Source identified1
Image design Coastal
Read & copy
“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
Meaning & context
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.
Source details
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.