David Hume and Future Occurrences

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David Hume, in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, discusses how we cannot predict the future. Even though our experiences and our reasoning tell us that objects act in a predictable way, we still cannot prove how objects will act in the future based upon previous interactions. After biting into a piece of pizza we expect an enjoyable taste. This enjoyable taste is expected because our past experiences have proven this to us. Even though we think we can predict that the pizza will act the same as our previous experiences, it may just blow up upon biting. Hume explains that there is no way to predict the future based on our previous experiences and reasoning and I will explain the logic he uses to prove this.

To start, Hume makes the distinction that humans’ relationships with objects are either relations of ideas or matters of fact. “All the object of human reason or inquiry can naturally be divided into, relations of ideas and matters of fact.”(499) Lets discuss these one at a time.

Relations of ideas are parts of knowledge that are a priori, or not learned by experience. “Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe.”(500) So geometry would be put in this category because of the relationship between lines and figures. The opposite this type of knowledge is logically impossible. The example of how a square can never be a circle shows how the opposite of these claims do...

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