Hume’s Critique of Science

Hume showed that science is based on three assumptions that have no rational basis.

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the mid 1700s. His philosophy was a culmination of British empiricism. This was a tradition that began with Francis Bacon and continued through Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and then was critiqued rather effectively by George Berkeley.

Berkeley had said that it is a wrong idea to think that we can know for certain what our sense perceptions say to us. Hume took this critique very seriously. He realized that Berkeley was correct, that our sense perceptions are highly variable. Locke had kind of admitted that, but still carried on with the idea that really, because we have nothing but our impressions, that really has to be the basis of our knowledge.

Well, Hume said this is not good enough. There must be a more firm basis for the sciences, and by the mid 1700s, science was everything within academia and scholarship. Hume, like Locke before him and Descartes before Locke, wanted to create a firm foundation for the sciences so that we could know for certain that what science seems to be telling us in its explorations is actually true.

For philosophy, Hume said that it seemed obvious that philosophy has not resolved anything. We are still having the same arguments that we have been having since Plato.

As for science, Hume was rather disturbed by the looseness that he saw. In science, people were just making observations, and if their observations looked like they gave them an answer, they accepted that as an answer, and that was not good enough for Hume.

The Nature of Human Perception

Hume said that one thing that both science and philosophy were neglecting to look at was human nature, and by that he meant simply how do humans think? How do humans perceive? So, he looked at this human nature of how it is that we perceive things.

Being in the British empirical tradition, he basically accepted Locke’s fundamental view that there are objects in the world, and those objects create sense impressions within our minds. Hume…