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

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rigorous work that WAS available in the 18th century, namely, the labourious, borderline autistic analysis of corn prices that Smith later did. All of Hume's economics was just a priori reasoning.

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I also find it unpalatable that Hume, the great empiricist, devoted no empirical evidence to support his economic essays. No signs of even basic empirical economic analysis were present, e.g. simple observations of the inflation rate, the unemployment rate, or the size of the money supply. These aggregate statistics did not exist in Hume's time, to be fair, but he did not even take the effort to do the ...

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I genuinely believe they do for the most part, save when they be swayed by inevitable personal biases, which happens to the best of us) - but it is folk wisdom now among practitioners that the highly advanced econometric techniques of today are dubious in predictive power. Hume himself addresses this in Section 1: that the real practical dangers of the abstruse philosophers is that they have no 'safety ...

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speculations and dogma; but now, the word 'empirical' in modern econ is all about sophisticated yet ultimately abstract and far-fetched techniques to study economic phenomena, the predictive power of which remains highly debatable and even scoffed upon by practitioners and operators of markets. I highly respect modern empiricists' (I can only speak for economics) commitment to only follow the data (which...

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Some meta thoughts:
It is ironic that the great philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume being arguably the spearhead of this movement, advocated for empiricism as a grounded scaffolding to study the natural world, drawing conclusions only from data, evidence and observed experience, which fundamentally shifts us away from 'sophistry and illusion' - i.e. rationalistic, abstract, unfalsifiable ...

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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.

Note 4/n:
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.

Note 3/n:
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 ...