Hume Critique

To start, Hume makes the distinction that humans' relationships with objects are either relations of ideas or matters of fact. "All the object of human reason or inquiry can naturally be divided into, relations of ideas and matters of fact."(499) Lets discuss these one at a time.

Relations of ideas are parts of knowledge that are a priori, or not learned by experience. "Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe."(500) So geometry would be put in this category because of the relationship between lines and figures. The opposite this type of knowledge is logically impossible. The example of how a square can never be a circle shows how the opposite of these claims do not make sense. Now that this distinction is made, we can move to discussing matters of fact.

Matters of fact are parts of knowledge that are a posteriori, or learned through experience. An example of a matter of fact is that my name is Josh Peete. I could have been named something else like John Doe and I still would be the same object. "The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality."(500) So the opposite of a matter of fact can be true. The piece of pizza that I bite into could explode in my face even though I had never experienced that before. Matters of fact, or knowledge learned through experience, cannot prove how objects function.

People believe in matters of fact because they have some other reason for doing so. "All reasoning concerning matter of fact seems to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses."(500) I have a firecracker and a lighter. The cause for the firecracker to explode would be me lighting the fuse. The effect of me lighting the fuse would be that the firecracker explodes. These claims are called causal claims and they explain the cause and effect relationships of objects. Hume uses the example of someone on a desert island who finds a watch. The person on the island concludes that the effect of a watch being on the island is a cause of a human once inhabiting it. His reasoning though may be wrong; he just uses prior experience