Lecture 4 - David Hume tbh

In our latest lecture the main focus was the hugely influential and important David Hume. He is influential to many philosophers but also us journalists as his approach asks us to constantly verify information. He comes from the empirical school of philosophy and believes that ideas are synthesised; this is in great distinction from the idealists and rationalists such as Descartes. His approach is more like science whereas the rationalist viewpoint comes from a more religious way of thinking. He was probably an Atheist as to be religious would go against his own theories but to have said so in his time he would probably have been prosecuted and killed if he said so; Galileo was persecuted just because he questioned some of the less fundamental aspects of religion. Hume's work helped influence the modern philosophy of Logical Positivism (The Vienna Circle) which is the philosophy that modern science uses and social science follows as well. Social science is the scientific explanation of human behaviour, similar to but not entirely like Sociology.
Hume saw things in a similar way to Einstein and Einstein 'admitted that he could not have the gumption to oppose Newton's immortal status without reading Hume'. He saw things as mechanisms with no absolute truths or knowledge. Just because the sun rose yesterday doesn't mean it will tomorrow; the sun rising is a mental illusion, (admittedly the sun does not rise, it just appears to). He had ideas on a number of things, for example he had ideas on causation saying that it is only happening in your head, not in nature. With an example of billiard balls he says that whilst the white ball hits the red, you cannot know that it was this that caused the red ball to move, you cannot show the causation. On the subject of induction and logic he says you can draw inferences from your own synthetic logic, e.g. you can add knowledge to certain things as the brain synthesizes them together; an example of this would be a unicorn (bear with me), if you know what a horse looks like and you know what a rhinoceros looks like your brain can synthesize the image of a unicorn. Hume also had thoughts on morality, the 'is/ought' dichotomy, but there is no morality in phenomena - no teleology - if Hume were alive today and was told to solve the speeding problem, he would simply put up more cameras.

Hume's philosophy influences the modern philosophy of Logical Positivism which follows the verification principle. By this I mean that any knowledge you might have needs to be verified to have scientific value. The metaphysical needs to be separated from science, this is part of Aristotle's logic, it needs to be non-contradictory, i.e. if the sun is not the moon, then the moon is not the sun. In logical positivism there are three kinds of statements: those statements that can be verified as provisionally 'true', non contradictory; those statements that can be verified as definitely false, contradictory; and those statements that cannot be verified, gibberish. This is very similar in the way it functions to how a computer operates and thinks.

If Hume was the progenitor of logical positivism, Karl Popper was a disciple of Hume's theories and philosophy and took the theories to their logical conclusion. He ritually attacks metaphysics, what he wants is science but he also attacks the verification principle as this is also metaphysics. The statement that non-verifiable statements are gibberish is gibberish itself as it is not actually verifiable. To Karl Popper, statements need to be falsified also, it must be capable of not just verification but falsification.

Hume sought to take to its logical conclusion the work of earlier empiricists such as Locke and Berkeley, rooting out any explanations that depended on invention rather than experience. In the book I Think Therefore I Am: All the Philosophy You Need to Know by Lesley Levene, she writes that "Reasoning, says Hume, is about discovering relationships between things. He identified two different sorts: 'relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact'. That 15 is half of 30, for example, can be discovered and demonstrated by reason alone, without reference to other forms of evidence, so belongs in the first category. Statements such as 'The sun will rise tomorrow', however, cannot be demonstrated by reason alone; as long as their negation is conceivable, we depend on experience to determine whether they are true or false - which means they belong in the second category." She goes on to say that, for Hume, "mathematics was the only worthwhile form of demonstrative reasoning. Books that did not contain mathematical demonstrations or empirical reasoning - he singled out those on metaphysics and theology in particular - deserved to be 'committed to the flames' as nothing but sophistry and illusion".

To journalists, Hume is so important that this blog really does not do him justice so it will be interesting to look into him more and the seminar will also be an interesting experience.

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.