Hume, Kant, and Gettier

Cracks and Repairs

Hume split all knowledge into relations of ideas (like math, certain but empty of facts) and matters of fact (informative but never certain). He then exposed the problem of induction: no amount of past experience logically guarantees the future. Kant answered by arguing for synthetic a priori knowledge; truths that are both informative and knowable in advance; while, much later, Edmund Gettier showed that justified true belief can still fall short of knowledge.

“Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.”

Where this sits in the course

“Hume, Kant, and Gettier” is lesson 3 of 3 in What Can We Know?, a course about slow down on knowledge itself: doubt, experience, induction, and proof.. The lessons are sequenced rather than a menu, so this one assumes what came before it.

What Can We Know? is itself one of 18 courses in thinkr. The set opens with what philosophy is, moves through the Stoics and the Eastern traditions, then into what can be known, what exists, how to act and how power works — closing on practical reasoning you can use in an argument this week.

More from David Hume

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”

“Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

In the app this lesson is followed by 5 exercises that check whether the idea actually landed — and every answer, right or wrong, is explained rather than scored. That is the part a written page cannot reproduce.