Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to argue that on the Materialist reading, Hume (of the first book of the Treatise) is significantly less of an empiricist than he is on the Idealist reading, and that on several interpretations of his methodological view, the Materialist reading renders his intellectual conduct less consistent with the epistemology he endorses than does the Idealist reading.
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Notes
- 1.
Because Idealism and Materialism pertain only to body-terms, they cannot impinge on Hume’s attitude to other terms. This is why it is clear that the Materialist reading takes him away from concept-empiricism: there are no terms that can render the two readings on a par vis-à-vis concept empiricism, let alone reverse the imbalance.
- 2.
Of course, this is just an artefact of the way I have chosen to formulate the two views (so that they are exhaustive and exclusive). The alternative, less convenient for my discussion and less customary, is to characterise empiricism as the claim that there are synthetic propositions that are not knowable a priori. Rationalism would then be the claim (very seldom, if ever, held) that all propositions are knowable a priori.
- 3.
Hume thinks only the privileged relations can be known with certainty, but we shouldn’t take this to be required by empiricism, which I take to be a doctrine about the sources of knowledge and justification.
- 4.
Hume scorns mathematicians who “pretend, that those ideas, which are their objects, are of so refin’d and spiritual a nature, that they fall not under the conception of the fancy, but must be comprehended by a pure and intellectual view, of which the superior faculties of the soul are alone capable” (T 1.3.1.7; SBN 72). Philosophers, too, he mockingly suggests, “are so fond of this notion of some spiritual and refin’d perceptions; since by that means they cover many of their absurdities” (T 1.3.1.7; SBN 72).
- 5.
The qualification is required to accommodate the (Materialist) supposition that Hume allows for non-imagistic “relative ideas”. But these are exceptional: necessity and “bodies”. So even if (contentiously) this exception holds (Sect. 3.1), it is irrelevant to COLOURS.
- 6.
In contemporary discussions, the term ‘enumerative induction’ applies also to statistical inferences: from ‘x out of y observed A’s are B’s’ to ‘The proportion of A’s that are B’s in the entire population is x/y’ or to ‘The probability of the next A being a B is x/y’ (where x < y). For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on the extreme case of the so-called “straight rule”. Nothing in what I say is affected by this restriction.
- 7.
I choose this example advisedly. When we (inductively) infer from the sun having always risen daily to its rising tomorrow’, it seems to us that today’s sunrise does not cause tomorrow’s. But perhaps they do relative to Hume’s regularity notion of causation, which only requires cause and effect to be regularly conjoined and contiguous, and the former to precede the latter.
- 8.
Invoking an unjustified claim is not the only mistake a philosopher can make. He may also invoke unjustified inference principles. Familiarly, if Hume is sceptical about induction or deduction, he violates his considered methodological view throughout the Treatise.
- 9.
Here, one might wonder whether Hume is committed, via the CP, to classifying the term ‘universal’, and correlatively, the argument against abstract ideas, as meaningless. But this worry is engendered by Hume’s concept-empiricism, which is not my concern in this chapter. So I will assume, for the sake of the argument, that the term ‘universal’ is meaningful. Alternatively, we can construe Hume as assuming that everything is individual, a claim that satisfies the CP.
- 10.
I am inclined to think that Hume accepts ontological nominalism because his predecessors did. And they do not argue for it. Hobbes merely says (Elements of Philosophy, l.ii.9) “this word universal is never the name of any thing existent in nature”. Locke thinks “[a]ll things, that exist, being Particulars…” (E.III.iii.1) and “General and Universal, belong not to the real existence of Things” (E.III.iii.11). Finally, Berkeley says (through Philonous) “it is an universally received maxim, that every thing which exists, is particular” (DHP, p. 192).
- 11.
In fact, Hume goes on to rebut arguments adduced by Hobbes, Clarke and Locke in support of the principle. So his charge that the principle is “taken for granted…without any proof given” (T 1.3.3.1; SBN 78) is disingenuous. A bad argument is still an argument.
- 12.
There may be a problem in the vindication. If perceptions need no support, a mind may be a bundle of perceptions. But one who thinks (not implausibly) that an unperceived perception is contradictory regardless of a perception needing “support” will say that any bundle, including one constituting just one perception, constitutes a mind. If so, then when a perception “leaves” one mind, it will perforce belong to another, and there won’t be unperceived perceptions. Some principled account is required to distinguish mere bundles from those constituting minds. And it is hard to see how one can be given, given Hume’s definition of the mind as “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement…the mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (T 1.4.6.4; SBN 252–3). True, Hume attempts to account for our “propension to ascribe an identity to these successive perceptions” (T 1.4.6.5; SBN 253). But the belief that we are “possesst of an…uninterrupted existence thro’ the whole course of our lives” (T 1.4.6.5; SBN 253) is false. If our bundle may count as a mind, so may any momentarily existing perception. But although difficulty may impugn Hume’s reasoning, it doesn’t undermine the supposition that he endorses the (non-empiricist) principle.
- 13.
In fact, they do not argue that the missing shade is a “singular” exception to the CP. Instead, they suggest that Hume should modify the CP so that it allows for a new way of forming ideas, in addition to copying an impression and conjoining existing ideas. The modified principle allows for the acquisition of the missing shade (and other ideas of its ilk), but not substance and necessity, thereby upholding some of Hume’s most momentous pronouncements. Pears suggests, very vaguely, that an idea can “be derived, as it were, laterally from other ideas in the group [colours, say] to which it belongs” (1990, p. 25). Garrett says (1997, p. 51), more precisely, that available impressions can “point…to the content of the missing impression” by relying on degrees of resemblance it bears to them. I think the idea is that a unique impression is determined by these resemblances. Without this restriction, necessity and substance would also pass muster. Being (putative) simple impressions, they resemble all other simple impressions (in being simple). Another, to my mind more rigorous, way of contending with the missing shade is to give up the Separability Principle, which renders simple the idea of the missing shade. Without separability, the missing shade would be a complex idea, constituted by two ideas: blue and the particular shade. As I argued above, the Separability Principle is itself empiricistically unjustified.
- 14.
Here is a third possibility: that ideas are defined phenomenologically, and thought is defined as the having of ideas, so there are no competing definitions of ‘idea’ (phenomenological and functional). But the term ‘thought’ cannot be defined in this way. It already has a meaning (perhaps undefinable). This is why Locke can invoke it to define the (technical) term ‘idea’ as that with which we think. And if ideas are defined phenomenologically, it is an empirical question whether we think with them.
- 15.
We encounter the same duality in Hume’s distinction between ideas of memory and ideas of the imagination. Hume draws the distinction phenomenologically. “When we remember a past event, the idea of it flows in upon the mind in a forcible manner; whereas in the imagination, the perception is faint and languid” (T 1.1.3.1; SBN 9). And he also suggests, in a functional vein, that “the imagination is not restrain’d to the same order and form with the original impression; while the memory is in a manner ty’d down in that respect, without any power of variation” (T 1.1.3.2; SBN 9). Here, too, the phenomenological distinction is better viewed as evidential, rather than definitive. This is also reflected by ordinary speech, in which memory retains information.
- 16.
There are other interpretations to be found in the literature, but they can be similarly diagnosed. Landy (2006) offers a genetic definition: impressions are “original” and ideas – copies thereof. On this understanding of the distinction, Hume must substantiate the empirical claim that we think with copies of original mental states. (On this interpretation, Hume thinks that for every idea a person has, he had a corresponding impression. And this contradicts Hume’s claim that the imagination can form ideas of “winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants” (T 1.1.3.4, SBN 10). Broughton notes (2006, p. 45) that Hume sometimes identifies “vivacity” with “the attentiveness with which we are aware of things”. On this construal, Hume must substantiate the empirical claim that we are more attentive to what we feel than to what we think. (I think this interpretation doesn’t accord with Hume’s bundle view of the mind. Who (or what) is being attentive?)
- 17.
Van Fraassen’s “constructive empiricist” (1980) argues against the legitimacy of IBE to the unobservable, whose conclusions, unlike Hume, he takes to be meaningful.
- 18.
Hume infers to the best unobservable explanation on several occasions. First, as Garrett (2015, p. 81) notes, he infers “from the fact that the mind regularly does something of a particular recognizable kind that it has the power to do it and a faculty that does it”. The conclusion of this inference is meaningless according to the CP: we have neither an impression of power nor one of a “faculty”. Hume also infers to the actions of the (unobservable) “spirits”, for instance, to explain why we confuse similar ideas (T 1.2.5.20; SBN 60–1), and why we don’t believe the conclusion of the sceptical argument and other complicated demonstrations (T 1.4.1.10; SBN 185). I argued (introduction) that these do not count (significantly) in favour of the Materialist reading, because what he says is incidental, neither part of a larger argumentative move, nor involved in a systematic discussion of “bodies”.
- 19.
Berkeley suggests a particular idea (of a triangle, say) represents the others when we “selectively attend” to the features that are common to all triangles. “[A] man may consider a figure merely as triangular, without attending to the particular qualities of the angles, or relations of the sides” (PHK, Introduction, §16).
- 20.
Hume’s associationist theory explains why “languages so nearly correspond to each other” (T 1.1.4.1; SBN 10). But Hume does not infer to the truth of its principles (contiguity, similarity and causality) as best explaining the uniformity of languages. Rather, he purports to establish the laws inductively. For instance, “‘[t]is sufficient to observe, that there is no relation, which produces a stronger connexion in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily recall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their objects” (T 1.1.4.2; SBN 11, my italics). He then relies on the principles to explain the uniformity of languages.
- 21.
Landy (2017, p. 33) suggests Hume infers to the existence of simple ideas because they explain the novelty of human thought. “Simple ideas are posits, or theoretical entities, because we have no direct experience of them as simple” (2017, p. 34, original italics). If he is right, this would be another case in which Hume (illicitly, by the fork’s lights) invokes IBE. But in fact, Hume adduces a deductive argument in to establish their existence: “‘Tis universally allow’d, that the capacity of the mind is limited…‘Tis also obvious, that whatever is capable of being divided in infinitum, must consist of an infinite number of parts…It requires scarce any induction to conclude from hence, that the idea, which we form of any finite quality, is not infinitely divisible” (T 1.2.1.2, SBN 26–7).
- 22.
Berkeley, from whom Hume perhaps takes the Conceivability principle, explicitly rejects its converse. “Many things, for ought I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever” (DHP, p. 232).
- 23.
Berkeley says, in a similar vein, that it “is…a receiv’d axiom that an impossibility cannot be conceiv’d” (First draft of the Introduction, Works II, p. 125). And he invokes the “axiom” in his argument against abstract ideas (PHK, Introduction, §10): “I deny that I can abstract from one another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated”.
- 24.
As Price says (1940b, p. 8), “empiricism is hostile to…every sort of ipse dixit”. But Hume, I will argue, flouts this injunction.
- 25.
In the Enquiry, contrariety is a causal relation, obtaining between two objects (fire and water, for instance) just in case the first (causally) destroys the second. “[C]ontrariety…may, perhaps, be considered as a mixture of Causation and Resemblance. Where two objects are contrary, the one destroys the other; that is, the cause of its annihilation, and the idea of the annihilation of an object implies the idea of its former existence” (EHU 3.3.n.4; SBN 24). This construal doesn’t fit that of the Treatise, in which contrariety is one of the four privileged relations, the obtaining of which is knowable a priori.
- 26.
Bennett (1971, pp. 250–6) construes the privileged relations as depending only on the individual properties of the related objects (and not on their relative situation). As Millican (2017, p. 22) notes, “the proposition that Venus is larger than Mars is actually true, and could not cease to be true without a change in the objects themselves, but nothing in the typical person’s idea of Venus and Mars guarantees this”. But we can bypass this dispute. On Bennett’s construal, privileged relations are not discoverable a priori. So even if the Conceivability Principle falls under the privileged prong of the fork, it cannot be justified a priori.
- 27.
A more expansive methodological empiricist, who countenances, unlike Hume, inference to the best explanation in addition to inductive inference, is not better placed vis-à-vis the Conceivability Principle. What does the principle best explain?
- 28.
Descartes also infers in the opposite direction – from the impossibility to conceive to impossibility: “it is incumbent on us to imagine that he is a deceiver if we wish to cast doubt upon our clear and distinct perceptions; and since we cannot imagine that he is a deceiver, we must admit them all as true and certain”; that accidents cannot exist apart from a substance, since he cannot conceive of an accident that does not inhere in a substance (CSM II, p. 176); that a vacuum is impossible since he cannot conceive of a space which is not extended (CSM I, p. 230). But Hume very seldom, if ever, invokes the Inconceivability Principle (Lightner, 1997). So in considering the possibility that Hume sometimes reasons as a rationalist, I focus on the Conceivability Principle.
- 29.
This does not mean that Hume’s science of man cannot be empiricistically justified. Perhaps the Conceivability Principle is not interesting in itself, and Hume only invokes it as a lemma, in order to establish claims he does view as of intrinsic interest. Perhaps, too, there is a different route to the interesting claims of Hume’s science of man, that nature’s uniformity cannot be established a priori, for instance.
- 30.
Hume is here implicitly assuming that only necessary propositions can be demonstrated. The assumption, too, must be empiricistically justifiable, and this is not trivial. Just as a proof system may be unsound (allow for proofs of statements that are not logically valid), so may Hume’s informal system allow for “demonstrations” with conclusions that are not necessary. Perhaps it is possible to prove that the four privileged relations are necessary and that Humean demonstration preserves necessity, thereby showing that the “demonstration principle” is a logical truth. This would require (unrealistically) a rigorous characterisation of the four privileged relations and of Humean demonstration.
- 31.
De Pierris (2015, p. 144, my italics) imputes to Hume a “radical” form of scepticism, but what she has in mind is only “that we might always be stuck with merely probable conclusions”. Scepticism that only denies our ability to attain certainty does not merit the label ‘radical’. And this sort of scepticism does not threaten to impugn Hume’s own inferences.
- 32.
It doesn’t matter here whether Hume is thought to accept inductive scepticism already in part III of the first book of the Treatise (Fogelin, 1985) or only in part IV (Loeb, 2002). On the latter possibility, he shouldn’t have retained the parts of the book that run counter to the methodological view he ends up espousing.
- 33.
Qu (2019) thinks “[n]o account is going to perfectly integrate all the texts and come out unscathed”. But this does not suffice to show no account is reasonably adequate, more adequate than the other contenders. I cannot point to such an account in the case of Treatise 1.4.7.
- 34.
Qu (2019) presents detailed criticisms of the available interpretations.
- 35.
The label is Garrett’s (1997).
- 36.
Whereas for Garrett and Allison, the TP is an epistemic principle, Meeker (2013, p. 74) thinks that it is a “pragmatic concession to scepticism”, so the justification it provides is not epistemic. But he, too, does not explain what Hume means by “reasoning”, so his interpretation, like that of Garrett’s and Allison’s, doesn’t decide the status of the Conceivability Principle.
- 37.
For our purpose here, we should count as an empiricist interpreter Paul Russell (2008, p. 221), who thinks Hume enjoins us to be somewhat diffident about the deliverances of the fork, and to keep in mind that certainty is too strict a standard for justification.
- 38.
A strong objection to this interpretation and to others that ascribe to Hume the view that our beliefs have some epistemic merit, is that Hume explicitly says the sceptical argument (T 1.4.1), whose conclusion is very radical (that no belief is at all justified) is cogent; it cannot be rebutted: “[I] can find no error in the [sceptical] argument” (T 1.4.1.10; SBN 185). Furthermore, Hume says of the Treatise that it “is very sceptical…and…concludes that we assent to our faculties only because we cannot help it” (T Abstract 27; SBN 657).
- 39.
The strongest objection to this interpretation is that it has Hume thinking that the Treatise is merely “excusable”, and does not even aspire to get at the truth about Human nature, to develop the “science of man [as] the only solid foundation for the other sciences” (T intro.7; SBN xvi, italics mine), the aim Hume sets himself in the introduction to the Treatise. Perhaps Hume cannot resist his desire to philosophise, but he can certainly refrain from publishing his “findings”. And on this interpretation, he should. The fact that he doesn’t counts against the interpretation, because it has Hume behaving very unreasonably. The objection is not that scepticism is so foolish a position that Hume cannot be thought to endorse it (Wilson, 2008, 436–7). Instead, it is the much more plausible claim that scepticism is inconsistent with Hume’s declared aim, which he does not retract after the sceptical crisis.
- 40.
I find Baxter’s interpretation implausible, because it has Hume also countenancing the Conceivability Principle’s denial: there are no counter-arguments to it, either.
- 41.
Loeb thinks the sceptical conclusion applies only to the “reflective person”. But this does not save Hume from scepticism, since he is “reflective”.
- 42.
One of the strongest objections to this interpretation (Beauchamp & Mappes, 1975; Garrett, 1997; Cummins, 1999; Allison, 2008) is that it renders inexplicable the fact that Hume went on to write two more books, attempting to account for the emotions and morality in accordance with the “experimental method”.
- 43.
I have two objections to this interpretation. First, Hume never considers the warrant for the principle, and simply says it is an “established maxim in metaphysics” (T 1.2.2.8; SBN 32). Surely, if he thought it was intuitive, he would have said so, and noted the relations of ideas under which it can be subsumed. Second, I argued above that the principle cannot be subsumed under any of the four relations that give rise to a priori knowledge. And Hume would have realised this had he considered the possibility.
- 44.
Durland (2011) provides a comprehensive enumeration of the non-eclectic interpretations and insightful criticisms of the strategies they impute to Hume and of their interpretative cogency.
- 45.
Qu (2019, p. 305) suggests that “reading Hume as committed to irreconcilable viewpoints that are nevertheless equally valid seems significantly to compromise the overall coherence and systematicity of [his] project”.
- 46.
We are familiar with another epistemic lack of fit: between a (1st-order) belief and the (2nd-order) belief about its justification. Plausibly (to my mind but contentiously), epistemic akrasia, believing of one’s belief that it is unjustified (or unjustifiable), constitutes an epistemic flaw.
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Weintraub, R. (2024). The Idealist Interpretation Renders Hume More of an Empiricist. In: Humean Bodies and their Consequences. Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50799-1_11
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