PHL137 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Pareidolia, Implicit-Association Test, Implicit Stereotype
Document Summary
Week 5: critical thinking and the human mind. Famous argument about inductive generalisations from 18th century philosopher david. Hume argued that despite the centrality of inductive reasoning to our thinking, it is not rationally justified. All of our knowledge come from either deductive reason alone (mathematics, logic) or from experience. It is being assumed that nature is uniform, and doesn"t change. 2 is based on another implicit premise based on our past experience, that nature has been uniform before. We are assuming the uniformity of nature to justify our belief in the uniformity of nature. The sun has always risen in the past. Nature has always been uniform in the past* Hume"s point was that induction is only rationally justified if we"re justified in assuming that nature is uniform. But we only have inductive evidence for the uniformity of nature. So we have to assume that induction is justified to justify induction (which means it isn"t really rationally justified)