The Five Characteristics Of Hume's Empiricism

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Empiricism is based on the belief that human beings enter the world a blank slate, or tabula rasa, without any innate knowledge. Empiricists believe that we aquire all of our knowledge through experiences. Hume is an Empiricists who is lead to skepticism through rigorously applying Occam's razor to the theories of previous philosophers. Hume is sure that the simplest theory will be the most efficient.
Hume denies rationalism, specifically Descartes, knowledge of self, by stating that truth should be permanent. Something that is continuously changing cannot be known, and cannot be the truth, because it will never be the same as it was previously. Your mind is constantly changing. This yields the questions, is the way the self exists now, five minutes ago, or 3 years from now, the …show more content…

It is a priori knowledge, meaning its existence is not based on experience, but logic and theory. Negating the statement leads to self contradiction, implying that if your were to oppose an analytic statement, you would be denying that something exists as it truly does. For example to negate “I know I am a thing which thinks” would result in the statement “I doubt I am a thing which thinks”. The latter of the two statements does not result in a comprehensible statement because by doubting that you think, you are actively thinking. The analytic statement must be true by definition; for example, a triangle has three angles. This definitional truth is also a tautology. Analytic statements must be repetitive in the sense that no new knowledge is gained, but perhaps new associations may occur. Take 2+3=5 for example. Both sides of this equation show different ways of expressing the same quantity, yet no new knowledge is gained. Finally, analytic statements must be necessarily true, meaning they are true now, and always. Mathematics are necessarily true, because their truth does not rely on interpretation, its truth exists

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