Reference no: EM133472048

Case Study: Please chose one of the following three paper topics. Your discussion should be between 800-1050 words. Part of this assignment is to develop and defend your own philosophical perspective on one of the course topics.

Notice that the prompts each do a fair amount to walk you through developing your position. (Topic 3 has the most, followed by topic 2 and then topic 1). Adhering to this structure, and making sure he feel comfortable with one part before moving onto the next, will help you write a focused, engaged paper.

Topic 1: Hume gives a general account of how we come by our beliefs about unobserved "matters of fact," but most of his examples concern a special case: beliefs about the future. First, come up with an example that does not fit this mold-a belief about some past or present matter of fact that you have not personally observed. Explain how Hume's problem about induction arises in your case, and what the problem is more generally. Do this in roughly the first 1/3 of your paper.

Hume claims that all of our reasoning concerning unobserved matters of fact is "founded on the relation of cause and effect." But this is puzzling. People living near the ocean have always known that high tide is followed by low tide at certain intervals. These people experience a regularity and come to expect it to persist into the future, and this would appear to be a clear example of the sort of reasoning Hume has in mind. But over the centuries, most of these people have had no idea what causes the tides. That is a scientific discovery (due to Isaac Newton).

Question 1: In this part of your paper, explain why Hume might have thought reasoning about the unobserved involves reasoning about causes, and why the case of the tides and the case you came up with in the first part of your paper, may pose a problem. What problem does it pose? That's the next third of the paper.

Question 2: In the last 1/3 of your paper, try to answer the following question. Is Hume just wrong to say that reasoning about the unobserved always involves reasoning about causes? If so, why? If not, why not?