Hume: Compatibilism

Hume believes that determinism and freewill are compatible. I have always had issues with compatibilists because determinism and freewill appear to contradict each other. Determinism implies that everything happens for a physical, statistical reason. All of the facts about one moment, when considered along with the laws of nature, determine all of the facts about the very next moment. Freewill does not seem to fit into this equation because there is no room human decision. Even if we think we are making decisions in a deterministic world, we are not because every decision is determined by facts about the past (like the person P choosing between actions A and B, which I talked about in my last post on liberty). I think that people are normally inclined to think that we have freewill because we are constantly making choices and we feel in control of those choices. When considered along with determinism, however, it seems possible that maybe we are not in control of the decisions we make. Perhaps we choose to do something because all of the facts about the world and the laws of nature in the very moment before we made the decision determined that we would make that decision. So, suppose there are two routes that I can take from campus to my house---one is faster, with lots of highways, and the other is longer, with back roads and a nice scenery--and I need to decide which route I'm going to take home today during rush hour. Although I may feel in control of my decision to take the scenic route to avoid traffic, the facts about the world and the laws of nature at that moment played a role in determining my decision. Fact #1, there is traffic on the highways because it's rush hour. Fact #2, I hate traffic. Fact #3, the scenic route will take less time today at this time. Fact #4, I enjoy the scenic route. All of these facts (and laws about nature, I suppose, because I cannot drive through the traffic and things like that) determined what decision I would make.

Hume: Liberty

Hume's discussion of liberty is not as detailed as his discussion of necessity. That bothers me because I agree with everything he says about necessity, but I'm unsure of some of the things he says about liberty. His general description of liberty is that person P is at liberty with respect to performing a certain act A if and only if, if P were to choose to do A then he would be able to do A. Although this seems to give a satisfactory explanation for freewill, I think that Hume is restricting himself. In this definition, he is not presenting P with a choice--there is only act A. What if P had to make a decision between A and B, and he can only choose one even though he wants to do both. If he chooses A, then how do we know that he was at liberty to choose and perform B (or even that he was at liberty to choose and perform A)? We cannot affirm that he chose A because he was at liberty to do so unless we send him back in time and see if he can choose B in the exact same moment and situation. Otherwise, it is just as possible that he chose A because all of the facts about the world and the laws of nature determined that he would choose A at that time and in that situation. Although liberty sounds like a nice thing to believe, I am always pushed towards thinking it isn't true for reasons like this.

Hume: True Doctrine of Necessity

Hume talks about the true doctrine of necessity to begin his argument for compatibilism. His definition of determinism (necessity) is: "It is universally allowed, that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause, that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it." (54) In order to back this up, Hume proposes the idea of a world in which one event never resembled another. Every object and "scene of nature" is so entirely new to us that we cannot comprehend any connections between them. If this was the case, then we could say that events and objects followed each other, but we could never assert that one was produced by another. We would not have any knowledge of cause and effect. He concludes from this that our understanding of necessity and causation (and their existence in general) is evident from the uniformity of nature and the predictability of human actions. He asserts that if we are presented with an event or object for which we cannot understand a cause, then we must assume that we are simply incapable of understanding its cause. I'm inclined to agree with Hume on these points, as everything appears to have some physical or natural cause and we are not subject to randomness.

Of Miracles 2

Hume goes on in this section to discuss four reasons why he feels that there isn't or ever has been enough evidence to prove miracles to be true. He starts off by saying that there has never been a miracle that has had a large number of trustworthy people testify for it. In order for a miracle to be considered possible or true, there would have to be a decent number of sane people that agree on the same event occurring and can give the same details of the event. The second reason Hume gives is basically that our imagination runs wild and that although we should believe we should believe what we have known to be true in the past, we can't help but believe things that surprise us. The third reason Hume gives us against miracles is that a majority of reports of miracles occur amongst ignorant or uneducated people who do not have the sense to question the testimony of a fellow citizen. The final reason he gives to doubt miracles is that miracles from each religion differ and oppose each other and therefore could never be agreed upon by every religion in the world.

I definitely agree with Hume on this subject. Miracles have never had any evidence to support them and a majority of the time, when they are investigated, they are explained pretty quickly. I think he is right in assuming that people love the unknown and love to believe things that surprise them rather than use their common sense to reason that the experience could not be true.

Of Miracles 1

In section 10, Hume discusses miracles and says that we really have no reason to believe in miracles or to consider them foundational to religion. He says that all knowledge we have of miracle comes from the account of others and what they say they have seen, which should make us more skeptical of them. He goes on to say that there is no evidence that miracles exist and we should not believe something that we do not have evidence for. He says that the only evidence we have for miracles is the testimony of others, but the laws of nature show evidence of against miracles. Since we have observed and have evidence that the laws of nature are true and a miracle is, by definition, a violation of these laws, it leads us to believe that miracles cannot be true.

Probability

In section 6, Hume says that chance does not exist in the world, but "our imagination of the real cause of any event has the same influence on the understanding, and begets a like species of belief or opinion." (pg 37) He says that there is a probability that arises from a superiority of chances on any side. Hume uses an example of a die to demonstrate his point and says that if it was marked with a certain figure or number on 4 sides and marked with a different symbol on the other 2 sides, the symbol that is on 4 sides would be more likely to appear than the symbol on 2 sides. He goes on to say the if 1000 sides were marked with a different one, the probability would be even higher.
Later in this section, Hume says that the probability of the die is the same as probability of causes. Some of the effects from causes are relatively constant while others are more irregular. He says that when this happens, philosophers do not claim its due to an irregularity in nature, he says "but suppose that some secret causes, in the particular structure of parts, have prevented the operation."
I think Hume may be onto something here; He's right to assume that there is a kind of probability to every effect and that some effects are more probable than others. It is not simply due to chance that certain causes almost always have the same effect. Although there are some effects we may not know the probability of, this doesn't mean that the effects are chances.

Kant and The analytic synthetic distinction

There are two types of propositions, those that are analytic and those that are synthetic. An analytic proposition is constructed by analyzing a concept, while a synthetic proposition is constructed by synthesizing (or putting together) concepts. Analytic propositions do not add any new knowledge, that is, the predicate is contained conceptually in the subject. Synthetic propositions amplify knowledge, that is, the predicate contains something not thought of in the subject. Kant takes this distinction a step further. While it seems obvious that a posteriori knowledge (knowledge from sense experience) is synthetic, and that a priori knowledge (knowledge independent of experience) is analytic, Kant introduces the a priori synthetic. Here are some examples of the three types of propositions:

a priori analytic: "Triangles have three sides"
- Here the predicate " have three sides" is part of the definition of what a triangle is: a three angled, three sided, closed planar figure.

a priori synthetic: "The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees"
- this fact concerning triangles can be proven apart from sense experience. We can derive this fact simply by what we know about a triangle by its definition.

a posteriori synthetic: "The sides of the pyramids at Giza are triangular"
- This is a contingent (as opposed to necessary, as all true a priori propositions are) fact about the world, and it requires sense experience in order to be discovered.