Chris Dixon: belief

Transcript context

…Sure, yes. Actually, it was really in Locke, but then Hume comes along and says, “Okay, let’s analyze how we get knowledge.” He says, “There’re really just two ways you get knowledge.” You get knowledge through what he called relations of ideas or matters of fact, so sort of math, right? You could sit in a room and think about the numbers and decode. Or “all bachelors are unmarried” is a famous example. It’s embedded inside of the words that to be a bachelor is to be unmarried. That’s relations of ideas. Then there’re empirical matters of fact. That’s things we go out and see in the world. Hume asked the famous skeptical question: Okay, if that’s the case, where does something like induction fit in? Where does causality fit in? Where does time and space fit in? Because they’re neither purely true based on the relations of ideas, and it would be circular if we learned induction through induction. How do we know that the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, it’s always risen in the past. How do we know that futures will be like future past? It goes through the whole skeptical argument. Then Kant comes along and says, okay, that’s right, but what that means is, there are other preconditions for knowledge, which is a really interesting move, because what he’s saying is — this is what a transcendental argument is — is you’re not going from premises to conclusion. You’re going from premises to preconditions to those premises. I’m just giving you an example. That move, that plasticity of thought — when I first saw that, I was like, “Can you do that? You can go and — ?” He says, “Look, you can’t fit — ” I’m not sure you can do it, to be clear. [laughs]…

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