Hume's Fork - History

History

Hume's strong empiricism—as through Hume's fork as well as Hume's problem of induction—was taken as a threat to Newton's theory of motion. Immanuel Kant responded with rationalism in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attributed the mind a causal role in sensory experience by the mind's aligning the environmental input by arranging those data into the experience of space and time. Kant thus reasoned the necessity of the synthetic a priori—combining meanings of terms with states of facts and yet known true without experience of the particular instance—crossing the tongs of Hume's fork and thus saving Newton's law of universal gravitation.

In 1919, Newton's theory fell to Einstein's general theory of relativity. In the late 1920s, the logical positivists, appalled by the nationalism, racism, and bigotry surging in Western society, asserted Hume's fork while hinging it at language—the analytic/synthetic division—while presuming that by holding to analyticity, they could develop a logical syntax entailing both necessity and a prioricity, thus restricting science to claims verifiable either false or true.

In the early 1950s, Willard Van Orman Quine undermined the analytic/synthetic division by explicating ontological relativity, as every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world. By the early 1970s, Saul Kripke established the necessary a posteriori, since if the Morning Star and the Evening Star are the same star, they are the same star by necessity, but this is known true by a human only through relevant experience.

Hume's fork remains basic in AngloAmerican philosophy. Many deceptions and confusions are foisted by surreptitious or unwitting conversion of an synthetic claim to an analytic claim, rendered true by necessity but merely a tautology, for instance the no true Scotsman move. Simply, Hume's fork has limitations.

(Related concerns are Hume's distinction between demonstrative and probable reasoning, Hume's law as the fact/value distinction between claims of is versus claims of ought, and Hume's "dilemma of determinism" as the problem that our actions are either causally determined or random. Other important two-category distinctions Hume makes are those between beliefs versus desires and between impressions versus ideas.)