david hume?

Question

David Hume believed that things of the outside world are not really
things. Instead, all are ideas. What lead him to believe in this?

Answer 1

The answer to your question, if it were brought out to full detail, would be extremely complex. Humean philosophy requires a great deal of quibbling over specific meanings of terms, establishing specific relationships between concepts, and so forth. Specifically, he makes a crucial distinction between "perceptions", "impressions", and "ideas".

The Reader's Digest version (or is that the Yahoo! Answers version?) is that the outside world as we know it is informed ONLY by our sensory perceptions. Therefore we are making an illegitimate inductive leap when we speak about "things"; in reality we are only speaking about our PERCEPTIONS of things. Perceptions, however, are to be distinguished from ideas. Our sensory impressions are the actual sensations caused by our sensory organs; our ideas are merely poor-quality "copies" of these impressions (thinking about burning your hand is a much less painful feeling than actually burning it). And, he postulated, there is no RATIONAL reason to believe that any of our perceptions, impressions, or ideas have a necessary connection to the outside world (with the notable exception of mathematics, which needs no external reference).

He extended this reasoning to show that our concept of the world around us is not "real" in any rational sense of the word. We can only go on with our lives by accepting a certain amount of irrational dependence on our senses. I very strongly recommend reading the source below for a detailed explanation of this philosophy.

FWIW, your question should probably be defined just slightly to read, "David Hume believed that our concept of the outside world does not include things. Instead, our concepts involve nothing other than ideas". Humian philosophy can't do much to define any part of the outside world, because it rejects our ability to escape the limitations of our own perceptions.

Answer 2

One must keep in mind the fact the Hume was an empiricist, though he didn't go so far as to deny certain rational truths. He believed all the judgments about the world must be grounded in sense experience. If this is true then we really can't know the objects we experience are connected to the external world. The impressions we receive according to Hume are merely subjective, and we have no data that is external to our experience. This issue looks back to his thinking on causality, since we can't be sure that the experiences we have today will be repeated.

Answer 3

He believed that an object had to be conceptualized before it existed in the mind. The world existed only in the mind by virtue of our senses.

Answer 4

Because he was in capable of believing the evidence of his
senses.