 The distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact is often called “Hume’s Fork”, generally with the negative implication that Hume may be illicitly ruling out meaningful propositions that don’t fit into these two categories or fit into both of them. To defuse this objection, however, it is important to bear in mind that Hume’s categories are his translations of a traditional absolute categorical classificatory distinction, which all his contemporaries and immediate predecessors accepted. 