Hume’s Epistemology and Theory of Knowledge
Hume’s Epistemology
David Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1711. He lived in the heart of the Enlightenment (being its most characteristic British representative). He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, but in 1734 moved to France, where he settled in the same school as Descartes. In 1739, he began to publish his Treatise on Human Nature, but it received little attention. In 1748, he released the first version of his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In this famous work, he synthesizes many of the ideas outlined in the Treatise. His upbeat mood helped him to bear with fortitude his failures to obtain a professorship at the University of Edinburgh. Hume died in Edinburgh in 1776.
Investigating Knowledge
From both empiricism and the Enlightenment, Hume inherited a basic and legitimate interest in human knowledge. For this reason, philosophy has to study first man and his faculties; only this way can one know whether or not their products have a warranty.
The Origin of Our Ideas
For Hume, all our mental contents are perceptions, and all perceptions come from experience. Nativism, as Locke said, is false. Hume does not want to echo the idea that our perceptions are representations of the world. For this reason, he ranks them, according to their degree of vividness, into two categories: impressions and ideas.
- Impressions are immediate sensations of experience.
- Ideas, however, are fuzzy images or copies of impressions. They are products of imagination and memory that fail to mimic the intensity of the originals.
Our perceptions can also be classified according to other criteria. According to their sources, perceptions can be:
- Perceptions of sensation: These come from the senses.
- Perceptions of reflection: These are only mental states.
Depending on their composition, perceptions are divided into:
- Simple: These cannot be divided into smaller ones.
- Complex: These can be distinguished and divided into simpler ones.
The Association of Ideas
All simple ideas come from their corresponding simple impressions. Complex ideas are the result of the combination and union made by the imagination with simple impressions. Imagination is the faculty charged with combining simple impressions to form complex ideas. Sometimes it does so fancifully. However, in most cases, the imagination creates complex ideas following certain laws and regularities. These trends are what Hume called the laws of association of ideas. Let’s see what they are:
- Resemblance: Something in our minds drives us to associate ideas between which there is some degree of similarity.
- Contiguity in space and time: One idea leads naturally to another when there is a close relationship between them, either spatial or temporal.
- Cause and effect: Because phenomena tend to happen successively, our understanding creates an expectation for the future.
Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact
For Hume, our mental contents are reduced to impressions or ideas. We think or reason, that is, construct judgments and statements, and establish relations between our perceptions. All these trials that make up the edifice of knowledge can be classified into two types: relations of ideas and matters of fact. In the former, we establish relationships between ideas and concepts, and they do not arise from experience, but from reasoning.