Michael Daniel

9-22-2006
Sober p. 182-187, ‘Justified Belief and Hume’s Problem of Induction’

Thesis: Hume believed that belief was possible but truth and justification was not

possible.

Knowledge requires justified true belief. Justified belief requires no truth. For

example, you can be justified in believing that your lottery ticket probably will not win

the lottery. It is not a hard truth that your lottery ticket will loose, it is just probable that it

will loose.

Hume was not only skeptical about truth but he was skeptical about justified

belief. The only part of the justified true belief theory that he did not attack was belief.

Hume says that justification relies on our assumption of the principle of the uniformity of

nature, which can not be rationally justified, therefore knowledge can not be justified, and

therefore knowledge does not exist.

The principle of the uniformity of nature is our belief that nature is uniform and

that nature does not change. We can not assume that the principle of the uniformity of

nature is true because the alternate could just as easily be true. In other words, nature

could, for no reason at all, become random at any moment. The belief that nature is

random is just as valid as the principle of the uniformity of nature.

If we can not rationally deduce an inductive statement about generality or an

inductive predictive statement then those two types of statements must be false. For

example, we can not say that, ‘all emeralds are green’ simply because every emerald that

you have seen so far has been green. We also can not say that the next emerald that you

will observe will be green simply because every emerald that you have seen so far has
been green. To put it simply, we can make no predictions about the future based on past

events.

Hume says that the principle of the uniformity of nature cannot be known as

definitional truth. Definitional truth would involve the same reasoning that “all bachelors

are unmarried” possesses. It is an a priori argument. Hume says that there is no

contradiction in believing that even definitional truths could change at any moment along

with the universe.