David Hume Induction

There have been many times in our lives where someone has brought up a point that they wanted to prove but did not have a strong supporting fact to go along with it. The problem there is that the person is thinking that by simply bring up something related to that topic they can prove that they are correct. This way of trying to reason is called induction. Induction is when there is support to a viewpoint but the support is not one hundred percent ensured. David Hume is a philosopher that deeply examines this way of thinking called induction and makes radical conclusions worth exploring. The fact that everything that we think is true may be false because of our narrow amount of knowledge. Most of the time we tend to draw conclusions on the

From the day we are born we experience a huge amount of things happen around us on a daily bases. Based on what we experience we conclude that what we have seen before will most likely happen the same way in the future. We predict the future of occurrence by the past. As Hume said that if we experience “a stone raised into the air and left without any support immediately falls; but if we consider this situation a priori we shall find nothing that generates the idea of a downward rather than an upward or some other motion in the stone,” (Hume, 3). This idea of cause and effect, that we know something will occur because we have experienced it before by seeing a step by step occurrence, is rejected by Hume after thorough examination. Most of the time everything that we see occurring the same way every time simply forms a habit. There is never a one hundred percent possibility that every times one drops a rock it will fall downward. We simply believe that it will fall downward because we have seen it happen over and over again yielding the conclusion that it will always be the same. There could always be a shift in gravitational pull that messes up this expectation that we have generated. Habit makes people assume that they can predict the future from past experiences of cause and

One could argue against Hume that there are rules that the earth functions upon. There are gravitational pulls that exist making sure that the rock will fall every time downward. There is no way that gravitational pull can be changed. If there is a change then it does not count due to the fact that there has been a change in the question. Adrian Heathcote from the University of Sydney takes on exploring the ideas that Hume suggests. “I suggest the reason that Hume does not say that he (or we) can clearly and distinctly conceive of snow falling tomorrow that yet has the taste of salt or feeling of fire is because it is not se. We, and he, would say that such a substance was simply not snow.” A change in the factors playing towards the question in sight does not count. There are strong rules of the Earth that are not habit. They are simply the reality. According to Heathcote habit is not the reason we believe in cause and effect but logic