David Hume’s Empiricism: Context and Critique of Causality
David Hume: Biography and Historical Setting
Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 and died in 1776.
Historical Context
England after the Revolution of 1688
- The Revolution established bourgeois parliamentary democracy and the supremacy of Parliament.
- Intervention of the people in the laws, rights, and political liberties.
- Economic and religious freedom: Abolition of monopolies.
- England becomes the first economic, industrial, and capitalist power.
Pre-Revolutionary France
- “Enlightened Despotism”: “All for the people, but without the people.”
- Secularization, deism, and atheism.
- Increasing influence of the Enlightenment.
Sociocultural Context: The Enlightenment
The Scottish, English, and French Enlightenment
- Confidence in critical, autonomous, secular reasoning.
- Confidence in education and the development of knowledge.
- Confidence in the progress of mankind.
Economic and Industrial Shifts
- Economic liberalism takes hold.
- The Industrial Revolution begins.
Philosophical Context
Continental Rationalism
- Belief in innate ideas.
- Mathematical modeling of reasoning and deductive methods.
- Metaphysical speculation.
English Empiricism
- There are no innate ideas; all ideas and all knowledge come from experience.
- Physics as a model of inductive reasoning and the experimental method.
- Denial of metaphysics.
Utilitarianism
- The good is what is useful, what brings pleasure, and what provides the most happiness.
- The goal is “The greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.”
Moral Emotivism
- Moral judgments do not derive from reason, but from the ‘moral sense’.
Hume’s Core Philosophy: Empiricism and Knowledge
Hume is situated, like Locke, in the field of psychological empiricism: he addresses the explanation of knowledge starting from the most immediate experience of one’s own mind.
He considers the word ‘idea’ imprecise and confusing, replacing it with the term perception. To know is to have perceptions. By studying these perceptions, he distinguishes two distinct types:
- Impressions: Perceptions of great vividness and intensity, where details are easily perceived (e.g., immediate sensory data).
- Ideas: Perceptions that are duller and more diffuse, which always accompany some impression (e.g., memories or concepts).
This distinction means that any idea must necessarily arise from a corresponding impression.
The Laws of Association
Perceptions are presented with order and regularity. This order is attributed to the laws of association, which Hume considered the mental equivalent of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. These laws are:
- Association by Similarity.
- Association by Spatio-Temporal Contiguity.
- Association by Causality (or Cause and Effect).
Two Types of Knowledge
According to this approach, Hume distinguishes two types of knowledge:
1. Relations Between Ideas
This realm is dominated by the association by similarity (logic and mathematics). It yields real knowledge that is universally valid. Its validity depends only on the principle of contradiction.
2. Knowledge of Facts
This presents more difficulty. Its development involves the laws of space-time association and causality. While space-time relations can be seen and are therefore impressions, causality cannot be perceived. In causality, the mind goes beyond what is immediately present, moving from one event to another.
The Problem of Causality
For traditional rationalism, the cause-effect relationship was necessary, justified by the principle of causality: “Whatever begins to exist must have a cause.” This principle was considered self-evident and a law of the mind. However, for Hume, the ultimate justification is experience, and there is no impression that justifies the validity of this principle.
Causality, in the background, signifies a “necessary connection” between cause and effect. Hume concludes that causality is only a “belief,” the result of the custom and habit of having always found the cause and effect linked psychologically.
Rejection of Substance
Once the cognitive value of the principle of causality is removed, the three main areas of reality—the “I” (Self), the external world, and God—are left substantially unsupported.
Moral Emotivism
In the area of morality, reason loses its force. Reason can only determine the truth or falsity of propositions, but it cannot influence behavior. The foundation is moral sentiment. Hume defends moral emotivism, thus leaving the door open to the irrational, a path that Rousseau would later emphasize in modern and contemporary philosophy.