The Study of History

The following is a statement of my personal understanding of the study of History, and how it relates to the past, relics, collective memories, and the meaning of the past.

1. History is the study of the past.
2. The past is a set of events that occurred previous to the present.
3. Events can leave evidence, which is known as relics.
4. Not all events create relics.
5. The relation that makes a relic historically significant is that it was affected by the past in a way that could bear meaning.
6. Human-created relics can bear meaning.
7. Relics act as symbols for bundles of meanings.
8. The relation between the bundles of meanings associated with relics and the past is determined by collectives of individuals.
9. The collectives normalize meaning amongst themselves via communication about the remembered past.
10. Collectives are determined by some aspect of commonality.
    1. Degrees of difference can remove individuals from identifiable collectives.
    2. Collectives are not necessarily inclusive or exclusive.
       

Closing Pascal’s Box

          Nearly four centuries ago Blasie Pascal laid out his famous wager in an attempt to prove that it was rational to believe in God. The argument seems deceptively simple, either God exists or not, we have to “place a bet,” so to speak, and the only way we “win” the wager is if we bet for God, and God exists. Hidden in this attempt to justify theism is a rather complex use of probability and decision theories, voluntarism, pragmatism, and an often overlooked use of infinity.¹ This argument had implications far beyond the Philosophy of Religion, and set the stage for the continuing debate on epistemic justification, how it is rational for us to form and hold beliefs. In effect, he opened Pandora's box on this topic.

          In this paper I will show that some of the last openings for Pascal's mode of thinking have been closed off in recent years. While it is clear that there is a great number of things that can be said about his argument, I will focus on voluntarism, forming beliefs at will, and pragmatic justifications, basing beliefs on non-epistemic concerns. With these two features alone, we can remove any doubt that rational people can be epistemically justified in being convinced by the wager, and we can close Pascal's box.

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.

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.