Précis of Imagined Causes

Abstract

Précis of Imagined Causes Stefanie Rocknak (bio) By Hume's own account, his most ambitious project, the Treatise on Human Nature, was a notoriously immature undertaking, choked with immutable difficulties.1 Perhaps as a result of this immaturity, and perhaps because, as Kant suggests above, Hume is perpetually misread, his view on objects remains obscured. What are they? Are they ideas? Impressions? Mindindependent objects? All three? None of the above? To date, scholars have not provided a unified, much less exhaustive, answer to these questions. Rather, four somewhat fragmented interpretations have been circulating in the literature. We may characterize them (in partial response to Marjorie Grene)2 as follows: 1.) The phenomenonalist reading, where objects are impressions (for example, Grene, "The Objects of Hume's Treatise"; Bennett, Locke, Berkeley and Hume; Steinberg, "Hume on the Continued Existence and the Identity of Changing Things"; and Dicker, "Hume on the Intermittent Existence of the Objects of the Senses"); 2.) The intentional reading, where objects are the objects of thought (for example, Salmon, The Central Problem of Hume's Philosophy); 3.) The realist reading, where objects are mind-independent things (for example, Wilson, "Is Hume a Skeptic with Regard to the Senses?"; Flage, David Hume's Theory of Mind; Costa, "Hume and Causal Realism"; Strawson, "David Hume: Objects and Power"; Wright, "Hume's Causal Realism: Recovering a Traditional Interpretation"; 4) The imagined, but non-causal reading, where objects, to varying degrees (depending on the scholar at hand) are imagined, but are not imagined as causes (for instance, Price, Hume's Theory of the External World; Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume; Wilbanks, Hume's Theory of Imagination; and Waxman, Hume's Theory of Consciousness). This book presents a new interpretation of Humean objects, where I focus on just Book 1 of the Treatise. In the course of doing so, I show that although in places, Hume surely does suggest that objects are impressions, or are intentional, or are imagined but are not imagined as [End Page 47] causes, these intermittent uses of the word "object" do not reflect Hume's more comprehensive position. Nor does Hume think that objects are mind independent things; he is not a realist. Rather, throughout Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume struggled with two positions on the nature of objects. On the one hand, Hume believed that despite what we, in our common, that is, "vulgar" state of mind, or alternatively, in our more sophisticated "philosophical" state of mind, think that objects are, what we actually and always do, is imagine that objects are the causes of our various and interrupted perceptions. Objects are nothing more than complex, imagined ideas, as such, they are perceptions. Moreover, objects are necessarily imagined (as causes) because they constitute certain conditions of possibility for experience, making them functions of what we may refer to as a "transcendental" faculty of the imagination: "we always imagine that there is some cause that separates or unites [objects]" (T 1.3.2.2; SBN 74; emphasis added). In this very general respect, Hume anticipates the Kantian transcendental turn. But Hume also seemed to think that we only imagine causes (although unwittingly) when we reach a certain "philosophical" level of thought. Thus, when we imagine a cause of a set of interrupted and varying perceptions—where we believe that this cause is a real mind-independent thing—we are "philosophers," as they are described at the end of 1.4.2 ("Of skepticism with regard to the senses"). However, such philosophers are not aware that they are imagining causes. Instead, they mistakenly think that they are using reason to conclude that objects are real, mind-independent things. As a result, on this second reading, imagining causes is a natural, although unacknowledged, culmination of human thought, as opposed to being something that all of us, always—although unknowingly—do. The tension between these two positions on objects manifests itself in Hume's much discussed account of personal identity, presented in 1.4.6 of the Treatise. In fact, Hume openly acknowledges this tension in the Appendix to the Treatise. Here, he suggests that the philosophical account of perfect identity is mistaken, while his account of...