David Hume – Empiricist Philosopher

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) was part of the intellectual tradition of British Empiricism. Empiricism considered experience more important than reason (in contrast to rationalism, which took the opposite view).

Hume used the distinction between ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ to explain how we experience and interpret the world. Impressions are our perceptions, what we learn through the senses. For Hume, the mind could not know anything that was not first an impression. The only way the mind could know anything was through impressions.

Ideas are impressions once they pass into memory. For Hume, an idea was almost like a dormant impression, an idea was less lively and forceful than an impression. Ideas are therefore also drawn from experience, but are a step further removed from experience than impressions. Hume explained the imagination by saying that the mind has the ability to knit certain ideas together to make a new one. For example, he said that people could imagine a gold mountain because they had had impressions, and then ideas, of each separate element, gold and a mountain. He set out a challenge, to produce an idea that was not first an impression. He then set about refuting any possible suggestions that people could come up with in answer to his challenge!

Hume was entirely opposed to the idea of innate knowledge, that is, knowledge that we simply posses as part of the human condition, knowledge that we are born with. His position was an extreme empirical view. To Hume, it was almost impossible to know anything that went beyond direct experience. And in his view it was certainly impossible to know it with any certainty. Therefore, he suggested, that we should stop speculating about things we could never know or prove: such endeavours, to Hume, were futile. Hume’s empiricism is a direct challenge to the philosophical study of metaphysics, the study of being and the nature of the world beyond the limitations of human experience. To Hume, impressions, and therefore experience, are the only true foundations of knowledge. Individual ideas should be tested to see if they are first based on impressions. If they are not, they are not truth, but instead mere jargon or speculation.

Hume’s thoughts on experience and knowledge are based on his understanding of the relationship between cause and effect. It was in his account of causation that he made his most significant and long-lasting contribution to philosophy.

In explaining causation, Hume said that ideas and thoughts can follow on from each other with method and regularity. For example, he said that if we think of a wound, we think of pain. Therefore we think that the wound causes pain, the ideas are related together. However, Hume had sceptical doubts about causation. He thought that the idea that pain followed a wound was not a logical truth. In fact, Hume thought that just because pain had followed a wound one hundred times, this did not mean that pain would follow every wound in the future. He did not think that it was legitimate to make unlimited claims on limited empirical evidence. Just because a sequence of events had happened repeatedly in the past does not mean that it will certainly happen in that sequence in the future. And if we cannot rely on the regularity of causation, then all empirical science is in doubt. This gave rise to the problem of induction, one that was not dealt with in a philosophically satisfactory way until Popper (1902-1994).

Hume’s empiricism has had a long-lasting effect, particularly in the English-speaking philosophical tradition. His reliance of experience as the means towards genuine knowledge and his fixation with causation, as well as his hostility to the rationalist idea of innate principles and metaphysics, are enduring themes in the philosophical tradition.