Back when I was studying Liberal Arts at Dawson College, I learned about a Scotsman who proved that you couldn’t prove anything. His name was David Hume, he lived in the 1700s, and he argued that all knowledge is inductive and empirical, that is to say, we only know anything from experience: if we see a hundred zebras with stripes, we can only make an educated guess that the next one we see will have stripes too. I remember reading Bertrand Russell’s 1945 book A History of Western Philosophy, where he said that nobody has ever disproved Hume’s epistemology, and I’m pretty sure that assessment has held up.
I didn’t really know it until recently, but I am a Humean. And apparently, I’m in good company. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has listed Hume’s An Enquiry into Human Understanding as one of his major inspirations, which he read in college:
Then I read Hume’s Enquiry, this wonderful, humane book saying that nobody has all the answers. What we know is what we have evidence for. We do the best we can, but anybody who claims to be able to deduce or have revelation about The Truth – with both Ts capitalised – is wrong. It doesn’t work that way. The only reasonable way to approach life is with an attitude of humane scepticism. I felt that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders when I read that book…. You look at people who are very certain, and have these beliefs of one form or another and you think, “Maybe they really know something!” And what Hume says is, “Actually, no. They don’t.”
Krugman argues forcefully for various economic policies in his columns, but I think that he would admit that his knowledge is provisional, and based on experience, rather than immutable truths. In this way, he’s like the man who inspired him, John Maynard Keynes. As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote of Keynes:
At the heart of his vision, however, there is an elusive combination of boldness and humility. It calls not merely for the management of risk but for something politically and intellectually far more demanding: the acknowledgment of uncertainty.
