Hume Argues Reason Cannot Justify Induction
Custom and habit, not logic, explain why we expect the sun to rise tomorrow
Quick facts
- Hume's dates
- 1711-1776
- Treatise published
- Books 1-2, 1739; Book 3, 1740
- Problem raised
- The problem of induction
- Key distinction
- Hume's Fork (relations of ideas vs. matters of fact)
What happened
David Hume, born in 1711, published the first two books of A Treatise of Human Nature anonymously in 1739, with the third book following in 1740, before he was thirty years old. In it Hume argued that reasoning from past experience to future events, induction, has no rational foundation: we cannot prove that the future will resemble the past without already assuming the very principle we are trying to establish. Hume concluded that our confidence in cause and effect rests not on reasoned demonstration but on custom or habit, a psychological tendency to expect repetition based on past regularity. He also drew a sharp division, now called Hume's Fork, between relations of ideas, truths knowable through pure thought alone such as mathematics, and matters of fact, claims about the world that depend on experience and can always be coherently denied.
Why it matters
Hume's argument against a rational foundation for induction became one of philosophy's most durable problems, still called the problem of induction, and it directly provoked Kant's attempt to rescue the possibility of necessary knowledge about experience, making Hume's Treatise a hinge between early modern empiricism and Kant's critical philosophy.
How we know
The Treatise survives complete in its original 1739-1740 printing; Hume later judged the work a commercial failure and reworked its arguments into the more widely read Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, giving scholars two datable versions of the same core arguments to compare.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. David Hume · Reputable sourceplato.stanford.edu · The domain "plato.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Hume · Reputable sourceiep.utm.edu · The domain "iep.utm.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Enlightenment → · See the Enlightenment timeline for Hume's later restatement of this argument in the 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.