Isaac Chan’s Reviews > An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding > Status Update

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But then, what is the foundation of why we identified custom itself that led Hume to causally infer custom? It is now obvious that this is a painful ad infinitum chain of probing that must eventually lead to a BELIEF - that 'custom connects all our causal reasonings'. This belief is but a leap of faith. I have no reason to particularly favour Hume's belief over, say, a rationalist philosopher's belief.

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itself? Hume observes a phenomenon of the human mind (that we constantly ascribe causes and effects) and he labels a cause to this phenomenon - custom! Why should I hold much faith for Hume's causal identification? I am now very much sceptical of judgments of cause and effect.

We could say that it was custom itself that led Hume to causally infer custom as the driving force of our causal reasonings.

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cause and effect. Well, Hume comments that our reasonings of effects don't flow logically from observations of causes - they are just connected by custom. And he says that he posits no underlying cause as to why custom operates the way it does in the human mind - this is just a factual observation of human nature. I agree with this, of course.

But is this identification of *custom* not causal reasoning ...

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*belief* (in other words, ALL people must hold SOME beliefs). Hume considers a study of the nature of belief to be a digression from the core study of epistemology already. For all intents and purposes, we've concluded our epistemological journey.

Ironically, Hume's own commentary on *ad infinitum* led me to find some problems with his identification of custom as the architecture of our reasonings of ...

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Interestingly, Hume, for whatever reason, posits an argument that is now familiar to me via a variation by Tim Keller: that all judgments of matters of fact cannot be parsed through scepticism ad infinitum - logically, they must ultimately rest on some fact. As C.S. Lewis later put it, one 'cannot continually see through everything ... the final layer must be opaque'. And this final fact is what we call ...

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reason and sustained intellectual activity. Indeed, this is the goal of a human life.

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camp. This is a helpful compass, although I still see problems in reconciling degrees-of-probability views with the philosophy that we cannot infer causation from past observations. I still see it as a cheap 'ploy' by Hume to maintain his atheism, as I outlined in my review of 'Of miracles', but I am willing to change my mind on this as I learn more. I will have a chance to revisit 'Of miracles' later on...

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Hume helpfully distinguishes between (and Millican, more helpfully, directs my attention to) Pyrrhonism and Academic scepticism. Millican explains that Pyrrhonism tilts more towards absolute scepticism (according to Millican!) whereas the Academics allowed for certain judgments being more PROBABLE than others, according to the evidence. Millican says that Hume ultimately places himself more in the latter...

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observations or samples. This strikes at the heart of 1 of my thoughts (as I outlined in my review of the 'Abstract') - I would love to see a modern econometrician respond to Hume.

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propositions are not logically joined - they require a medium (IF one is to hold that they are joined via reason, which Hume does not). My question is whether modern Humean research, or any rationalist philosophers after Hume, has shed any light on this medium.

Millican comments that Hume, understandably, does not mention statistical science as a form of reasoning to infer causation from past ...