David Hume On Knowledge

Hume argues that we are naturally inclined to reason about the world using evidence from our senses or past experiences, but whether this evidence we use is actually good as knowledge is what he questions. Hume argues that our beliefs about what is true about something, is based on our past observations of that thing. For example, the laws of physics are assumed to be true because in all past observations they have held true. According to Hume, the problem with what we regard as knowledge is that even though we've repeatedly observed things such as the laws of physics to be true and give us that knowledge, they could logically be untrue just as easily if we were to observe something that was different from all past observations. To use the laws of physics example: even though gravity has always been active up to this point, there is no way to guarantee that we could eventually observe gravity breaking its own rules. …show more content…
The role of the Uniformity of Nature are assumptions like gravity being broken, or an observation as simple as "ducks always quack" being broken by a chirping duck. So the ultimate inadequacy of the Uniformity of Nature is that it is based on all of our past observations, and Hume argues that it only takes one observation to the contrary to disprove our causal