Dr. Ari Santas’ Notes on

Hume’s Enquiry VI: Of Probability

A. Three Kinds of Certainty

· Up to the time of Hume, most philosophers had distinguished between two forms of certainty

the Demonstration Probability the

objects objects

of Absolute Certainty Uncertain of

knowledge belief

Necessary Contingent

Reason Experience

· Hume says this is a false dichotomy and adds a third candidate

Demonstration Proof Probability

logically empirically contingent

necessary necessary

cannot be uncontradicted chance

otherwise by experience (not entirely

(entirely uniform) uniform)

Knowledge

Belief

degrees of legitimacy

B. Proof and Probability

· Leaving knowledge to the rationalists, Hume focuses on belief and considers how we arrive at it

· It is based on experience, in particular, past experience

· Repetition in experience creates habit

· Experienced patterns fashion belief

· When these patterns are entirely uniform we say that the belief has proof behind it

· It has always happened that way, so I believe it

· When these patterns are less than completely uniform, we say there is a probability

· It sometimes happens that way

· Neither carries apodictic certainty, but we say some beliefs are better than others

C. A Normative Model of Belief

· A wise man, then, proportions his belief to evidence

· When the pattern is complete, we must infer that the same will occur in the future

· The Laws of Nature

· When the pattern is incomplete, we must suspend belief, how much depending on how complete or incomplete the pattern

· Degrees of uniformity > Degrees of Certainty

· To believe well, then, we need to observe carefully, look for patterns, and infer accordingly

Overview of Sections I-VI

Let us introspect on Consciousness (I)

Ideas come from Impressions (II)

By Memory And the Imagination

(II) (II)

By Combining and Dividing By Association (III)

(II)

Resemblance Contiguity Causation

Made Possible by Custom, not Reason

(IV, V)

Resulting belief is (and should be) proportionate

to the uniformity of experience (VI)

D. Reconstructing the Guiding Principles

· All knowledge of the world ultimately boils down to impressions, our ability to associate ideas from habit

· In that sense, the ultimate principle of reasoning about the world is not rational - it is a feeling that accompanies a habit

· The traditional Principles of Rationality have been modified or curtailed

· Principles of Contradiction cannot discover things about the world - only deduce things given relations supplied by experience

· Principle of Sufficient Reason is limited to what we have experienced

· PSR revision: everything in experience has a cause, where cause means an associated idea and not a reason as in ultimate explanation