Abstract
According to Husserl, Hume’s empirical method was deeply flawed—like all empiricists, Hume did not, and could not adequately justify his method, much less his findings (PRP 113–114, LI 115–117, 406). Instead, Hume gives us a “circular” and “irrational” “psychological explanation” of “mediate judgments of fact,” i.e. of inductive inferences (LI, 117). Yet Husserl was certain that he could justify both his own method and his own findings with an appeal to the phenomenological, pre-theoretical, pre-naturalistic “epoché” (I1 §§59–60). However, whether or not Husserl’s notion of an epoché is justified, or even viable, is not our focus here. Rather, our issue is with Hume, particularly: How could Hume have responded? In this paper, I show that in Book I of the Treatise, Hume did—however implicitly—appeal to a “pre-theoretical” notion of belief, which meets Husserl’s demands for a pre-theoretical grounding, i.e. a justificatory grounding. And so, his method is, at least in this respect, justified. But this belief is by no means “prenaturalistic.” Rather, it is a function of empirical data. In particular, it is a product of the “constant and coherent” impressions that seem to naturally obtain of experience. As a result, Hume’s method, which, in agreement with Husserl, we may characterize as psychology, does admit of a certain degree of regularity, but an empirical regularity. And according to Hume, contra Husserl’s complaints, this is the best that we can hope for; regularity will have to suffice, not certainty. However, it must be noted up front that this justification is implicit—Hume is not nearly as forthright as he could have been. Thus, making his position more explicit is the task of this paper. I am not presenting my own position, where I offer my own arguments. Instead, I present textual evidence, contextualized with ample explication. It is my hope that by doing so, Hume may more effectively make his case.
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Notes
I will use the following abbreviations throughout: Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy (PRP), The Logical Investigations (LI), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (I1).
For the sake of brevity, I am limiting my discussion to just the Treatise. Forthwith, I will abbreviate the Treatise as ‘T.”
I am not using the term ‘naturalistic’ in the sense that “natural” beliefs are to be distinguished from “rational” beliefs. This usage began with the Scottish Naturalists, e.g. Shaftesbury, Hutchenson, Turnbull, Kames, Reid and Hamilton. See also Kemp Smith (1905a, b, 1941). Rather, by ‘naturalized,’ I simply mean empirical (see Mounce 1999 for more detail on Scottish Naturalism).
This is not to say that Husserl does not discuss Hume elsewhere in regard to different matters (see, for instance, Chapter 5, Volume II of The Logical Investigations, where Husserl criticizes Hume’s notion of abstraction). However, the intention of this paper is not to give an exhaustive account of Husserl’s thoughts on Hume, nor do we need to take Husserl’s entire phenomenological project into consideration. Rather, we are focusing on just his remarks about Hume’s empirical method, and attempting to respond as Hume might have.
This distinction is related to two other distinctions Hume makes between the memory and the imagination. The first is the fact that the imagination “has the liberty to transpose and change its ideas” (T 1.1.3.4), while the “memory preserves the original form, in which its objects were presented” (T 1.1.3.3). Second, as already suggested above, by and large, the ideas that we remember are more vivacious than the ideas that we imagine (T 1.3.5.3). In fact, if our memories were not more vivacious than our imagined ideas, we couldn’t distinguish them from each other, regardless if the memory retains the order in which our impressions occurred to us. This is the case because we cannot always determine if the order in which we think our ideas exactly corresponds to the order in which their corresponding impressions caused them (T 1.3.5.3).
See Rocknak (2012) for more detail.
Granted, just what Hume means by reason is quite complex, but our purposes, we may understand “reasoning” as the reflective “comparison” (T 1.3.2.2, T 1.3.14.31) of two perceptions. This is opposed to a reflexive, conditioned association of perceptions.
It must be noted that it is not Hume’s intention to reify beliefs and/or vivaciousness here. In other words, Hume is not implying that vivaciousness is an additional “thing” that, when added to impressions or memories of impressions, will constitute a belief, which as such, creates still another “thing” above and beyond an impression or a memory of an impression. Rather, according to Hume, vivaciousness is simply a property of any given perception (T 1.1.1), nor can it exist independently of any perception.
Indeed, as suggested above, the natural relation of causality, because it is not reflective, may belong to the first system of reality. However, as also noted, Hume is never clear about this, and for the purposes of this paper, we do not need further clarification.
However, a number of scholars seem to have overlooked these passages, especially T 1.3.5.7. As a result, they do not acknowledge this kind of belief, claiming instead, that Humean belief must always be a more vivacious idea, but it is never an impression. Generally speaking, these scholars argue or assume that beliefs only occur as a result of thinking in terms of a causal process. Granted, Hume does also have this kind of belief in mind in the Treatise; see T 1.3.6.15-1.3.8.3, T 1.3.13.19. However, acknowledging as much does not rule out elementary beliefs, and thus, the burden of proof lies with those scholars who do not acknowledge the evidence presented throughout T 1.3 that substantiates Hume’s employment of elementary beliefs, particularly T 1.3.5.7, as well as T 1.3.13.19. See, for instance, Stroud (1977; Chapter 4), Ayer (1980, p. 31), Wright (1983, p. 214), Falkenstein (1997, p. 33), Garrett (1997, pp. 36, 209–213), Owen (1999, pp. 166–170), Broakes (2002, p. 189), and Broughton (2006, 45).
In some respects, this anticipates Stove’s (1973) analysis of Hume. However, Stove argues that Hume was actually a “deductivist,” where Hume meant to show that any method that does not rely on a priori principles is worthless [see Millican (1995) for a comprehensive discussion (and dismissal) of Stove’s position]. Husserl however, thought that Hume had no such noble intentions. Rather, Husserl thought that the Scotsman was just terribly mistaken, mired in a methodological circle (see above).
More specifically, “they are associated in a regular order of contiguity and succession” (T 1.3.6.3). See §4.1 of this paper for more detail.
Some might argue that Hume did not rule out all kinds of metaphysics in the Treatise. For instance some recent scholars, i.e. the “New Humeans” argue that Hume thought that causality and objects did, indeed exist (see e.g. Wright 1983; Strawson 1989). However, for our purposes, we may set this debate aside and focus on the general remarks that Hume makes about the metaphysical method in the Introduction to the Treatise. As explained above, the metaphysical method, on the whole, was incoherent, and thus, as a result, he has no option but to rely on the method of experience and observation (see Rocknak 2012).
More precisely, Millican argues that inductive claims are not justified by a “faculty of intellectual insight” (211), but the “true foundation of such extrapolation is revealed to be animal instinct” (212). This means, Millican argues, that there is a loose sense in which inductive claims may be classified as “reasonable:” “Hume thus has the basis for a naturalistic account of his intermediate sense of ‘reason,’ according to which beliefs and methods of inference count as reasonable if they have a place within a consistent and systematic rule-governed framework dominated by the ‘permanent, irresistible, and universal’ principles of the imagination, and in particular by the fundamental belief in inductive uniformity and the rules by which to judge of causes and effects which systematize its implications. Hume can, of course, give no independent justification for this fundamental belief itself” (207). I show above, however, that our belief in the principle of uniformity, is in fact, justified, however implicitly.
However, it must be pointed out that the idea qn+1′ produced as a result of the causal reflex is a belief (see T 1.3.6-8), comprising in fact, Hume’s second definition of belief (T 1.3.13.19). As noted earlier, this is the form of belief that a number of Hume scholars focus on, where they tend to overlook elementary beliefs.
Stroud writes: “[No] objective connection between perceptions or objects [is] required in order for me to come to think of things as causally connected with each other. As long as my experience exhibits certain regularities I will come to have that ‘ficticious’ idea (140; emphasis added).
Recall that this is also in keeping with Hume’s notion of an abstract or general idea; it is an extensional definition, that is, it consists of a collection of particulars, and so, it is not a type, but a collection of tokens: “all general ideas are nothing put particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them” (T 1.1.7.1) (c.f. Garrett 1997).
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Rocknak, S. Regularity and certainty in Hume’s treatise: a Humean response to Husserl. Synthese 199, 579–600 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02679-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02679-z