30 Phil, Chapter 27, Hume, Touchstone 71: Hume’s Fork.
Hume’s Fork is a philosophical tool that categorizes meaningful statements into two distinct types: relations of ideas and matters of fact. It offers a clear demarcation between different kinds of truths. Relations of ideas are statements that are necessarily true, such as “all bachelors are unmarried.” Matters of fact, in contrast, are statements based on empirical experience, such as “the sun rose in the East this morning.” The problem of Hume’s Fork is that, when taken strictly, statements that fall outside these two categories are dismissed as logically false and meaningless.
