David Hume's Ideas

Hume’s ideas may seem to be contradictory to people who try to understand, but they are not. He simply has similar ideals that just change when the circumstance change. When it comes to our natural world, Hume believes that induction is not based on reason, neither demonstrative or moral reasoning, but customs, the individual’s instincts or habits. However, when Hume demonstrates his beliefs that people should make an inference about a person’s future or private behaviors based off their past ones, he is speaking with regards to the fact that people are not predictable. Although Hume slightly defends people’s unpredictability by declaring every person acts the way they are suppose to (meaning if a person constantly changes their minds, they
If a person were to see something happen, and then see something else happen after that, they may pay it no mind. The second time it happens, they think it is a coincidence. After the third time, they think it is strangely connected in some way. By the multiple time after that, that person expects the same thing to happen again, and every single time after that. That is what Hume describes as cause and effect. The example he uses is the game of billiards. When one ball moves and touches another, we expect that ball to move as well. That is a simple situation that people think of as a fact because they have seen it happen so many times. According to Hume, that is a form of moral reasoning, which is based off of matters of facts because it was our experience to watch the same chain of events happen multiple times. Hume also feels that it is experience that causes us to make inferences, just not reason. Customs, or our instincts or habits, force us to think right away what will happen when the ball hits the second ball because we have experienced it so many times. In other words, it becomes our instinct to know what will happen because of our experience seeing. Once the first ball moves, we do not sit there and reason what will happen next, we just
People, unlike most things in our natural world, are not concrete. Each person has their own sets of beliefs, goals, morals, motives and other characteristics that are constantly changing due to the situation at hand. Since people have the free will to change their ideas at any given moment they are unpredictable. That is why they should be looked at with reason. While concepts in our world such as science and mathematics most of the time have concrete, right or wrong answers, there is nothing to reason because once we learn the answer, we remember the answer. Just as previously stated, when people have past experiences of the same thing over and over again, like five plus five equals ten, we eventually learn it as a fact. Though, people have no right or wrong answers, mainly because they can be both right and wrong at times. So even though Hume feels people always act the way they are suppose to, we still must take into consideration all the behaviors and actions that a person has exhibited in the past, so we can take all those observations and formulate them into a prediction of what that person might do next. For example, if a person has 6 interviews in one month, and he was ten minutes late to three, seven minutes early to one and one minute early to one, when would he arrive to his sixth