One of our earliest points of contention with Hume was whether or not everything is ultimately reducible to a single simple impression. The example in question was whether or not we could ever have the simple impression of “blueness” without it coming to us in a complex form—is the simple impression of blue original and basic, or is it simply an abstraction that comes about through the manipulation of our ideas? Although we did not get to a discussion of, say, the complexities of human language, our difficulty in establishing this sensation of “blueness” still speaks to the same anxieties that we had expressed in our discussion questions: if we cannot reduce to simple impressions even an item as simple as a paint chip from Home Depot, is Hume’s insistence on reaching a clarity in ideas through reducing them to their originating impressions threatened?
Another point of contention was Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact; in particular, we seemed to have die-hard Lockeans who were unwilling to be brushed off in re innate ideas as Locke himself is in Hume’s footnote on p. 22. The debate hinged on the a priori (but not innate!) nature of relations of ideas, and it seemed that the problem was in accepting that we could have an ROI without an experience to match it (how can I have the geometric notion of a square without having encountered one?). What ultimately helped to dispel (most) of this disagreement was establishing ROIs as frameworks for structuring experiences, e.g. the principle of identity as an ROI that is necessary for sense perception to even be comprehensible and the ROI of the square as structuring our ideas of a square after these ideas have been occasioned by (and copied from) experience.
We also spent a great deal of time fleshing out Hume’s notions of constant conjunction vs. necessary connection. For some, this observation was commonsensical; having already accepted that the findings of science are at best probabilistic, they readily accepted that we could not know with absolute certainty any power of connection. Given this position, there was a question of whether or not we should abandon all attempts to reason in the world and live in distrust of all our observations of constant conjunction. We arrived at a position, though, like that presented by Hume on p. 41:
Nor need we fear that this philosophy, while it endeavours to limit our enquiries to common life, should ever undermine the reasonings of common life, and carry its doubts so far as to destroy all action, as well as speculation. Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever. Though we should conclude, for instance, as in the foregoing section, that, in all reasonings from experience, there is a step taken by the mind which is not supported by any argument or process of the understanding; there is no danger that these reasonings, on which almost all knowledge depends, will ever be affected by such a discovery.
The principle of Custom or Habit is what compels us to carry on our daily life and reasonings without being paralyzed by the knowledge that we have no way of knowing that our classroom will necessarily exist tomorrow.
Of course, this argument for conjunction over connection was not accepted without question. One particular point of contention was the knowledge of modern science—don’t we know enough to determine by scientific laws why a pin prick causes bleeding? What we determined, however, was that the best science can do is continually subdivide the line between cause and effect by positing ever-smaller chains of cause and effect that never actually determine a necessary connection. We left class on Friday in a certain state of doubt regarding conjunction and connection; given the thought experiment of the wind and the trees, we batted around a few terminological and situational quibbles without coming down in any substantial way on whether or not the wind could be determined as the cause and the movement of the trees determined as the effect. It is likely, however, that we have not abandoned this question and will have reason to return to it in our continued readings of Hume.
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