David Hume's Mitigated Skepticism

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher who made the idea of “mitigated skepticism,” a popular concept in the 18th century. Hume’s mitigated skepticism is an approach for humans to be cautious when approaching reasoning. The term was mainly popularized in an essay written by Hume entitled “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding." Hume traditionally has been regarded as a skeptic in western philosophy. Skepticism is the process of applying reason and critical thinking to determine validity. Hume based his studies of the ideology of John Locke, who thought there weren’t any innate ideas, ideas that are held in the mind a priori, or independently of experience. Hume was called an empiricist because of his emphasis he placed on the contribution
Their mind’s fills the gap, for example, if they are given a complete sequence of shades with one gap where a single shade is not seen, they are able to imagine what the shade is like, essentially they can form an idea of that shade. Hume believes that this exception is so minuscule and singular that the general principle he outlines should be retained. Since impressions are always more vivid and clear when thinking of any idea, people should always try to trace it back to the impression from which it was derived from. If humans cannot locate where the ideas are rooted from, it can be suspected that the term is employed without any meaning or idea. Hume’s theory of ideas is separated into impressions and ideas, where impressions are emotions, passions and sensations and ideas are faint images of impressions in thinking and reasoning. An example of this is if you accidentally bang your toe against a dresser, the sensation you feel us an impression but your recollection of that pain is an idea. As mentioned earlier Hume separated his ideas into simple and complex perceptions. The simple perceptions are single, solidarity ideas and complex ideas are built off of these simple ideas. Simple ideas are dependent on simple impressions. Since there are so many ideas how does one determine whether the term is meaningless or not? Hume believed that if you could trace back an idea to an impression it is meaningful, if not it is meaningless. Hume stated that mathematics (geometry, algebra, calculus) represented relations of ideas, because it is intuitively or demonstratively certain. For example, you cannot have a two sided triangle, or have a one sided square. We couldn’t know the truths of mathematics without first knowing the extent of human understanding, the nature of the ideas we employ or the operations we perform in our