Mention Regarding Books An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Title	:	An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Author	:	David Hume
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 96 pages
Published	:	January 1st 2006 by Digireads.com (first published 1748)
Categories	:	Philosophy. Nonfiction. Classics. Psychology

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Paperback | Pages: 96 pages

Commentary In Pursuance Of Books An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

I had seen so many references to Hume's Enquiry that I almost thought I had read it; but, when I actually got around to opening the book, I found as usual that things were not quite as I had imagined. I was not surprised by his relentless scepticism, or by his insistence on basing all reasoning on empirical evidence. These qualities, after all, have become proverbial. I was, however, surprised to find that I hadn't correctly grasped the essence of his argument concerning the nature of knowledge. In case you are as poorly informed as I was, let me summarise it here.

Hume's position is wonderfully simple. He asks what grounds we have for supposing that multiple repetitions of an experiment justify us in inferring a necessary law. If we note, on many occasions, that hot objects burn our hands when we touch them, what logical reason do we have for assuming that we should not touch the next candle flame we happen to see?

The answer is that we have no logical grounds at all for making such an inference. Of course, as a matter of observed fact, we do assume, after a small number of trials, that touching hot objects will hurt us. Hume says this is nothing to do with logic; we are simply designed in such a way that we cannot help being influenced by our experience to adopt such rules. As he points out, many other living creatures do the same. It is impossible to believe that a dog or a horse is performing any kind of logical deduction when they learn to avoid touching naked flames. They simply acquire the habit of behaving in this way. The most economical explanation of what we see is that human beings are doing the same thing.

A mountain of discussion has accumulated since Hume published his book, and it would be presumptuous of me to give my opinions when so many extremely clever people have already done so. I am, however, struck by something I have noticed in the course of my professional career. I have worked in Artificial Intelligence and related subjects since the early 80s, and during that period the field has suffered a profound change. In 1980, most AI research was related to logic. People assumed that the notion of intelligence was in some essential way based on the notion of deduction. Making machines intelligent was a question of making them capable of performing the right kinds of logical inferences. This tempting approach was, unfortunately, a resounding failure.

Somewhere towards the end of the last century, a different way of looking at things started to become fashionable, and quickly gained ground. Instead of thinking about logic, people began more and more to think about probability. They collected data and extracted various kinds of statistical regularities. The new AI systems made no attempt to think logically; their decisions were based on associations acquired from their experience. At first, the AI community was scornful, but it was soon found that "data-driven" systems worked quite well. They made stupid mistakes sometimes; but so did the logic-based systems, and the mechanical logicians tended to make more stupid mistakes. They could reason, but they had no common sense. Today, data-driven systems have taken over the field, and the approach has been shown to work well for many problems which had once been considered impossible challenges. Particularly striking successes have been notched up in machine translation, speech recognition, computer vision, and allied fields.

If David Hume came back today, I have no idea whether he'd be offered a chair at a philosophy department. But I'm fairly sure that Google would be interested in hiring him.

Details Books Concering An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Original Title:	An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
ISBN:	1420926993 (ISBN13: 9781420926996)
Edition Language:	English

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Article Regarding Books An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

A few years ago I had, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. I was completely unsatisfied with the explanations for existence/purpose that I had been given by parents/teachers/friends. It terrified me that no one had ever written about this concerns (obviously people had, I was just never introduced to them). I felt like an idiot for allowing my mind to dwell on concepts such as the basis of human understanding.It's nice, it's calming to know that extremely intelligent people, and

Hume eviscerates the belief that we can understand anything about the world on a rational and certain basis. At his most optimistic, Hume argues that all knowledge beyond direct observation is probable rather than certain. This was an important chastenment of Enlightenment rationalism, and is generally accepted today.But Hume's argument seems to go much farther, and the more optimistic later sections are the result of his either not recognizing the strength of his earlier arguments or

This book is perhaps the most sophisticated book on philosophy that has ever been published. In its core it touches on psychology, physics, and the physiology of the brain, biological claims to survival, and then some. This book portrays the science of philosophy.As I go through my career, references to Hume come up in my thoughts. As I read psychology books, physics books, and such, references to Hume come up in my thoughts. Connections to Hume are everywhere. No other author has been so much

I enjoyed the straightforward, no-nonsense style of this famous philosopher. Good though he is, however, his vision of life is that of pure empiricism - that all real knowledge is gained only through sense contact. In other words he appears to completely disregard a vital aspect of the human consciousness, i.e. the possibility of gaining knowledge through contemplating the mind itself, for instance through the practice of mindfulness and meditation. Furthermore he discounts the possibility of

It's a bit pointless to try to comment on this book, especially considering how much scholarship there is on Hume and how widely studied he still is by the intellectually curious and in Philosophy departments. He is an amazingly advanced thinker for the time, and is still important today, partly because although he doesn't seem to like Spinoza or any of the Rationalists, most of the basis for contemporary psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience is found in these two great philosophers'

I read this as an ebook, which while convenient I feel is not the best medium for texts that need to be read and understood slowly while taking notes. Nonetheless, I was impressed by Humes prose style and look very much forward to reading Kant and seeing how he addresses the difficult questions Hume raised.

It was recommended that I read this because David Hume influenced Kant and it would help me understand the concepts in Critique of Pure Reason. He's certainly an influential figure; in fact, without him, there would probably be no Arthur Schopenhauer, my favorite philosopher ever. He also influenced Albert Einstein, and I can see how this book was revolutionary in the science world. Sometimes it seemed more like a science book than a philosophy book. But I felt as if I was already familiar with