Humean malaise

The Great Whatever

Hume used to be one of my favorite philosophers, and I think he's the favorite, or near-favorite, of a lot of young people studying philosophy. He's also probably one of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking philosophical world, and the only one of the early moderns that contemporary philosophers non-trivially identify with as something other than a historical precedent.

Lately my love of Hume has been wearing off, he doesn't seem as impressive as he was, and I wonder why I was so taken with him.

If I could get to the keystone of Hume's thought, I think it all rests on one sort of fundamental purported insight, which is roughly the insight that nothing has to do with anything else, unless by logical deduction, which are really at bottom just tricks of language. Everything is isolable and considerable as a completely atomized, free-floating substance with no non-logical connection to anything else. This, I think, sums up fairly Hume's entire epistemological and metaphysical output, and the influence of this picture on later thinkers is obvious.

One of the reasons I think this picture appeals to young thinkers is because it's easy to dispel certain sorts of arguments with a certain sort of response, viz. by taking any claim anyone makes that assumes a connection between two things and pointing out that in fact one thing does not necessarily imply the other. Most fallacies people tend to make when unschooled in argumentation can be rebutted by this sort of trick.

But this just seems less and less interesting as time goes on. So many objections can be rephrased as 'well, yeah, but nothing has to do with anything else.' But this is obviously false and not an interesting thing to say or think. So Hume, in retrospect, doesn't seem all that interesting.

It's especially dispiriting when talking about social categories, because we tend to respond to people claiming that certain things are related to certain other things in this way. Are mental health and left-handedness (to choose a non-political example, so as not to ruffle feathers) linked? No, the Humean says – after all, nothing about being left-handed implies you're more likely to abuse drugs or commit suicide, etc. But for all that the world tells a different story. For whatever reason, left-handed people just have worse mental health on most fronts. But your typical young philosophers, or typical people say on a philosophy forum, are not going to be sensitive to these sorts of deeper and more subtle connections between things, because they're still infatuated with Hume. And so they're more likely to play word games with the categories rather than try to explain, or even wonder, why these connections might hold. Hume's world-view leads only to logic-chopping and absolutely nothing else, and is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that once you assume everything is totally disparate from everything else, there's literally nothing to say about anything.

Just a feeling. That's all.

Janus

I concur with you on this, however I was never taken with Hume at all. Apart from the fact that he is obviously a genius, to be able to write such original, comprehensive, and subtle treatises with great clarity in his mid-twenties, I think his philosophy is uninteresting because the direction he perhaps pioneered has been a disappointing cul de sac.

In my view, the greatest thing about Hume was his awakening of the truly great Kant from "dogmatic slumbers". Sometimes a profoundly, brilliantly, wrong view propounded by one thinker may lead to a profoundly right view propounded by another.

If I could get to the keystone of Hume's thought, I think it all rests on one sort of fundamental purported insight, which is roughly the insight that nothing has to do with anything else, unless by logical deduction, which are really at bottom just tricks of language. Everything is isolable and considerable as a completely atomized, free-floating substance with no non-logical connection to anything else. This, I think, sums up fairly Hume's entire epistemological and metaphysical output, and the influence of this picture on later thinkers is obvious. — The Great Whatever

That plays a big role, but then, so does the fundamental role of experience. He set out on an enquiry into human understanding, to make some headway into a science of human nature. And his philosophy was not entirely destructive. He is well known for his copy principle, for example, which he presents as something that everyone's experience confirms, but he also gives an argument to establish it. This part of his philosophy has to do with relations between impressions and ideas, such as that there is a constant conjunction between the two. The failure of logical deduction does not prevent him from constructing a philosophy that seeks to explain why we think of things as having to do with other things.

I think that you are being a bit unfair, actually. But I get where you're coming from, and I agree to some extent.

The Great Whatever

The failure of logical deduction does not prevent him from constructing a philosophy that seeks to explain why we think of things as having to do with other things. — Sapientia

The point is, though, that he didn't. His philosophy ended with no account of personal identity or separation, continuity, or the coherence of any two ideas or impressions between each other. He gives several observations about mechanisms that seem to empirically govern certain things following or being associated with other things, but his own philosophy prevents him from giving any account of why these things should cause associations as they do.

TheWillowOfDarkness

I think your reading performs the same reasoning Hume was breaking out of: the equivocation of logic and the world.

Hume doesn't really deny the connections of the world, just that they are given by logic or metaphysics.

It's not a denial of association, but an alteration of how we grasp it. Rather than, for example, left-handness and mental illness being connected in logic, Hume recognises they are together in the world. The connection is a result of particular people, their attributes and environment, rather than a logical or metaphysical truth that left-handness=mentally ill.

Hume recognises there is no "why." States are associated as they are only through themselves.

The point is, though, that he didn't. His philosophy ended with no account of personal identity or separation, continuity, or the coherence of any two ideas or impressions between each other. He gives several observations about mechanisms that seem to empirically govern certain things following or being associated with other things, but his own philosophy prevents him from giving any account of why these things should cause associations as they do. — The Great Whatever

His explanation had to do with custom or habit.

To address just the first of those, he advanced the bundle theory of the self, which gives a sceptical account of personal identity. He didn't just uncritically adopt past or contemporaneous theories - or rather, assumptions - of the self (which is to his credit, in my view). Although he cannot account for the self (conceived of as some sort of totality of our conscious life) through his empiricism, he accepts that we nevertheless have some idea of personal identity, and that this must be accounted for, which he does by appealing to the "associative principles" that he has previously elucidated and to memory.

I agree that his own philosophy prevents him, to some extent, from giving any account of why these things should cause associations as they do. He himself says or suggests as much at one point (which, again, I think is to his credit, since it indicates intellectual honesty and an unwillingness to do exactly what he has criticised other philosophers of doing, as well as maintaining consistency). But where he may have lacked solutions, he raised important challenges.

TheWillowOfDarkness

I do agree Hume is not all that interesting from a personal point of view though. He more or less only tells you what you are not-- not logic, not necessary, so he's really only interesting as a refutution of ideas you are a necessary state. He doesn't really elucidate anything about who you are or how that's important.

The Great Whatever

To address just the first of those, he advanced the bundle theory of the self, which gives a sceptical account of personal identity. — Sapientia

Hume noted that the theory was unsatisfactory because he wasn't able to coherently characterize the notion of a bundle by his own lights. That is, he had no way to characterize why from one moment to the next one bundle should persist qua bundle: the very notion is predicated on a deeper notion of continuity that he locked himself out of. The bundle theory is literally incoherent, and Hume recognized this.

In my view, the greatest thing about Hume was his awakening of the truly great Kant from "dogmatic slumbers". Sometimes a profoundly, brilliantly, wrong view propounded by one thinker may lead to a profoundly right view propounded by another. — John

He also influenced Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper, and others.

Moliere

↪The Great Whatever

Golly, it's been wayyyy long since I've read Hume. I remember being very impressed with his argument though when I did read him. But I also remember learning later that I had misread him too.

My main disagreement was with his take on causality. I wasn't sure how to tackle the problem differently, because his argument isn't fallacious or anything, but it just seemed like there had to be something wrong somewhere since -- i knew that heat caused water to boil, for instance, and it didn't make sense that tomorrow the water would freeze due to heat.

It seemed to me, at least then, that a fallabalistic account of knowledge could accommodate Hume's causation skepticism. But I don't know if I could say that now. It just seemed a "quick fix", if anything at all.

Really, I think you'd need a different account of causation.

But, that specific problem seems pretty far astray from your lament with Hume. Yours seems more general, in that Hume's account of knowledge is largely the product of analysis -- the breaking of categories and things and concepts into its constituent parts, as well as the sort of hammer-scourge which skepticism has on other kinds of questions or inferences which are not exactly certain or even close to certainty, but still worth considering and wondering about in a philosophical fashion.

Do I have you right?

Evol Sonic Goo

Lately my love of Hume has been wearing off, he doesn't seem as impressive as he was, and I wonder why I was so taken with him. — The Great Whatever

He suited your agenda, now he doesn't.

The Great Whatever

But, that specific problem seems pretty far astray from your lament with Hume. Yours seems more general, in that Hume's account of knowledge is largely the product of analysis -- the breaking of categories and things and concepts into its constituent parts, as well as the sort of hammer-scourge which skepticism has on other kinds of questions or inferences which are not exactly certain or even close to certainty, but still worth considering and wondering about in a philosophical fashion. — Moliere

It's not so much that Hume is ruthlessly analytical, but rather that the whole of his thought seems reducible to a single analytical move, applied relentlessly. If the validity of that move is questioned, his thought is no longer compelling.

Good analysis also recognizes the way in which things are to be broken up along their joints, and so reveals the way they were put together before being broken up. Hume lacks a taste for this. He assumes from the start that everything must be completely separate, and so concludes that it cant be put back together: and he sheepishly admits in a footnote that this isn't actually coherent on its own terms.

It's worth noting that Hume didn't just leave himself without the possibility of certainty, but also without the possibility of probability. He had habit, as Sapientia said, but by his own lights habit could never be rationally justified. There is a sense in which Hume concludes that one cannot really think about anything.

Janus

There is a sense in which Hume concludes that one cannot really think about anything. — The Great Whatever

Yes, this is exactly the problem; and it is what led to Kant's great insight that we can and actually do think about absolutely everything, and that it is merely a profoundly tenacious illusion that there is, rationally speaking, anything left over from our thinking.

Marchesk

I never found Humean skepticism about causation to be compelling. It's just obviously so that there is an order in the world that goes beyond mere conjunction. Humean causation, at least on the face of it, reduces the entire universe to radical contingency, which is prima facie absurd.

Also, the idea that the sun could stop shining tomorrow (or water ceasing to be boiled by heat) being analogous to Thanksgiving for the turkey just seems very wrong, as if anything could literally happen at any moment, we've just been lucky so far the cosmos appears orderly.

And all of that just to maintain purity of skeptical empiricism, instead of just admitting the very well could be more to the world than meets the senses. It's too high of a price to pay.

Pneumenon

I think that Hume represents what you might call the "terminus of sense" for empiricism, if you see empiricism and its attendant skepticism as a process of denying (or maybe bracketing) connections between things.

Incidentally, reading this just now has made Kant's attempt at responding to Hume at least somewhat more intelligible to me. Kant wants to say, "But the connections are in you anyway." The thing is, Kant can't maintain that, or at least, he doesn't seem to in the CPR, e.g. the part where he claims that temporal determinations would still present themselves without the temporal organizing faculty, just in a different way.

The Great Whatever

↪Pneumenon

Yeah, Kant always seemed to me to be engaged in a purely apologetic exercise that went nowhere. I was never taken in by him.

Marchesk

eah, Kant always seemed to me to be engaged in a purely apologetic exercise that went nowhere. I was never taken in by him. — The Great Whatever

Next, you'll be taking aim at Witty ;)

The Great Whatever

↪Marchesk

He was a handsome dude.

Wosret

Hume was a cool dude, brah. I listened to a lecture course on him, and read like three of his books. I liked his machine head when I was one as well. He made the most sense to me. He wrote raving reviews of his own books under pseudonyms, and ate and drank himself to death because "reason is a slave to the passions". He also suggested that England had attained an unprecedented, and the highest comparative state of liberty mankind had ever seen. He liked to talk about all of this, while high-fiving his French buddies and scattered among talk about what a tosser god is in his Scottish accented French.

He didn't have a lot of sense, but he had a machine head, better than the rest.

I do like Kant, but no one should be taken too seriously, as if they have all of the answers, or always know what's what. If someone seems wrong to you, then they probably are, and where we disagree is a lot more fun and interesting to focus on than where we agree. If we can handle it.

Janus

↪Sapientia

Yes, but Kant was so much more important than any of those inferior men. >:O

Agustino

But your typical young philosophers, or typical people say on a philosophy forum, are not going to be sensitive to these sorts of deeper and more subtle connections between things, because they're still infatuated with Hume. And so they're more likely to play word games with the categories rather than try to explain, or even wonder, why these connections might hold. Hume's world-view leads only to logic-chopping and absolutely nothing else, and is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that once you assume everything is totally disparate from everything else, there's literally nothing to say about anything. — The Great Whatever

Let me be a necromancer for once and raise this thread from the dead.

The problem with Hume is the problem that is often encountered with modern Western philosophy. A very legalistic, and logistic way of doing philosophy - a lack of awareness of how we actually learn about the world. The process of learning does not involve logical processing of information. Logical processing seems to be helpful only to put data into a coherent whole, enable better predictability, determining consistency, and easier retrieval (connected data is easier to retrieve than disconnected) - but it certainly cannot produce any new data. So when induction fails for Hume - all that it shows is that we cannot reason our way to new data - new information. We need to appeal to the contents of experience, and induction in order to be able to do that.

Humean malaise

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