display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
3 ideas
| 10328 | We think testimony matches reality because of experience, not some a priori connection [Hume] |
| Full Idea: The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them. | |
| From: David Hume (Enquiry Conc Human Understanding [1748], X.i.89) | |
| A reaction: Well he would say that, wouldn't he? If there is no connection in testimony, presumably there can be no a priori connection with private experience, but there is a danger of never getting started, and ending in anti-realism. |
| 2230 | Good testimony needs education, integrity, motive and agreement [Hume, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Reliable testimony needs a good number of educated people, all of undoubted integrity, who have a lot to lose if they are caught lying, reporting very public events. | |
| From: report of David Hume (Enquiry Conc Human Understanding [1748], X.II.92) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: A nice checklist for flying saucer sightings etc: education, integrity, lying risky, very public. If any of those fail, it comes down to likelihood (apply Bayes?) and character assessment. |
| 12417 | Mathematicians only accept their own proofs when everyone confims them [Hume] |
| Full Idea: There is no Mathematician so expert as to place entire confidence in any truth upon his discovery of it. ..Every time he runs over his proofs his confidence encreases, ..and is rais'd to perfection by the applause of the learned world. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature [1739], IV.1.4) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Quoted by Kitcher, and a nice example of the social nature of 'warrants', even in mathematics. It was illustrated well in the 1990s by the story of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles. |