The only question which used the word “Humean” concerned the laws of nature, so none of Hume’s other views are relevant, though I admit to not being sure why RobbBB is so certain that the Humean view of laws of nature is wrong. The Humean view is sometimes called the regularity view; the short version is that it is the view that what it is for a law of nature to be true just is for there to be a pattern of events in the universe conforming to the law. The non-Humean view insists that there is something more, some additional metaphysical component, which must be present in order for it to be true that a regular pattern reveals a genuine law of nature.
One simple argument for the non-Humean view is that it seesm that some patterns are coincidences, and we need some way to distinguish the concidences from the genuine laws of nature. The standard Humean response to this is to say that there are ways for a Humean to identify something as a coincidence. A Humean identifies a coincidence by noting that the pattern fails to cohere with broader theory; laws of nature fit fairly neatly together into larger wholes up to the general theory of everything, while coincidences are patterns which in light of broader theory look more like chance. Further, the Humean will argue that when there aren’t clues like broader theoretical concerns, saying that it’s a law of nature if it’s got the right metaphysical extra and not otherwise is useless, since there’s no way to detect the metaphysical extra directly.
This is a great summary! My confidence that Humeanism is false is not extremely high; but it’s high enough for me to think philosophers of science are far too confident of Humeanism relative to the evidence. The main source of uncertainty for me here is that I’m really not clear on what it takes for something to be a ‘law of nature’. But if the essential question here is whether extremely strong correlations in fundamental physics call for further explanation, then I side with the ‘yeah, some explanation would be great’ side. The main worry is that if these events are brute coincidences, we have no Bayesian reason to expect the coincidence to continue into the future. The core intuition underlying non-Humeanism is that some simpler and more unitary mechanism is far more likely to have given rise to such empirical consistency than is such consistency to be the end of the story.
My concern with philosophers of science confidently endorsing Humeanism is that I expect this to be a case of ‘I’m supposed to think like a Scientist, and Scientists are skeptical of things, especially weird things we can’t directly observe’. Even if Humeanism itself is true, I would be very surprised if most Humeans believe in it for the right reasons.
In some ways this argument parallels the argument Eliezer has with himself over whether our universe is more like first-order logic or more like second-order; first-order logic is similar in some ways to Humeanism, because it doesn’t think we need to subsume the instances within a larger generalization in order to fully explain and predict them. (Or, more precisely, it thinks such generalizations are purely anthropocentric, human constructs for practical ends; they give us little if any reason to update in favor of any metaphysical posits.)
Hmm, I may need to reread the paper, but my understanding that they were also using Hume in the context of the question which asked which philosophers or philosophical schools people most identified with.
True, but when RobbBB comments on experts being wrong, he specifically mentions the tendency of philosophers of science to be Humeans, so I’m pretty sure he means to say they are mistaken in being Humean in this specific sense, not that it’s just generally a mistake to be influenced by Hume (I don’t get the impression that he is that down on Hume generally).
The only question which used the word “Humean” concerned the laws of nature, so none of Hume’s other views are relevant, though I admit to not being sure why RobbBB is so certain that the Humean view of laws of nature is wrong. The Humean view is sometimes called the regularity view; the short version is that it is the view that what it is for a law of nature to be true just is for there to be a pattern of events in the universe conforming to the law. The non-Humean view insists that there is something more, some additional metaphysical component, which must be present in order for it to be true that a regular pattern reveals a genuine law of nature.
One simple argument for the non-Humean view is that it seesm that some patterns are coincidences, and we need some way to distinguish the concidences from the genuine laws of nature. The standard Humean response to this is to say that there are ways for a Humean to identify something as a coincidence. A Humean identifies a coincidence by noting that the pattern fails to cohere with broader theory; laws of nature fit fairly neatly together into larger wholes up to the general theory of everything, while coincidences are patterns which in light of broader theory look more like chance. Further, the Humean will argue that when there aren’t clues like broader theoretical concerns, saying that it’s a law of nature if it’s got the right metaphysical extra and not otherwise is useless, since there’s no way to detect the metaphysical extra directly.
Hope that helps.
Just to make everything more confusing, it turns out that David Hume was not a Humean about laws of nature.
This is a great summary! My confidence that Humeanism is false is not extremely high; but it’s high enough for me to think philosophers of science are far too confident of Humeanism relative to the evidence. The main source of uncertainty for me here is that I’m really not clear on what it takes for something to be a ‘law of nature’. But if the essential question here is whether extremely strong correlations in fundamental physics call for further explanation, then I side with the ‘yeah, some explanation would be great’ side. The main worry is that if these events are brute coincidences, we have no Bayesian reason to expect the coincidence to continue into the future. The core intuition underlying non-Humeanism is that some simpler and more unitary mechanism is far more likely to have given rise to such empirical consistency than is such consistency to be the end of the story.
My concern with philosophers of science confidently endorsing Humeanism is that I expect this to be a case of ‘I’m supposed to think like a Scientist, and Scientists are skeptical of things, especially weird things we can’t directly observe’. Even if Humeanism itself is true, I would be very surprised if most Humeans believe in it for the right reasons.
In some ways this argument parallels the argument Eliezer has with himself over whether our universe is more like first-order logic or more like second-order; first-order logic is similar in some ways to Humeanism, because it doesn’t think we need to subsume the instances within a larger generalization in order to fully explain and predict them. (Or, more precisely, it thinks such generalizations are purely anthropocentric, human constructs for practical ends; they give us little if any reason to update in favor of any metaphysical posits.)
Hmm, I may need to reread the paper, but my understanding that they were also using Hume in the context of the question which asked which philosophers or philosophical schools people most identified with.
True, but when RobbBB comments on experts being wrong, he specifically mentions the tendency of philosophers of science to be Humeans, so I’m pretty sure he means to say they are mistaken in being Humean in this specific sense, not that it’s just generally a mistake to be influenced by Hume (I don’t get the impression that he is that down on Hume generally).
Yes, thanks for pointing this out. I’m not criticizing anyone for being a follower of Hume in general. I am decidedly not down on Hume, usually.