Humean Being

Hume is quite enough of a philosopher to make you wail and gnash your teeth...but he does make finishing papers devilishly difficult. Here's a passage from the paper I'm working on at the moment. Any philo-philes out there who want to mock or correct me, feel free.

Hume’s position, while vastly sounder empirically than Locke’s, admitted a significant problem: how do these single idea entities, culled from individual impressions, come together in any coherent way? In other words, how do ideas associate?

Absent any laws of association, “it is theoretically possible that any one of our simple ideas might precede or follow any other simple idea, in any order whatever” (Jones 302). This is transparently inaccurate. With very rare exceptions, typically occasioned by gross lack of sleep or reckless inebriation, we don’t speak in gibberish, thoughts and words stringing themselves together meaninglessly.

Hume determined there must be laws governing the relation of ideas, laws numbering three: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Some ideas resemble one another: a facsimile of an object points to the existence of an original. Adjacent ideas are also clearly related: as Hume writes, “the mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning others.” Finally, we assume a causal relationship between some ideas: handprints of red paint littering an apartment and a shower stained blood red point to a body-painted fan having recently attempted, most likely in vain, to clean himself after the game. These three principles are the means by which simple ideas are related in our mind and combined to form complex ideas.