人类理解研究

Human Cognitive Abilities The study of human understanding focuses on empiricist epistemology, including theories of ideas, causality, and skepticism. It also includes ideas such as "miracles, providence, and the afterlife. Hume called his philosophy "the science of man," referring to the study of human nature as opposed to the natural sciences, and therefore Hume also called this science "the science of human nature. The so-called human nature here has a broad meaning, which includes aspects related to human understanding, emotion, interest, morality and ritual behavior. The term "science of human nature" is in line with the rise of modern Enlightenment thinking and the reverence and importance of human nature, and is also a reflection of the trend that theoretical philosophy is about to "break up" with natural science. In A Study of Human Understanding, Hume analyzes human cognitive activity comprehensively and points out that human cognitive ability is limited. His analysis of philosophies including religion, atheism, and absolute skepticism leads to his philosophy of "moderate skepticism," in which Hume, as a moderate skeptic, argues that a reasonable reasoner should retain a permanent degree of skepticism, caution, and humility in all his investigations and assertions. A moderate skepticism or collegiate philosophy can be both enduring and useful. Nor is the conclusion of philosophy anything other than a systematic and revised reflection on everyday life, and Hume points out that there are two aspects of the inherent subject of science and research that one can come to: a quantitative science, and the existence of actual and factual facts that are based entirely on experience. Hume further pointed out that the best and firmest foundation for theology is faith and divine revelation; ethics and criticism are objects of interest and amusement, not of understanding. The rest of the books contain nothing but sophistry and fancy, except those which contain reasoning about number and quantity, and those which contain inferences about real facts and the existence of any experience, and then one can cast them into the fire. The book argues that human understanding is very weak and the scope of understanding is very narrow. But in the past, philosophy failed to recognize this problem and often discussed things beyond human understanding, which resulted in no unanimous understanding and gave rise to many unnecessary arguments and the formation of different schools of thought. If philosophers discuss issues within the scope of human understanding, they will be free from many troubles and be happy. Then, what is the capacity and scope of human understanding? To solve this problem, the author critically draws on previous philosophies, especially that of Beckley. He argues that sense perception is the only object of people's awareness and the only existence. Even if people focus their attention outside themselves, even if they trace their imagination up to the heavens and as far as the extreme edge of the universe, they will not go one step beyond themselves, nor will they get other existences than their sense perceptions, which, as the objects of people's knowledge, are divided into two categories, impressions and ideas. By impressions, we mean people's current and immediate sensations, which include all sensations, feelings and emotions that first appear in the soul, which are strong and vivid, and are the source of all ideas, and by ideas, which are copies of impressions, which are reproductions of impressions in memory and imagination, which are weak and obscure. In his view, the latter is not a qualitative leap to the former, but a combination, a transposition, an enlargement and a reduction of the former. Therefore, all philosophical propositions should be judged and decided on the basis of sensory impressions, and anything that cannot be reduced to sensory impressions should be discarded as "delusion". In this way, the senses become the only and ultimate source of knowledge, which "cannot establish any direct relationship between the mind and the object", but is a barrier, a wall, separating the consciousness from the external world, apart from which nothing can be presented to the mind. This is the author's most fundamental point of view. From this point of view, he criticizes the philosophy of Beckley, who on the one hand asserts that things are a "composite of sensations" and that nothing exists outside of sensations, and on the other hand affirms that sensations are produced by spiritual entities such as the ego and God. He asserts that there are only sensations in the world, and that one cannot go beyond sensations, and that it is unknowable whether there are other existences beyond sensations. This rejects both materialist reflectionism and idealist empiricism, taking a middle course between the two. The connection between ideas The book also talks about the connection between ideas, describing the relation of similarity, proximity, and causation as the three principles of the connection between ideas, but completely avoiding the connection between external things and ideas. The book also divides rational objects into relations of ideas and actual things. The mathematical disciplines such as geometry, algebra, and trigonometry provide knowledge of the former relationship, which has "intuitive certainty or demonstrable certainty", i.e., it can be proved by intuition and reasoning, while the disciplines such as physics provide knowledge of the latter relationship, which is only contingent but not certain. According to the author, this knowledge is "based on causality", which cannot be perceived directly. The author also devotes a lot of space to arguing the point about causality. According to the author, people usually say that there is a causal relationship between two things because they feel that what is the cause has some "power" to produce the result, and that there is a "necessary connection" between the cause and the result. The author points out that this so-called "power" and "necessary connection" are not empirical, so it is not certain that causality exists objectively outside of experience.