On David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature"
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Using Past Experiences to Predict the Future
The aim of the book is to chart the nature of human cognition, and in doing so, tell you what its limits are. Hume saw a problem with this way of thinking - we can only rely on experience if the world is orderly enough for us to rely on it. So relying on past experiences does save us from potentially harmful situations in the future. But he did notice with this thought experiment that there is a limit to our knowledge.
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