Q&A: On Hume’s Challenge and Your Answer to It
On Hume’s Challenge and Your Answer to It
Question
In your view, the answer to Hume’s famous challenge [about causality and induction] is that the intellect grasps and recognizes abstract concepts directly, yet these concepts are objective and external to us. You add that this is the epistemological proof of God’s existence. That is, God is the one who ensures the correspondence between our cognition and the external reality.
My question is: what gives you the basis to assume that the source of those concepts in our intellect is those very objects themselves? In other words, that we know their validity from observing those objective concepts that exist outside us [such as causality, for example]. Perhaps the intellect does not interact with the external world at all—that is, it does not directly observe those objective external concepts—but rather God programs it to think in a way that corresponds to the external world.
Note that my question is not claiming that those concepts are merely subjective. I am arguing that perhaps the source of our knowledge of those concepts is only the structure of our intellect and cognition, except that God arranged it in a way that corresponds to the world as it really is.
Of course, you could answer that this is what pure intuition claims, or invoke various other arguments that require this assumption. But the main question is whether Hume’s challenge by itself requires that assumption.
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. I’ll just note that this argument is a revealing (“theological”) argument, not a generating (“philosophical”) one. I explained that distinction in the fourth conversation of The First Existent.
Discussion on Answer
It could be either way. If I remember correctly, I even wrote this in Two Carts.
Here is the question in short:
Is it necessary to assume the existence of a direct interaction between the human intellect and abstract, objective concepts in order to justify our trust in the data that the intellect gives us about the objective world [such as causality]?
Or perhaps the intellect is enclosed within itself and does not directly interact with the world, and God is the one who ensures the fit between the structure of our thought and the structure of the objective world. To be sure, this also has an effect at the level of cognition, since in the end it does correctly know the objective world; but that cognition is not based on direct interaction, rather on the structure of subjective thought.