Ian_Ryan

First, a couple general considerations:

• How far are you in the book? If you're stuck in Part II, I would recommend skipping to its last section. In my opinion, for somebody just starting out with his philosophy, the rest of that part simply isn't insightful enough to justify how difficult it is to read. Save it for later, if at all.

• Remember that he wrote it over 200 years ago. You'll have to spend a lot of time getting fluent in his idiosyncratic 18th century English to really get what he's saying. I find that sort of thing interesting, so it was actually a bonus for me. But if it would only be an

Everybody's always citing Hume, but nobody ever seems to do him any justice. The OP is simply yet another example in this trend. I have no idea whether after reading the first paragraph of your post, Hume would agree that he couldn't "bring himself to seriously doubt the content of his own subjective experience", but I'm pretty sure that by the end of it, he would summarily reject your interpretation of his epistemology.

First of all, to make what I'm saying at least sound plausible, I need only give you one counter-example:

• He referred to our propensity to ascribe a place to each sound as an illusion. According to Hume, a sound exists nowhere.

By the way, in that word language, I simply have a group of 4 grammatical particles, each referring to 1 of the 4 set operations (union, intersection, complement, and symmetric difference). That simplifies a few of the systems that we find in English or whatever. For example, we don't find intersection only in the relationship between a noun and an adjective; we also find it in a bunch of other places. Here's a list of a bunch of examples of where we see one of the set operations in English:

• There's a deer over there, and he looks worried. (intersection)
• He's a master cook. (intersection between "master" and "cook")
• The stars are the suns and

I think that most of the potential lies in the "extra-radical possibilities". The traditional linguistics descriptions (adjectives, nouns, prepositions, and so on) don't seem to apply very well to any of my word languages. After all, they're just a bunch of natural language components; they needn't show up in an artificial language.

For example, in one of my word languages, there's no distinction between nouns and adjectives (meaning that there aren't any nouns and adjectives, I guess). To express the equivalent of the phrase "stupid man", you simply put the word referring to the set of everything stupid, next to the one referring to the one of everything that's a man, and put... (read more)