Abstract
In the first Enquiry, Hume takes the experience of exerting force against a solid body to be a key ingredient of the vulgar idea of power, so that the vulgar take that experience to provide us with an impression of power. Hume provides two arguments against the vulgar on this point: the first concerning our other applications of the idea of power and the second concerning whether that experience yields certainty about distinct events. I argue that, even if we accept Hume’s conception of the vulgar’s approach, neither of Hume’s arguments succeeds. The first argument can be resisted either by using the very arguments Hume provides concerning other causal representations or by simply rejecting Hume’s strict empiricism. The second argument can be resisted on epistemological grounds: there is no reason to think that an experience of a maximally-strong metaphysical connection would provide a maximally-strong epistemological connection. Unlike some recent neo-Anscombean responses to the second argument, my response does not require challenging Hume’s view that causal relations are strictly necessary. Though I do not attempt to translate the resilience of the vulgar view into contemporary terms, the failure of Hume’s arguments challenges one of the long-standing motivations for Humean approaches to causation.
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Notes
References to passages from the Enquiry are by chapter and paragraph number. References to Hume’s Treatise (Hume 2000) are by book, part, section number, and paragraph number. References to Locke’s Essay are by book, chapter, and paragraph number.
Some of Hume’s readers have taken such statements as implying that he believes there is a secret connection binding events together (so that causation is more than mere regularity), and his negative claim is only that regularity is all we know about the nature of causation (e.g., Strawson 1992). I remain neutral on this issue in what follows.
We do get a number of hints, though, especially in the Treatise. The vulgar “take things according to their first appearance” (Treatise 1.3.12.5). This means, at least in part, that the vulgar take both qualities like bulk and solidity and qualities like color and heat to “have a distinct continu’d existence” apart from our perceptions (Treatise 1.4.2.12). Hume also says that it is part of the popular way of thinking, and natural to imagine, that “we feel the solidity of bodies, and need but touch any object in order to perceive this quality” (Treatise 1.4.4.12). In causal matters, the vulgar “imagine they perceive a connexion betwixt such objects as they have found constantly found united together” (Treatise 1.4.3.9).
Despite calling solidity a force, Locke does not explicitly discuss solidity in his chapter on active and passive powers (Essay 2.21). This may be because he thinks of active powers as what allows a substance to initiate a causal chain, and of passive powers as a substance’s mere capacity for being changed (cf. Essay 2.21.2). Solidity would then be somewhere between an active and passive power. It does not itself initiate any causal chains, and so is less than an active power, but it does contribute to the continuation of causal chains (e.g., by causing objects to bounce off each other), and so is more than a mere capacity for change.
Though we differ on some key points, the previous commentator whose approach is closest to my own, especially in responding to Hume's second argument, is Evan Fales in Fales (1990). Fales’ important discussion, while occasionally referenced, is under-appreciated: Armstrong (1997) mentions Fales’ view, but leaves out several key pieces. Despite the significant affinities between their views and his, there is no mention of Fales in Mumford and Anjum (2011).
Schaffer (2008). Schaffer later cites several post-Humean metaphysicians who side with the vulgar view, some of whom I mention below.
A key step in such translation, I believe, would be understanding Hume’s talk of impressions in terms of something like Russellian acquaintance (as opposed to understanding them in terms of a weaker notion of perceptual representation). Though this has only suggestive value, it’s worth noting that Hume talks of acquaintance at various points in the Enquiry, and seems to treat having an impression of something as sufficient for acquaintance (cf. 2.8, 9.2). Note that Hume seems confident that everyone will accept his basic ontology of the mental in terms of impressions and ideas (cf. 2.1–3).
Hume returns to nisus in the last footnote of Sect. 7 of the Enquiry, but does not add anything significant to his argument: “No animal can put external bodies in motion without the sentiment of a nisus or endeavour; and every animal has a sentiment or feeling from the stroke or blow of an external object, that is in motion. These sensations, which are merely animal, and from which we can a priori draw no inference, we are apt to transfer to inanimate objects, and to suppose, that they have some such feelings” (7.29n). Hume’s apparently pejorative use of ‘animal’ here is somewhat uncharacteristic (cf. Sect. 9 of the Enquiry). For discussion of the hint of an argument here, see Fales (1990, pp. 14–15).
Given the ultimate aim of Hume’s argument, it is puzzling that he initially describes this endeavoring as “exert[ing] our force” and “call[ing] up our power.” If we aim to read Hume charitably, we should take these phrases merely as superficial accommodations to the vulgar way of speaking.
As Wood (manuscript) shows, Hume’s concern with nisus has important ties to Berkeley and Leibniz—in fact, his use of the term ‘animal nisus’ probably derives from Berkeley’s De Motu. Wood argues that, at least as far as Leibniz’s notion of nisus is concerned (which may well have been another of Hume’s targets), Hume is wrong to think nisus has any important tie to physical exertion.
Materialists might be tempted to shrug off at least the part of the argument concerning God, but I think that would be too quick [Markus Schrenk, for instance, sets aside the ‘Supreme Being’ part of the argument on grounds of methodological atheism (Schrenk 2014)]. Even if we do not accept the existence of God, we might still need an account of our idea of causation that makes sense of how it is so frequently applied to God.
Evan Fales takes an approach along these lines (Fales 1990, pp. 13–14).
On this last point, cf. Massin (2009, p. 578) (who lists others who have made related suggestions). In the Treatise, Hume argues that we can make no sense of the resistance we experience in bodies resembling a quality in mind-independent bodies themselves (Treatise 1.4.4). But his grounds there are quite general, and extend to our experience of shape, motion, etc. Those general skeptical arguments are independent of (and not obviously consistent with) the arguments of 7.15n.
In fact, Leibniz and Kant may have had such a view, namely, that we experience force at least as directly as we do shape, but that we do not derive our causal concepts from such experiences. See Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding (Leibniz 1996, p. 124) and Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science 4:510. I discuss this view in Marshall (manuscript).
Three complications: First, it is not obvious what Hume takes the relation to be between psychological certainty and epistemic justification. I take it Hume thinks they go together in this case, but the general issue is complicated [for an in-depth discussion, see Loeb (2002)]. Second: it is worth asking whether Hume’s principle concerns only inferences to future events (foresight), or extends more widely. Despite the wording of the above passage, Hume’s use of the principle suggests a wider reading: at 4.6, he emphasizes that Adam would not be able to draw inferences about either the effects or the causes of the things he first encounters (see also the quotations below concerning Hume’s reasons for interest in causal relations). Third, though Hume does not say this, it seems essential to his argument that it must be the intrinsic nature of the candidate impression that would put us in a position to foresee the effect. So if we are, say, hard-wired from birth to expect stationary objects to start moving upon contact with moving objects, that alone would not be enough to challenge Hume's views. The expectation must be based in the intrinsic nature of the conscious experience.
Anscombe (1971). With Hume’s argument in view, David Armstrong advances a broadly similar line: “Hume’s target… was the old rationalist conception of causation where causation was assumed to be necessary in the way that, say, Euclidean geometrical theorems were assumed to be necessary. He was certainly right to argue that we perceive no such necessity in causal sequences. But here is a position that Hume does not consider. It is the position that, in favourable situations, singular causal relations are perceived without any perception of the necessity of the relation… They need involve no perception of necessity, nor need there be any necessity” (Armstrong 1997, p. 211). See also Massin (2009) (who also insists on distinguishing forces from causes), Schrenk (2010), Mumford and Anjum (2011), and Schrenk (2014). Mumford and Anjum also seem to think that a view that makes causes simultaneous with their effects has some force against Hume's argument (Mumford and Anjum 2011, Chap. 9), but that seems to me to put too much weight on Hume occasional talk of foresight (see the previous note).
The vulgar, I take it, assume the uniformity of nature. If an all-feeling being were convinced of Hume’s way of connecting conceivability and possibility, it might have less than certainty if it imagined the possibility of the door simply vanishing, or having new repulsive force appear from nowhere.
A referee for Phil Studies suggested that these passages could be read as Hume just emphasizing how far away we are from having any impression of power. A possible analogy: the statement “You haven’t proven I’m guilty—you don’t have a single shred of evidence!” does not imply that a single shred of evidence would be sufficient for proving guilt. I grant that this is a possible reading of at least 4.9, though the relation between inference and causation in Hume’s system (discussed in the next paragraph) makes me think that Hume took his argument to require the denial of even mere-suggestion-yielding impressions.
My suggestion here should not be confused with the ‘New Hume’ proposal that Hume thought causal powers (in some thick sense of ‘causal’) were real but beyond our understanding (for one important discussion, see Millican 2009). On the view I’ve described, Hume would be entertaining only the possibility that causal connections might be knowable in the same way that the volumes of three-dimensional opaque objects are: by accumulating partial views. Whether Hume ultimately allows there to be ‘deep’ and robustly real causal powers is another question.
For this reason, I set aside Hume’s apparent emphasis on knowledge in the penultimate sentence of the footnote. As far as I can tell, Hume never considers the possibility that a single experience might give us grounds for a less than certain inference (contra Fales 1990, p. 24), despite his giving a clear place to probabilistic inference in our thoughts about matters of fact (the topic of Sect. 6 of the Enquiry).
No empirical study will be of direct help here, for reasons noted above. The issue is the suggestive force (if any) of the experience of resistance alone. Even if we could isolate newborns' responses to feelings of pressure from random movements, there would be no obvious way of telling whether those responses were based on the intrinsic qualities of the experience itself or were merely reflexive.
Fales offers a more elaborate case: a communicative but otherwise new-to-the-world subject whose head is immobilized and then struck with a blow (Fales 1990, pp. 23–24). Fales also contends that the subject could accurately infer the speed and direction at which his head would have moved had his head not been immobilized. Fales' case seems to me to involve unnecessary complications (including the counterfactual nature of the inference), and Fales is more confident about the reliability of such thought-experiments than I am, but the core intuition his case and mine aim for is the same.
Cf. Siegel (2009).
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Acknowledgments
For comments and discussions, I’m grateful to Tristram McPherson, John Morrison, Tristram Oliver-Skuse, Mike Raven, Markus Schrenk, Jonathan Simon, Cass Weller, Joshua Wood, and the participants of the 2013 Australian Metaphysics Conference.
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Marshall, C. Hume versus the vulgar on resistance, nisus, and the impression of power. Philos Stud 172, 305–319 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0304-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0304-1