that it is sometimes merely presented incorrectly.
Hume will tell you, must tell you, that we can tell something about the present - again, he never abondoned his empiricist roots. He based his entire thinking on observation. He cannot sensibly discredit this. He had to trust his senses to make these observations. He did trust his senses - he rejected any Cartesian basis for this trust.
Deduction describes the past - describes faits-accomplis. Observation describes the present. Nothing predicts the future. The present is the one event, and there is only the present. Hume could not claim solipsism for this reason. He could not claim nihilism, or radical scepticism. He was trying to pre-empt the halting of infinite regress at God, just as you are trying to head off my attack on radical scepticism. Neither obtains.
The ability to observe, upon which all of Hume is based, disallows radical scepticism. This is what I am after. Logical relations are not empirical events. Causation is a logical relation. Hume could not refute this. He did not even try. He tried to refute it as an empirical event. He mischaracterised causality.
no, he didn’t mischaracterize it. modern science and kantians do.
-Imp
Imp - I agree that Kantians do. But Hume’s milieu was not very different.
Radical scepticism holds that Hume (or someone) vanquished the present, as well. He vanquished the future only - the past remains, also.
This is what I mean - cause and effect is an implication which, after Hume, can only be taken as a contingency. But, logically, that is what it is, as it happens. This was not always so obvious as it is today. But, causation per se is not disproved. That we can predict the future, that we can ignore actual observation, is disallowed. Hume freezes time here, which was the fashion until Nietzsche, who put this notion in motion. . Hume removes the Prime Mover - he not only implies this with his epistemology, but clearly states that he uses this to question religion in the Treatise. Hume thereby removes the usual (well, only) resolution to infinite regress. He disallows premises of absolute derivation - absolutist renderings of these premises. He also removes infinity from logic, which is right and proper to do, for “infinity” is neither a number nor an operation. Straight through from Hume to Nietzsche to Russell - draw a line.
Hume is left with trust in his senses, and he is left with a description that starts with a billiard ball and ends with one. He is describing what happens “if” the first ball hits the second, and “then” what happens. He saw causation as temporal - it’s analytical. But everyone who believes in God must see causation as temporal and specifically not analytical. I think the converse is true, also. If causation is analytical, how can one believe in God?
Move from Russell to Ayer, now.
The psychological is not at odds with the logical. The latter is a subset of the former. Hume over-rated his impressions. These are not errors, but a methodology, which is what Nietzsche showed. A partial view is not “no view”. That we do not perceive a causal mechanism is not sufficient to disprove it, especially if it is a mathematical relation. Perspectivism does not deny objectivity, it ignores it. Hume could not do this. To a perspectivist, Hume’s psychological causation is not a trigger for scepticism - it makes scepticism impossible as a psychological fact. To a perspectivist, the symbol for “cause” is an operation. It is modus ponens. Actually, it is only material equivalence. Tarski is not wrong.
The difference between you and me is one of politics.
politics? how so?
-Imp
There has to be a connection between events, else Hume would not have gone to the trouble of repeating them so often. He wouldn’t know how to. But no two events are the same event. That is why we cannot generalise, or if we can, we cannot produce certainty by it.
Conjunction is a logical connection. But that is not the only connection. And that we cannot observe a causal mechanism is to be expected.
In Hume’s time, the produce of science was wholly mecahnical - literally, technology was mechanical. Scientists and philosophers incorrectly inferred from this that laws of nature were, as well. They reasoned back to this. Thus, the model of the Universe was mechanical. Cosmology was mechanical. We no longer use that model, exclusively, so we need not expect a mechanism for causation. Science now rests upon mathematical relations, not mechanistic models at all. Every mechanistic model that remains useful can be reduced to mathematics. Hume was beating a horse that was still breathing in his time, but which since has expired.
The connection between events is logical, and not actual. You will not agree, but this is a language difficulty. My point in all of this is that we need new linguistic models. This does not refute Hume, it passes him by on one or two points.
Hume did not comprehend that determinism is a theological idea. I have made that point elsewhere, and will not repeat it here. It is a common mistake.
I think you misinterpret that Hume mistrusted his senses - he doubted them, as we all should. But doubt is not a basis for rejection - it is a method. Hume was merely inconsistent here - he didn’t know he was.
Descartes’ argument starts before and includes the cogito, and is, briefly:
There is a God.
God is benevolent.
God wouldn’t fool me.
If I think anything at all, it is that I think.
I think, or at lesast think that I think.
Therefore, I am.
Humean doubt is real doubt, but it is not conclusive in showing that doubt necessitates that we cannot know, only that we cannot connect the psychological state of certainty to knowledge. He shows that the weak link in Descartes’ argument is the “I think that I think” part. Because he cannot show that there is no God without this. But that is the prize.
Hume assumes that events are seperated in the world. They are not - there is only one event. When we seperate them, we do so by logical analysis, so the seperation itself is analytical.
Nietzsche showed that the psychological state of certainty is what we cannot connect to the world. But we connect the analysis that produces it (or doesn’t) to the world. The result is language.
Hume could not change the world any more than I can. He could change language, however. Nietzsche changed it again. He redefined certainty. That’s all Hume was after.
Have the last word.
I don’t want the last word.
-Imp
Why are you both so keen to make Hume make sense? His theories on cause and effect were flawed, his analysis of induction via induction-cum-deduction was flawed and he was woefully inconsistent on most fronts. I preferred it when Faust dismissed Hume as a God theorist only.
because he does make sense.
the god of “science” is dead.
-Imp
That’s a typically ambiguous answer Imp. You are on record as saying you find him often inconsistent. Consistency goes hand in hand with sense.
not necessarily…
-Imp
Wow - you’ve totally opened my mind, man. 
Imp - That’s what I mean by politics - that science is Ultimate Truth is a political stance - broadly speaking. I don’t mean US politics - I mean that this view has nothing to do with actual science. It’s a judgement about science. Nietzsche was apolitical.
Lookysee - Hume had such unerring, complete, utter, blind faith in his senses that it was the very fact that he could not sense causation that led him to disbelieve it. No one has ever had more faith in their senses than Hume. Not even me! This is an incontrovertible fact, and if you force me to, I will find a copy of the Treatise and give you quotes. But you don’t need me to - you know Hume inside and out.
I could have suppiled that Nietzsche quote - this is precisely where I got my shit from. “We infer”, "but it is ‘description’ ". This practically makes my case for me, for I am making Nietzsche’s case.
All I am saying is that Hume accused causation of being something that it is not, and then refuted it. It is inference, always was, always will be.
Look at it another way. Induction is probabilites. But probabilities only obtain in a closed set. It doesn’t apply to open-ended sets. So it cannot apply to future events (unless these events have a known limit - but this is not a counterexample). So it cannot predict. I’m fine with Hume there. But induction is not logic at all, because there is no relational connection between its “premises” (as they are erroneously called) and its “conclusions” (equally erroneous). There is no mathematical relation between the two.
In deduction, there is this relation, for that is all deduction consists of. Cause and effect can be determined “backwardly”. The premises of a deductive argument are accepted as true previous to the argument - the set of billiard ball actions and reactions already observed. Hume did not see causation, because causation cannot be seen. Neither can multiplication.
Socrates was not really proved mortal until he died. But that does not negate the proof. These are simply two different sense of the word “proof”. Hume confused them.
The ramifications of this are that Plato’s Forms cannot be true, that Ayer was essentially correct, that no rationalism is rational - but these are all for subsequent posts.
The connection between Nietzsche and Rusell has only been hinted at here, but will have to wait. You’re wearin’ me out, my friend. Remember, I am old.
Data
This is the essence of Hume.
Portent
Review past portents
Task of Reader
Imagine the wide ranging effect the above idea has had on non-physical areas of study.
you are only as old as you let yourself be…
-Imp
Imp - induction is claimed to be logic.
Let me try again - I’ll use the text you provided of Nietzsche…
“Cause and effect.” ‘Explanation’ is what we call it: but it is ‘description’ that distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science.”
Hume is at that older stage.
“Our descriptions are better” we do not explain any more than our predecessors. We have uncovered a manifold one-after-another where the naive man and inquirer of older cultures saw only two separate things, ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ as the saying goes; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it.”
Hume was trying to disconnect two things - C & E - but they were never two things - they are one, a mathematical relation (and this is where Russell is helpful - but this will be long enough without him).
“In every case the series of ‘causes’ confronts us much more completely, and we infer:”
We infer. We infer the two from the many and the effect from the cause - read on…
“first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then follow” but this does not involve any comprehension. In every chemical process, for example, quality appears as a “miracle,” as ever; also, every locomotion; nobody has “explained” a push. But how could we possibly explain anything! We operate only with things that do not exist: lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible space, how should explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image!”
Like to go into more depth, but - we do not literally see the relation - it’s like a miracle - to the unaided senses - we do not see it happen. The things that do not exist - mathematics. We analyse, in other words. No analytical truth is real. But nietzsche accepts the psychological truth here as being what we actually mean by truth - he is defining certainty. Redefining it, but conclusively - this isn’t all right here, but it’s Nietzsche - you already know this.
“It will do to consider science as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible; as we describe things and their one-after-another, we learn how to describe ourselves more and more precisely. Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists,—in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it.”
A continuum - in my words - It’s all one event. We see the event of the billiard balls as a descrete event only through analysis - only through implication, through inference. It is no more real than mathematics is. This is not Nietzschean mysticism (which does not exist) nor is it radical scepticism - we analyse the world away - without ever leaving it. It is an act we perform. The stage is real. Cause and effect as a duality never existed - as a duality. It never was a duality, but a relation, an analysis. That’s all I’m saying. It is a sign, a symbol - a word, if you will. It exists if words do. As words do. But logic is about statements. So is science, in method. These statements are valid inferences or they are not.
“The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment—would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.”
We are subject to the scale we live on - the dullness, if you will, of our senses. Processes elude us. It happens too fast - but not only that - we don’t sense everything. Everything we do sense is part of our perception, like billiard balls. Hume made this seperation - this division, this dismemberment. And then saw that the parts could not be re-attached but they can - we just can’t see it. He could not, by Nietzsche’s account, have fulfilled the conditions N here lays out for the repudiation of C & E. This intellect he speaks of is a god, or is God, who exists outside space/time, and would, indeed, repudiate all temporal conditionality. An intellect that would not start with one ball and end with the other, as Hume did. But there is no God.
Nietzsche is calling C & E a psychological effect - one that is caused by attributes of the brain. So, if our “impressions” cause (are the fertile ground for) C & E, we should not be surprised. The difference between Hume and Nietzsche - the only difference on this matter, to be sure, is that Hume called this an error. Nietzsche called it the truth.
I once knew a fire investigator. He investigated that club fire in RI a couple of years ago, where 100 people died from a heavy-metal band’s fireworks-caused conflagration. He found the cause, after the fact, by reasoning backwards. I have been on scenes with him, and that is exactly how he does it. Backwards-tracing from the latest damage to the earliest. He presented a deductive argument that sent a guy to jail. It works. All he did was describe how the fire moved, and from which location to which. He presented it “forward”, but he reasoned it “backward”.
I am following your argument and I have one or two minor objections (concerning the scope of language and the moral implications of this position) but I’d like to see where you are taking this.
-Imp
Data
This is the disconnect between what Hume proposed and what is done in practical life.
The academic researcher that follows Humian ideas concludes that even the most obvious connection is not provable, thus many ideas in academia remain inactive.
The practical researcher concludes that garbage left in the back of the garbage truck too long results in stink and rust.
Portent
Hume created a dark age in formal circles that continues to halt progress.
Harbinger - my point is that we have, some of us, underestimated Hume.
Imp - I have already been some of the places I am going with this. I cannot give you the entire exegesis here - only because it is quite lengthy. Besides, I am making this up as I go along.
My post On Certainty for The Philosopher is one ramification, presented metaphorically. We may not know where we are going, but that does not imply that we do not know where we have been, or where we stand.
What I present here is a recasting of Hume in a perspectivist (Nietzschean) light. My claim, one of them, is that Hume does not support radical scepticism, or scepticism other than as a technique, any more than Nietzsche supports nihilism, except as a technique. Nietzsche provides the positive formulation of the destruction Hume wrought on epistemology - Nietzsche shows that epistemology, as it has been practised, is irrelevant. Actually, Hume showed this - but, just as Nietzsche made Scopenhauer important, he made Hume intelligible.
Every word is an abstraction. Some words denote a logical operation. “Event” is just such a word. An event is an implication, an inference. Logic, or mathematics, is not a science - it is a technique of science - it is a method. If I say “There is a dog”, that “makes sense” absent an actual dog, but it has no significance (I will only mention Russell here - that’s his bit - he made Nietzsche intellible to logicians, even if he didn’t himself think Nietzsche was intelligible).
Deductive logic is always only implicit in Nietzsche - he used forensic reasoning, which is not unlike my friend Mike, the fire investigator, which is why I mentioned him. Forensic reasoning always assumes a cause - that is its object. To define an event is to imply causation.
Hume used inductive reasoning (in part) to disprove inductive reasoning. This made sense to him, because he thought that induction was logic. It is not. There is no relation between the premises and the conclusion. In recognition of this, when Nietzsche makes a prediction, it’s a doozy. Why not? But Nietzsche’s forensic resasoning always looks backwards - through history. You know the examples - I am trying to be brief.
The passage of N you provide is classic perspectivism - there is continual motion - we freeze time when we name, abstract, analyse - when we seperate this constant motion into events. Far from there being no connection between events, there are no events without the logical connections we make in seperating them. The events depend upon the inference, not the other way 'round. This represents a psychological truth - truth as a function of analysis - this is the only truth available, for truth is defined by analysis, just as every word is the result of an abstraction.
The thing(-in-itself), however much of it we perceive, is manufactured. There is no thing-in-itself that is more real than the thing-in-itself we perceive. We are not in the dark about it - we made it.
Science manufactures truths - this makes them “artificial” - compared to what? Only to God. This is not scepticism - that is only the negative formulation. Hume provided that. But he claims that we have no access to the real - only that we believe this due to psychological error - it is not an error. Cause and effect is contained within the object that we abstract, because we abstract it.
There is no thing-in-itself - this is babble - epistemology must recognise that there are only occurences - an eternal recurrence of particulars. We classify similar relations together - this is a convenience. There is no subject matter of causation - it is all the subject matter. The definition of a word does not tell us what the word means except by telling us what it does not mean - look to the etymology of the word “definition”.
We may, essentially, trust our senses (not all the time, no) for we make “sense” only through them. This is why rationalism is irrational - Hume destroyed it. Abstraction from an abstraction does not produce anything that is more real than that from which it is abstracted - it cannot. No logical relation is any more real than any other. The perspectivist is only more keenly aware of his abstractions.
What can Natural Rights be? What Nietzsche added to Hume was the idea of what a referent really is. Referents are always particulars - we can generalise, but not indefinitely - infinity is not rightly a mathematical concept, but a placeholder - it is not a number. And we cannot make these generalisations transmogrify back into particulars - they remain generalisations. Hume shows that we cannot generalise causation indefinitely - that remains untouched. Nietzsche shows that we do not have to. I take this to be a blistering attack not on Hume, but on, among others, rationalists. Upon Kant. Upon religion. It falls a little short of an attack on God, however, and so I can see how you, Imp, can claim agnosticism. This is logically correct, but not ultimately, I believe. But you know how I feel about disproving, God, anyway.
That is at once verbose and brief. I hope it makes sense - that I haven’t left too much out. My purpose is to deny that Hume supports radical scepticism - and that his attack is not rightly on science, but on Truth. Mathematics is vital to our understanding, and causation is mathematics. Even mathematics cannot predict the future (or I’d be in Vegas), but it provides an accurate picture of the present and past. That Russell showed (via Frege - okay) that logic and mathematics are one is signal to this. It does not tell us about the world - it is the telling itself. This is just as true of Hume as it is of anyone else.
Fuck - I’m beat. While I might not look forward to everything you have to say about this, I am keenly interested in what the moral ramifications are, in your view. To me, they are that we must know the true referents of morality in order to be coherent about morality. Morality is wholly social, and has nothing to do with epistemology, God, or pure reason. Reason itself is not a referent, but a method.
if there is no cause for events, then whatever you think you decide to do of your own free will is not actually your choice. you are not the cause of the events that occur after you act (you aren’t even the cause of your choice)… taken from nietzsche’s widest view, there was no free act chosen but only the event as was presented and determined…
-Imp