what makes them legitimate if they are not justified by reason? — JuanZu

Nothing. What makes the notion of “legitimate” coherent and applicable divorced from reason? Nothing.

If you believe as Hume does that constant conjunction has little or nothing to do with necessary connection, then belief in the necessary connection between two constantly conjoined things, is fancy, or practical for now, or whatever else you want to believe about it. It’s not actually true or actually legitimate.

Ask Hume, what do vivid impressions cause? He has to say “stop asking stupid questions.” But to “impress” is to transfer something, from one, to another. Light impresses itself upon my eyeballs. Do my eyeballs and the light cause anything? Or do I just constantly connect them to my “visions” out of habit (can’t say “force of habit” because “force” sounds like a cause)? He had to say that light and eyeballs don’t cause - causation is a figment of our minds. But for some reason he allows constant conjunction and “recurrent association” to be prior to a judgment of belief - like a cause is prior to some effect. (I guess if we just avoid using the word “cause” and stand on “recurrent” we can lift up a rational “conclusion” of “legitimacy” - without sounding as naive as people who still believe and say “cause” and believe they actually know something about the world.)

I agree with Hume that “cause” itself is a metaphysical concept. But I agree with Aristotle that metaphysical concepts, formal causes, exist - minds alone can sense or grasp or discern or understand or constitute, or believe them…

If you believe as Hume does that constant conjunction has little or nothing to do with necessary connection, then belief in the necessary connection between two constantly conjoined things, is fancy, or practical for now, or whatever else you want to believe about it. It’s not actually true or actually legitimate. — Fire Ologist

It is surprising to me that we can survive with these kinds of beliefs that are imposed on us most of the time. Of course, this is assuming that truth is subsumed by reason. We are beings who live in constant ignorance of truth and reality. I would say that these beliefs work on a practical level, but I wonder how they can work at all. It seems that another belief underpins legitimacy: that the external world is regular. But we are back where we started, as this belief is also illegitimate.

In Hume, legitimate beliefs exist. They occur in a process of recurrent association. A belief is legitimate when it is associated with a vivid impression. For example, the belief that one object will move after another is based on past experience of their constant conjunction. Hume concluded that fundamental beliefs, such as the existence of an external world or the existence of the self, are not rationally justifiable but are legitimate because they are the result of experience and custom. — JuanZu

So, you can’t trust induction, so just act as if you can. After all, what else are you going to do? Seems kind of a cheat. It’s not rational, but it’s legitimate. What other use is there for rationality other than to help us figure out what to do?

So, you can’t trust induction, so just act as if you can. After all, what else are you going to do? — T Clark

That is the pragmatic position. The world seems to be ordinary, and we act accordingly. But a philosopher pauses and asks about rational truth. Pausing seems like a suspension of everyday action and pragmatism, the things to be done. There is a relationship between the philosopher's contemplation (pausing) and not following inductive everyday life, if one can say such a thing. Can it be said that philosophy has classically rejected this more fragile aspect of empiricism? Heidegger spoke of an authentic and inauthentic mode of existence. I believe there is a relationship between philosophical thinking, rejecting everyday life and this authenticity, but it is not yet very clear to me.

The nearest thing to an answer to Hume comes from Wittgenstein, along the lines that doubt too stands in need of justification. Whatever can be known can be doubted and knowing and doubting both need justification. Can one justify the doubt that the sun might not rise in the morning? One can say that it might not, but can one really doubt it?

:up: :up:

Can one justify the doubt that the sun might not rise in the morning? One can say that it might not, but can one really doubt it? — unenlightened

Gambler's fallacy? :chin:

I don't think anyone has ever rolled the same number 1,000 times in a row. But apparently, it's just as likely as rolling the dice 1,000 times and at least one of those times being different than the next.

Huh? Your statistical claim makes no sense, but anyway statistics cannot answer Hume, whose argument comes down to 'you can't logically derive a proposition about the future from propositions about the past, just as his moral scepticism states that 'you cannot get an ought from an is.'

Given every morning of my life (that's more than 1,000) the sun has risen. Habit leads me to expect it to rise tomorrow. Now justify the doubt. Something like "I saw the devourer of suns starting to consume it last evening", perhaps?

Your statistical claim — unenlightened

And what claim was that? I'm fairly certain it can be proven no person has ever rolled a dye 1,000 times with the exact same result each time. If you put 6 people, each with a six-sided dye in a room, and instruct them to roll the dye 1,000 times, at least one of those 6 people should have a fair chance of rolling the same number every single one of those 1,000 times. Yet that never happens. That leads people, if not falsely, to believe, anything can happen, just because the same thing happened before. But that was a minor piece of commentary and not a claim or argument. That is as follows, next.

Given every morning of my life (that's more than 1,000) the sun has risen. Habit leads me to expect it to rise tomorrow. Now justify the doubt. Something like "I saw the devourer of suns starting to consume it last evening", perhaps? — unenlightened

Yes, that's reasonable. One with a mind to argue might say such an example is "low hanging fruit". Of course the Sun, a planetary body described by millions of people across thousands of years that has been doing the same thing will probably do the same thing tomorrow. But what does that have to do with non-physical concepts? There's the clear distinction between philosophy and science. Science would be, "if you touch that open flame, your skin will burn or blister." A person who doesn't know what fire is, may, rationally, mind you, doubt that. Until proven. They've never touched fire before, and perhaps they've never been burned or blistered. Without knowledge of the situation, doing such, and resulting in injury, wasn't (relatively) foolish. It was simply dangerous. A result of ignorance. Something we are all born with, and at least in some aspects of life, will die with.

Philosophy, on the other hand, attempts to reach at things a bit non-physical. Such as the mind, emotion, the sense of identity, and purpose. Things that can't be measured by your science. Doubting a metaphysical position is easier to justify than doubting a physical scientific one, for obvious reasons. Which stands to reason, the burden or "minimal quality" of proof, doesn't have to fit every single person's understanding to be valid (unlike science). Basically, comparing one's doubt in philosophy is nothing like doubting whether the Sun will rise tomorrow. At least, not generally let alone automatically.

But a philosopher pauses and asks about rational truth. Pausing seems like a suspension of everyday action and pragmatism, the things to be done. There is a relationship between the philosopher's contemplation (pausing) and not following inductive everyday life, if one can say such a thing. — JuanZu

I don't see the value in this kind of distinction. How do you see it?

For Hume, imagination is the faculty of the mind that has the ability to associate or connect ideas with each other. Unlike memory (which only preserves the original order and position of impressions), imagination is free to combine ideas in infinite ways, producing both fictions (such as a unicorn) and the fundamental ideas of philosophy. In this sense, imagination plays an important role in legitimate beliefs. However, the fact that legitimacy is based on imagination makes its legitimacy even more problematic. Imagination provides the mechanism of association, but habit is the force that imprints the certainty of belief in those repeated associations. Without habit, imagination could only offer us fictions; with habit, it gives us the "legitimate beliefs" necessary for practical life.

Don't ask me why I said "certainty". Hume also discusses illegitimate beliefs. These consist purely of imagination and lead us to fictions because they are not based on habit. Among these illegitimate beliefs are the ideas of traditional metaphysics, such as causality as a necessary rational connection.

I don't see the value in this kind of distinction. How do you see it? — T Clark

You don't see the value of the distinction between rational and irrational? Or memory and imagination?

:gasp:

Hume's anthropology/psychology is what justifies his skeptical positions. Book II of the Treatise lays this out pretty well. The senses—impressions—are appearances. They do not bring the mind into direct contact with reality. Ideas are themselves derivative of impressions (as manipulated and analyzed by reason and imagination) and so they also do not bring us into contact with reality. Following the "Scandal of Deduction," "relations of ideas" cannot ever tell us anything we don't in a sense already know, and at any rate the ideas themselves are internal to the thinker. Reason is instrumental; it is, as Hume puts it, "inert" and has no direct contact with reality, nor any appetite for it (no drive towards union or knowledge).

So, if all we have access to is appearances, what then is the relationship between appearances and reality? Hume bars speculation here. Any knowledge of the relationship would need to come to us through appearances themselves, but then appearances, in being appearances, can never inform us as to this question. Appearances might be arbitrarily or only accidentally related to reality (consider the arguments against causality).

It should be obvious from this starting point that skepticism cannot be escaped if we accept the premises. At no point are we ever in contact with reality, and any relationship between reality and the appearances we do have access to is forever obscured.

The question then is, should we accept Hume's anthropology and psychology and his metaphysics of appearances? I don't think we should. For one, he doesn't really argue for it; he merely assets it as obvious, e.g., in Book II (and then refers to this assertion as a "proof" going forward, e.g. 3.1.1.8). But it isn't obvious. A great many thinkers have disagreed here, including almost everyone prior to the Enlightenment (plus plenty since).

A problem for Hume here is that, per his own epistemology, he cannot possibly know what he is asserting here. He cannot know the reality of how the mind works for the same reason he cannot know causes in the classical sense, etc. Not only that, but he doesn't even have any strong probabilistic warrant here, just an appeal to "shrugging and going back to billiards." Is it more "pragmatic" to believe Hume here though? Certainly, he cannot claim that he is "more likely" to be right based on inductive inference. He arguably is cutting off the branch he sits on, giving himself no warrant for asserting a hotly contested set of premises.

Now, to be fair, this inability to justify his own claims is exactly what we should expect if he is correct, but that hardly neutralizes the way in which the epistemology is self-undermining. We might also think that, prima facie, an epistemology that cannot justify even our most bedrock beliefs is likely to be a defective epistemology. Hume and the many who follow him normally justify these fairly radical claims by making them seem to be paragons of humility. However, arguing for the ignorance of all from one's own ignorance is arguably quite a presumption.

Second, we should take a good hard look at any philosophy that demands an appearances versus reality distinction but then denies access to reality. If "reality" is inaccessible, then we have no warrant for positing it. Only appearances show up. But if there are only appearances, then appearances just are reality.

Third, if appearances are arbitrarily related to what they are supposedly "appearances of," then they aren't actually appearances of those things in any meaningful sense. We might as well call them free floating, spontaneous, uncaused apparitions if we're going to deny that there is a reality that is in any way the causes of appearances (and no, I don't think the Kantian "limiting relation" is strong enough to secure status of "appearances" as appearance; it is just the spectral relation that is left by the sheer dogmatic presupposition that "phenomena" are "appearances of").

skepticism cannot be escaped if we accept the premises. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which, ironically, makes experience something of a miracle.

He cannot know the reality of how the mind works for the same reason he cannot know causes in the classical sense, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can you explain that further?

Maybe Hume just didn’t get into it? But I could see our experience of our own mind being different than our sense based experience. (I guess that is what Kant did.).

But consider Russell's Turkey. The turkey knows from a lifetime of experience that every morning the nice man comes to feed him at sunrise. This correlation has never failed; it is as regular as the rising sun. And yet on Thanksgiving morning, when the man comes for the turkey, he isn't planning on feeding him...

The doubt is justified on similar grounds. Might we be like the turkey? You might "remember" the sun always rising, but in virtue of what do you know that your memory is reliable? Plus, given Hume's disjoint bundle anthropology, the reliability of memory is perhaps more open to doubt.

Can you explain that further? — Fire Ologist

Hume gives a very specific narrative of how the mind and consciousness works, from which the skeptical arguments follow. But such a narrative itself presupposes the reliability of his own memory and introspection, induction, and indeed his own knowledge of a causal relationship between impressions and idea formation, as well knowledge of a cause-like computational role for reason.

And consider his objection to the idea that reason has direct access to reality or that the actuality of what is known must, in some sense, be "in" the knower. If this is dismissed as "metaphysical speculation" only because, "we could only know such through impressions, which are merely appearances, and there is no knowable relationship between appearances and reality," that simply begs the question.

I think Hume's argument hangs on the appearance of humility here. To be sure, he is saying that most of the past thinkers of East and West are grievously mistaken, but he isn't saying their beliefs are false, just that they cannot be known to be true. Yet this applies just as much to Hume's own narrative of how the mind works, which is what justifies this skepticism. Hence, what we have is an argument to global gnosis about the limits of knowledge made from a position of ignorance.

Arguably, when we see a rock shatter a window, we are experiencing a cause. Likewise, when we encounter evil, we are experiencing it. Hume thinks we cannot be experiencing what we think we are experiencing. But it is helpful to turn around and ask what would constitute the experience of a cause? If we had a discrete "cause sense" like smell, and experienced it when a rock smashed a window, surely Hume would just dismiss this as mere appearance as well. So there is actually no evidence that can falsify Hume here; the conclusion that we cannot experience causes is axiomatic, which just brings us back to why we ought to accept his axioms. It's important that his axioms don't just limit us to the senses (after all, the Peripatetic Axiom: "whatever is in the intellect is first in the senses" doesn't result in these consequences) but also declare what can be known through the senses a priori.

This is more obvious when we get to his claim that we never experienced vice or evil in Book III. Arguably, we do. What else is disgust, outrage, pain, etc.? These are surely sensations. And pain is a sensation that is continuous with touch and hearing. So why can we not sense badness? Again, it's axiomatic that these sensations are internal (and in a certain sense, all sensation is internal because it only deals in appearances).

But I could see our experience of our own mind being different than our sense based experience. — Fire Ologist

I don't see how this helps. In virtue of what is Hume's introspection more right than those of pre-modern thinkers or modern phenomenologists, etc. such that we should dismiss their understanding of how the mind works and accept Hume's? Consider also the idea that the act of understanding is luminous (reflexive). Hume can deny this on the grounds of introspection, but why ought we believe he introspects more correctly than his opponents?

Speaking of Hume, if I witness what appears to be a miracle, which explanation is more rational?

Suppose I am standing before a person who says “Let there be fish!” and, before my eyes, dozens of fish appear out of nowhere. I’ve eliminated other possibilities: it’s not a magic trick, there’s a large crowd of people with me seeing the same thing, and I’m not hallucinating. Suppose I've narrowed it down to two remaining explanations:

A genuine miracle is occurring — a supernatural violation of natural laws, or I am probably in a universe (within an infinite multiverse) where an extraordinarily improbable natural fluctuation — say, a “Boltzmann fish” scenario — has spontaneously produced the fish.

If I I think I probably live in a multiverse, which explanation would Hume think I should favor?

You don't see the value of the distinction between rational and irrational? — unenlightened

Hume’s idea of legitimate belief is not irrational. If anything it’s non-rational. Very few of our beliefs are rational. Even fewer are irrational. The large majority are non-rational. Rational belief comes into play when a monkey wrench gets thrown in the machinery.

Or memory and imagination? — unenlightened

I don’t understand how this is relevant.

Hume concluded that fundamental beliefs, such as the existence of an external world or the existence of the self, are not rationally justifiable but are legitimate because they are the result of experience and custom.

However, I wonder: what makes them legitimate if they are not justified by reason? — JuanZu

If the natural world produced life, and evolved a consciousness that mediated interaction with the world, it seems that this would entail an innate sense that this world is external to the organism. This would make it a a properly basic belief - which are rational to have and maintain, unless defeated. This entails a non-doxastic justification.

The doubt is justified on similar grounds. Might we be like the turkey? You might "remember" the sun always rising, but in virtue of what do you know that your memory is reliable? Plus, given Hume's disjoint bundle anthropology, the reliability of memory is perhaps more open to doubt. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it? Do you doubt it on any of those grounds? Want to put some money on it? :wink:

This is Wittgenstein's suggestion. There might be reasons such as these on particular occasions and in particular circumstances. But because my memory is sometimes unreliable does not mean that I can or should never rely on it, because even the interpretation of immediate sense data relies on memory, and thus there is nothing at all without it. And Hume is similarly complacent in practice about such matters.

But because my memory is sometimes unreliable does not mean that I can or should never rely on it, because even the interpretation of immediate sense data relies on memory, and thus there is nothing at all without it. — unenlightened

It seems to me the reliance on memory you are talking about is rational. So, what’s the problem?

So, what’s the problem? — T Clark

The problem is that it is not rational, in the sense that no amount of past evidence can constrain the future in any way, logically. And you just saying it seems rational does not make it so either. It goes something like this:

The future will be similar to the past because in the past, the future was usually similar to the past, and the future will be similar to the past, because it generally was in the past, so it will be in the future.
Repeat without rinsing until convinced.

The problem is that it is not rational, in the sense that no amount of past evidence can constrain the future in any way, logically. And you just saying it seems rational does not make it so either. It goes something like this: — unenlightened

So let’s say you and I are sitting out on my front porch drinking whiskey sours. I live on a pretty busy road so cars are going by often. Let’s say every 30 seconds. We sit there for 10 minutes or so watching cars go by and keeping track. During that time 20 cars go by. Fifteen of them have Massachusetts plates, two have Rhode Island plates, and three have New Hampshire plates.

Then I say “I’ll bet you $50 the next car will have Rhode Island plates?“ You say “sure.” I’d say your decision to take that bet was rational.

I won't take your bet, because I'm a stranger and you're local and you might know that the ferry just docked and we're due a contingent of Rhode Islanders. Instead, I'll throw you what I hope is a more substantial lifeline/timeline.

So, imagine a world where the future is not always like the past.

You are watching a film, Death in Venice, say, and somewhere in the middle, it cuts to the middle of Bambi, and then it starts jumping every frame to a different movie, so that there is just a meaningless flicker of images changing without connection and too fast to even identify.

But there is still a continuity, which is the person watching.

So now remove that continuity, such that each frame, is seen by a different person. Now there is no continuity, but there is a problem: without any continuity, there is nothing to say one frame comes before or after another; there is no temporal order of past and future, just a heap of random watchers of random frames with no connection at all.

In other words, if the future fails to be connected to the past and related to it, it fails to be the future. The future is necessarily similar to the past, otherwise it is not the future. The timeline has to hold together, or else it is broken, and a broken timeline is not a timeline at all.

I won't take your bet, — unenlightened

Too late, you already took the bet. The question is was your decision rational? If you say no, it’s kind of hard to take your argument seriously.

imagine a world where the future is not always like the past. — unenlightened

I don’t have to imagine it, I live in the world where the future is not always like The past.

In other words, if the future fails to be connected to the past and related to it, it fails to be the future. The future is necessarily similar to the past, otherwise it is not the future. The timeline has to hold together, or else it is broken, and a broken timeline is not a timeline at all. — unenlightened

Sorry, I really don’t understand this argument

Sorry, I really don’t understand this argument — T Clark

I'll just leave it there, and see if it appeals to anyone else. I think you didn't understand Hume's problem in the first place, so an argument that addresses it might likely be rather opaque.

I'll just leave it there, and see if it appeals to anyone else. I think you didn't understand Hume's problem in the first place, so an argument that addresses it might like — unenlightened

You still haven’t answered my question. Would your decision to take the bet be rational?

Would your decision to take the bet be rational? — T Clark

I have already explained why it would not have been rational, viz. that your offering the bet in circumstances where you had expertise that I lacked, especially when you had been plying me with alcohol made me suspect a scam. Thus I had legitimate Wittgensteinian reasons for doubt in the particular circumstances.

I have already explained why it would not have been rational, viz. that your offering the bet in circumstances where you had expertise that I lacked, especially when you had been plying me with alcohol made me suspect a scam. Thus I had legitimate Wittgensteinian reasons for doubt in the particular circumstances. — unenlightened

This is why we pragmatists rule the world.

I have already explained why it would not have been rational, viz. that your offering the bet in circumstances where you had expertise that I lacked, especially when you had been plying me with alcohol made me suspect a scam. Thus I had legitimate Wittgensteinian reasons for doubt in the particular circumstances. — unenlightened

You provided rational reasons not take the bet. But another person might very well take the bet, on the basis of the probability and some good reasons to be confident he wasn't being scammed - that would be rational also.

You provided rational reasons not take the bet. But another person might very well take the bet, on the basis of the probability and some good reasons to be confident he wasn't being scammed - that would be rational also. — Relativist

So rationality doesn't work as a decision guide.