Skepticism, David Hume, and UFOs
How David Hume's view on causation and the problem of induction can remind us to be humble in our claims about the UFO phenomenon.
Introduction
What does a Scottish philosopher from the 1800th century have to do with the UFO phenomenon? David Hume (1711–1776) was not a believer in UFOs. Neither did he, in any of his books or essays, discuss the UFO phenomenon.
So, what is my point in bringing up one of the most influential philosophers to write in English? Bear with me for a moment.
David Hume is famous for many contributions to philosophy (also to, for example, history). Still, he is probably most known among philosophers and scientists for his thoughts on causation and “the problem of induction”. Hume's thesis about causation, and if we ever can justify any of our observations with certainty, made his contemporaries to call his epistemological standpoint “radical skepticism” (my interpretation is that Hume’s skepticism is sound rather than radical). Radical or not, Hume was quite shaken by his discovery and conclusions about the limits of our five senses and cognitive abilities to acquire certain knowledge about the world.
What I am going to say about Hume’s thoughts about causation and knowledge has not so much to do with the UFO phenomenon per se. Rather, the point of bringing up Hume's skepticism has to do with everyone who would like to see the UFO subject getting more serious attention outside the UFO community.
We want to know the truth about the UFO phenomenon. Knowledge. Truth. Reasons and justification. Before we move on, let us do a thought experiment. Ask yourself the following question:
What do I know with certainty about the UFO phenomenon? Seriously, think about it for a moment before you continue reading. Be brutally honest in your answer.
Let me also clarify what I am not trying to do in this text. I am not discrediting experiencers (contactees, abductees). In fact, I am not trying to invalidate any idea, perspective, or opinion about the UFO phenomenon or its related aspects (disclosure, consciousness, and so on). Neither do I advocate an unsound skepticism that dismisses evidence without looking at it or misrepresents facts to suit its own interests.
What I am trying to do is to use David Hume's skepticism as an inspiration for an honest, serious and nuanced dialogue about what we know and what we do not know about the UFO phenomenon. I think about it as one of several ways to raise the status of the UFO subject.
And here is where David Hume's skepticism comes in. His reflections on what we can know and express about the world with uncompromised honesty can motivate how we all can aid in rendering the UFO subject more reputable to debate openly. A more nuanced dialogue on the UFO subject inside the ufo community can have positive effects on the subject's status for people outside the ufo community.
What is imperative at this moment is for more people to learn about the evidence of the physical and technological aspects of UFOs and their potentially profound scientific and existential implications for the future of humanity and life on earth.
Now to David Hume and his thoughts about causation (cause and effect) and the problem of induction. He first wrote about those topics in his book A Treatise of Human Nature (Book I and II published in 1739, book III in 1740). The title is quite revealing of what Hume is trying to do in the “Treatise.” He is more interested in human psychology than in natural philosophy (what we today call physics, chemistry, etc.). Hume was a firm believer in empiricism, the standpoint that we can only acquire and justify certain, or meaningful, knowledge of the world through observation and experience. But as we soon will see, he stumbled upon issues with the reliability of the empirical method.
In what follows, I will start with Hume’s view on causation and then his view on “the problem of induction.” In the third and last part of the text, comes my interpretation of what I think Hume’s skepticism amounts to and its relevance for the UFO subject.
The distinction of “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact”
In the Treatise, Hume considers questions about knowledge and causation in Book I, part 3, with the title “Of knowledge and probability.” To make justice to Hume, and for you to appreciate his insights about causation, I first have to say something about the categories of “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact.” I should also add that the following is my personal interpretation of David Hume’s thoughts on causation and the problem of induction. I am not sure if a scholar on Hume's philosophy would agree or not with my interpretation.
Relations of ideas are about a priori knowledge, or what we today call “analytical knowledge”. It is the kind of knowledge and truths about the world we get in arithmetic, geometry, and formal logic. The good thing with this kind of knowledge and truth is that it is certain or reliable. 1 + 1 = 2, and “a bachelor is an unmarried male” are examples of analytical truths. If we understand the meaning of the terms involved, we know that the proposition is true or false. But, as you can see, “a bachelor is an unmarried male”, if you understand the meaning of the terms involved, do not add any new knowledge about the world. The conclusion (“unmarried male”) is only making explicit what is already implicit in the premise (“a bachelor”).
Matters of fact are about knowledge and truths that we only can get to know through observation, experience, and experimentation (a posteriori, or synthetic truths). We need to go out and explore the world to discover knowledge and truths through observation, measurement, etc. In other words, if we want to justify our hypothesis with evidence so that other people can evaluate and replicate it, then it is not enough to sit in one's armchair and think.
Now, in which category of knowledge do we find the idea of causation? Is causation as certain as 1+1 = 2? I think most of us take cause and effect for granted. When a billiard ball hits another billiard ball, I can see that the former causes the latter to move. And the same chain of events has happened every time I have watched one billiard ball hit another billiard ball.
Here is where David Hume would ask us: Can you point out to me where you saw the link — or “necessary connexion” as Hume called it — between event A and event B?
Hume argued we could never observe such a necessary connection between a cause and an effect. The only thing we observe and with certainty can say is that we experienced event A (the first billiard ball hits the second ball) and then event B (the second ball moves). But we can never observe or measure a necessary connection between event A and event B.
According to Hume, the “necessary connexion” only occurs in our minds. Or, as Hume expressed it, “we feel the determination”. It is like we fill in the gap between event A and event B with a sensation or a feeling of a necessary connection. From our minds, we project that feeling of necessity onto the world. You can think of it as being conditioned, like a Pavlovian dog, to believe there is a necessary connection between event A and event B. When we observe cause and effect, the only thing we can say is that event A preceded event B, but we can never say that event A must precede event B.
In short, Hume pointed out that we cannot observe, experience or measure a “necessary connexion” in nature.
To be clear: Hume does not deny the existence of causation. Instead, Hume urges us to uncover a way to validate empirically that the universe has some “must” or “necessity” embedded within her.
Imagine I am standing up and holding a pen in my right hand. If I say that I will drop the pen, what do you think will happen? Yes, both of us will assume, or expect, (Pavlovian conditioning) that the law of gravity is intact and that the pen will drop to the ground. But if I do not drop the pen? How can we know or prove that the pen would have dropped to the ground? How can we know with certainty?
The problem of induction
This takes us to Hume’s second skeptical conclusion about knowledge and causation. His first skeptical conclusion was that we could not observe or measure a necessary connection in nature. His second skeptical conclusion is known as “the problem of induction” and is probably familiar to a wider audience than his view on causation.
Hume's problem of induction makes us aware of two assumptions we make, or two expectations we have, about the world that underlies our reasoning about the regularity and uniformity of the world. The first assumption we make is that like causes have like effects (causality). That is, we assume/expect that the world has a regular structure, which makes us assume that if I had dropped the pen, it would fall to the ground because that has happened every other time we or someone else have dropped a pen. The second assumption, or expectation, that Hume wants us to focus on is that we think every effect/event must have a cause (causation). Note the “must”.
What Hume is asking with the problem of induction is this: how can we prove that similar causes have similar effects and that every effect (or every event) must have a cause? Are they analytical truths (self-evident)? Or is there any empirical evidence that can justify our beliefs about causation and causality?
According to Hume, the answer is no to any of the questions above. Why? Because to prove our assumptions about causation and causality to be true, we would, in our evidence/conclusion, end up with what we presuppose. We would end up with a circular argument. Thus, using inductive reasoning can never justify our assumptions or evidence. That is the core of the problem of induction. But let us look at it in more detail.
Recall the difference between “relations of ideas” (deduction) and “matters of facts” (induction). The former gives us certain knowledge but does not add any new knowledge about the world. The latter is how we do science: we make observations, form a hypothesis about a phenomenon, and then set up an experiment, or a study, to determine the answer. We demonstrate our results to other people so that they independently can replicate our experiment or evaluate the merit of our study. Hopefully, the scientific method will produce (new) knowledge about the world.
However, says Hume, we seem to be in a dilemma. It seems we have to choose between certain but obvious knowledge (deduction), or uncertain but potentially new knowledge about the world (induction).
Why is “matters of fact”, or induction, uncertain? According to Hume, we can never prove or infer, with certainty, that the future will resemble the past, or that the unobserved will follow from the observed, or that “all” will follow from “some.” It gets circular: you can not justify induction with induction.
Again, think about the example of me holding a pen. You saw me drop the pen yesterday, and it fell to the ground. But how can you know with certainty that the pen will fall to the ground today? I think we have to agree with Hume; there is nothing in nature that says that just because the pen fell to the ground yesterday, it must — it will necessarily — fall to the ground today. Try to present a proof.
As long as I have lived and can remember, the sun has risen the next morning. But from those past experiences and observations, it does not necessarily follow that the sun will rise tomorrow (that is, in the future).
I expect that the sun will rise tomorrow, but that is not knowing for a fact that the sun will rise tomorrow. My expectation, or assumption, about a sunrise tomorrow is based on past experiences and observations that have shaped me into a “Pavlovian dog”.
In a way, I am basing my “knowing” of a sunrise tomorrow on (blind?) faith. It is more about my psychology than anything objective out there in the world.
Hume used the term “custom” instead of conditioning, but his description of how our experiences and observations shape and determine our perception of the world as regular and uniform, is very modern from a psychological perspective.
The same “custom” is at work when we think we can justify, or infer, “all” from “some”. Today we know all swans are not white, but it took some time and some black swans to disprove our assumption about the colour of all swans. On the other hand, we discovered something new and unexpected about the world. “Matters of fact” holds the promise of discovery, progression, utility, etc., but the knowledge is uncertain in the sense that it has to be considered provisional:
No matter how many times our observations have turned out to be accurate, we can never justify with certainty that our next observation (“the unobserved”) will follow the past ones (“the observed”).
But the positive side of that provisional nature of our knowledge is that it opens up possibilities of shifts and changes in our understanding that may benefit humanity. Albert Einstein discovered and paid attention to anomalies in physics, and the rest is history.
Perhaps anomalies are the key to new and unexpected discoveries and understanding about the world? There are, for example, “anomalous flying objects”, or UFOs, or UAP. Even the US Department of Defence has acknowledged the validity of the anomaly we call the UFO phenomenon.
What I think Hume meant with his skeptical stance
My interpretation of Hume's “radical skepticism” is not that he meant we can never know things about the world or that we should stop trying to discover more about human nature and the universe.
What he was trying to say with his skepticism was simply that we have to be aware of our assumptions and expectations about how the world works, what is true or false, possible or impossible.
I think he wanted to say that his view on causation and the problem of induction should not discourage people but encourage us to be more careful and humble in our search for and justification of knowledge. Hume put us in a dilemma, not in a dead-end. So Hume is presenting a sound scepticism, rather than an unsound scepticism.
I believe the way out of the dilemma, the choice we have to make, is to accept the uncertain and provisional nature of our knowledge, and perhaps, even of truth.
Both proponents and debunkers of the UFO phenomenon should be aware of and accept the limits of human nature to acquire knowledge and the limits of our abilities to justify what we think or believe we know about the world.
The uncertain, provisional nature of knowledge is, perhaps, the (necessary?) condition for discoveries and knowledge about ourselves, the world, and our place in the bigger scheme of things.
So, whether you are a proponent or a debunker, ask yourself: What do I know with certainty about the UFO phenomenon?
