Isaac Chan’s Reviews > An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding > Status Update

Note n/n:

interest, etc: and these concepts can help me succeed in the phenomenal world.

Note 3/n:
hard to understand the phenomenal world, accepting that he/ we can never know the noumena.

Cuz who cares if the noumena might be a naked old guy who struts shamelessly around gym locker rooms and dries his balls with the hand-drying machine - all I care about is that the phenomenal world validates concepts such as the price-specie-flow mechanism, time-tested principles of value investing and compound ...

Note 2/n:
But it is also not difficult to accept the fact that we can never transcend the bounds of experience, and make do with 'rationalisation within experience'. In fact, such acceptance might be the very key to 'practical wisdom' and 'practical knowledge'. So, to me, Hume had already gained the same intuition that Kant later formalized - through his extensive economic and political works, I think he laboured ...

Note 1/n:
More on rationalisation in a world bounded by experience: I find myself becoming more interested in the fact that Hume himself rationalised often, despite expounding the doctrine of skepticism. It seems quite clear to me now, that it is not difficult to accept the conclusion that all our judgments of 'matters of fact' can only stem from fickle experience, and there is nothing certain in this experience.

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Black-Scholes, pricing kernels, general equilibrium models ... these are just various examples of the 'relations of ideas'. In fact I am of the opinion that overenthusiasm for elegant 'relations of ideas' can have disastrous consequences for the real economy, for example the neoclassical ideologies that led to financial underregulation prior to the GFC.

Note 6/n:
a different critique - I wish to focus on the 'relations of ideas'. It is literally the case that knowledge of 'relations of ideas' do not require empirical experience, so, why does Hume say that all knowledge must come from experience?

In fact, there exist many 'relations of ideas' within MODERN economics that completely do not require empirical observation - we would call them 'theory papers' now.

Note 5/n:
observation cycle - but bits and pieces of observations (for example, maybe prior consistent examples of bullion inflows were followed by domestic inflation) allowed Hume to form his mosaic, to seemingly rationalise these meta-principles of both the mind and of economics.

I now might posit - all rationalisation is the reorganization within the mind of prior experience.

But I now direct my attention to...

Note 4/n:
have had an insight into these principles through prior experience themselves! The nature of 'prior experience' is scattered - it is of course extremely unlikely, to the point of being impossible, that one would directly experience the modes of thought of the mind, or directly experience Hume's price-specie-flow mechanism unfold in real time, or the quantity theory of money over a fully contiguous ...

Note 3/n:
indignation of Hume's 'Of miracles', which I read some months ago in 2025. In my review of 'Of miracles', I raised the objection that - did Hume not RATIONALISE (in the vein of Descartes) the workings of the mind? Of economics? This rationalisation seemed a direct contradiction to me back then. I am now able to respond to my own objection: Hume APPEARED to rationalise these principles, but he could only ...

Note 1/n:
More and more familiar ideas from the Treatise are unfolding themselves as gracefully as a dramatic opera - this time, it's the doctrine that all human insight into cause and effect MUST come from experience. A human mind, equipped with all the faculties of reason of an Einstein, could never infer the nature of an object's causes and the mechanics of its effects, without prior experience. This doctrine, ...