Hume on Impressions, Ideas, Memory and Causation

Element: Cone

ELEMENT CONE The cone is made from the perceptions and understanding of the activity itself, through imagination, combining simple ideas to form complex ideas. Perceptions are everything that contains the mind and come from sensory experience (there are no innate ideas). They are representations of the world and are classified into two types:

Types of Mental Contents

A. Prints (Impressions): feelings that come from experience: the images and emotions. As experience can be external or internal, prints can be of two types:

• Impressions of sensation: those known by the outside world of objects.
• Impressions of reflection: those by which we know our inner states.

B. Ideas: copies of the prints when the prints are gone. Ideas are products of memory and imagination and are therefore weaker than the prints. All simple ideas derive from the corresponding simple impressions; this is the criterion of validity that all ideas must satisfy to be considered true.

Imagination and Association

Imagination functions to produce complex ideas by bringing together simple ideas. This is done using three laws of association of ideas:

• Law of similarity: ideas associate on the basis of their similarity.
• Law of contiguity in space and time: ideas establish a relationship based on their proximity in time or space.
• Law of causality (cause and effect): because events tend to occur in temporal sequence, our understanding expects certain other facts to follow as they have in the past.

Tips of Cone

According to Hume, our mental contents are reduced to impressions or ideas. We think—that is, we build judgments, arguments, and statements. All these elements that make up our arguments can be classified into two types:

Relations of Ideas

Relations of ideas are universal and necessary claims that do not arise from experience but from reason. They are obvious truths, and their denial would involve a contradiction. Such statements include mathematical truths.

Matters of Fact

Matters of fact are statements that establish relationships between events that we must verify through observation and experience. They are contingent (they may be otherwise) and probabilistic (what is asserted so far might not hold in the future). Their negation is perfectly possible and involves no absurdity. This type of proposition is the basis of the empirical sciences.