Читать книгу Adam Smith - Craig Smith - Страница 14

To start to understand Smith’s methodology and the version of the science of man that he developed in response to his reading of Newton and Hume, we should turn to his final, posthumous, publication, the Essays on Philosophical Subjects. The Essays were published in 1795, five years after Smith’s death, and represent the only unpublished papers that he thought worth saving. The rest of his papers were burned shortly before he died. His executors, the scientists Joseph Black and James Hutton, prepared the essays for publication and added a biographical essay by the Edinburgh philosopher Dugald Stewart. It may seem odd to look to Smith’s posthumous writing to start a consideration of his philosophical method, but this becomes less surprising if we understand that the most interesting essays in the volume were written early in Smith’s career and revised through his life. The three historical essays on Astronomy, Ancient Physics, and Ancient Logics and Metaphysics form part of Smith’s projected, but uncompleted, book on the history of art, science, and literature.³

The full title of the longest of these essays is ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’. This reveals that Smith’s true interest is not the details of the development of astronomy, but rather the exploration of the nature of philosophy (including what we would now call science). His main contention is that the formal practice of science is a deliberate version of the underlying way in which the human mind operates. Smith follows Hume’s views on the association of ideas through repeated experience as the source of the habitual mental patterns that form human understanding. As we saw above, Hume’s reputation as a sceptic arose from his view, first laid out in the Treatise of Human Nature, that the power of philosophy to provide absolute certainty for our beliefs was radically limited.

For both Hume and Smith, humans form their beliefs about the world from experience. We form expectations drawn from repeated past experience of links between phenomena and these suggest to us that a similar relationship will hold in the future. As a result, our knowledge is always a probability rather than absolutely certain. Our minds flow from one idea to another through a set of habitual expectations and associations of ideas. We think that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has done in our past experience, that fire is hot because it has always been found to be so; but we cannot be absolutely certain that these generalizations will continue to hold. This observation colours Hume’s and Smith’s understanding of what we can expect from philosophy and leads to a sort of epistemic modesty that is characteristic of the latter’s entire career.

That said, both Hume and Smith were clear that such knowledge was reliable and that nature did provide us with universally applicable laws that could be explored through observation and theorization. The point, as Hume had observed at the start of the Treatise, was that experience and observation were the only truly reliable basis for belief. Smith seeks to explore how it is that human beings understand the world by understanding how the mind creates these regularities from its experience of the world.