Ouphilpo

Hume’s investigation into causality leads him to question how it is possible to arrive at any degree of accuracy or certainty of our knowledge when all our knowledge is rendered through our process of perception. Initially, the real entities have a stimulus in such a way that it is translated by a sense organ. These sense organs produce sensations, which are converted to representations or ideas when finally ending up in the mind. What is most peculiar about this is Hume’s investigation into how humans continually, despite knowing this psychology of representation, create and refine science, and “in vain we do home, that men, from frequent disappointment will at last abandon such airy sciences, and discover the proper province of human reason” (Hume 359). One generation creates a metaphysical science that is ultimately debunked, but people continue in vain to create these.
Hume begins his analysis of causality by stating three principles of connection between ideas: resemblance, contiguity, and cause or effect. Resemblance is the association of an image with an idea; seeing a painting of an object leads to an impression of the object in our mind. Contiguity is an appeal to the universal understanding of an object in order to comprehend a specific instance—talking about a shoe brings up impressions of a formal shoe. Lastly, cause and effect is the pairing of a cut and pain in a single instance, associating them simply by their order of occurrence—because they happened in succession, the first instance (the cut) caused the second (the pain). By means of cause and effect, “we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses” (Hume 366). Both resemblance and contiguity require the use of our memory and our senses, however, cause and effect relations require no memory of past events and the causal relationship is totally intelligible, completely outside the realm of experience. Yet, we continually cling to these causal relationships in science laboratories and daily life. Hume asserts that with this common sense belief in the world, our knowledge has a genesis in consistency and our objectivity depends on one’s subjectivity.
The problem with this, for Hume, is that nothing is able to more forward prior to theory. All information Hume is able to accrue is done so in the very same manner as when he was a child in his crib. “I cannot now discover an argument which, it seems, was perfectly familiar to me long before I was out of my cradle” (Hume 372). This primary belief in causal relations has at its root the faith that “the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities” (Hume 371). However, the past does not dictate the future, and any certainty of the qualities of the future is derived from uncertain means—certainty derived from subjective interpretation of real entities through the process of representation. At the end of Hume’s analysis, causality is shown to be the primary mode of association of two ideas. If philosophers striving for certainty are gathering information in the same way as a child in the crib, what then does that say about the degree of certainty that we can attain from our representations?