Well, firstly nobody seems to agree on what Hume's arguments establish, but in my opinion:

Hume's argument against a logical justification for induction appears at first to be rather trivial. For he stated that the effects of a cause are not made true by the definition that constitutes what is meant by the cause.

Taking his snooker ball example, if the 'cause' is a cue-ball travelling towards the black ball, then there is nothing present in the definition of a 'travelling cue ball' that necessitates a particular movement of the black ball upon contact. But of course, if we saw the cue ball pass through the black ball we would likely revise our identification of the cue-ball, to say a ghost cue-ball. Hence our identification of types expresses our expectation of effects.

Hence Hume's argument against logical justification for induction might be rephrased by saying that one only 'believes' that one is seeing a travelling cue-ball as opposed to say a ghost-cue ball, where the certainty of this belief cannot be established purely via appeals to logic.

Hume also gave an argument against an empirical justification for induction, which boils down to the fact that in our repeated observation of causes and effects we do not in a literal sense see anything called 'necessity'. Hence we are under no purely empirical obligation to alter our beliefs in response to seeing anything.

But this shouldn't be taken to mean that Hume implies that induction is a misguided principle, or that there is no such thing as 'necessity' or that 'necessity' is meaningless, but only that what we mean by necessity cannot be grounded purely in terms of rules of logic and observations. In other words, when we speak of necessity we aren't merely appealing to stated rules of logic and observations, but also to our behavioural inclinations that includes what we think, say and do in response to what we call 'evidence'.

Hence Hume is merely forcing us to revise our understanding of what 'necessity' means so that it includes more things, namely our thoughts, our psychological preferences, our choices and our customs.

And the resulting picture should feel holistically positive in the sense of including our intuition and customs as integral components of the meaning of causation and determinism , whereby it is seen to make no sense to speak of 'free will' being an illusion or of being incompatible with determinism.

2. Ignoring the definition you manufactured above (which contrasts how belief is generally described) science obtains whether or not one chooses to believe in science... — ProgrammingGodJordan

The definition you've quoted is more or less the same, as is the psychological conception of belief as a behavioural disposition towards evidence, which of course is modelled as probability distributions over choices, actions and so on.

Furthermore, by the definition above one is said to be in a state of belief whether or not one has infallible proof. So really your statement boils down to the assertion of infallible belief. I think. Or are you saying that one should judge all beliefs as being fallible?

Obviously science does not consist of infallible beliefs and since there is not even a mathematical justification for a correct way to interpret evidence it seems one cannot eliminate the role of subjective decision making in the assessment of evidence.

There are no infallible proofs and to a certain extent they are subjective, except those which are said to be infallible by definition or by assumption.

1. No, I don't detect that I have confused "practical belief" with "religious faith" those things; in fact, I had long encountered scientism, which is near to the 'practical belief' you refer to.
However, scienticism does not underline belief's generally science opposing nature, contrary to "non beliefism". — ProgrammingGodJordan

If beliefs are defined as the assignment of probabilities to outcomes conditioned on one's partial knowledge, and if it is impossible to decide upon any particular probability assignment on the basis of one's partial knowledge, then for the purposes of acting one is forced to choose a set of probabilities, i.e. a model, without justification. Hence my referring to justified belief as practical belief.

You say no beliefs are necessary. Then let's suppose you are presented with an urn containing an unknown number of red and black balls and you have no other information. What is the rational choice of prior probabilities?

I think you are confusing the idea of practical belief with religious faith in scenarios pertaining to prediction and control. You've jumped the shark from a practically reasonable statement, to what a community would interpret to be a conceptual error.

In statistical decision theory, belief is the assignment of probabilities to possible outcomes, and in every instance it is impossible to assign definite probabilities without a priori assumptions. Science consists of the collection and evaluation of evidence in response to the beliefs states of the science community, which vary extensively for reasons pertaining to scientists having different knowledge, unconscious biases and so forth.

As a programmer, have you ever studied data-science? Tell me how I should decide upon what is 'the definitive' algorithm for winning a Kaggle competition, and how do i decide what it is, in such a way as to avoid any assumptions and hence belief?

Anthropomorphism is usually associated with a "projection" of some kind of substance into forms where it does not belong. These to me seem to be two different positions. I think the reason we do not attribute consciousness to robots and computers is due to an awareness of different forms of embodiment which do not operate in accordance with the principles of certain forms of life. — michael r d james

To my mind, the only problem with not attributing consciousness as a metaphysical substance to 'suitable' forms, is that there no longer seems to be a 'truth of the matter' as to whether or not other minds exist, since without positing consciousness as being a metaphysical-substance one collapses the distinction between defining what is conscious versus recognizing what is conscious.

One cannot avoid this problem by identifying consciousness with a type of life form, since theories containing 'types' of life forms are theories of metaphysical substance if they assert the objectivity of their categorical distinctions, yet if types of life-form are merely arbitrary constructs then we are back to there being no matter-of-fact about the existence or otherwise of other minds .

isn't trying to change one's own beliefs a bit like trying to tickle oneself?

One somehow needs to present evidence to oneself that reinforces the target belief, in such a way that one isn't reinforcing the opposite belief through the very act of selecting the right evidence.

Perhaps it is only possible in general to weaken existing beliefs, by putting oneself into novel situations that have the propensity to challenge one's existing beliefs to a certain extent.

Time is real. I have an argument in favor of it in here. — bahman

I don't quite follow that argument, because in practice no proposition is applied exactly with infinite precision, hence even the meaning of a 'precise' calculus remains ill-defined in application, whatever the intended precision of the signs.

Remember Heraclitus's argument, that no man ever steps in the same river twice. How does one insist that a single application of a sign refers to a single state-of-affairs without question begging? If one cannot insist upon such a thing, then can't we be said to be using the calculus on X->Y, regardless?

That is the price you pay for holding substance views of space-time, as if space and time were transcendental tape-measures being aligned to a table-universe.

So why not simply reduce talk of time to measured intervals between events? For presently observed change does not require a background notion of temporarily if one accepts present change as irreducible and fundamental.

The idea that ethical interventions shouldn't interfere with "destiny" undermines the very idea of ethics. And why shouldn't a Jury consider it "destiny" to have pulled the lever?

You believe in determinism, yes?
Determinism as I understand it is that for every event there exist conditions that could cause no other event. Therefore the event of one making a decision would be due to past conditions that could cause no other event, yes? — SonJnana

Supposing I insisted " Having seen five white swans, it has been determined that all swans are white". Clearly this statement only expresses my behavioural disinclination to presuppose swans of any other colour.

One might object that this example is not representative of a statement of determinism, but i beg to differ. All examples of determinism, whether physical, logical, mathematical or social are universal generalisations of this form; they consist a finite number of assertions along with a proposed rule for generating an unlimited number of similar assertions, and yet no finite supply of assertions considered independently of one's behavioural dispositions can justify even a single inference, never mind an unlimited number of them. Rather, what we call a "rational justification in response to evidence" is how we believe we should react to evidence to be successful. One might say like Wittgenstein that our beliefs are groundless, i.e. they have no epistemological justification except for our anticipatory feelings of success.

Universal generalisations are not empirical facts, nor are they even empirical statements. Rather they are proposed rules for generating new hypotheses for pragmatic purposes. For example, accepting my previous universal statement means that I condone the invention of a testable hypothesis such as "the next ten swans observed will be white".

Hence the notion of determinism does not describe states of affairs independent of our behavioural compulsions, rather it expresses what we feel we are able to do in response to our observations. Universal statements over an open domain are not truth-apt 'in themselves'. Rather to take the universal statement as being true reflects one's disposition to act in accordance with it.

The only argument that I've come across with compatibilists in the past is that they redefine free will as a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will. Hume also redefines free will this way (you can correct me if I'm wrong about that).

However that misses the whole point of what hard determinists mean when they say there is no free will. If you redefine free will that way, you aren't taking a different position than hard determinists in their argument. You are forming a completely different argument because free will has been redefined. I doubt many hard determinists would argue that there isn't a clear difference between a decision where eat pizza because you like it and a decision where you eat pizza because there is a person holding a gun to your head telling you to eat pizza. — SonJnana

Hard determinists appear to believe that determinism is a metaphysical or physical fact of nature that is independent and separate from our conscious choices, hence as you say, they appear to reduce conscious choice to determinism as a separate, unconscious and pre-psychological notion.

In contrast I am saying that determinism expresses nothing more than the feeling of having a gun held to your held. Furthermore, I am saying that one has the choice whether or not to interpret the statements of physics, logic, and mathematics as constituting such a gun.

If you feel that what you know and think about nature determines your choices, then you are correct. But if you feel they do not, then you are also correct.

I think confusion arises because the sentence "consciousness is a product of the brain because one get can knocked out" looks on the surface as if it is submitting the experience of getting knocked out as evidence of a causal relationship between consciousness and the brain.

On the contrary, the experience of getting knocked out is a plausible definition of what it means to say that "consciousness is a product of the brain".

"consciousness is a product of the brain because one get can knocked out"- isn't really an evidence-based causal assertion - it is merely the statement of an empirical convention.

The meaning of determinism is akin to an "infinite for-loop" running inside a computer program that executes the same instruction repeatedly until the external world interrupts it. I find it somewhat remarkable that an infinite for-loop contains less information than a bounded for-loop representing and checking for its own stopping condition. Consequently, infinite for-loops can be implemented on simpler devices than bounded for-loops.

Like the "forever looping" computer program, scientists who mention determinism aren't saying anything about nature, they are merely expressing the fact that their science customs do not contain the stopping-condition for their obsolescence. Talk of determinism isn't talk of positive epistemic facts, it is merely the expression of intending to do the same thing until interrupted.

It involves the person thinking that the universe is determined. But it could also have already been determined that the person would be thinking that the universe is determined. So I don't really see why that wouldn't work. — SonJnana

Can you explain this transcendental notion of "determination" that is over and above our practical judgements that something is determined?

What does judging that some event is determined consist of? Does it involve a raw appraisal of information that tells us the event is in fact determined? Or is it more pragmatic, that we take the event as being determined, perhaps unconsciously and as a matter of course, for some intended purpose?

When we judge something to be determined, first we look at a finite amount of evidence, then we jump to a conclusion and then we produce some sort of behavioural response. But if no amount of finite evidence can justify our conclusion on logical or empirical grounds, then our conclusions are merely part of our behavioural response which is arbitrary in relation to our understanding of the evidence.

Those who don't believe in Compatibilism mistake the principle of necessity for an empirical fact.

Remember, Hume was a compatibilist - and this wasn't coincidental to his understanding of the problem of induction and his solution of it. It pays to look closer at what we mean by something "being determined", and when we closely inspect this concept in light of the fact that none of our universally quantified inductions are rationally or empirically determined, we discover that determinism, whether physical or social, is implicitly defined in terms of our normatively driven decision-making.

Hence the free-will vs determinism debate is nonsensical; for the ability to consider something as "being determined" already involves active choice on behalf of the cognizer.

Your argument seems to boil down to the observation that the experience of contemplating two things together, whether simultaneously or in quick succession for sake of comparison, is vague and hard to describe in contrast to the two things contemplated separately.

But why should experiential vagueness be interpreted epistemically?

Take another example; the problem of identifying colours that are poorly illuminated. One reports that the hues are ambiguous. But why should colour ambiguity under poor illumination be considered 'evidence' that poorly illuminated colours are hard to determine? For if the illumination is increased we are no longer comparing like for like.

Grammar, empirical fact and value aren't three independent things.
— sime
What does this mean? — Agustino

I am saying that they are not dichotomous domains, but inseparable aspects of a single cognition or application of language, for Wittgenstein did not accept the analytic-synthetic distinction, and he drew attention to grammar, i.e. his personal thinking process, only by way of empirical examples, and stressed how the meaning of empirical propositions depends upon regularities in acts of measurement, agreements in human judgement and normative principles pertaining to human behaviour within a custom.

This is false, since language is social and collective, not individual. — Agustino

You can define language that way if you wish, but you miss Wittgenstein's aim of philosophical investigations, which was to demolish Cartesian phenomenology and dissolve mind-body problems, as opposed to giving any supposed 'factual content' pertaining to linguistics, or even indeed to philosophy. His remarks are logical remarks pertaining to his definitions, not factual remarks.

Wittgenstein's remarks concerning language were just a special case of more general considerations of what it means to say that one is "following a rule", which for Wittgenstein boil down to external criteria of assertion such that it only makes logical sense to speak of "following a "rule" when there are independent means of checking whether or not one is following the rule independent of one's definition of it within an appropriately normative context where talk of obeying or breaking rules is motivated. Hence Wittgenstein preempts Searle's Chinese Room Argument attack on functionalist metaphysical approaches to AI that presume it is meaningful to speak of following rules in an Cartesian and cultural-independent context.

In the supposed "private language argument" passages Wittgenstein did not say that "one cannot invent a private terminology for expressing one's immediate sensations and use it meaningfully without public guidance" for that would contradict PI $109 you just quoted and constitute a substantial philosophical thesis, and not to mention fly in the face of what we intuitively do ubiquitously in our aesthetic lives, when we express ourselves.

Rather Wittgenstein merely implied that a speaker's utterances cannot be understood as "following a rule", "conveying a message" and so forth, until the speaker's utterances are correlated to external states of affairs within a normative context that motivates talk of "obeying and disobeying rules".

In the "sensation diary" passages Wittgenstein's chief preoccupation was to understand
what it means to "name" particulars by acquaintance, to which he concludes that it is meaningless to speak of someone as referring to or representing a particular by way of a universal , unless it is meaningful to speak of correct and incorrect application of one's 'naming rule', which in turn demands that criteria for correct naming is independent of the intuition of the person defining the naming rule.

See for example his manometer passage, where the "private-linguist" believes he is 'naming' a novel private sensation with the letter 'S' , and then later discovers that his use of 'S' predicts whether his blood pressure is rising. So 'S' can now be said to mean that "his blood pressure is rising", and we can now understand what the private-linguist is saying by 'S', i.e. he can now be said to infer something public.

Hence Wittgenstein had nothing against what "private linguists" i.e. philosophers, express when they colloquially speak of inventing and using language in reference to their own sensations, rather Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot speak of inferring anything from or conveying anything with verbal expressions precipitated by immediate sensations, unless that is to say, a correlation of verbal behaviour to external matters of fact can be established and confirmed independently of the immediate mental contents in the minds of the speakers.

The "Truth" of all of Wittgenstein's philosophical works was in terms of their aesthetic or therapeutic value. This is why the Tractatus's self-refuting epistemology was ultimately unimportant.

And since none of our concepts can be adequately explained in terms of rules divorced from their contextual use, our employment of them is intrinsically tied to our aesthetic intuition. Grammar, empirical fact and value aren't three independent things. The later Wittgenstein had long since abandoned the mirror-of-nature view of science and philosophy.

Nobody knows the answer to this question, but I think that the most logical answer is that it feels just like before you were born. "You" do not exist, in the sense that there is no consciousness to experience. After death, consciousness ceases. — RepThatMerch22

But we don't experience consciousness, we experience the world, and all of our ordinary non-philosophical questioning are empirical and are said in response to, and only concerned with, predicting and relating to the world we experience.

So you should first ask whether supposedly 'transcendental' questions concerning an "after life" or lack of, are really different from ordinary non-transcendental questions concerning the world we live in, in spite of the apparent difference of these questions on the surface.

i.e. Are after-life questions merely ordinary questions about the world we live in, but in disguise?

Indeed, when we ask questions about an after-life we actively conceive of possible "after-lives" in our imagination, which as a consequence become physically realisable outcomes - including the so called "absence of after-life" possibility, where we kid ourselves into thinking that we have visualised so-called 'nothingness'. In all instances, we are imagining something that could be experienced during our actual lives here on earth, in space, or in virtual reality.

What about philosophy that you can't understand? Is that the basis of rejecting a philosophy? On whether you can understand it or not? — Purple Pond

Yes, in part. As a recently converted pragmatist, I assess the "truth" of a philosophical statement, whether metaphysical, epistemological or ethical, firstly in terms of whether I can relate to it in some way that coheres with how its proponents apparently relate to it, and secondly whether upon relating to it I find it practically useful, ethically inspiring, or aesthetically appealing in some way.

But non-pragmatists don't see "philosophical truth" in that way, rather they see it as something akin to a feeling of psychological-compulsion. That they should feel forced by the throat to accept it, regardless of whether or not they like it, or even understand it - as if a philosophical statement was the same thing as an empirical proposition.

While I used to think like a non-pragmatist, the force of reason eventually compelled me (rather ironically) to ignore my psychological compulsions to think or behave dogmatically in a certain way, a general life-style I have found to be unhealthy, counter-productive and misguided.

Unfortunately, the notion of philosophical-veracity doesn't exist because we don't generally agree as to the meaning of philosophical statements, whose concepts are under-determined by our stated rules of language and which lack truth conditions in terms of public ostensive demonstration.

So I don't like to think of the "philosophical understanding" of a philosophical statement in the sense of knowing and adhering to a public fact. At most we can individually relate to a philosophical statement and decide for ourselves whether or not we like the statement and find it useful.

↪sime So you judge a philosophy based on how persuasive it is to you? — Purple Pond

yes, in the same sense that art and works of fiction are persuasive - or perhaps i should say, "inspiring" or "therapeutic", since the word "persuasion" might be misinterpreted to imply the presence of an underlying absolute 'truth' in mind or nature to be persuaded of, a notion which I no longer find intelligible having studied the pragmatism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Pierce and Dewey, who together pretty much demolish the idea of epistemology.

Compare the quoted passage with Dewey:

"We only think when we are confronted with a problem"

I think the question of truth-aptness in relation to philosophy dissolves once we understand statements of philosophy as not so much constituting propositions that are true or false in relation to some independent correlate of experience or in virtue of linguistic meaning , but as constituting speech acts of rhetoric, that attempt to persuade the listener to think differently for therapeutic or practical purposes, such as to increase aesthetic appreciation, and to protect a person's psychological life from succumbing to cultural or self-imposed dogma.

The primary example of something that has intrinsic value is Pleasure. Hedonism is the Value-Theory that asserts that Pleasure/enjoyment is the ONLY thing that has intrinsic value. — Mitchell

that looks to me like a grammatical proposition that is true by definition and hence amounts to as much as saying "I like what I like". i.e. our language doesn't represent what we mean by value, rather our use of language expresses it.

your argument is correct, but only if it is assumed that 'physical time' is metaphysically independent of the stream of consciousness. Only under this assumption does it make sense to speak of time continuing without consciousness.

On the other hand a Presentist who thinks that consciousness is metaphysically identical to 'the present' will think of 'physical time' as being conceptually reducible to a public convention of temporal signification within the present, and hence will interpret the meaning of 'the afterlife' very differently, in an exact manner that depends on how they understand the conceptual relationship of the present to observed change.

Having already collapsed the distinction between 'the present' and consciousness, if the Presentist then insists on collapsing the conceptual distinction between 'the present' and currently observed change, then they might say that talk of a non-changing present is nonsensical, and hence conclude that the after-life is a tautological truth, indeed a trivial fact that is logically necessary.

On the other hand, if the Presentist believes that 'the present' and 'current change' are two separate things, then they might think of the 'after-life' as a meaningful null-hypothesis which states that a non-changing present is possible but won't happen.

You cannot escape, however, the fact that our best theories are fully deterministic. — tom

I don't think the notions of either determinism or randomness amounts to anything meaningful when describing 'nature in itself', because the 'necessary' truths of any physical theory are only the logical truths that defined as being true according to linguistic convention, with the convention being arbitrarily chosen and perpetually subject to revision.

Consequently it is meaningless to distinguish necessary truths from contingent truths in any absolute sense.

I would first suggest untangling the grammar of psychological predicates when used to directly express oneself in the first-person, from the grammar of the corresponding psychological predicates when inferentially applied to behavioural observations of the third-person, that are consequently re-applied in this behaviourist sense to the first-person via analogy of the first person with the third-person.

Disantangling the asymmetric grammars of first-person expression from third-person behavioural inference should help to clarify concepts pertaining to mental access.

Is stillness something we can even imagine or perceive?
— sime

Watch a movie. Hit pause — TheMadFool

I notice the screen is still moving as my eyes are wandering, and when I prevent them from moving my vision plays tricks.

Are you implying that I should infer that the movie is still given my shakey and unstable observation of it, or that I should literally experience a state of stillness when I hit pause?

Wouldn't it be better in the long run to replace the "proof of work" performed in the creation of blocks with a social or economically useful task?

The idea of mining in the sense of being rewarded for performing pointless computing activity merely for the sake of affirming the consensus of the block-chain seems fishy to me - especially given the increasingly non-consensual centralisation of computational resource.

Wouldn't it be better to perform GPU work for a big-pharma block-chain where 'proof-of-work' involved performing calculations for drug-discovery, that after independent empirical confirmation rewarded the miner with actual currency?

A Logical Behaviourist would dispute that minds aren't observable. After all, we didn't learn the concept of 'other minds' by being shown the private contents of people's skulls or by psychically observing their souls in an ethereal realm. Ergo, our concepts of other minds are reducible to the behaviour we observe and our reactions to behaviour.

Ergo, the presence of other minds is falsifiable.

A toddler puts their hand into a fire and get burnt. Their mother says:

"Fire is always hot"

Which is another way of saying

"It is a fact that fire is hot"

But don't these two statements only mean

"Don't put your hand into the fire!" and other heat-related normative speech acts???

Why should the meaning of the laws of science be any different from this???

In other words:

Why should we believe in a De jure - De facto distinction????

Doesn't collapsing this distinction circumvent Hume's problem of Induction???

Suppose someone insisted that they didn't believe in the existence of facts. What would they be missing?

I imagine objections

"it is a fact that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris"
"It is a fact that Peano Arithmetic, if consistent, has undecidable propositions"
"It is a fact that nothing with positive mass can travel at the speed of light"

But in all of these cases the objection merely consists in re-affirming a statement, as if the statement by itself isn't up to the job somehow.

Doesn't this imply that talk of 'facts' merely consists in speech acts that attempt to enforce a normative behavioural response on behalf of the listener by declaring scepticism to be illegal?

in other words, isn't the following a fact?

"Facts are true de jure, but are not true de facto"

Similarly, imagine a world without change - no movement, no chemical reactions, absolute motionlessness (heat death of the universe?). In such a world, time would be meaningless and it'd lose its value as part of the space-time frame of reference. — TheMadFool

Is stillness something we can even imagine or perceive?

To my mind 'constancy' or 'stillness' is never present in sensation nor in the imagination since they are always unstable, while 'sensed change' is synonymous with 'experience'.

This to me implies that our public meaning of "stillness" is merely a social directive to ignore the presence of change when it is considered to be unimportant for whatever purpose is at hand.

Therefore it seems somewhat strange as to why process ontologies and the relational notion of time haven't dominated philosophy from the very beginning.

I would say that reasoning is merely habits of thought, trained partially under external supervision, that have been found to lead to survival advantages when precipitating action.

It is tempting to conclude that reasoning is successful for epistemological reasons, namely because reasoned-thinking mirrors the structure of nature in some way, but that doesn't make sense due to being a circular argument that depends on reasoning to both define the 'mirroring' relationship and to justify why it leads to success.

Perhaps we could say that the "habits of thought that mirror nature" are by definition the habits of thought that bestow the most benefits to society, thereby dissolving the question as to why reasoning is successful, albeit at the cost of sacrificing the notion of epistemology by redefining "truth" to mean "success".

While nobody appears to be in agreement as to what philosophy is, if we understand philosophy in terms of its psychological benefits, we could say, loosely speaking, that philosophy is the development of mental habits that bestow psychological benefits to the individual, i.e. it is a generalised form of cognitive-therapy.

So how can the present be ambiguous if it is not a concept of perspectival experience, while having no definition in physical theory, except as an arbitrarily chosen time-slice that is mentally equated with experience?

Isn't it due to the fact that the notions of "stillness" and "change" are phenomenally ambiguous and do not possess a simple relationship with their corresponding physical notions?

In fact, are "stillness" and "change" privately deducible experiences?

How can I tell if my immediate and unshareable experience is static or dynamic?

What does it mean to speak of error here?

"Esssence is expressed by grammar."
"Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is"

I think Wittgenstein's central point here was deflationary in the sense of identifying essence with grammatical expression. which is to not take kinds seriously in any transcendental sense that is independent of our way of speaking.

In contrast, suppose somebody said:

Essence is represented by grammar

This leads to Hume's problem of induction but in the context of the classification of objects.
For to state that grammar is a representation of essences raises the sceptical question "what is it about the previously witness examples of each essence that necessitates how this object is to be classified?"

This question, along with other Humean problems of induction can be thrown out by replying that essences and the notion of necessity are normative notions pertaining to what we say and do rather than referring to independently intuited features that the individual sees.

Which I suppose is complementary to the empirical idea of epistemic selection.

is to talk of 'the present' necessarily to speak of a concept?

e.g "I call all of what I see around me the 'present' "

Isn't our concept of the present as discussed in public discourse an entirely different usage, that typically involves pointing to a spatio-temporal axis and saying "the present is at this location" when making plans?

That still fails to explain how we came up with the concept of causality. Saying that it's a habit of mind is not explaining the concept. — Marchesk

The word "concept" is ambiguous, as are "relations among ideas" and "matters of fact".
Must the content of a concept be thinkable, or are concepts only demonstrable on a case by case basis?

Suppose for example that somebody claims to not understand infinity. So we provide him with a verbal definition, say

" [1,2,3,...] represents an infinite collection, where the dots allow us to write [1,2,3,4,...] and so on"

The learner then queries

"what do you mean by 'and so on' "?

At this point all we can do is demonstrate to him a finite number of applications of our rule of infinite expansion, and hope that he continues to use our rule in the same way. To verify this, we might test his understanding of the rule of infinity on a finite supply of test questions and then breathe a sigh of relief if he passes all the tests.

But where in any of this process did we teach to him and confirm his understanding of what we want infinity to mean?

And the problem is the same when teaching what is meant by the word "necessary", for we can only teach a concept with a finite number of examples and by appealing to the words "and so on". Hence an exhaustive a priori definition of the word "necessary" cannot be given such that it's meaning is water-tight before all of its uses.

Therefore, and especially considering human fallibility, physical uncertainty and mechanical breakdown, the very notion of "necessary consequent" is not only non-demonstrable it is also under-determined thereby permitting exceptions.

Hence to say that "B necessarily follows A" is in some sense compatible with saying "B doesn't necessarily follow A".

Constant conjunction (also known as correlation) isn't causality. They are two different concepts. — Agustino

Right, although judging by how many people wrongly equivocate Hume's skeptical conclusion with "correlation doesn't equal causation", we should be careful to avoid the potential conflation of constant conjunction with the 'inferred' notion of essential correlation.

Perhaps we should say:

1. The constant-conjunction of A and B refers to the sampled correlation of A and B over a finite history of observations, that happens to equal 1.

2. Hume's problem of induction also implies that a correlation parameter cannot be rationally deduced from a sampled correlation, regardless of the value of the sampled correlation.

For just as we cannot rationally infer causation, we cannot rationally infer correlation.

What's interesting is that Hume felt the need to explain our concept of causation with a causal psychological explanation. Perhaps because past constant conjunction alone wasn't enough to get the concept into our heads.

Turning to Darwin next, we can further explain our habituation to causation with an adaptive explanation. Animals who came to expect constantly conjoined events to continue their conjoining were better at predicting when and where there would be food, mates or danger, and thus had more reproductive success, passing that psychological tendency on. — Marchesk

The use of the word "explanation" sounds misleading, since Hume accepted the skeptical premise that the concept of causal necessity isn't reducible to "relations of ideas" (the analytic a priori) or to "matters of fact" (the synthetic a posteriori).

Hence the concept of causal necessity cannot be "explained" to the skeptic in terms of what is thinkable, and this must include the idea of psychological association in terms of an analytic or synthetic explanatory hypothesis.

If Hume is to be consistent, his notion of "psychological habit" or "custom" can at most refer to the empirical observation that historical experience of repeated trials with identical outcomes is often observed to co-occur with present expectations for similar outcomes in the future - expectations which we might call "judgements of necessity".

But to avoid contradiction the empirical co-occurrence of identically repeated empirical trials with judgements of necessity cannot itself be considered to be a "causally necessary" relation, and therefore "judgements of necessity" cannot be synonymous to either "observed matters of habit" or to histories of identical trials.

To conclude, "psychological association" can only refer to the empirical background conditions in which judgements of causal-necessity are typically observed to follow, but cannot constitute a theory of causal judgements. Causal-necessity isn't so much of a thinkable idea but a feeling of compulsion that one sometimes feels subjected to.


Secondly, although Darwinian selection provides a naturalistic explanation of our inferential capacities, it cannot augment Hume's classical skeptical argument since naturalistic explanations beg the very notion of causal necessity that is in question. Indeed it isn't even the case after granting the notion of causal-necessity that evolution is guaranteed to improve any of our empirical inferences.

Skepticism is the tendency for beliefs in representational theories of perception to collapse into beliefs in direct-perception and vice-versa.

I don't like discussions of skepticism in relation to idealism or realism, since both idealism and realism have been interpreted through the lens of representational metaphysics, and it isn't clear that either position constitutes a substantial ontological thesis.