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sumation of hume's inquiry sec


            Summation of Hume's Inquiry Section 5.
             Section five part one of Hume's An Inquiring Concerning Human Understanding is an opposition of the skeptical philosophy. Hume felt that philosophies that were designed to suspend all judgments or to doubt, such as Foundationalism, confined understanding to very narrow bounds and that these kinds of fences should not be put up; also that there is a principle or a step inside the mind that is not supported by understanding or by any argument. Hume states that this principle is custom or habit. He gives the example of a person with strong faculties of reason and reflect be brought into the world. This person could not have any reasoning of fact outside what he is being exposed to or what was immediately present to his senses. This person could not be able to realize the idea of a cause and effect conjunction between objects, to this person the correlation would seem arbitrary. This is why our a priori knowledge is based on experience, not reason. One does not draw the same conclusion after witnessing an object or event as that person does after witnessing it a thousand times over. Knowledge through reason does not allow this variation of restructured conclusions.
             Hume also gives another example; let me sort of restate it in the manner of which I understood it. Let us take two men, one is an experienced house builder, the other a novice, but endowed with many natural house-building talents. The experienced homebuilder will be obviously more trusted because he, through study and reflection, will be able to avoid mistakes he once made as novice. That at any age maxims are formed through observation and the more observations or experience one has, the less liable that person is to make errors. Hume goes on to state that there are some situations such as being able to feel love or fear or hatred cannot be prevented or produced by reasoning, but that they are natural instincts based upon correlations with experience or custom.


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