The Evidence-Based Knowledge of David Hume

So here’s a question for you – will the sun rise tomorrow? I think so, and you do as well (hopefully), but this man showed that you couldn’t prove it. Not with logic, anyway.

You are looking at David Hume (d. 1776), one of the most important philosophers ever. A skeptic and a naturalist, Hume praised the pursuit of evidence-based knowledge even as he acknowledged that we are better off following our human instincts than our reasoning abilities, because our reasoning skills are so liable to err.

These quotes get at the apparent tension between the way Hume upholds reason while asserting the primacy of human instinct: “When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that probable deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.” But also, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”. In _Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding_, Hume explored the limitations of the logic of cause and effect — we believe that what has always happened will be an indicator of what will happen next. Thus, we think that because the sun has always risen, it will rise again. However, this idea is a belief — there is in fact nothing that can demonstrate that what has happened will necessarily happen next. Nevertheless, we might as well build our lives around our faith that the sun will rise, because we would not know how to go about our days without our instincts concerning cause and effect.

In our current pandemic (etc) situation, our patterns of cause and effect have been disrupted, and this is because we are experiencing a break from our beliefs that what has happened before will happen again. I certainly feel unsettled. But I like to think that David Hume would have smiled, since he knew all along that my idea that things would progress as they had always done was merely a mirage.