David Hume on Human Judgements

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that 'Section VII" of David Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" opens by differentiating the mental processes associated with the exact and provable mathematical nature of science in the natural world and what he calls "the finer sentiments of the mind". The author points out that Hume recognizes the validity of science and the physical world and does not dispute the logical deductions made from observance and experimentation; however, he says knowledge itself is not a finite object that is subject to science and mathematics. The paper stresses that Hume does not question of God exists or whether man has a sou but rather he says that these things are not known and therefore causal theories, which rest on the supposition that they do exist, cannot be true.

From the Paper:

"He uses the sun rising every day as an example, inferring that the fact that the sun has always risen every day does not, logically at least, mean that it will rise tomorrow. The reason that the sun rises every day is a function of physics, and the fact that the sun rises one day is not connected to its rising the previous day, but to those laws of physical motion. Thoughts, ideas and impressions cannot be measured in physical terms. A weakness in this argument would seem to be that he is separating deductive reasoning based on observable facts from the conclusions established in the mind regarding these facts. While he dismisses thought as an abstraction separate from science, he contends that space and time are the way impressions occur to us and these abstractions are the basis of ideas."

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