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David Hume is an empiricist believing that all knowledge comes from experience. He views there to be two types of knowledge as presented in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a knowledge emerging from different combinations and relations of ideas and a knowledge dependant on cause and effect reasoning. The latter is referred to as matters of fact knowledge and acts as the primary basis of all knowledge.
There are two kinds of perceptions of the mind that Hume distinguishes, impressions and ideas. Impressions come directly from experience and refer to simple sensations, movements, internal impressions like emotions and sensual perceptions. They seem forceful, vivacious and lively; in perception of a wall they would convey colour, texture and size. Ideas are internal reflections of those impressions; they convey what the person was conscious of when experiencing an impression. They are often stored in memory and can be imagined while not currently being experienced. Ideas are less lively and vivid, and do not always express the complete truth of what was happening during the impression – just what the person was conscious of. The existence of an idea without the existence of an impression is possible through certain combinations of already present ideas and their extensions resulting in an estimation. Hume argues that there are no innate ideas as presented by Descartes, eliminating metaphysical certainty from our knowledge.
Ideas form three different types of associations among each other, based on resemblance, continuity of space and time and cause and effect relationship. A person is able to recognize another person just by looking at their picture, this is referred to as association of ideas by resemblance. Time elapsed affects the clarity and vividness of an idea and the further something away from you the harder it is to associate with it, indicating time and place relationships. The cause and effect relationship is a form of...