Cause and Effect: Humean Doubts and Kantian Answers

          To understand David Hume's criticism of the idea that we can know, in a robust and philosophical way, that there is a connection between what we call causes and effects, we must first examine how he thought our minds related to the world. Unlike the Rationalists that came before him, Hume was skeptical that reason and intuition were all that we needed for knowledge. For Hume, the first contact that we have with any object (if it exists at all) is the appearance the object has on our senses, so that the first thing that we are aware of is an impression that we have.¹ Humean impressions are not simply limited to our sensual perceptions of the potential objects around us, but are also of every possible thing that we might experience, including our own internal mental processes, like emotion-states and first-order desires. Impressions are not just what we see, feel, taste, etc., but how we feel, what we want, and what motivates us. In short, impressions are the way that we first experience everything.

          From those impressions, content is directly added into the mind and forms ideas that share the same content. Hume thought this was a matter of common sense, anyone could see that while reflecting upon the painful experience of touching a burning hot object, we almost feel the same pain, but with less force than if we were actually touching something hot.² To Hume, the impression had a strength to it that could never be matched by a mere idea, but impressions only differed from ideas in strength; the content was copied directly into the idea exactly as it was in the impression.³

          Once a series of impressions has formed a series of ideas, the imagination tends to form perceived connections between the ideas, and those connections can be evaluated according to any number of relationships they bear to each other.⁴ The comparative work is not a function of perception, but of imagination, and as such, it cannot involve working with impressions, but only with ideas. Of all possible relations, Hume thought that they fell into seven broad groups: resemblance, identity, space and time, quantity, quality, contrariety, and cause and effect.⁵ From the comparison of ideas, the imagination then sorts the ideas in a way that allows us to make sense of the impressions we receive.

The Heart of Men and the Direction of God

“The PREPARATIONS of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord. … The Lord had made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. ... A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.”¹

There may be no more enduring philosophic problem than that of human free will. We seem to think that we are ultimately morally responsible for what we do, and yet by means of excuse we can find reasons where one might not be responsible. Some of those reasons seem to be so strong that they are either taken as Gospel or appear to be metaphysical facts of the universe.

It might be a fools errand to try to fix a date to the beginning of the free will debate, but surely the threads of the debate can be found in ancient texts, both religious and philosophic. For instance, Plato held that the will of a person comes from the rational portion of the three-part soul, and is properly used to keep base desires in check.² Essentially, in this view, as long as reason governed desires, a person was acting freely.

On Fictions

By James Zike

8 March 2013

A Treatise of Human Nature
or
Project Gutenburg ebook

As modern readers, we often bring with us a large amount of intellectual baggage that tends to cloud our judgments.  At times, it can be difficult to separate modern usage and meanings of words from historic works that use the terms in ways that we are not accustomed to any longer.  When David Hume uses the term “fiction”, it may be tempting to import our concept of fiction as fake, false, or untrue, into a work that does not support that usage. 

Hume demonstrated that certain common understandings about objects in the world are not correct and amount to nothing more than “fictional” accounts, but with his ontological statements, he did not intend to answer any metaphysical questions.  That is to say, that Hume’s use of the term “fiction” did not imply falsity or impossibility.  A careful understanding of how he organized his system of knowledge based on empirical means might place his fictions back into the realm of metaphysical possibilities in a way that preserves how he used them throughout his works.