Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Hume concludes bluntly (p. 28) that "All inferences from experience ... are effects of custom, not of reasoning." Thus we are justified in expecting the sun to rise tomorrow, though only by habit or custom -- it is not a proposition supported by reason. This seems a very strange claim.

Has he simply defined reason too narrowly, to include only deductive inference? We are tempted to say that it is an inductive inference, which we believe to the degree of certainty that the evidence (our past experience, reports of others) warrants -- and that the weight of probability is very heavy in this case. Given our individual and collective experience and known history (including geologic history), the sun will rise tomorrow to a near certainty, we want to say, and inductive reason strongly warrants our belief that it will.

But Hume might reply that we have only made the proposition seem highly probable by artificially excluding myriad other possibilities of which we have no knowledge. We don't know what we don't know, so we cannot accurately factor in all possibilities to calculate the genuine liklihood of its occurring. Thus the probability calculation we used to justify the belief is not meaningful data after all.

3 comments:

David K. Braden-Johnson said...

Is there a fallacy of ignorance lurking in his claim that induction is irrational? (No one knows whether our experience is radically mistaken, therefore, I assume that it is or is likely to be?)

Anonymous said...

Quite possibly there is something like a fallacy of ignorance here. But there are other cases (like Pascal's wager) where the fact that we have no knowledge one way or the other really does undermine our ability to calculate probabilities -- the wager only seems to make sense by begging the question in favor of God rewarding faith, whereas it is equally possible that He rewards only the good sense of refusal to believe without evidence. The trick is to show that Hume's appeal to ignorance is fallacious whereas this one is not...

Christina Porter said...

"we Dont know what we dont know"- appeal to ignorance, is a neg into a positive- from what we dont know, we know..., so i dont think that statement has any appeal to ignorance. not that this is what you implied, david. Just what I thought when i read these comments.