David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In this paper, I shall summarise a portion of Hume's (1748) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Namely, section four, Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding, and, section five, Sceptical Solutions of these Doubts, focusing on the text's key points.

Section four begins with Hume asserting that human reasoning and enquiry can be divided into two types, namely, Relations of Ideas, and, Matters of Fact. In terms of relations of ideas, Hume has in mind a priori operations, such as mathematics, which can be shown to be true through the use of reason alone. That is, propositions such as 'five plus five is equal to twenty minus ten' do not utilise or depend on something existing in the universe in order to be demonstrated (Hume 1993: 15). In contrast, matters of fact are a posteriori, dealing with experience. For instance, whether the sun will rise tomorrow, or whether or not it is a sunny day today, cannot be proved or disproved through the use of reason alone. Instead, such claims rely on experience. Unlike relations of ideas, there can be no contradiction

Here, Hume states that such conclusions are not grounded in reasoning (Hume 1993: 21). Instead, when we put trust in our past experiences, we are, importantly, assuming that from like causes we can expect similar effects. Hume does, however, admit that if the reliability of nature and thus our past experiences changed, all experience would become useless and would no longer provide us with inferences or conclusions (Hume 1993: 23-24). In spite of his admittance that he may be ignorant of an account of a rational basis for causal reasoning, Hume concludes section four by making it clear that he has yet to be presented with a compelling argument for such a position (Hume 1993: