David Hume's Skeptical Argument Against Induction

In Lara Buchak’s essay, Can It Be Rational to Have Faith?, she asserts that everyday faith statements and religious faith statements share the same attributes. She later states that in order to truly have faith, a person ceases to search for more evidence for their claim, and that having faith can be rational. Although she makes compelling arguments in favor of faith in God, this essay is more hearsay and assumption than actual fact. In this paper, you will see that looking for further evidence would constitute not having faith, but that having faith, at least in the religious sense, is irrational.

The argument from design builds its foundation on the following premise. There is evidence of design, or purpose, in the natural world. Therefore, a creator created the natural world. Despite its nature that has lead this type of logic to be a default in several cultures, this argument is unsuccessful in proving a creator—which is its goal. Many of Hume’s objections to the argument may be brushed off by those who are blindly religious and take offense, but many, from the same pool of objections, are simply logical and commonsensical, while some are too rigid.

Throughout Elbow’s essay, the reader is given the definition and rules for each of the two games, being believing and doubting. In this essay, Elbow leans towards the believing game and tries to persuade the reader to leave the doubting game behind. Elbow states rules for each game that are used to form a plausible conclusion. The

Humans are unlike any other creature on this planet, as we are able to think and reason. These two abilities have created the most powerful minds ever known such as, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Plato. These abilities have also lead to some powerful arguments one of such being our beliefs. Some philosophers believe that all beliefs must be justified, while others believe that only some of our beliefs must be justified. W.K. Clifford argues that it is morally wrong to act or believe without sufficient evidence. This means Clifford was an evidentialist. William James argues that sometimes it is allowed to believe without sufficient evidence.

William K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” is an essay about justification and how we are morally required to prove our beliefs. Clifford’s theory throughout the essay was “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Clifford thinks that it is a moral obligation for you to confirm each of your beliefs with sufficient proof, no matter how questionable or insignificant the beliefs may be. I believe he thinks this because beliefs have serious effects and consequences on others.

In the first case, we are presented with two characters, Smith and Jones, who have both applied for the same job. It is stated that Smith has evidence for a proposition, which we will call A, that 1) Jones is going to get the job and 2) Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith’s evidence for this is that 1) the president of the company told him that Jones would get the job and 2) Smith counted the number of coins in Jones pocket ten minutes ago. Here is the first problem in this case. I would argue that for both parts A, the evidence that is provided is not sufficient enough to classify it as true justification. In terms of the first reason, merely trusting what someone says, no matter how much power

I read both the William James article, “The Will to Believe,’’ and William Kingdon Clifford’s “The Ethics of Beliefs”. Each of these writings explained the author’s views on human’s and their belief systems. William James broke down belief into different category’s that certain beliefs could fall under. William Kingdon Clifford’s idea was much more straight to the point. Clifford states that if you do not have good evidence for something, then it must be wrong. I examined both articles closely and considered which one made the most sense to me. I believe that both authors, in their own way are correct, but I also found flaws in both William James paper and William Kingdon Clifford’s argument.

A theory is a set of statements or principles developed to explain a group of facts or phenomena. It has been repeatedly tested and used to make predictions. Theories in this category attempt to explain why an individual commits a crime or delinquent behaviors. The primary goal of criminological theory is to help one gain an understating of why and how certain things are related to criminal behavior (Bohm and Vogel, 2011). Theories dissect the making and the breaking of the law, criminal different behavior, as well as patterns of criminal activity. Theories can be used to guide policy making and can be weighed on a number of criteria including biological things, psychological things, sociological things, economic things or a combination of

In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume explored the philosophical problem of causation, and sought to answer the question of “What is involved when we say A causes B?” There have been three main interpretations of Hume’s account of causality, the Skeptical Realist interpretation, the Regularity Interpretation, and the Skeptical Naturalist Interpretation. This essay will evaluate these interpretations, and argue for the Skeptical Naturalist Interpretation as the most plausible. Firstly, Galen Strawson’s skeptical realist (SR) reading of Hume’s account of causality asserts that Hume thought that there were causal powers. Contrarily, the regularity theorists, who champion the Regularity Interpretation (RI), assert that Hume thought

Descartes and Hume. Rationalism and empiricism. Two of the most iconic philosophers who are both credited with polarizing theories, both claiming they knew the answer to the origin of knowledge and the way people comprehend knowledge. Yet, despite the many differences that conflict each other’s ideologies, they’re strikingly similar as well. In this essay I will attempt to find an understanding of both rationalism and empiricism, show the ideologies of both philosophers all whilst evaluating why one is more theory is potentially true than the other.

I describe a belief as an idea that is thought to be true by a person. Beliefs have the potential to influence and determine what a person values. Religion is a main factor that defines a person’s beliefs. It is known that people share common beliefs within the same religion.

Be that as it may, he immediately stresses his steadfast reluctance to accept this association, as he contends that naturalistic epistemology (or rather, moderate naturalistic epistemology) is indeed quite compatible with a priori knowledge and justification (Goldman 1). Goldman briefly reminds us of what two other stronger, yet quite different versions of naturalistic epistemology claim. On the one hand, scientific naturalism, he explains, holds that “[e]pistemology is a branch of science [where the] statements of epistemology are a subset of the statements of science, and the proper method of doing epistemology is the empirical method of science” (Goldman 2). On the other hand, empiricist naturalism claims that “All justification arises from empirical methods [and the] task of epistemology is to articulate and defend these methods in further detail” (Goldman 3). In his attempt to construct a more comprehensive, milder version of the two, Goldman’s own formulation of moderate naturalism is, as he states, a “fusion” of the two previous versions of naturalism. This reformulation consists of two components: (A) “All epistemic warrant of justification is a function of the psychological (perhaps computational) processes that produce of preserve belief”, and (B) “The epistemological enterprise needs appropriate help from science, especially the science of the mind” (Goldman

However, Gettier argued that ‘p’ cannot simply be known because you are justified in believing that ‘p’. He proposed several counter-examples to the Justified True Belief theory (JTB theory) and they are known as Gettier cases. In this paper, I aim to explain how a Gettier-style case spells trouble for the view that knowledge is justified true belief. Gettier’s main objective wasn’t to solve the mishaps behind the JTB theory, however other philosophers took it upon themselves to use Gettier’s

Part IX of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, presents an a priori rendition of the cosmological argument through Demea: a conservative theist who sparks discourse with his claims. The majority of this discourse consists of Cleanthes (another fictional character) presenting several objections to Demea’s argument.

Goodman states that the real problem in explaining “how induction happens” is not the difficulty of justifying the forms of inductive inference, instead it is how we can distinguish valid and invalid predictions. He argues that Hume only focuses on regularities but fail to distinguish the projectible from non-projectible regularities.