Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
- Date
- 1748
Meaning of “A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to…”
Hume argues that confidence should rise or fall with the strength and consistency of the available evidence rather than remain fixed regardless of what experience supports.
Where does it come from?
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, ‘Of Miracles,’ Part I, paragraph 87 in the represented Selby-Bigge text, Project Gutenberg #9662. ‘A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence’ follows Hume's discussion of varying degrees of assurance from experience. It is eighteenth-century epistemological argument and preserves the connective ‘therefore’; it is not a complete modern statistical or scientific decision rule.