Project Gutenberg #4705
A Treatise of Human Nature
David Hume
1739Hume's major work on knowledge, mind, and morality, prepared section by section from Project Gutenberg HTML.
Project Gutenberg #4705 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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AI Summary
Chapter 32 — SECT. XIII. OF UNPHILOSOPHICAL PROBABILITY. Central question Why do people often reason badly about probability? Main argument Hume discusses biases that distort judgment, showing that psychological...
constant and uniform connexion of causes and effects, and that which depends upon an interrupted and uncertain. It is indeed evident, that in all determinations, where the mind decides from contrary experiments, it is first divided within itself, and has an inclination to either side in proportion to the number of experiments we have seen and remember. This contest is at last determined to the advantage of that side, where we observe a superior number of these experiments; but still with a diminution of force in the evidence correspondent to the number of the opposite experiments. Each possibility, of which the probability is composed, operates separately upon the imagination; and it is the larger collection of possibilities, which at last prevails, and that with a force proportionable to its superiority. All these phenomena lead directly to the precedent system; nor will it ever be possible upon any other principles to give a satisfactory and consistent explication of them. Without considering these judgments as the effects of custom on the imagination, we shall lose ourselves in perpetual contradiction and absurdity.