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Articles

A Justification of Empirical Thinking

Arnold Zuboff tells us why we should believe our senses.

How can you know that your present experience isn’t due to an artificial stimulation of your brain disembodied in a vat, or to a merely chance and causeless occurrence of its pattern in the absence of any world outside it? Either of these possibilities, or numerous others we could imagine, would involve exactly the consciousness you’re having at this moment: these possibilities and what you think to be your actual situation in the world are completely indistinguishable from within this conscious experience. So what could legitimately count in favour of the sort of thing that you do think about the world – that it exists beyond your experience? How, with any justification, can your thinking reach beyond the appearances that would be common to all these skeptical hypotheses?

Before we directly confront skepticism regarding the world external to appearances, it will be instructive for us first to take up David Hume’s famous challenge to provide a rigorous justification for induction. ‘Induction’ is forming beliefs concerning repeatedly observed associations of qualities or things, that those associations will continue into the future.

Hume’s Challenge

Let me try to evoke for you Hume’s classic ‘problem of induction’. On a newly discovered island we have so far observed 100 birds of the new species ‘humebird’.

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