Our lecture today was focused around David Hume, possibly the most important philosopher ever to write in English. He can be seen to have started the original establishment of contemporary cognitive science, his methods and believes are hugely contemporary with Freud and the practice of Psychoanalysis. Hume was incredibly captivated with Newton’s ideas so began his thinking with trying to apply a utopian theory to human behaviour. Hume employs Machiavelli’s scientific explanations of human behaviour though he tries to emphasise the influence of liberal realism.
If we look at The Vienna Circle; including its members we become aware that logical positivism underpins social science. Einstein followed this idea of logical positivism; he didn’t believe there was such thing as law with regards to the universe. Hume used the sun to comprehend Einstein’s thesis, claiming the sun rising could be purely a mental illusion, there is no absolute truth, everything that exists and occurs is all due to probability.
To explain this concept further it justified by Hume’s theory of Causation. Causation is the relation of two or more events occurring only after the first event has taken place. Hume using the example of billiard balls to explain this theory, he claims there is no evidence of causation, you cannot prove that one thing i.e. the white ball moving towards the black ball, then hearing a click, is the cause of another i.e. the black ball moving. According to Hume nothing in nature actually occurs it only occurs in your mind. For Hume everything is a miracle; "Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country." (Taken from section X of Hume’s An Enquiry concerning human understanding entitled “Of Miracles”)
The idea of testing an event to see if it actually occurred by a causation or if it was purely a miracle is drawn from the simple method of logic; logic is a specific scientific method for analysing truth claims, we use logic to find if a claim is integrally logical. There are two types of logic; analytic logic and synthetic logic. In analytic logic the conclusion is drawn from the subject i.e. all bicycles have two wheels – this is always true by definition as ‘bi’ stands for two. Synthetic logic is based on non-identity and contradiction; when someone has made a claim you must add knowledge, the claim can only be true if the axiom is true. This falls down to the logic of scholarism; we may claim ‘all swans are white’ although this is deductively invalid, it may be possible that there is one swan that may not be white – there discovery of black swans in Australia proved this statement to be false.
Drawing a conclusion based on synthetic logic is called induction; Hume claims induction is never possible as there will always be doubt. Hume maintains that just because something has happened once or even concurringly there is no absolute certainty that it will happen again. For example we may all believe that the sun will rise tomorrow morning cannot be falsified therefore we must accept that it may be true that it won’t happen. Hume sticks purely to facts, he believes synthesis is dangerous, the thought at ideas are mixed to create something new i.e. the idea of a horse and a rhino created the myth of the unicorn. Similarly to Locke, Hume doesn’t analyse his beliefs.
This leads on to the verification principle on method of social science; it is the most important aspect of the movement. The principle was proposed by Freddy Ayer in his work ‘Language, Truth and Logic’. Ayer argues that most things are not verifiable thus they cannot be proven true.
“The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.”
Karl Popper follows Hume very closely; he states however that the verification principle is not scientific. He supports Hume in saying just because an event is repeatable does not mean it will always be repeatable. A statement which is unfalsifiable can never be scientifically valued; if it cannot be falsified then we must expect the possibility of the statement being true.
A good journalist will always verify then falsify before criticising something to see if it is false.
