Commit What You Know of Iran to the Flames
Skepticism is warranted on the war and market behavior. Call it the Hume Doctrine.
Smoke from air strikes rises over Tehran.
Photographer: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty
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We might be witnessing the revenge of David Hume in the Middle East. The ideas of Scotland’s great 18th century philosopher, and friend of the father of economics Adam Smith, are best remembered now for their bracing if extreme skepticism.
Hume summarized this most clearly as the “problem of induction.” In today’s terms, just because B has always followed A in the instances we have observed in the past does not prove that A caused B, or that A will always be followed by B. In the language of modern economics, correlation does not mean causation. The concept of causation isn’t something we can see or experience or logically infer, it’s just something that we come to assume. The notion that one event has caused another, then, doesn’t come from nature or from logic, but from the habits of our mind. Psychologists might these days call them heuristics.