Abstract
David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is arguably the best candidate for the first ever overarching attempt at a descriptive-explanatory science of the mind. This paper characterizes the key tenets of Hume’s undertaking and situates its central features in the context of then-contemporary science. According to the present argument, Hume’s science of man provides a chemical-organismic account of mental functioning that fits an intellectual environment dominated by post-Newtonian natural philosophy.
I am grateful for discussions with László Kocsis and Krisztián Pete. My work has been supported by the MTA Lendület ‘Morals and Science’ Project.
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Notes
- 1.
It is convenient to interpret Hume’s distinction here with Sellars’ (1963) famous contrast in mind between the manifest and the scientific image.
- 2.
There are similar revisionary tendencies in contemporary Newtonian medicine and natural philosophy, too. John Keill’s introductory text to natural philosophy, which might have been well known to Hume (see Barfoot, 1990, 171, 172), also complained about the explanatory emptiness of “faculty” in the hands of the Perpateticks who, instead of discovering causes, had “invented such Terms, as are very fit to express natural Actions.” This, however, does not mean that one should be “ashamed to use” such terms as “Quality, Faculty, Attraction, and the like”, only that we should not “pretend to define the true and physical Cause or Modus of Action” (Keill, 1745, 2, 4).
- 3.
- 4.
The idea of Hume’s commitment to cognitive atomism is still influential today. Some of its features are discussed in the context of contemporary cognitive psychology in Fodor, (2003, 146–152).
- 5.
As for magnetism see Norton and Norton (2000, 429). Interestingly, in the editorial material published as the second volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Treatise Norton and Norton (T 2:701) point out, rightly I think, that attraction for Newton had a broader sense than gravitation.
- 6.
I know of no direct evidence that Hume was acquainted with Geoffroy’s achievements, but they were widely known and discussed in France, and they were also appropriated in a Malebranchian fashion by Fontenelle (see Shank, 2008, 114–120). It is not implausible to think that while at La Flèche Hume encountered these ideas. Besides, through unofficial public lecture courses Geoffroy’s affinity table became part of “informal pedagogy” in Britain by the 1730s (see Taylor 2016, 36).
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Demeter, T. (2022). The Foundational Document of Cognitive Science. In: Gervain, J., Csibra, G., Kovács, K. (eds) A Life in Cognition. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66175-5_11
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