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

Note 5/n:
system, custom alone can create an internal impression that imprints an idea.

Finally, Hume maintains that a cause = if the 1st object had not been, the 2nd never had existed. This jives exactly with that Goodfellows episode 'The counterfactual show' that I watched in 2024, where I learned the profound concept from Stephen Kotkin that all causal explanations are counterfactual arguments BY DEFINITION.

Note 4/n:
capital which caused its trade deficit? I thought that the temporal priority of many events in real life are highly ambiguous but no one can doubt that they are causally intertwined. Thus I concur with Hume to drop this condition of temporal priority.

Millican's commentary that Hume had 'finally tracked down the impression of necessary connexion' also confuses me: I did not know that, within Hume's ...

Note 2/n:
'necessary connexion'.

A further thought on Hume's 2 famous definitions of a cause (also refer to page xlv in the intro). Millican teaches me that in the Treatise, Hume had insisted that a cause must be contiguous with its effect as well as temporally prior, but he had dropped the latter condition from the Enquiry. (The 2 definitions in the Enquiry both concern themselves only with contiguity in space.)

Note 1/n:
Revisiting my review of the 'Abstract' this morning was so annoying - it revealed how many details I had forgotten and had missed in the Enquiry. Firstly, Hume had mentioned the terms 'power' and 'force' (in relation to necessary connexion) multiple times in the Abstract, so I should NOT have found those terms foreign in my current reading of the Enquiry, nor should I have not known what he means by ...

Note 5/n:
that this constant conjunction stops completely.

Again, Hume leaves his metaphysics of causation unclear: whether he thinks there ARE underlying causes at all, or just that the mind can never directly observe underlying causes.

Note 4/n:
to and thus harvest the long-run US equity risk premium was initially borne out of a presumably deep understanding on the underlying causes of the equity premium (e.g. systematic market risk, disaster risk, risks to human capital, the longer I play the higher my chances of winning etc), but now Hume is telling me that all those causal inferences are merely post-hoc narratives. I can conceive of a state ...

Note 3/n:
of causation (which I do not understand, because I clearly find within myself an idea of causation). All causal inferences can only be assigned AFTER observing constant conjunction - the mind can never have an insight into the underlying causal forces with no prior experience. This is deeply unsettling to me (not to say that I have not been unsettled by Hume for years now): my decision to gain exposure ...

Note 2/n:
Berkeley lie on the instrumentalism spectrum - just that Berkeley was a strict/ hard instrumentalist - but Berkeley pushed this philosophy to a completely opposite view on God, compared to Hume. Berkeley's instrumentalist view of God's laws is very exciting to me.

Finally, Hume is basically saying that all our ideas of causation are post-hoc! We never directly observe causation, so we don't have an idea...

Note 1/n:
So, this 'instrumentalism' philosophy as embraced by Hume (who was deeply influenced by Newton) is exactly just the pool-player analogy advanced by Friedman in 'The methodology of positive economics', then. (It's also quite funny that both Friedman and Hume alluded to pool and billiards.) Note that Hume is generalizing instrumentalism to ALL causes in the world.

It is interesting that both Hume and ...

Note 2/2:
great danger of the abstruse philosophy: that it can stray far from the logic of real life, cuz it has no common sense to rein it in. So this must mean that Hume thinks that his empiricism is not remote from common life and experience, then! Indeed, this is slightly disingenuous of Hume imo: for he is a champion of the abstruse philosophy himself, and his doctrine of skepticism is hardly common-sense.