David Hume on Ideas, Impressions, Causality

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Discussion
Conclusion

Introduction

David Hume is a Scottish philosopher from the 1700s. In his book “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” he describes his take on the concepts of impressions, ideas, and causality. This paper will provide an overview of this book.

Discussion

Hume proposes two main concepts in this book: the concept of impressions and the concept of ideas. Impressions in Hume’s view are anything that we perceive with our senses. They could be formed from something we see, like a beautiful sunset, or even from emotions like anger or happiness. These impressions serve as the foundation for ideas. Ideas are created from impressions through three different processes. The first is called resemblance. This process makes people recognize something they’ve perceived before making people think about the initial impression they have had. The second process is called contiguity. This process describes how people can base their ideas of things and experiences, based on already existing ideas. For example, a person can prefer a certain kind of apple-based on their previous experiences with that kind of apple. This process also gives people the desire to compare their perceptions of things with others like them. The third idea-creating process is called “cause and effect.” This process lets people create assumptions about the causes behind the effects. For example, crumbs on the table could make a person think that somebody ate there. However, this process is not based on ideas, but matters of fact. Hume describes ideas as mathematical truths when matters of fact are only common truths that are gained through experiences. Matters of fact do not have to be true, and therefore assumptions made through cause and effect thinking are not always correct.

Hume sees cause and effect as a useful tool for observations, but nothing more. As he points out, it is not based on reason, but a probability. Since this probability is based on the experiences people have, it cannot be reasonable to take them as fact, because no law says that the future is guaranteed to be exactly like the past. Surprisingly, this concept of cause and effect closely resembles the modern scientific ideas of cause and effect. Experiments are often based on the idea that something causes an effect on something else. The only true difference is that Hume thought that there is no need to use cause and effect beyond gaining simple observations. Science tries to find factual, empirical evidence between the cause and effect of the experiment, beyond the concept of correlation. However, the results are often only presented as a probability, with the cause being more or less probably to create the desired effect. The viability of cause and effect experiments is not uniform between different sciences, and some of them find this kind of experiment inappropriate. As with Hume’s original idea, there is no way to be sure of something by using only cause and effect ideas.

Conclusion

David Hume was a philosopher of the common people. His ideas focused on human emotions and common sense. This could be seen in his concepts of ideas. They are presented in simple terms, without an attempt to prove a complicated concept, but to examine the human perception of the world. These ideas have shown to be relevant even hundreds of years later, with the scientific method of experimentation adopting a very similar concept of cause and effect.

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David Hume on Ideas, Impressions, Causality

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