Abstract
Abstract: Hume’s account of contrariety in Book I of the Treatise poses several interpretive puzzles. I consider each in turn and offer a novel interpretation of contrariety based on Hume’s discussion of the passions. That Book II and Book I form a complete chain of reasoning suggests that the way in which passions are related is analogous to the way in which ideas are related in the understanding. I argue that Hume identifies three species of empirical contrariety in Book II: contraries, oppositions, and contradictions. All three species help clarify Hume’s remarks concerning contrariety in Book I. I further identify a second genus I call logical contrariety by drawing on Hume’s discussion of fictitious duration and distance.
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Notes
References to Hume are cited as follows: ‘T’ are to A Treatise of Human Nature; followed by Book, part, section, paragraph (from 2000 Norton and Norton edition), and then corresponding page number in the 1978 Selby-Bigge edition revised by Nidditch: ‘SBN’; ‘Ad’ are to the 1739 Advertisement to the Treatise; ‘E’ are to An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, followed by section and paragraph (from 2007 Millican edition), and then corresponding page number in the 1975 Selby-Bigge edition revised by Nidditch: ‘SBN’.
See, for instance, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe’s discussion in “Hume’s Psychology of the Passions,” especially Sect. 4 where Radcliffe provides a comprehensive overview of Hume’s theory of the passions as it relates to Book I and III of the Treatise.
For instance, Henry Allison remarks that “[w]hile Locke treated these relations [identity, diversity, coexistence, and necessary connection] as species of agreement or disagreement, Hume effectively treated agreement and disagreement (under the guise of resemblance or identity and contrariety) as species of relations” (2008, p. 76). Allison qualifies his statement by noting that he is not suggesting that resemblance and contrariety are “precise counterparts,” but merely that they are the closest analogues to Locke’s theory (2008, p. 354).
For an excellent, brief overview of the history of relations in the context of Humean relations, see Rocknak (1999).
Specifically, Millican argues that Hume’s “treatment of contrariety—as his text suggests—is ill-considered and cursory, motivated mainly by the recognition that his artificial taxonomy of relations requires some notion of negation, but providing no satisfactory treatment of it. That taxonomy itself seems to be an attempt to shoehorn Locke’s theory of relations into a sevenfold structure, prompted by the seductive idea that the nature of the relations involved in a proposition can provide a reliable criterion of demonstrability” (2014, p. 209).
Annette Baier echoes this by calling it an “enigmatic pronouncement” (1982, p. 646).
Livingston specifically argues: “The relation of contrariety poses a special problem, for Hume holds ‘that properly speaking, no objects are contrary to each other, but existence and non-existence’ (T, 173), and that there is no simple or complex idea of existence. It would seem, then, that contrariety is not a relation between ideas at all, much less a necessary one” (1984, p. 52).
Allison does not see this as a problem. For him, “[t]he problem does not lie in the inclusion of [contrariety] in the class of those within which intuitive knowledge is possible, since, as Hume puts it, ‘No one can once doubt but existence and non-existence destroy each other, and are perfectly incompatible and contrary’ (T 1.3.1.2; SBN 70)…the problem is that existence and non-existence are not really distinct ideas, so that the perceptual model does not appear to apply to them. Indeed, this may be why here, more than in the case of any of the other relations, Hume seems to be making a logical claim, which one might properly describe as analytic” (2008, p. 80). The latter I have called the negation problem.
In Waxman’s interpretation, he argues that “contrariety counts as a relation because it trivially involves a resemblance relation” (2016, p. 150). In the case I am presenting here—where the association of passions is predicated on the association of ideas—it is not trivial that resemblance relations involve contrariety; rather, it is fundamental. More tellingly, Hume makes the explicit claim that contrariety is a species of resemblance: “The connexion, then, of cause and effect is the same in both cases; and if in the one case, the cause and effect have a farther relation of resemblance, they have that of contrariety in the other; which, being also a species of resemblance, leaves the matter pretty equal” (T 2.2.9.8; SBN 384, italics added). John Laird interprets Hume to have given “no proper account of non-resemblance, since contrariety, for him, was a kind of resemblance, and since he offered no analysis of logical negation, but presupposed it, along with affirmation, throughout his argument” (1932, p. 49). Note Laird’s claim that Hume offers no analysis of negation, but presupposes it.
Whether or not the ability to emphasize certain relational aspects of an idea meets the objection that simple ideas cannot both resemble and be contrary to each other is beyond the scope of my argument. It is, on my view, a much broader discussion as to whether multiple relations may inhere in a simple idea, without compromising its simplicity. While R. J. Hawkins notes that it is “least implausible if contrariety is interpreted as a kind of extreme dissimilarity,” he also argues that a serious difficulty with this interpretation is whether it is possible for resemblance to hold between simple perceptions (1976, pp. 27–28).
Emphasizing certain parts of a relation, I suggest, is permitted via Hume’s philosophical perspectivism. Robert Fogelin argues that “Hume’s writings exhibit a radical form of epistemological, or better, doxastic perspectivism. What we believe and what we think it appropriate to believe is a function of the level of investigation we are indulging in” (1998, p. 164). Therefore, a single relation may be viewed under contrary lights—compare Hume’s analysis of the relation of identity—such that both the resemblance and contrariety relation obtain at the same time and in the same respect. Donald Livingston, on the other hand, appeals to Hume’s account of distinctions of reason to understand the relation of contrariety in as much as it may be uncovered in the a priori structure of our perceptions (see 1984, pp. 52–6).
By these three terms, I mean some ‘intimate connection’ or ‘common property’—whatever that may be. Here, I follow Stanley Tweyman, who argues that “…contrariety is seen to depend on an inequality existing between two items in virtue of a common property” (1974, p. 125). Instead of ‘inequality,’ I employ the word ‘difference,’ for ‘difference’ may mean quantitative inequality just as much as qualitative inequality. Tweyman suggests that “the essential ingredients for the relation of contrariety, namely, resemblance and contrast, are both present. Thus, when Hume speaks of contrariety as holding between existence and non-existence, these terms can be taken as referring either to objects or to their properties or aspects provided that resemblance and contrast are both present. The philosophical relation of contrariety can then be said to obtain wherever contrasting claims can be made as long as there is a common element upon which the contrast can be made” (1974, p. 126).
Note that what Hume means by the terms ‘opposition,’ ‘contrary,’ and ‘contradiction’ changes according to context. The names of the three species I have selected are an interpretive tool for the purposes of conceptual clarity; they do not correspond directly to Hume’s ambiguous usage. Caution must therefore be taken when applying the three species to Hume’s texts.
By ‘opposition’ here, Hume does not mean the sense of oppositional contrariety I have been examining, but the sense of one idea being able to affect another.
In Book I, I take Hume’s discussion of general rules to be another example of oppositional contrariety, in so far as general rules of the imagination and understanding alternate: “Sometimes the one, sometimes the other prevails, according to the disposition and character of the person” (T 1.3.13.12; SBN 149–50).
Compare similar phrasing in Fogelin’s take on Humean identity: “[t]he fiction of identity over time is the result of flip-flopping back and forth between these two perspectives [of unity and number]” (2009, p. 71).
I understand Donald Gotterbarn to imply the same criticism in his claim that “when dealing with objects, we conceive some as existing and others as not existing, where existence means continuous existence of identical things, and non-existence means no independent continuous existence. But even under this interpretation, there is still no simple idea of existence or non-existence” (1973, p. 136). Even in the Enquiry, Gotterbarn believes Hume’s account of contrariety is “basically the same” and does not solve the problem of “how we can speak of the relation of contradiction when by the very nature of the relation either one or both of the relata cannot exist” (Ibid.). Indeed, contrariety involving existential negation is not even a contrariety relation at all but a contradictory one, since “[t]wo propositions are contradictory if at least one and not more than one applies, but contrary if not more than one can apply” (1973, p. 136).
Allison believes Hume is committed to non-existence: “Hume’s account of contrariety as a philosophical relation…is limited to the contrast between existence and non-existence. Hume’s inclusion of contrariety, so understood, in his list of philosophical relations may be puzzling, but it indicates that he was committed to the thesis that we have an idea of non-existence, which entails that we can conceive of things as non-existent” (2008, p. 165). Allison here seems to leave out that it is not merely non-existence per se, but that existence and non-existence imply “both of them an idea of the object; tho’ the latter excludes the object from all times and places, in which it is supposed not to exist” (T 1.1.5.8; SBN 15, italics added).
Hume also refers to the process of generating fictions as a mistake, confusion, substitution, or conversion. The name of the process is arbitrary in this case; what is important is the plausibility of whether the imagination has the capacity to generate a fiction of negation.
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Delaney, B. Contraries, oppositions, and contradictions: a species/genus account of humean contrariety. Synthese 200, 56 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03473-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03473-9