David Hume, but it's not certain...

David Hume

David Hume (1711-1776)’s theories on certainty can be summarised by the phrase; ‘can’t derive an ought from an is’. This phrase outlines Hume’s belief that nothing is certain and that, although experience is usually our only source of information, due to our ‘synthetic’ way of thinking, humans often allow our past experience to lead us into error by assumption. In this way Hume is very sceptical and would even disagree that the Sun will definitely rise tomorrow and that every event has a differing degree of certainty based on human testimony and sensory experience.

The synthetic method is how Hume believes we, as humans, think most of the time: combining our past experiences and simpler ideas to form more complex ones. A good example of this would be the concept of angels, where we have taken our experience of human beings and combined them with that of birds, thus creating the idea of such a creature without any sensory experience of one. The fact that humans think like this fuels Hume’s argument for the ridiculousness of belief in miracles and religion. It is important to note however, that Hume is not suggesting that miracle a certain to not have occurred, instead that through a natural ability to assess the likelihood of an occurrence. From this Hume suggests that the likelihood that the person who would spread word of a miracle is far more likely to be a deceiver or be deceived than the extremely unlikely occurrence of a miracle or the physical apparition of a god etc. Hume suggests that the synthetic method of thought is far better for scientific progress due to the potential for creativity through it’s usage, he warns however that one must be wary as it can lead to error due to assumption, hence his emphasis on the uncertainty of anything. He also believes that this uncertainty means that with scientific thought, one cannot assume causation, with the best example being that of billiard balls. Hume would suggest that no matter how many time a person has experimented with billiard balls; seeing a white ball hit a red ball and seemingly forcing it to move, it is not so that the white ball has caused the red ball to move, merely that the balls have happened to move at those angles every time it is repeated, as one can’t be certain that will happen again in the same way. This is a habit of association, where a mind associates the two events the two events together regularly; to the point where one might believe that the movement of the white ball must cause the movement of the red ball, however, Hume argues against this.

He compares the synthetic process with the deductive process, which he claims can have no use in scientific thought, an example of this process is the conclusion that all bicycles must have two wheels, this is because anything with more or less wheels than this goes by another name e.g: tricycle, unicycle etc.

Hume, due to his comprehension of the synthetic thought process, did not place any faith in metaphysics, as he saw the theories to have no grounding in likelihood, but a fabricated theory built to fit what we don’t know, Hume argues that this is preventing scientific progress, with those who accept unfounded testimonies require no proof as to what actually occurs when an event happens, and thus no developments can be made regarding improvement or prevention of events. Hume validates this theory by assessing the false prophet Alexander and the Paphlagonians, a civilization that was ‘ignorant and stupid’ in comparison to the rest of the world, and the belief that they placed in the testimony of humans even though they were known to be untrue by the more informed world outside. He then berates religion by saying that belief in such a thing is belief in conformity, following the human testimony of the masses rather than evidence or sensory data and that those; who are weak enough to think that such testimonies are even worth a second thought, have no opportunity for receiving any ‘better information’. A point that is even raised by Western Christians in modern times (when discussing terrorist beliefs and motives): Even though they themselves place belief in equally unlikely and unfounded human testimonies