Listening to Hume’s “An Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding.” Perhaps Hume’s most
famous soundbite: “That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no
less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the
affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to
demonstrate its falsehood” (IIII.1.21).
To put his more eloquent syntax in modern parlance: logic
(demonstrative, a priori, deductive reasoning) cannot prove that the sun will
come up tomorrow. Only inductive reasoning, or experience, leads us to “believe”
it will come up. Certainly, the probability
is high. But it is still only probable, not necessary, to use the language of
analytical philosophy. Science often uses the word “theory” in this way. In
science, a theory is a proposition that has been tested sufficiently that its
probability is so high that we can start to refer to it as a scientific fact. This
difference is often why Creationists can’t understand why scientists continue
to refer to the Theory of Evolution as a fact, and not “just a theory.” With every
discovery, the statistical likelihood becomes more and more probable. But it
will never be certain, just as the sun rising tomorrow will ever be certain.
This is the sort of game runners are playing when they train
for a race. Training is a way of building up experience, of terrain, of the
body, or what works (critical, since what works one day doesn’t seem to work
the next, confounding us as we try to figure out our best form or strategy) in
order to increase the probability that we will perform the way we wish for the next
race. Hume sometimes uses the word habit, though it doesn’t seem to be as
critical a word for him as it is for Charles Sanders Peirce, who goes as far as
to argue that everything happens from habit, even nuclear fusion. All I want to do is finish another 50 miler.
Every runner knows that it’s habit, the training you do before a race rather
than the race itself, that helps you finish that race.
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