An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume · 1748
"We never actually observe cause and effect itself, only one event constantly following another — so our belief in causation, and in the reliability of induction generally, is a habit of the mind formed by repeated experience, not something reason or observation can ultimately justify."
Hume pushes empiricism further than Locke, to a genuinely unsettling conclusion: even our most basic assumption about how the world works, that causes produce effects, isn't something we ever directly perceive. When you watch one billiard ball strike another, you see the first ball move, then contact, then the second ball move — you never actually see the causal power connecting them, only the constant conjunction of the two events happening in sequence, over and over.
This becomes his famous problem of induction: we assume the future will resemble the past, that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, but that assumption can't be justified by reason alone, since there's no logical contradiction in the sun not rising, or by past experience alone, since using past experience to justify trusting future experience is circular. His conclusion is that causal belief and inductive reasoning are habits of the mind, custom formed by repeated association, not truths grounded in logic or direct observation — useful and unavoidable in practice, but not rationally provable in the way we assume.
What is Hume's central problem with our belief in cause and effect?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (full text)Project Gutenberg
- David HumeStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Meditations on First Philosophy
"By systematically doubting everything that can possibly be doubted, including the reliability of the senses, Descartes arrives at one thing that survives the doubt — the fact that he is thinking, and therefore exists, cogito ergo sum — and builds all further certain knowledge back up from that single indubitable foundation using reason alone."