What do you think?
Previous version:https://warosu.org/lit/thread/24329939See:https://davidhume.org/scholarship/papers/millican/1996PhD.pdf
>>24749318I don't think it's possible to use a priori probabalistic methods to refute Hume. To start Hume never denied reasoning like this so it's something akin to saying the definition of a die is a cube with each side numbered and upon tossing it the die must land with one side facing up. Without any experience the prior is 1/6. Even in more highly sophisticated methods where agreements are needed to set priors the simple fact that this had to be established means the participants have accepted a probabalistic determination regarding knowledge. This also doesn't refute Hume.If you use a method like this to challenge Hume then you likely aren't challenging Hume's philosophy but rather challenging the hierarchy of probability being used. For anything that can be tested the outcome will either produce support for or against the hierarchy or produce a neutral or uninterpretable outcome. For anything that cannot be tested you have no way of challenging Hume. What I mean when I say this is that if you try to stack your priors to make the most unlikely outcome seem possible but it cannot be tested then you have moved past the empirical and by definition the exercise was a waste since there can be no certainty. For simple deductive prior probability there may not be a way for Hume to have an innate advantage since in order to meet the criteria there had to be a distribution model with some form of equal likelihood or a ratio involved. If it appears Hume has an unfair advantage it's because the challenger either made a mistake or was trying to game a certain outcome where certainty can't be had.
Im debating getting into hume
>>24749318I don't think that's quite fair but I think it is obvious that for Hume reason is entirely instrumental. In classical terms, he only recognizes ratio, not intellectus. Reason ceases to have many of its old properties. Hume has no "rational appetites" in his anthropology. Reason for him is not erotic, knowing doesn't involve ecstasis, there is no "knowing by becoming," it is not luminous (reflexive, such that we know that we know), it doesn't involve the formal identity of knower and known, etc.This is why I think historical treatments, particularly those contemporary ones that want to dismiss "all past Western philosophy" risk equivocating when they speak of "Western rationality" because Hume is a long, long way from Plato or Saint Augustine, let alone the Eastern Christian vision of the nous.And I think this leads directly to his sort of moral anti-realism (I would call it that at least, others differ) and skepticism.
>>24749318We've moved on to esoteric Humeanism. Hume was a spiritualist trad Cathlodox type.
>>24749719A zoomer tradcath wrote this post. Note how he strings together a lot of trad buzzwords about the eroticism of reason without engaging either with Hume or the tradition he claims to represent in any meaningful way.
>>24749732In THN at 3.1.1.8 Hume writes:>“reason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection.” Book II. Part III. Sect. 3 is where he asserts this in more detail. He calls this a "proof" in book 3 but it isn't argued for, just asserted. It is obvious that Hume thinks there are no rational appetites and that reason is wholly calculative.It's you who show you haven't read Hume and who are just throwing around buzz word slur.Hume states confidently that: “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will" at 2.3.3.1. Reason might allow us to connect irrational sensations of pain and pleasure with different sense objects, but “it [could not] be by [reason’s] means that… objects are able to affect us" (2.3.3.3) What this means is that, out the gate, even if there were moral facts, we couldn’t be motivated to act by our knowledge of them. Hume achieves this by reducing rationality to the intellect and essentially denying the will’s appetite.By 1755, Hume's milieu (Johnson's dictionary) defines reason mater of factly as "the power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences."That reason is just ratio is obvious in Book 2. This is obviously very different from Plato, or pretty much any other pre-modern thinker of note. You can claim that Hume is in the right here but it's ridiculous to say it isn't a sea change or that it doesn't guide his skepticism particularly vis-á-vis ethics.Feel free to read the man's words where he lays this out very clearly: https://davidhume.org/texts/t/3/full
>>24749763Also, it should be obvious from 2.3.3.1 that Hume rejects the classical categorization of the will as a rational function (part of the rational soul), a distinct appetite ordered to the Good (being qua desirable) as a broad formal object, rather than the specific formal objects of the lower appetites.
>>24749318Anyhow, I would frame this differently. Hume makes reason calculative and associative, functioning over what we might now call sense data. But sense data is mere appearance, clearly, it is fallible.Hume posits no clear relationship between reality and appearances, as is obvious in the attack on causality. Yet if reason never makes contact with the objects of knowledge, but only deals with the senses (appearances) and appearances are perhaps arbitrarily or accidentally related to reality (as the arguments on causation suggest) then it should be obvious that reason can never grasp reality.Nonetheless, Hume still seems to value relations of ideas and deduction. The question though is if he has any right to this, given that relations of ideas seem like they will simply be relating patterns recognized from sense data, which is itself merely appearance. "Ideas" come from "impressions" with the extra addition of imagination and reason IIRC. So nothing in contact with reality is ever in the equation unless appearances have a knowable relation to reality. But:>The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objectsBut isn't this the real problem? Even if we thought deduction alone was somehow useful, it couldn't be useful if its terms are generated solely from mere appearance. The agent is solipsisticly isolated from the outset, by axiomatic declaration.
