Some of my detractors have claimed that David Hume said, "Only a madman would be a complete skeptic." Who is David Hume? Why would anyone think I was a complete sceptic?
First of all, let's set the story straight; David Hume never made the above comment. What he said was, "...though none but a fool or madman will ever pretend to dispute the authority of experience, or to reject that great guide of human life, it may surely be allowed a philosopher to have so much curiosity at least as to examine the principle of human nature, which gives this mighty authority to experience, and makes us draw advantage from that similarity which nature has placed among different objects." As we can see, David Hume's quote (when not taken out of context) seems to indicate that a healthy scepticism is a good thing and that a degree of delving into the value of experience was meritted and worthwhile.
David Hume is important because he was the first person to officially touch on what is now known as the "Problem of Induction," although he never used that term. The problem is this: There is no logical reason to believe that the future will resemble the past.
At first people may vigorously object to this idea. "Just you wait," they may say. "The sun has risen every day and it will rise again tomorrow. You watch and see!" Then, appearing triumphantly on the following day they state, "A-ha! So you see, the sun has risen as I predicted. Now, surely, you must realize that the past is a good guide to the future."
Unfortunately for these well-meaning people, they are committing a logical fallacy called "begging the question." They are saying that the past is a good guide to the future because it has worked in the past (and will therefore work in the future). This is circular logic and proves absolutely nothing.
Over the centuries since David Hume first encountered the problem many great minds have struggled with the problem and to date there is no answer to the problem of induction. David Hume resolved the problem for himself by deciding that mankind was irrational and that it was impossible to avoid using induction. As such he is known as the father of anti-rationalism. Rationalism has been defined as "any view any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification." Anti-rationalism is the view that even though something conflicts with reason, logic and good-sense that this is no reason to abandon the procedure. As you might guess, I heartily disagree with this notion.
In fact, I should like to point out that the basis on which David Hume argues that humans are irrational and that induction is unavoidable is based on the past and the assumption that the past is a good guide to the future. As such, he basically justified induction and the irrationality of humans by using induction. This, as we have already mentioned, is begging the question.
Scientific apologists generally try to sweep the problem of induction under the carpet, and with good reason. Accepting the idea that the past is not necessarily a good guide to the future means that science itself is suspect. After all, the idea of science is that after dropping a rock a few dozen times and noting the acceleration downwards that this observation can be applied not only in that same spot, but everywhere in the universe both in the past and in the future. What scientist would like to admit that there is no rational basis for his craft? Perhaps it is even more unappealing when lucrative scientific funding is at stake.
Those who have seriously delved into the matter, however, have advanced two possible solutions to the problem. Karl Popper proposed 'falsificationism' in which induction is abandoned. It is true, he argued, that science cannot prove any theory right - but it can and has proved a number of apparently good theories to be faulty.
So simply by objecting to the illogical nature of induction does not mean that someone completely abandons experience as a guide nor does it mean that a person who insists on using logic is a complete sceptic. It just means that I don't place stock in things that are blatantly irrational and that I'm not going to sacrifice logic and common sense on the altar of science just because I'm told to do so.
The second proposed solution to the problem of induction is Bayesian statistics. This argument proposes that although you cannot use induction to say that just because you have observed 6 white swans in a row that all swans are white, that you CAN say with a degree of statistical precision that it is very likely that the next swan you see will be white. This n+1 workaround is what most scientists fall back on if they are pushed on the problem of induction. In another article, I plan to take the time to criticize this claim.
But for now I will suffice by saying that naive reliance on induction, as the vast majority of science-ophiles do and the willful ignorance of the problem is just another reason to realize that science... is BS.
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