Summary Of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In the book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume, Hume provides his own skeptical solution to the question, how is our causal reasoning justified? The word skeptical means that you are not easily convinced and may have some doubt about what you are being told. After evaluating Hume’s proposed skeptical solution, I have come to agree with his argument as I find it to be very logical when looking at he natural instincts of human beings. I believe that it is a common tendency to base our expectations on our past experiences.

Section four of Hume’s book opens up by saying that any objects of human reason or enquiry are naturally going to be divided into one of two categories; relations of ideas or matters of fact. Relations

These categories consist of resemblance, contiguity, and causation. Looking deeper into these categories, the question “does it happen, in all these relations, that, when one of the objects is presented to the senses or memory, the mind is not only carried to the conception of the correlative, but reaches a steadier and stronger conception of it than what otherwise it would have been able to attain?” (Hume, 1711-1776, pg.33) arises. To help answer this, Hume argues that causal relations are formed because of induction and occurrences rather than based upon reason alone. Hume proposes a skeptical solution to help defend his causal argument further. This solution is known as The Problem of Induction. The problem of induction argues whether or not something can be rationally justified by any form of objective senses. An example to help support this argument would be taking into consideration a piece of ice. When looking at my experiences and encounters with ice, I can recall the last time I touched a piece of ice it was cold, and the same goes for all the previous times I have touched a piece of ice. Therefore, after having these experiences, I can only expect that the next time I touch a piece of ice that it will once again be cold. According to an article called The Problem of Induction (n.d.) written by a team at Princeton University, they say when looking at the human mind we tend to expect that “in general, all Fs are G, or at least, the next F I consider will be G”. Hume believes it to be acceptable for humans to employ their causal reasoning regardless of their rational justification because as written by a team of editors in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there “seems to be that there is no clear way to rationally justify any causal reasoning”(The Problem of Induction,