Sunday, November 30, 2008

Hume on Science – Negative

In advance of experience, we cannot know anything about what causes what.
*So experience is our only basis for making predictions about the unobserved.
All inference from experience is based on the assumption that we can extrapolate from observed to unobserved (“induction”).
*But this assumption has no rational foundation whatever! The basis of our reason is animal instinct rather than angelic insight.

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