Scepticism and Meaning

Abstract

1. It is a commonplace that contemporary empiricism, or antimetaphysical philosophy, at least in this country, is a re-statement of the essentials of Hume's position with the aid of the more complete analysis of a priori reasoning provided by logicians within the last fifty years; what logical empiricism has most substantially added to Hume's sceptical method is the means of stating and applying his distinction between purely analytic sentences and sentences conveying information about matters of fact more precisely than he was able to state or apply it. It was Hume's governing purpose in every part of his writing to defend what is now generally called the language of common-sense, which is essentially what he called natural belief, against every kind of philosophical theory, whether rationalist or professedly sceptical. By “philosophical theory” is meant in this context any attempt by the use of logical or a priori arguments either to justify or to amend our common-sense beliefs or assertions; Hume tries to show that all such attempts are mistaken in logic and ineffective in fact. The work of the genuine sceptic, who is the true philosopher, is repeatedly to draw attention to the limits of human reason; to draw attention to the limits of human reason is to point to the logical impossibility of answering philosophical demands for some general, and therefore non-empirical, justification of our natural beliefs; such demands involve the substituting of some single, imposed criterion of justification in the place of the various and shifting criteria which we in fact habitually use.