Do you know that the sun will rise tomorrow PDF

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Epistemology and introductory philosophy. Cartesian. ...

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Do you know that the sun will rise tomorrow? The sun has risen everyday I have been alive, therefore, tomorrow I should expect it to rise again. Many would argue that tomorrow it will definitely rise again, because I have seen it rise every other morning of my life. On the other hand...can I actually prove that the sun will infact rise tomorrow? Surely I cannot truly know of such an observed truth until I can deductively justify without a shred of doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow? This is exactly the problem which Hume tackles in sections of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the issue of inductive reasoning, cause and effect, and the reliability of the assumption that the past will resemble the future. In this essay I will explore the strength of inductive reasoning in order to establish if we can definitively know and validate propositions such as ‘the sun will rise tomorrow’. We confidently base our knowledge of future events in past experience, but how do we know for sure that the past is a good guide for future hypothesis?

To begin with, we need to distinguish between two types of argument; deductive and inductive. Deductively valid arguments guarantee the conclusion through the truth of the argument’s premises, on the other hand, inductive arguments do not necessarily definitively confirm their conclusion. Instead we regard inductive arguments as probabilistically ‘good’ arguments. Below is an example of what appears to be a good argument, but is not deductively valid:

The sun has risen everyday up until now ∴ The sun will rise tomorrow

The argument that the sun will rise tomorrow, based on its rising in the past is making an inductive leap, based on this assumption that the future will necessarily resemble the past. Whilst we have good reason to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, the argument is not deductively valid.

The problem of induction lies in justifying the rationality of believing in inductive arguments on the basis of belief in their premises. Hume concerns himself with how the observation of one

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state of affairs provides us with evidence for belief in another state of affairs. For instance, how receiving a letter from a friend in another country confirms that the said friend is in the country.

“If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country...he would give you a reason; and this reason would be some other fact; as a letter received from him, or the knowledge of his former resolutions and promises… All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. And here it is constantly supposed that there is a connection between the present fact and that which is inferred from it.” (Hume)

If we are to argue for induction being a valid form of reasoning, there must be some way of establishing that the future will definitely resemble the past. Whilst it may seem obvious that physical laws will not change in the future, Hume argues that there still needs to be a definitive way to ensure that we can put our faith in the future being the same as the past. In this case, we need to assert that because the sun has risen in the past, it will rise again tomorrow. Following this, Hume attempts to discover how knowledge of this kind could be possible. In doing so he advocates a clear distinction between two specific types of knowledge.

Hume’s key distinction is the separation of relations of ideas and matters of fact. All statements which can be deemed logically true can be classified as relations of ideas, for example “2 + 3 = 5” or “all bachelors are unmarried”. These statements are certain and a priori, meaning they are independent of experience, and denying such statements would imply contradiction. On the other hand, matters of fact are a posteriori - dependent on experience. Hume suggests that we learn these matters of fact through the idea of cause and effect. My knowledge that it is raining may have been caused by me looking out of the window, and my knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow is inferred from my past experiences, which tells me that the sun has risen everyday in the past. This distinction between relation of ideas and matters of fact leaves us with the question of how we come to attain knowledge of matters of fact which we cannot directly observe. Here Hume argues that reason alone is not enough, instead he lends himself to the idea of cause and effect.

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This idea of causation is central to Hume’s inductive debate. Hume asks how we come to know of the idea of cause and effect; if I see one domino falling toward another, how do I know the second domino will fall too when struck by the first? Hume suggests that this kind of knowledge cannot be a priori as nothing in the movement of the first domino can a priori suggest to me the movement of the second domino, yet my reliance on experience tells me that the second too will fall upon impact. Hume thus concludes that our knowledge of cause and effect is based on experience, and from past observances we infer unobserved occurrences in the future.

With questions such as “will the sun rise tomorrow?” it is common to cite the uniformity of nature to support the argument that, yes, the sun will rise tomorrow. In order to justify moving from past experience to future correlations we use this idea that, in general, the past does seem to resemble the future through this uniformity of the world around us. Using this uniformity principle we are able to add a second premise to our argument to support the claim that we know the sun will rise tomorrow.

p1. The sun has risen everyday up until now p2. The future will resemble the past ∴ The sun will rise tomorrow

This argument is now presented as deductively valid, if we assume this second premise to be true, unlike our original inductive argument. Therefore the principle of uniformity seems to bridge the inductive gap and justify our inductive inferences.

However Hume finds no good reason to trust in any such principle. The uniformity principle is designed to justify inductive claims that are based on past experience, therefore it the principle itself cannot too be proved through induction, we must first independently justify the principle before we can question inductive reasoning. The principle itself instead lends itself to a vicious circularity argument. We learn of it through experience, but it is not confirmed in experience. We cannot prove the uniformity principle without appeal to experience and thus we find ourselves

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with no independent means of justifying the principle. We base our knowledge from experience in Hume’s idea of cause and effect, which is in turn grounded in induction. Inductive reasoning relied on this idea we have that the future will resemble the past and the uniformity principle. Therefore, we come to know of this uniformity principle from our experience. Consequently we find no means of justification in the uniformity principle and Hume finds himself no further on in his argument of proving his principle.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we rely heavily upon our past experience to formulate an idea of the future. Induction does just this, upholding the claim that we can expect the future to be like the past. Why do we do this if it doesn’t provide us with certainty? For starters we may use science as a reliable source of knowledge, even though we may not be certainly say ‘x’ will happen, pre existing physical laws are unlikely to change. For example, in the instance of the sun rise, many would confidently say if the Earth continues to rotate on its axis for 24 hours, the sun will rise tomorrow. This reliance on past experience provides us with predictive certainty in argument, whilst we may not be ably to deductively provide a valid argument formula- we have good reason to believe the claim we are making.

Whilst we may derive knowledge of the world from our past experiences or from our senses, neither of these provide us with conclusive knowledge for instances such as our knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow. In these instances Hume relies heavily on his principle of causation and effect to provide knowledge of unobserved phenomena. Our knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow is inferred from the fact that everyday up to the present we have witnessed the sun rise, which would suggest that tomorrow will be no different. Here Hume acknowledges that we seem to infer similarities between the past and the future, but concludes that there is not sufficient reasoning that can confirm our inferences.

We can conclude therefore, that we cannot truly know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Claims like these can not be demonstratively proved and are deductively invalid. Whilst we can appeal to past experience, we find that induction itself is not strong enough to assert claims such as “the sun will rise tomorrow”. Hume too concludes that, despite his appeal to cause and effect, we form beliefs on habit and not necessarily on proof.

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“That it is possible for the sun not to rise tomorrow only suggests that I should not be absolutely certain that it will rise. I can still be pretty damn sure, which is all we should ask for from an inductive argument.” (Stove 1973, Strawson 1952).

References Howson, C. (2003) Hume’s Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, USA.

Hume, D., (1748) Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1ed.). London: A. Millar

Hume, D., (1777) Inquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Stove, D. C. (1973) Probability and Hume’s Inductive Scepticism. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, F. (1997) Hume’s Defence of Causal Inference. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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