How is hume different from locke

Why did Hume think he was raising, and answering, a new question? Is his answer really so appalling? Why did he define belief in terms of a relationship with a present impression? In this paper, I propose answers to these questions. The answers emerge by contrasting Hume with Locke. Locke thought that belief was a pale imitation of knowledge, and that the assent we give to propositions is constituted in the very same act as forming those propositions.

Hume saw the problems such a theory faced concerning existential beliefs. By ceasing to treat existence as a predicate, Hume was confronted with the issue of what it was to judge something to be true, or to assent to something. This issue had to be solved independently of the question of what it was to conceive something, or understand the content of a proposition. Hume thought this problem was new. He should be looked at, not as giving a bad answer to an important question, but rather as being the first in the early modern period to recognize that there was an important question here to be answered.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. Rent this article via DeepDyve. Ayers, Michael: , Locke , 2 vols. London, Routledge. Google Scholar. It is not his place to find a foundation for science because science already has a contract according to which it has implicitly agreed to proceed. He is simply pointing out that the 'wording' in that contract may not be as clear as everyone imagines, and that things would be better if it were squared away. Hume is a Radical: Hume wants the world to be based entirely upon a common underlying structure, and sees everything built upon other structures as not having any inherent value just by already being there.

For him, the 'agreement' upon which science proceeds is useless if no one knows exactly what it is, and the vocabulary used to approximate it even fails to make complete sense.

He considered science as indefinite and factual thus upholding experience as the basis. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What is the contrast between Hume's and Locke's philosophies of science? Ask Question. Asked 5 years, 1 month ago. Active 4 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 11k times. Thanks for any help you can give! Improve this question. Conifold Hi, welcome to Phil SE. Could you provide a link or reference to the quote. Extra context might help us give more pointed answers.

Hi, the quote I've put is slightly paraphrased, but the essence is taken from the bottom of this page: sparknotes. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. It is just the limitations of human senses in their penetration into the "real essences" that prevent us from attaining this ideal: " I doubt not but if we could discover the Figure, Size, Texture, and Motion of the minute Constituent parts of any two Bodies, we should know without Trial several of the Operations one upon another, as we do now the Properties of a Square, or a Triangle.

In this, Hume's "psychological" approach to the grounding of science anticipates Peirce's and Quine's, and Quine explicitly credits him as a major inspiration in Epistemology Naturalized : " It was sad for epistemologists, Hume and others, to have to acquiesce in the impossibility of strictly deriving the science of the external world from sensory evidence He argued that you do not feel the connection between your mind and arm, and thus don't sense the cause of the muscles contracting to raise your arm.

Cause, in Hume's mind, is a synthetic experience used to explain the unobservable things in reality. To help explain he used the billiard ball experiement. Ball A is hit and put into motion towards ball B. When ball A collides with ball B the cause of ball B's movement is not experienced, there is no observable connection between the two.

This would mean that there is no way to be certain that everytime Ball A collides with ball B that ball B will move, ball A could just as likely bounce off and begin rolling in a random direction.

He believd that there is no way of knowing for certain the outcome of an event without being able to perceive the cause.