RC 4

CAT 2020  PREP  online   

FRESH BATCHES STARTING IN AUGUST!

CONTACT NOW!

Whatsapp 09674548313!

Skepticism quite properly forbids us to speculate beyond the content of our present experience and memory, yet we find it entirely natural to believe much more than that. Hume held that these unjustifiable beliefs can be explained by reference to custom or habit. That’s how we learn from experience. When I observe the constant conjunction of events in my experience, I grow accustomed to associating them with each other.

Although many past cases of sunrise do not guarantee the future of nature, my experience of them does get me used to the idea and produces in me an expectation that the sun will rise again tomorrow. I cannot prove that it will, but I feel that it must.

Remember that the association of ideas is a powerful natural process in which separate ideas come to be joined together in the mind. Of course they can be associated with each other by rational means, as they are in the relations of ideas that constitute mathematical knowledge. But even where this is possible, Hume argued, reason is a slow and inefficient guide, while the habits acquired by much repetition can produce a powerful conviction independently of reason. Although the truth of “9 × 12 = 108” can be established rationally in principle, most of us actually learned it by reciting our multiplication tables. In fact, what we call relative probability is, on Hume’s view, nothing more than a measure of the strength of conviction produced in us by

our experience of regularity.

Our beliefs in matters of fact, then, arise from sentiment or feeling rather than from reason. For Hume, imagination and belief differ only in the degree of conviction with which their objects are anticipated. Although this positive answer may seem disappointing, Hume maintained that custom or habit is the great guide of life and the foundation of all natural science.

According to Hume, our belief that events are causally related is a custom or habit acquired by experience: having observed the regularity with which events of particular sorts occur together, we form the association of ideas that produces the habit of expecting the effect whenever we experience the cause. But something is missing from this account: we also believe that the cause somehow produces the effect. Even if this belief is unjustifiable, Hume must offer some explanation for the fact that we do hold it. His technique was to search for the original impression from which our idea of the necessary connection between cause and effect is

copied. The idea does not arise from our objective experience of the events themselves. All we observe is that events of the “cause” type occur nearby and shortly before events of the “effect” type, and that this recurs with a regularity that can be described as a “constant conjunction.” Although this pattern of experience does encourage the formation of our habit of expecting the effect to follow the cause, it includes no impression of a necessary connection. Nor do we acquire this impression (as Locke had supposed) from our own capacity for voluntary motion.

Here the objective element of constant conjunction is rarely experienced, since the actions of our minds and bodies do not invariably submit to our voluntary control. And even if volition did always produce the intended movement, Hume argued, that would yield no notion of the connection between them. So there is no impression of causal power here, either.

Still, we do have the idea of a necessary connection, and it must come from somewhere. For a (non-justificatory) explanation, Hume refers us back to the formation of a custom or habit. Our (non-rational) expectation that the effect will follow the cause is accompanied by a strong feeling of conviction, and it is the impression of this feeling that is copied by our concept of a necessary connection between cause and effect. The force of causal necessity is just the strength of our sentiment in anticipating efficacious outcomes.

1

According to Hume, the linking of an effect to a cause is based on all of the following except

a. our rational thinking. b. our sentiment.

c. our feeling of conviction. d. the initial impression that we carry.

2

What is the primary purpose of the passage?

a. To highlight Hume’s theory of the predominance of custom or habit over reason in shaping beliefs and ideas.

b. To differentiate between the role played by custom and habits in beliefs and imagination.

c. To show the role of the constant conjunction in the formation of ideas about cause and effect

Relations.

d. To discuss Hume’s theory regarding objective and subjective experience.

3

Hume would agree with which of the following statements?

a. Association of ideas produces habit.

b. Ideas cannot be associated by rational means.

c. A cause cannot produce an effect.

d. Expectation of something leads to its experience.

CLICK HERE FOR SOLUTIONS 

CAT 2020  PREP  online   

FRESH BATCHES STARTING IN AUGUST!

CONTACT NOW!

Whatsapp 09674548313!