Q&A: Philosophy
Philosophy
Question
Is David Hume’s conception of the principle of causality, and the doubt he casts on our ability to reach the conclusion our senses lead us to—that everything is the result of cause and effect—not itself a kind of empiricism? Hume too arrived at this doubt by observing the world. Isn’t that so?
Answer
Hume assumes that whatever is not empirical is unacceptable. That itself, of course, is not an empirical assumption.
Arriving at doubt through observing the world is completely consistent with his approach. If you observed and did not see something, you doubt it. What is inconsistent about that?
Discussion on Answer
I am definitely not claiming that intuition is all one piece. What I am claiming is that someone who rejects intuition out of hand (that is, does not accept the products of intuition as valid) will have to reject it in all areas. Someone who says that he has a different intuition from mine, but in principle accepts the validity of intuitions—that is a different argument, and I was not talking about that.
I would also add that this has no connection at all to the question of necessity. Either you accept intuition or you do not. The fact that you are compelled to accept something does not mean that it is in fact true. Just as even if God is the only basis for valid morality, that does not mean a person must accept the existence of God. It may be that there is no God, and then indeed there is no valid morality. What ought to be and what is are two different things.
Rabbi, at times it seems that you present “intuition” as though it were all one piece: if we are forced to rely on it on one plane (for example, logic or everyday induction), then we must also accept it on other planes (such as metaphysics, God, or cosmic causality). But perhaps there is an essential difference between different kinds of intuitions?
It seems that basic intuitions—like that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that the floor will hold me when I stand on it—are part of our existential-experiential structure, almost unavoidable, and therefore hard to undermine. By contrast, metaphysical intuitions—for example, that the world must have a first cause—do not arise from daily experience but from distant abstraction, and are also highly exposed to psychological biases such as teleological tendency or cognitive bias.
If so, why not argue that there is a spectrum of intuitions, and that not everything falls into the same binding category? That is: we can accept the unavoidable intuitions that structure our very capacity for thought and life, while rejecting or at least suspending the more remote and speculative intuitions, which are not really necessary for our existence.
In other words: why accept the dichotomous picture of “absolute skepticism or acceptance of every intuition as such,” and not propose a middle position which, like a refined empiricism, accepts the necessary minimum but no more than that?