Understanding Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact

Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact

Matters of Fact

Matters of fact are based on observation and experience, and refer to the facts, all that is available to perception. Knowledge does not allow for strict certainty. Knowledge refers to the empirical world and is based on experience. Unlike mathematics and logic, it does not allow for strict knowledge but is based on probability, because the opposite of each event is always possible, though perhaps foreign to our experience.

The facts are the happenings in the world, the behaviors of things as shown by the senses. The physical facts are given in time and space, and mental events in time. We call the whole experience of perceived facts. A few facts are followed by other facts.

Not to be confused with the strange absurdity: the strange thing is that which does not coincide with our past experiences. It is absurd contradiction, something that goes against the fundamental laws of logic.

Any question of fact, we could say, is needed, since all questions of fact refer to the way things are empirically. That means, having experienced that fire burns, we cannot say that it needs to burn off, always in all cases to be burned. For Hume, everything that is not contradictory is possible: a square triangle is absurd and will never be possible, but that night after the sun does not appear is not absurd, but from the point of view of our past experience, it is strange.

It is possible that the sun rises tomorrow, we feel no pain when the hand is closer to the fire, and so with all the facts and relationships between facts. For the empirical reality is the set of facts that we can experience. We call empirical knowledge the knowledge of the facts.

Relations Between Ideas

Relations between ideas are not based on experience but on logical criteria. It refers not to physical things but to our own ideas. It leads to strict knowledge. It includes mathematics and logic.

Mathematical knowledge and logic are referred to relations between ideas and are achieved through the exercise of reason, not by experience. Its truth depends on the principle of contradiction, but not on questions of fact. Its accuracy cannot be refuted by any experience, if not refer to things that are offered in experience.

Propositions of this kind are discovered by operations of thought, and do not depend on any of the things that exist in the universe.