Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume Essay

When I refer to causality, I am referring to the belief that events have a relationship of action "A" causing action "B" where "A" is considered to be the final cause of "B." I also refer to the belief that we can know and understand these causal relationships and thusly know how the system works.

But David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, objected to Aquinas second point by arguing that if each individual link in the chain of causes and motions can be explained then there is no need for an additional explanation for the whole of the chain. The explanation of each part is enough of an explanation for the whole itself. But defenders say that the discovery of the Big Bang theory would be the beginning of the causes and motions in the universe and is not infinite, so infinite regress would not be possible.

Hume rejected lockes theory of experiencing cause. He argued that you do not feel the connection between your mind and arm, and thus don't sense the cause of the muscles contracting to raise your arm. Cause, in Hume's mind, is a synthetic experience used to explain the unobservable things in reality. To help explain he used the billiard ball experiement. Ball A is hit and put into motion towards ball B.When ball A collides with ball B the cause of ball B's movement is not experienced, there is no observable connection between the two. This would mean that there is no way to be certain that everytime Ball A collides with ball B that ball B will move, ball A could just as likely bounce off and begin rolling in a random direction. He believd that there is no way of knowing for certain the outcome of an event without being able to perceive the cause.

Have you ever wondered about the world beyond its original state? How we know that electricity produces a light bulb to light up or causes the sort of energy necessary to produce heat? But in the first place, what is electricity? Nor have we seen it and not we encountered it; however, we know what it can do, hence its effects. To help us better understand the notion of cause and effect, David Hume, an empiricist and skepticist philosopher, proposed the that there is no such thing as causation. In his theory, he explained the deliberate relationship between the cause and effect, and how the two factors are not interrelated. Think of it this way: sometimes we end up failing to light a match even though it was struck. The previous day, it lit up, but today it did not. Why? Hume’s theory regarding causation helps us comprehend matters of cause and effect, and how we encounter the effects in our daily lives, without the cause being necessary. According to Hume, since we never experience the cause of something, we cannot use inductive reasoning to conclude that one event causes another. In other words, causal necessity (the cause and effect being related in some way or another) seems to be subjective, as if it solely exists in our minds and not in the object itself.

David Hume, a philosopher who raised radical doubts about the rationality of the scientific enterprise. Hume believed that “experience can only assure us of what we are actually observing at present, or can remember having observed in the past” (Cottingham, 2008). In this paper I will show that David Hume’s claim on induction that when there is real knowledge of an event, it cannot correctly justify inductive assumptions.

On the other hand, Anscombe disagrees with Hume, and believes that we can, and do observe causation. Anscombe uses examples of crushing, chewing, pushing, and such to illustrate that we do perceive causation. For example, if person A holds a sheet of paper in their hand, and then begins to crush the sheet of paper, and then later we see the sheet of paper crumbled; Anscombe argues that this is enough evidence to show that we do perceive causation, because we can see the causing of the sheet of paper to crumble. Another example is of person A cutting a sheet of paper; Anscombe would argue that it is evident that we observe the causing of the sheet of paper be divided. In addition, Ansombe add that we can perceive causation by tracing an effect to its cause. For example, of the cutting of a sheet of paper by person A, one can traced the effect (sheet of paper cut in half) to its cause (person A cutting the sheet of paper). Therefore, Anscombe claims that we do perceive causation. Anscombe believes that this evidence is sufficient to prove that we not only perceive “contiguity” and “succession” of events, but the cause of events.

     Knowledge is gained only through experience, and experiences only exist in the mind as individual units of thought. This theory of knowledge belonged to David Hume, a Scottish philosopher. Hume was born on April 26, 1711, as his family’s second son. His father died when he was an infant and left his mother to care for him, his older brother, and his sister. David Hume passed through ordinary classes with great success, and found an early love for literature. He lived on his family’s estate, Ninewells, near Edinburgh. Throughout his life, literature consumed his thoughts, and his life is little more than his works. By the age of 40, David Hume had been employed twice and had failed at the family careers,

Hume says that for humans finding or thinking of no explanation for the cause and effect could be considered as such unintelligible. Hume explains that we get the knowledge of cause and effect through our experiences. Hume explains more in depth by describing if how something new is introduced to someone they would not have the experience to cover any of the causes and effects of that object because they have no past experience towards that one object. Hume also says that someone is not able to find the effect from just experiencing the cause and as Hume assumes only if you have experienced it all will you know what will happen if the same thing is going to happen you’ll assume or predict what will be the cause and effect. Such as for every day you experience the sun comes up every day you’ll expect it or predict that it will probably come back up tomorrow as it’s been a repeating experience. Hume presumes that people imagine, to discover the causes and effects through reasonings and not experience.which in turn is not what he believes is true. But Hume explains that we would never be able to find the cause of what gunpowder would do with fire through reasoning alone and also could not find the cause or effects of any particular event.

This is the assumption underlying all our ideas of causality. If the future does not resemble the past, then all our reason based on cause and effect will crumble. When Hume proposed questions such as “Is there any more intelligible proposition then to affirm that all trees will flourish in December and January, and will decay in May and June?” (49), Hume demonstrates that it is not a relation of ideas that future will resemble the past; it is possible that the course of nature will change. Therefore, what happens in the future is neither a relation of ideas, nor a matter of fact. “It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of past to future, since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance.”(51)

Hume’s sun argument consists of us assuming that the sun will rise because it always has. We as humans have a thought process in which we expect certain outcomes to take place purely based on what has happened through past experiences. Hume argues that just because the sun has always risen in the past, that does not justify the possibility that the sun will definitely rise again for the next morning. The sun not actually rise for the next morning is still a possibility. This argument is based on the fact that as humans we tend to believe that actions or events will take place in the future due to the same outcome occurring within past situations that were already experienced.

Hume also believed in cause and effect. I believe in this because in order for something to happen something needed to cause

It is logical to say that things happen for a reason. A ball, kicked by a child in a playground, flies through the air and eventually comes down to the ground. The child has kicked the ball enough times to expect that once the ball reaches its highest point, it will fall. Through experience of kicking the ball and it coming back to the ground, the child will develop expectations of this action. This thought process seems sound, yet a question of certainty arises. Can we be certain that future events will be like past events? Can we be certain that the ball will fall once it has been kicked? This concept was one of David Hume’s most famous philosophical arguments: the Problem of Induction. This paper will outline Hume’s standpoint, as well give criticism for his argument.

David Hume is a British empiricist which means that he thought that all knowledge is ultimately rooted in sense experience and that all of our ideas derive from preceding impressions of sense or reflection, this theory had a huge effect on Humes account of causation. In this essay I will look at Humes account of causation and examine if any version of the Regularity View of causation can be defended.

     Hume is an empiricist and a skeptic. He develops a philosophy that is generally approached in a manner as that of a scientist and therefore he thinks that he can come up with a law for human understanding. Hume investigates the understanding as an empiricist to try and understand the origins of human ideas. Empiricism is the notion that all knowledge comes from experience. Skepticism is the practice of not believing things in nature a priori, but instead investigating things to discover what is really true. Hume does not believe that all a posteriori knowledge is useful, too. He believes “all experience is useless unless predictive knowledge is possible.” There are various types of skepticism that Hume

Hume did not deny causation. He embraced it. But he did say that empirical methods could not logically prove its necessity, as observations only show a "constant conjunction" of events, a "regular succession" of A followed by B, which leads the mind to the inference of cause and effect. For Hume, causality is something humans naturally believe.