When I go to an event or a meeting with many new people to meet, as the other persons introduce themselves to me they mostly extend their hands to shake mine as they usually do with everyone else. If it is a man, it is that moment when I stop and apologize for religious reasons for not being able to shake theirs. Usually, they pull their hands back and apologize for not knowing. Even though I wear a Hijab (head scarf), which I expect others to know about my religious constraints but thats not always the case, the case where they have some background about Islamic rules. Rather, the case is that these new people are acting based on their background experience, and probably they have not met a muslim women before to know that shaking hands with a man is prohibited. As from my side of the story, my experience allowed me to know that most people I will meet do not know about this religious constraint, which made me gain experience from dealing with such situations.
David Hume presented a similar argument where he claimed that our knowledge and ideas came from sensory impressions (Hume, 10). I strongly agree with him on his claim, because we learn through experience, even if we read about something, we cannot realize it and fully understand it until we go through it and feel it ourselves. However, in the situation presented above, I had past experience about what's going to occur, that this new person will extend his hand as a cultural behavior and I will have to apologize and explain why not. This is a result of my previous experience that made me expect what's going to happen based on the similar situations I had before. Which is exactly what Hume claims, that “all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity, which we discover among natural objects, and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those, which we have found to follow from such objects" (Hume, 23).
However, gaining knowledge from experiences make us confident that the coming similar experiences will hold the same effect. Hume doesn’t agree on that, he claims that “Our confidence comes only from our previous experiences and that conclusions based on experience are never certain, but are instead fallible and contingent”. This is exemplified by the new person meeting me, he was confident that I will be shaking his hand as a culture of meeting new people, but then, after I apologize he stepped back and realized that no, its not the same here.Then he realizes that his conclusion he had based on his past experience, which is that everyone shakes hands back, should be fixed and its not absolute to everyone and every situation. In addition to that, he gained a new experience to his own, that every time he will meet a women wearing a Hijab he will probably not extend his hand to her, because he learned it already. Hume definitely mentioned that too, he said that "It is only after a long course of uniform experiments in any kind, that we attain a firm reliance and security with regard to a particular event" (Hume, 23). Meaning that we should not rely on one event or one piece of data to hold it true for a conclusion to be true. This is a very important point in Hume’s argument which explains why stereotypes occur. Stereotypes occur by using one piece of evidence gained by experience to generalize it on a whole population with similarities, which definitely doesn’t stand true for every person in that group.
In conclusion, Hume is right about his claims, we gain ideas and knowledge from our experiences in the world, we can read as much as we can but never actually know what it means until we experience it ourselves. Which, only then we can understand and realize the world, people, and situations better. It's how we become ourselves. Experience is what makes us unique from others. However, even if we experience the same situation with others, our processing and feelings about it still differs no matter how similar it is with them.
