PETER BORNEDAL

EXPERIENCE AS
SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE

HUME’S ENQUIRY CONCERNING

HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
 DEFENSE OF THE EMPIRICAL WORLD AGAINST SPECULATIVE REASONING, 1
In Voltaire’s Candide, we were introduced to two different philosophical attitudes to the world, a metaphysical and a practical, an
intellectualist and an empiricist. The first was introduced by Candide and his teacher Pangloss as an abstract and metaphysical
defense of Leibniz’s optimistic claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the second was introduced in the form of
Voltaire’s narrative, designed to illustrate that the practical and empirical world, encountered by the characters, at every turn is
disproving this optimistic claim. Qua this narrative, we were meant to discover for ourselves how hopelessly naïve and inane
Leibniz optimistic philosophy is in a world of evil, how hopelessly speculative, intellectualist, and metaphysical Leibniz Rationalist
thinking is. Voltaire introduced us to an empirical world, designed and arranged qua his narrative and therefore fictional, but
nevertheless meant to refute Leibniz’s claim.
Another distinction comes out of this confrontation between Voltaire and Leibniz; first a distinction between a priori and a
posteriori thinking, i.e., thinking based on deduction or thinking based on induction; second, a distinction between Religious
Faith and Atheism. Leibniz is representing the first position, giving logical argument meant to prove that God is omnipotent,
omniscient, perfect, and benevolent; Voltaire is rejecting these attributes by showing us his empirical world of evil, and tends
toward the atheistic position.
In Descartes and Hume, we are back to the these two essential positions. As we have seen, Descartes is an example of another
strongly Rationalist writer, who pursues a metaphysical proof of God’s existence, and where the empirical world in its own self-
manifestation cannot give us knowledge. Hume, on the contrary, sets out to argue that the empirical world is the only world that
can give us knowledge. In Hume, it has no meaning to start from an axiom (like Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum), and thereupon, by
deductive steps, prove God’s existence, and even the existence of the world. The world, our experiences of, and our beliefs in
that world precede all rationalist axioms. The latter belongs to what Hume calls speculative, abstract, or abstruse philosophy. In
the first chapter of his Enquiry, Hume pleads for an ‘easy’ thinking that proceeds from that which manifests itself.
 DEFENSE OF THE EMPIRICAL WORLD AGAINST SPECULATIVE REASONING, 2
Another problem with abstract, speculative reasoning is, according to Hume, the deductive method in itself, because if the
abstract philosopher makes only a single mistake, then the rest of the inferences in his logical chain of arguments are invalid as
well. It is like building a card-house, everything has to be carefully calibrated, but remove just a single card in the foundation, and
the entire house comes stumbling down.
Hume puts it this way: “It is easy for a profound abstract philosopher to make a mistake in his intricate reasonings; and one
mistake is bound to lead to another, while the philosopher drives his argument forward and isn’t deterred from accepting any
conclusion by its sounding strange or clashing with popular opinion. Not so with a philosopher who aims only to represent the
common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more attractive colors. If by accident he falls into error, he goes no further.
Rather than pushing on, he renews his appeal to common sense and to the natural sentiments of the mind, gets back onto the
right path, and protects himself from any dangerous illusions.” Hume, Enquiry, p. 3
Descartes, as we saw, was striving after absolute certainty by applying this deductive method to metaphysical thinking. Hume
says that quite to the contrary that speculative and abstract philosophy is an “inevitable source of uncertainty and error.”
Metaphysics, as it has been practiced hitherto, is but “fruitless efforts of human vanity, trying to penetrate into subjects that are
utterly inaccessible to the understanding.”
These metaphysicians are “the friends of superstition,” bad philosophers that never give up. So, Hume’s empirical program is to
liberate philosophy from dealing with these abstruse questions, and instead try to understand the very faculty of human
reasoning, and through an exact analysis of its powers and capacity show that it’s utterly unfit for such “remote and abstruse
subjects. [...] We must cultivate true metaphysics carefully, in order to destroy metaphysics of the false kind. [...] Accurate and
valid reasoning is the only universal remedy [...] that can undercut that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon that gets
mixed up with popular superstition.” Hume, Enquiry, p. 5
 IDEAS VS IMPRESSIONS, 1
To Hume, metaphysical thinkers are like robbers who have been “chased from the open country […] into the forest and lie in wait
to break in on every unguarded avenue of the mind and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices.” p. 4
Descartes is such a metaphysical abstruse philosopher who wants to ground his thinking in inaccessible principles, while Hume
wants to start out by examining our most obvious faculties and abilities. We must start with what we can do and can access;
what it within our capabilities. In looking for this, the most obvious faculties we use to understand our environing world is
perception. We are equipped with perception and of memory of perceptions, we either see things or we remember things we
have seen.
Hume sees a difference between these two forms of perception, direct perception and the memory of a perception, insofar as
the memory of a perception, also called idea or thought, is fainter than the immediate perception, also called impression. For
example the feeling of pain in contact with heat and the memory of this feeling, the emotion of anger and the memory of this
emotion, etc. In these cases the immediate impression is stronger that the memory. The reflection of something past
experienced, we copy in "faint and dull colors.”
“So we can divide the mind’s perceptions into two classes, on the basis of their different degrees of force and liveliness. The less
forcible and lively are commonly called ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’. The others we will call […] ‘impressions’ […] By the term ‘impression’,
then, I mean all our more lively perceptions when we hear or see or feel or love or hate or desire or will. These are to be
distinguished from ideas, which are the fainter perceptions of which we are conscious when we reflect on our impressions.”
Hume, Enquiry, 7-8
 IDEAS VS IMPRESSIONS, 2
When it comes to ideas or thoughts they seem to contain more freedom than impressions, because thoughts are not bound to
report on the things that exist. In thought, we can conceive of things beyond reality; we can imagine and fantasize, even dream,
and in these activities create fantastic imaginative universes. But in fact, Hume says, thoughts are always confined to real
experiences; in the last analysis, they depend on experiences and impressions. Therefore, the distinction Ideas vs Impressions is
not completely rigorous, because ideas depend on impressions. For example, we can conceive of something like a golden
mountain, but in producing this image, we only join two different ideas, gold + mountain, which we previously have experienced.
Therefore, all our so-called ideas/thoughts have derived from impressions.
"When we analyze our thoughts or ideas, however into such simple ideas as were copied from a precedent feeling or sentiment.
Even those ideas, which, at first view, seem the most wide of this origin, are found, upon a nearer scrutiny, to be derived from it.
The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own
mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom.” Hume, Enquiry, p. xx
In another of his arguments for this dependency on impressions, Hume argues that a man who has had no impressions, cannot
have any ideas corresponding to something he has never experienced. A blind can have no ideas of color, and a deaf can have no
ideas of sound.
This relatively simple observation concerns also the reasoning in philosophy. If in philosophy, we are introduced to a term that is
impossible to trace back to a corresponding impression, then we have reasons to believe that it is absurd, or that is does not
serve any purpose. “So when we come to suspect that a philosophical term is being used without any meaning or idea (as
happens all too often), we need only to ask: From what impression is that supposed idea derived? If none can be pointed out,
that will confirm our suspicion that the term is meaningless, i.e. has no associated idea.” Hume, Enquiry, p. 9
 RELATIONS OF IDEAS VS MATTERS OF FACT
In the first part of his Enquiries Hume introduces a new distinction between Relations of Ideas and Matters of fact. The first kind
concerns the formal sciences such as Logic, Mathematics, and Geometry. They include the rules of direction of proper rational
thinking that Descartes talked about when he applied Euclid’s rules of deduction to metaphysical thinking.
Formal thinking can be proven true or false. If something has been proven true we cannot state the opposite without involving
ourselves in a contradiction. However, matters of facts cannot be demonstrated in the same manner; they cannot be true in the
same strict sense as relations of ideas, and the opposite to a matter of fact is therefore not a demonstrable contradiction. If we
have experienced (either as individuals or as civilizations) that the sun rises every day, we have experienced this as a matter of
fact, and if we express the opposite statement, the sun will not rise tomorrow, we may be defying sound everyday sense-
experience, but we have not expressed a logical contradiction. It is still conceivable that the sun will not rise tomorrow; maybe
highly unlikely and highly improbable, but still conceivable (in fact, our sun will eventually burn out; so, one day in the distant
future it will indeed not rise).
“All the objects of human reason or enquiry fall naturally into two kinds, namely relations of ideas and matters of fact. The first
kind include geometry, algebra, and arithmetic, and indeed every statement that is either intuitively or demonstratively certain.
That the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides expresses a relation between those figures. That
three times five equals half of thirty expresses a relation between those numbers. Propositions of this kind can be discovered
purely by thinking, with no need to attend to anything that actually exists anywhere in the universe. The truths that Euclid
demonstrated would still be certain and self-evident even if there never were a circle or triangle in nature. Matters of fact, which
are the second objects of human reason, are not established in the same way; and we cannot have such strong grounds for
thinking them true. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it doesn’t imply a contradiction and is conceived
by the mind as easily and clearly as if it conformed perfectly to reality. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is just as intelligible
as—and no more contradictory than—the proposition that the sun will rise tomorrow. Hume, Enquiry, p. 11-12.
 CAUSE AND EFFECT
Now, since our reasoning concerning matter of facts does not rely on logic, or more specifically, on the law of contradiction, on
what principle does it rely?
We do not live in a world of only isolated facts, we bind facts together constantly. Hume’s answer is that our world is experienced
by us thanks to a cause and effect relation that we constantly adds to things. If our ancestors from the past found a footprint in
the snow, they would immediately infer that it had a cause, for example in form of a buffalo; if they observed a gathering of
vultures on the distant sky, they would infer that this was caused by the presence of a fresh carcass on the savanna, because they
remember from past experiences that this is how vultures behave. So, we bind things together in cause-effect relationships
according to how we in the past have been experiencing the world. Things we have experienced as repeatedly happening in the
past, we expect will happen again in the future. My experience of the sun rising causes me to believe that it will also rise
tomorrow; I presume there is a connection between my past experiences and my expectation of the future. All reasonings about
matters of fact seem to be based on the relation of cause and effect, which is the only relation that can take us beyond the
evidence of our memory and senses.” Hume, Enquiry, p. 11-12.“ Causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by
experience." Hume, Enquiry, p. 12.
In other words, causes and effects cannot be discovered through a priori reasoning. If we imagine a situation where we strip
ourselves for all experience, we could not by reasoning alone figure out, for example, which kind of food is a good nourishment
for a man.
Cause-effect relationships come about thanks to the experience of repeated sequences of the same events; as such they provide
us with evidence for our beliefs, which are not established from a priori reasoning, i.e. reasoning from speculative abstract first
principles. “I venture to assert, as true without exception, that knowledge about causes is never acquired through a priori
reasoning, and always comes from our experience of finding that particular objects are constantly associated with one other.”
Hume, Enquiry, p. 12
HUME’S BILLIARD BALLS
 HUME’S BILLIARD BALLS, 1
If we came into the world for the first time, we would have no knowledge of relationships. But, as Hume says, something ‘cures
this ignorance.’ Experience showed us that “certain ·similar· objects had similar effects; it teaches us that those particular objects
had such and such powers and forces at those particular times. When a new object with similar perceptible qualities is produced,
we expect similar powers and forces and look for a similar effect.” Hume, Enquiry, p. 17
To illustrate his cause-effect relation, Hume uses two billiard balls as example. He imagines that if you with your cue strike your
cue ball and it hits a red ball on the table, you seem to know for sure that the impact will cause the second billiard ball to move in
some direction. The impact of the cue ball is the cause, the movement of the second billiard ball the effect. But to Hume, this
cause-effect relationship, we cannot infer from reasoning, but only from experience.
We fancy that if we had been suddenly brought into this world, we could have known straight off that when one billiard ball
strikes another it will make it move—knowing this for certain, without having to try it out on billiard balls. Custom has such a
great influence! At its strongest it not only hides our natural ignorance but even conceals itself: just because custom is so strongly
at work, we aren’t aware of its being at work at all. Hume, Enquiry, p. 13
Only because we are accustomed to see bodies move when hit by other bodies, we anticipate this reaction. If billiard ball 1 hits
billiard ball 2, a thousands different reactions could have been expected by the unexperienced mind, only the experienced mind
tells us that ball 2 is about to move. So, by reasoning alone, we would know nothing, The mind can’t possibly find the effect in
the supposed cause, however carefully we examine it, for the effect is totally different from the cause and therefore can never be
discovered in it. Hume, Enquiry, p. 13. If the unexperienced mind looks at billiard balls, then the “motion in the second billiard
ball is a distinct event from motion in the first, and nothing in the first ball’s motion even hints at motion in the second. 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, Enquiry, p. 1
 HUME’S BILLIARD BALLS, 2
Suppose for example that I see one billiard ball moving in a straight line towards another: even if the contact between them
should happen to suggest to me the idea of motion in the second ball, aren’t there a hundred different events that I can conceive
might follow from that cause? May not both balls remain still? May not the first bounce straight back the way it came, or bounce
off in some other direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we prefer just one, which is
no more consistent or conceivable than the rest? Our a priori reasonings will never reveal any basis for this preference. Hume,
Enquiry, p. 13
What are the effects of the cue ball hitting the red ball? Does the
red ball move straight? Does it take a sharp left or right? Does it
swerve? Does it jump? Or is it lying dead while the cue ball swerves
back to the billiard player?
What is the cause of motion of the red billiard ball? Is the cue ball
hitting the red ball, the ‘cause’? Is the cue hitting the cue ball the
’cause’? Are the muscles in my hands and fingers manipulating the
cue the ‘cause’? Is my mind, in collaboration with perception and
experience of how to manipulate the cue, the cause? Where is the
‘cause’?
When we form cause-effect relations, we adhere to the average
case, where a cue ball hits a red ball, producing a linear movement
in the red. But who says that nature always follows the average
case?
 NON-FOUNDATIONAL THINKING: CUSTOM AND HABIT
Even the smartest person, if suddenly brought into this world without having any preceding experiences, could not guess what
effects would follow from certain events. He could not by reason alone understand that because one event in one instance
precedes another, they are as such typically connected. Had he been living a little longer in the world he would learn that some
events are always associated, and by the appearance of one event he would start to expect the emergence of another. But this
realization would come about thanks to a principle Hume calls custom or habit. That is, by means of repetition of a sequence of
events, he learns and start to take for granted that something is connected. This is the ultimate principle in Hume's philosophy,
custom is the great teacher of relationships, not reasoning about first causes or final principle or hidden powers.
“Suppose that a highly intelligent and thoughtful person were suddenly brought into this world; he would immediately observe
one event following another, but that is all he could discover. He wouldn’t be able by any reasoning to reach the idea of cause
and effect, because (firstly) the particular powers by which all natural operations are performed are never perceived through the
senses, and (secondly) there is no reason to conclude that one event causes another merely because it precedes it. Their
occurring together may be arbitrary and casual, with no causal connection between them. In short, until such a person had more
experience he could never reason about any matter of fact, or be sure of anything beyond what was immediately present to his
memory and senses. Now suppose that our person gains more experience, and lives long enough in the world to observe similar
objects or events occurring together constantly; now what conclusion does he draw from this experience? He immediately infers
the existence of one object from the appearance of the other! Yet all his experience hasn’t given him any idea or knowledge of
the secret power by which one object produces another; nor can any process of reasoning have led him to draw this inference.
But he finds that he can’t help drawing it: and he won’t be swayed from this even if he becomes convinced that there is no
intellectual support for the inference. Something else is at work, compelling him to go through with it. It is custom or habit.
When we are inclined to behave or think in some way, not because it can be justified by reasoning or some process of the
understanding but just because we have behaved or thought like that so often in the past, we always say that this inclination is
the effect of custom.” Hume, Enquiry, p. 20
 NON-FOUNDATIONAL THINKING: NO FINAL CAUSES
This is as far as we can push our inquiries, all of our knowledge are inferences from experience, i.e., effects of custom. From here
we can push our inquiries no further. If experiences tell us that something is the cause of this or that, then we should not pretend
to give a cause of this cause: "Perhaps we can push our inquiries no further or pretend to give the cause of this cause, but must
rest contented with it as the ultimate principle which we can assign of all our conclusions from experience. […] Custom, then, is
the great guide of human life. It alone is what makes our experience useful to us, and makes us expect future sequences of
events to be like ones that have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we would be entirely ignorant of every
matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses.” Hume, Enquiry, p. 21
Custom and habit do not provide us with ultimate causes; is only detects associations between one event and another event, and
from these associations of a sequence of events, we conclude a cause-effect relationship. But from the cause we infer we cannot
assert an ultimate or a final cause, says Hume. We for example observe by means of experience that all object fall downward;
you have an object in your hand, let it fall, and inevitably it falls downwards. What is the cause, one may ask? Gravity, Newton
said, and explained that gravity was a kind of attraction between two masses; further he could not go. He gave up on explaining
what could be the cause of gravity. He was able to set up an equation that made it possible to calculate the gravitational force
between two masses with great precision, but he did not attempt to look for an ultimate or a final cause for gravity. Such as
cause would to Hume’s mind have been purely speculative, i.e., asserted from other principles that experience, for example
religious or ideological. In any case, a final cause is inaccessible, and therefore not worthwhile speculating about.
“Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and modest has ever pretended to assign the ultimate
cause of any natural operation […] It is confessed that the utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the principles productive of
natural phenomena to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of
reasonings from analogy, experience and observation. But as to the cause of these general causes, we should in vain attempt
their discovery, nor shall we ever be able to satisfy ourselves by any particular explication of them. These ultimate springs and
principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and inquiry.“ Hume, Enquiry, p. xx
 NON-FOUNDATIONAL THINKING:
THE HISTORY OF THINKING AS A HISTORY OF ERROR
If there is no final cause, no final truth, then error in causality thinking is almost inevitable. To Hume, the best we can do is to see
an association of two events in a sequence, one occurring before the next. From there we conclude that event 1 is a cause of
event 2. On this thinking there is no truth, no necessity but instead contingency. The thinking is a Skepticism.
In the history of thinking, many, if not the most, of these causality conclusions have been false. If we return to Newton’s
explanation of the downwards fall of an object, as caused by an attraction between objects, it is very different from Aristotle’s a
couple of millennia before, who explained that objects fall down wards because they seek rest, which they find at the center of
the earth. Nobody believe that explanation today. About a hundred years ago, Einstein started to challenge Newton’s
explanation, by giving up the notion of attraction, and introducing a curved universe.
History of thinking has regularly been the history of error. Whenever we have asserted cause effect relationship, they have been
wrong more often than true, and then typically ‘true’ only for a while or given certain conditions or contexts. They may even
have been based on correct observations, but eventually been proved to be wrong. For a long time it was regarded as common
knowledge that lightning is the cause of thunder, for the obvious reason that one sees the lighting before the thunder. Today we
know that this is one and the same event happening instantaneously when air expands around the lightning rod, only appearing
to be separate because the speed of light moves faster than the speed of sound. So, we see the lightning before we hear the
thunder. Or how did maggots come about in rotten meat, because of heat and moisture. What caused depression? Slow
circulation of blood! How was it cured? By rotating the patient in a kind of carousel to wake his blood!
Often cause effect relationships have been based on superstition. Medicine has throughout civilizations been inventing the most
peculiar, often ‘insane’ to our mind, cause-effect models when explaining and trying to cure illnesses. Then there is the
individual’s hasty resort to cause-effect explanations, for example when a person gets ill and racks his brain what has caused his
illness. Is God punishing me? Did I do something wrong, for which I now suffer? Did I drink, eat, smoke, work too much? Etc.
man has reached a general principle, then he cannot go further: "The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off
our ignorance a little longer" p. 5. So, Hume's philosophy is ‘Skeptical’; it does not allow for any ultimate knowledge in the sense
Descartes was seeking this. There is no foundation; no God as the first principle for knowledge.
What are we to conclude from all this? Something that is far removed from the common theories of philosophy, yet is very
simple: All beliefs about matters of fact or real existence are derived merely from something that is present to the memory or
senses, and a customary association of that with some other thing. Or in other words: having found in many cases that two kinds
of objects—flame and heat, snow and cold—have always gone together, and being presented with a new instance of flame or
snow, the mind’s habits lead it to expect heat or cold and to believe that heat or cold exists now and will be experienced if one
comes closer. 22
Here, then, is a kind of pre-established harmony [Hume’s phrase, copied from Leibniz] between the course of nature and the
sequence of our ideas; and though the powers and forces by which nature is governed are wholly unknown to us, we find that
our thoughts and conceptions have occurred in an order matching the order of events in the other works of nature. This
correspondence has been brought about by custom, which is so necessary to the survival of our species and to the regulation of
our conduct in every circumstance and occurrence of human life. If it hadn’t been the case that the presence of an object
instantly arouses the idea of objects that are commonly conjoined with it, all our knowledge would have been limited to the
narrow sphere of our memory and senses; and we would never have been able to suit our means to our ends, or to employ our
natural powers in getting good results and avoiding bad ones. Those who delight in the discovery and contemplation of final
causes [= ‘purposiveness in nature’] have here a great deal to admire and wonder at.26