Hume Flashcards
What is the ‘Perceptions of the mind’ divided into?
Impressions and ideas
What are impressions?
Impressions are more lively/vivid and occur at moment of perceptions. Impressions included sense perceptions such as seeing, hearing, smelling and internal emotions such as love, hate,envy.
What are ideas?
Ideas are faint copies or priori impressions. They occur when we think about, remember or imagine things. The different between memories and imagination is that in memory our ideas come in a fixed order while with imagination they come in any order we like.
What is simple ideas?
Direct copies of earlier impressions
What is complex ideas?
They contain more than one element and can be broken down into simpler ideas; such as thinking about a red car.
How do we generate complex ideas?
By compounding,augmenting, diminishing, or transposing simpler ideas gained from experience
What are the criticisms of Humes impression and ideas to do with our ideas being faint?
- Not all ideas are faint; Hume admits that in fever,madness or dreams our ideas can be as vivid as our impressions
What is the missing shade of blue?
It is Humes own counter example to his own theory
He said imagine a man had seen all colour bar one shade. All colours are then arranged from him from darkest to lightest. Would he notice a shade was missing?- Hume said yes. Would he be able to imagine it without the priori impression-Hume said yes. However Hume says that this example is so singular that we shouldn’t alter the general theory just for this.
What are the criticisms of Humes missing shade of blue?
- Missing shade of blue undermines Humes empiricism
- It isn’t a singular example: you could also have a missing shade of green, red, notes on a scale etc.
- If the idea isn’t empirically based, then it must be innate- opening the door to rationalism
- Why can’t it just be a complex idea?
What is Humes causation?
Our belief in necessary connections is based on experience but in a direct way.
We never observe necessary connections but we do observe constant conjunctions
We observe a number of similar events being followed by other events which are in turn similar to each other. After we have seen events paired together enough times we become habituated to seeing this relationship. We then develop a psychological expectation that the same effects will follow the same cause.
Our belief in necessary connection is therefore based on custom and habit rather than any process of deductive reasoning
Criticisms of Humes causation?
Casts the whole of science as an irrational process
All future scientific knowledge can, in principle, be doubted in the future
Threatens to lead to scepticism rather than empiricism
In his psychological account accurate ( what about people who infer causal connections after only one experience such as food poising or what about people who fail to see causal connections even when presented with plenty of contact conjunctions such as a gambler
Issues of interpretation- is Hume saying that there are no causal laws? Or is he saying that if there were we could just never know them for certain? The second interpretation is less controversial than the first
Criticisms of not all our impressions being vivid?
When drunk or sleepy our impressions can be dulled
Criticisms of ideas have no obvious priori impressions
Gravity and ultraviolet
Criticisms of us not being able to distinguish impression and ideas by comparing vivacity
Whenever we think about an impression it becomes an idea hence we can only ever compare ideas with other ideas
Can we ever conceive of Simple ideas
Are even colours simple, given the missing shade of blue example
