David Hume’s Gnoseological Skepticism Essay

Introduction/Thesis

One of the main criticisms of David Hume’s gnoseological model has been traditionally reflective of the assumption that being strongly reductionist denies the possibility for people to be able to attain a complete understanding of the surrounding natural/social reality. Because of it, Hume’s outlook on gnoseology has been commonly referred to as such that epitomizes the “dead end of empiricist philosophy.”¹ Nevertheless, even though many individuals (especially the idealistically minded ones) tend to think of the philosopher’s insights into the very nature of human cognition as being overly mechanistic, this does not undermine the overall scientific legitimacy of Hume’s line of reasoning. After all, the recent discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and quantum physics confirm the full validity of the gnoseological model in question. The author will aim to substantiate the discursive appropriateness of this suggestion at length while arguing that Hume’s philosophy contributed towards keeping humanity on the path of intellectual progress.

Analysis/Discussion

The foremost idea that is being promoted throughout the selected sections in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is that there are two integral components of one’s conscious reasoning: impression and idea. The former refers to a person’s sensory-based experiences and the latter to his or her subjective judgments, with respect to what should be deemed these experiences’ significance, regarding the cause-effect ways of the world. Consequently, this implies that even the most abstract/perceptually unconventional notions, brought into existence by the brain’s capability to indulge in the synthesized type of thinking, are firmly grounded in the surrounding reality. As Hume noted, “When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.”² This, of course, reveals the fallaciousness of the idea that synthesized knowledge has any metaphysical quality to it.

According to the philosopher, while addressing life challenges on a daily basis, people involuntarily grow to recognize the recurring algorithmic patterns within the observable interrelationship between causes and effects in this world. A dropped apple necessarily falls down to the ground, the Sun rises in the East every morning, etc. The mind’s propensity for expecting a certain dialectical order of things is behind the formation of convictions in people. These convictions subsequently attain the subtleties of either an irrational belief or a rationale-based cognitive axiom. In his book, Hume identified three major principles of human cognition, “Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect.”³ The concerning principles, however, are “external” in the sense that they do not originate a priori in the person’s mind. Rather, they are the by-products of one’s ability to notice the cause-effect particularities of how the world turns around. Even though people are able to take practical advantage of the concerned principles while cognitively engaging with the reality’s observable extrapolations, there still remains much uncertainty as to why it is the case.

Hence, the most notable philosophical implications of Hume’s gnoseological model:

1. The mind is not independent in its constructions and conclusions concerning the world.

2. The mind’s lack of “cognitive independence” is reflective of the fact that people are naturally predisposed towards acting in accordance with their irrational/rational beliefs. Also, it shows that it is impossible to ascertain the truthfulness/falsity of one’s mental constructs outside of the experiential realm.

3. There is no good rationale in assuming that the cause-effect logic of the relationship among ideas inside one’s mind applies to the actual pattern of the person’s experiential impressions, from which these ideas derive.

Hume’s conclusions, in this regard, expose the fundamental inconsistency of the idea (popular with contemporary psychologists and social scientists) that the human brain has been specifically “designed” to do abstract/synthesized thinking per se, and that education is the key to making this world a better place. At the same time, however, they correlate well with what today’s neuroscientists know about the true purpose of human cognition. Human faculty for abstract thought is not concerned with discovering any “higher truth” about the workings of the universe but with enabling “hairless primates” to lead a socially integrated lifestyle. This, in turn, increases their chances to succeed in ensuring the survival of their genome into the next generation.⁴

If the deployment of a particular behavioral algorithm, on one’s part, makes it more likely for the person to successfully undergo the “natural selection” process, then his or her mind will automatically adjust the individual’s perception of the surrounding reality to be epistemically consistent with it. In other words, it is a person’s behavior (defined by the external circumstances) that determines the specifics of his or her conscious reasoning and not the other way around. This also explains the phenomenon of “competence without comprehension,” commonly observed with regard to the termites’ seemingly mysterious ability to construct termite mounds that closely resemble gothic cathedrals while featuring the same level of structural complexity.

Apparently, the ways of nature are not quite as intuitively sound as most people assume them to be. Hume must be given credit for having realized it well ahead of his time. It is specifically this particular realization, on the philosopher’s part, from which his “gnoseological skepticism” originates, “All inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past… If there be any suspicion, that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless”.⁵ To confirm the validity of Hume’s suggestion, in this regard, one will need to imagine a hypothetical machine that features two light bulbs (blue and red) and the button that is supposed to ignite either of them upon being pressed. After having pressed the button ten thousand times and realized that only the blue light bulb reacts to this action, a researcher is likely to conclude that the pressing of the button will necessarily result in this particular light bulb being turned on. However, it may be the case that the machine is programmed to ignite the red light bulb once the number of the button’s pressings reaches ten thousand and one. This alone implies that reproducibility should not be seen as the undisputed indication of veracity.

The earlier mentioned discoveries in the field of quantum physics substantiate the legitimacy of Hume’s argument even further. After all, these discoveries imply that the ways of the universe can only be predicted on a macro-level. The behavior of elementary particles (the building components of macro-objects), however, cannot be predicted by definition: Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” predetermines it to be the case.⁶ What this means is that there is always a theoretical possibility for the flow of events in the macro-world to cease making any conventional (intuitively sound) cause-effect sense. For example, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, warmth is always transmitted from the warmer objects to the colder ones and not vice versa. However, because the veracity of this law has a statistical quality to it, it is possible to imagine the situation when instead of being turned into vapor, boiling water turns into a chunk of ice. As Hume aptly suggested, “In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past experience. Their secret nature, and consequently, all their effects and influence, may change”.⁷ The only possible objection to Hume’s insistence that all mental abstractions are quintessentially experiential is that people appear to be capable of visualizing (mentally) even those shades of a particular color to which they have never been exposed in real life. The philosopher admitted that he does not know how to explain this phenomenon. In the author’s opinion, however, the very fact that there is a strongly defined sophist sounding to this inconsistency renders it deprived of much of its actuality.

Conclusion

What has been said earlier helps to explain why David Hume has never been considered a particularly popular philosopher in the West. Evidently enough, Hume’s “gnoseological skepticism” is quite inconsistent with people’s unconscious predisposition towards striving to attain an intellectual mastery over the surrounding reality as an integral part of their existential mode. Nevertheless, there can be very little doubt about the fact that one will indeed be able to benefit from reading Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The reason for this is apparent: one’s awareness of the factors that hamper human cognition is itself the necessary precondition for the concerned individual to be able to proceed with broadening its intellectual horizons. The author believes that this conclusion is fully consistent with the paper’s initial thesis.

Bibliography

Bansal, Ashish, and Ajay Kumar, “Generalized Analogs of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Inequality.” Journal of Inequalities and Applications 3, no. 2 (2015): 1-15.

Barlow, Richard. “’Hume Sweet Hume’: Skepticism, Idealism, and Burial in Finnegans Wake.” Philosophy and Literature 38, no.1 (2014): 266-275.

Delhez, Julien. “A Darwinian Manifesto for Rationality, Intelligence and Liberty.” Mankind Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2018): 127-143. Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Footnotes

1. Richard Barlow, “’Hume Sweet Hume’: Skepticism, Idealism, and Burial in Finnegans Wake,” Philosophy and Literature 38, no.1 (2014): 269.
2. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 2.
3. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 4.
4. Julien Delhez, “A Darwinian Manifesto for Rationality, Intelligence and Liberty,” Mankind Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2018): 135.
5. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 11.
6. Ashish Bansal and Ajay Kumar, “Generalized Analogs of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Inequality,” Journal of Inequalities and Applications 3, no. 2 (2015): 2.
7. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 12.