In "Insuppressible Fallacy-mongers," I wrote, "A. J. Ayer, influenced by Hume, 'developed his principle of empirical verifiability.'" I am not an expert in philosophy, but Bertrand Russell was. While discussing the "verifiability principle," he wrote, "A ... difficulty in the positivist position is the rejection of all philosophic speculation as gibberish. For the verifiability theory is itself a philosophic doctrine" (Wisdom of the West, ed. Paul Foulkes, Crescent, 1959, 306 & 307). I don't intend on criticizing positivism here. I simply want to clarify what I didn't mean when I wrote "influenced by Hume." In brief, I don't think that you can accuse Hume of being a verificationist. If I remember correctly, I have heard the Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias argue that Hume refuted himself. I doubt that Zacharias said explicitly that Hume was a positivist or verificationist, but he might have implied as much. The argument would go: Positivism (verificationism) says that philosophical speculation is meaningless. Positivism is a philosophical doctrine. Positivism says that positivism is meaningless. Positivism refutes itself. Even if true, was Hume himself a positivist? Dinesh D'Souza, in his book What's So Great About Christianity, seemed to think so. D'Souza cited the famous last paragraph of Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. There, we read:
"If we take in our hand any volume--of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance--let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quality or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact or experience? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." (quoted in D'Souza's book; most versions I've seen put emphasis on most of the paragraph.)
D'Souza continued, "This is sometimes known as Hume's principle of empirical verifiability. it allows only two kinds of truths: those that are true by definition and those that are true by empirical confirmation. Right away, however, we see a problem. Let us apply Hume's criteria to Hume's own doctrine: Is the principle of verifiability true by definition? No. Well, is there a way to confirm it empirically? Again, no. Consequently, taking Hume's advice, we should commit his principle to the flames because it is not merely false, it is also incoherent" (Regnery, 2007, 183). For an assignment, I criticized Hume using Zacharias's reasoning. If I had remembered that D'Souza had written the paragraph quoted above, I'm sure I would have used it as well. I was attempting to argue that Hume was some kind of positivist. The professor handed the assignment back. He noted what should have been obvious: The book ("volume") Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding did contain abstract reasoning (analytic truths) and matters of fact (synthetic truths). Hume's statement was about volumes, not sentences. That's what I got wrong. Hume didn't have to throw the last few sentences of his book into the flames. D'Souza's argument depends on whether he is interpreting Hume correctly. Even if Hume isn't expressing logical positivism of verificationism, could it be that he is still refuting himself? Just based on the evidence that Zacharias and D'souza offered, I doubt that Hume really made some major error. Hume didn't say, at least not in the oft-quoted paragraph, that all philosophical doctrines were gibberish. The positivists might have believed that, but Hume, at most, said that a book that contained nothing but "metaphysics" was full of "sophistry and illusion." Even if Hume did say that philosophical doctrines were not true, that wouldn't mean that he thought that they were "incoherent." D'Souza apparently thought that Hume himself was a logical positivist--he quoted Hume as part of a digression on logical positivism. I mentioned in my assignment that Hume was thought to be a positivist. My professor, if I remember correctly, wrote, in the margin, "thought to be". Even if D'Souza didn't proclaim that Hume was a positivist, he ignored that, for Hume, context mattered. We would not, if I'm not mistaken, have to consign Hume's principle to the flames if it was found in a book that also contained analytic and synthetic statements or truths. From what I gather, Hume was not a logical positivist; so statements that imply that he was are wrong. Even if D'Souza didn't say that Hume was a logical positivist, D'Souza is almost certainly wrong about what Hume advised us to do. Hume never said, "Take a principle;" he said, "Take a book." While looking for a transcript of the Zacharias speech, I instead found a blogger who either obliviously or dishonestly switched from talking about "a book" (what Hume said) to talking about "a statement" (not what Hume said) (<http://apologiaandopinion.blogspot.com/2009/01/humes-test-failed-itself.html>). Similarly, D'Souza used the singular pronoun to refer to a principle when Hume only used it to refer to a book. I conclude that D'Souza's commentary on Hume was deeply flawed.
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