Hume and Testimony

For the next meeting we are looking at David Hume and in particular his views on testimony. He was probably the first philosopher to delve deeply into the topic. Our theme is understanding the value of testimony.

The link below is the chapter Of Miracles from Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding which is a good introduction to his ideas on testimony.

There is of course a great deal on the internet on testimony, such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and many YouTube items on Hume. It is also a subject that is ‘everyday’: we all rely on testimony continually, so everyone will have views as to how to trust what we learn from others, particularly in this age of social media.

https://davidhume.org/texts/e/10

We hope discussions will shed some light on David Hume's critique of miracles and the role of testimony in the establishment of truth and knowledge.

Some questions you might care to ponder in advance:

1. Is Hume's religious scepticism, both generally and more specifically as related to the reporting of miracles, motivated more by scientific or psychological considerations?
2. Can his view of miracles be considered relevant to today's rife conspiracy theories?
3. In Part 2 of On Miracles he asserts that 'there has never been a miracle in the records of history.' Fair? Are some miracles simply 'extraordinary'?
4. Does Hume leave unaddressed the possibility that the force involved in causality in Nature, the nature of which his scepticism causes him to ignore, might just be the same force which arose spontaneously, from somewhere, to spark the formation of the universe, and which now explains at least some miracles… ??
5. Is Hume just too much of a 'common sense' philosopher, rooting all knowledge in sensory perception? Does he fail to address how we perceive the unperceived world? Does he omit the 'pre-sight' of Kant, for example?
6. Is knowledge acquired through testimony ultimately based on perception and induction? Or can it be a warrant in itself? And, in passing, it's worth asking, what precisely is 'testimony' in a world of rolling news, social media, bots…? More than ever the world teems with testimony…

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