✍ Scribed by Ian Hacking
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
No chapters in Book I of the Treatise are less well read than those on chance and probability, but they are of capital importance. I shall fix on three of the reasons for which they matter. First, Hume's own text needs them because his account of cause as constant conjunction is absurd without them. Secondly this study of probability matters to the history of ideas because Hume raises a problem about knowledge which could not have been put before that time, but which has vexed epistemologists ever since. Thirdly Hume was on the verge of saying something he ought to have said but which has for more than two centuries gone unsaid. This silence has hindered work on probable inference. It is this third theme that will chiefly occupy us here.
Cause, says Hume, is among other things constant conjunction. Causes are learned about from experience, and the idea of causation, with its concomitant, necessary connection, derives from the association of ideas. If Hume were right, causes could play little role in our thought, because 'for the most part', 'usually' and the like are the order of the day. Hume knew this well: to quote him out of context, "no one, who is arrived at the age of maturity, can any longer be acquainted with" uniform regularities (T 131) 1 . In this context, Hume is saying that the mature mind is no longer acquainted with a complete association of ideas. Even when, in the past, there has been a complete association over some recorded instances, the mind balks at making a uniformity out of that, and grants only a probability.
It is an irony that a rationalist can give a constant conjunction analysis of causality, and Leibniz did exactly that with his theory of expression. Only the empiricist who claims to find the origin of every idea in experience is flummoxed, for in fact we scarcely ever experience Constant conjunctions, and, in maturity, when we do experience them we do not always infer that the conjunction is altogether constant. That is my first theme. Hume needs a
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A pesar de serreconocido como el más grande filósofo británico, Hume ha sido desvalorizadopor una posteridad malevolente. Los filósofos de la traición académicaestimaron que sus obras eran de lectura excesivamente fácil y ofendían por suatrevimiento y por su variedad insólita.Lo quecriticaban no era