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

Note 4/n:
already largely see the world in probabilities. In the markets, probabilistic thinking certainly anchors our analyses and contains our biases, but we all know the hidden risk of probabilities in the markets - the risk of a black swan event.

Hume doesn't add much to resolve this conundrum, then! I am already skeptical of causation, and I don't know why he leaps to proposing thinking with probabilities - ...

Note 3/n:
central tension that persists in Hume's thinking: why is he skeptical of causation, yet allows for empirical reasoning from probability (essentially, merely a more sophisticated, mathematical induction from past observations)?

Thus, Hume adds little much to my existing mode of thought, then. Following my reading of books like 'Fooled by randomness' and 'Superforecasting', and writers like Mauboussin, I ...

Note 2/n:
Hume's methodology results in a peculiar probability scale that spans from -1 to 1 (because he deducts negative observations from positive), instead of the modern convention of 0 to 1 (because we now only count the positive observations and divide them by the total observations). Nice! Good value-add by Millican yet again.

But now that I have some grasp on 'Of miracles', I now direct my attention to the...

Note 1/n:
I have finally reached 'Of miracles' and I may be in a good position to critique my own (largely negative) 2025 review of 'Of miracles'. The notes made me understand that this lengthy ramble of i) proportioning one's beliefs to the evidence, ii) deducting negative from positive evidence is just Hume's 18th-century, rambly way of stating his doctrine of probabilistic thinking. Millican also taught me that...

Note n/n:

governed by the same maxims as the vulgar, especially in the active parts of life.

(I can also see now how deeply seeped in scholasticism the pre-Cartesians were, with their dogma of the superiority of human reason; and this allows me to see how compatible Aristotelianism is with Christianity, which made it so popular.)

Note 8/n:
less prestigious university, or people who speak in a heavy accent. I do not necessarily possess any superior insight into the 'real', deeper nature of things than anyone else - we are all bound by analogical reasoning and induction.

A Platonist might hold that philosophers are intellectually superior to others due to our deeper understanding of the Forms, but a Humean humbly realises that we are ...

Note 7/n:
goes to Dr Millican, as always.

'On the reason of animals' was humbling not just on an inter-species level, but on an intra level as well. If all living things possess but the same animalistic mode of reasoning, then there is zero justification for me to feel superior about my own reasoning compared to certain groups of people, e.g. people who may have less formal education than I have, or attended a ...

Note 6/n:
the Treatise. But my challenge to Hume last night was that he must now explain why humans are so intellectually superior to the beasts. And I read this morning that Hume answers this in his endnote: I will read it tonight. Ha.

I would not have known that Darwin's personal notes show that he read 'On the reason of animals' around the time that he was embarking in his groundbreaking revolution. The credit...

Note 5/n:
reasoning (there must be a medium). I wonder if Hume even realised this fallacy in his reasoning.

Also, I am smugly feeling like a philosophical genius now, because I accurately anticipated the key objection to Hume's 'Of the reason of animals'. I had accepted Hume's argument that humans possess merely the same mode of reasoning as the beasts (i.e. analogical reasoning and custom) since my reading of ...

Note 4/n:
in non-humans, I cannot infer that this means that homosexuality SHOULD be allowed among humans. There is a missing link from the premise to the conclusion.) So Hume's approach runs into the is-ought problem as well. I observe that all ideas correspond with an impression, yes, but I cannot rush to the conclusion that every idea SHOULD correspond with an impression! There is a missing link in the logical ...