Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Knowledge of Future Events

In section 4, Hume discusses our knowledge of future events and suggests that we base all of this knowledge on things we've already experienced. He gives 2 types of reasoning that may help us to determine if it is a good idea to base future knowledge on past events. The first type, "demonstrative reasoning" is based on relations of ideas. Hume says that since there is no contradiction in suggesting that the future will resemble the past, we cannot know that it will by means of demonstrative reasoning. The second type is moral reasoning, which is based on matters of fact. He says that since moral reasoning ends up going in circles, it also does not help us. Hume ends this section by saying that there is no form of reasoning that can show how we connect similarities between past and present. I think that there must be some type of reasoning that we use in order to connect past experience to future and learn from it. If there wasn't I would imagine we would never learn from our mistakes.

2 comments:

Daniel Miller said...
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Daniel Miller said...

There is such reasoning- induction. Hume is not questioning the success of our predictions in the past, but whether we are justified or not in assuming that these inductively-based predictions will hold for the future as well.