David Hume Experience

The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, was a pure empiricist; he believed that all thought and understanding could only be made or created by being exposed to an experience prior to the idea and that everything we know, understand, learn or imagine can only be done by using our senses. We can only have an idea of something based on an impression that we have observed at some time in the past. As Hume said, the “most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.” With this, Hume suggests that we can grasp something but unless we have or are experiencing it, we will never completely understand it as well. For example, I have grown up in a mixed cultural heritage, my family is from Pakistan but I was born and raised in America.

Hume says, “By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses.” One argument that Hume uses to prove his point that cause and effect is provable by experience alone is that of Adam, experiencing water for the first time. In this analogy, Adam would be unaware of the fact that the water could be harmful to him if he attempts at breathing it in. The only way for Adam to know the consequences of breathing in water was if he himself, or another being were to breathe in water, Adam would learn of the cause and effect of such a deadly action. This argument may seem ridiculous to many people because the result of breathing in water being fatal is so deeply ingrained in our knowledge banks that it’s hard to remember a time when this was an unknown notion to us. This however, would not be difficult for us to understand, the same principle when it relates to children and chemicals. Parents of young children are told to make sure all toxic chemicals, like bleach, are locked away so children don’t injure or poison themselves since they do not know the chemicals would be harmful (having never had the experience before). For those children who are exposed to these chemicals, often without the parent’s knowledge, will learn that the pain or injury was caused from the chemical, it is not ingrained in the

For a blind person, they could try to imagine the colors of a sunset (and the sun itself) but with absolutely no reference they would be unable to even begin to conceive the image. Hume goes on to say that for a person who has seen every shade of blue except one would recognize the missing shade existed, when put together in a line. Interestingly enough, an article was circulating on the internet a few weeks ago, discussing how scientists believe that at one time people could not, in fact, see the color blue, but that we viewed blue as an extension of green. It isn’t that the color blue did not exist but that we had not come to recognize it as a different color and therefore we could not imagine it as “blue”. This argument of his shows that while cause and effect can lead us to having an experience, it can also lead us to making errors in concluding the future based only on deductive reasoning, which comes from our experiences. Hume calls this type of reasoning ‘Matters of Fact’, where we cannot know if these are necessarily true, but their negation would be logically