In David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he attempts, by way of empiricism, to uncover the basis for knowledge and reasoning. Hume deals with the principle of induction, and his views on synthetic and analytic truths. Take his favourite example: his belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Clearly, this is a matter of fact; it rests on our conviction that each sunrise is an effect caused by the rotation of the earth. But our belief in that causal relation is based on past observations, and our confidence that it will continue tomorrow cannot be justified by reference to the past. So we have no rational basis for believing that the sun will rise tomorrow. Yet we do believe it. In this essay I intend to explain his theories of matters of fact and relations of ideas, and show how they effect his scepticism concerning induction from past experience to future expectations.

If we look at the first argument we see that it states, if I can't know the principle of induction to be true, I can't know the sun will rise tomorrow. I can't know the principle of induction to be true. So I can't know the sun will rise tomorrow. Hume argues this by relating it to the explanat

Hume comes up with the relation of cause and effect as the only way to reason beyond our senses. Hume then decides that the only way that we come to think in terms of cause and effect is through experience, defeating the validity of the second argument of the principle of induction. We can never know the effect of anything unless we have experienced it. This applies to objects as well as events. We are unaware of the effects of gunpowder, magnates, or food until we experience them because there is nothing in the qualities that we sense in any of these that indicates what they will potentially do. The same goes for events, such as the collision of billiard balls. There is nothing in the motion of the billiard balls indicating that they will communicate motion to each other unless we have seen it happen before (133).

The only certainty that we have is relations of ideas but they do not actually tell us anything to explain ultimate causation. Breaking down all thought into two categories has shown that we can never reason about anything in the world such as if the sun will rise, because our only forms of reasoning tell us nothing for certain. This is a very important part of Hume's "sceptical doubts" about induction from past experience to future expectations. He argues that reasoning is not the basis for making conclusions from the experience of cause and effect. He qualifies this argument by reminding us that we will assume certain causes to have certain effects even though we do not understand the reasons why they behave that way. We do not know the true connection between the sensible qualities of the cause and the sensible qualities of

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1115
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)