Hume's Argument Research Articles

The First Motive to Justice: Hume's Circle Argument Squared

The First Motive to Justice: Hume's Circle Argument Squared

The Two Definitions and the Doctrine of Necessity

Peter Millican claims that Hume's argument for the doctrine of necessity in §VIII of the first Enquiry is a ‘torpedo into the core’ of the sceptical realist interpretation of Hume. I argue against this claim: Hume's argument in fact provides no new evidence for or against any of the standard interpretative positions.

A Humean Argument for Personal Identity

Considering various arguments in Hume’s Treatise, I reconstruct a Humean argument against personal identity or unity. According to this argument, each distinct perception is separable from the bundle of perceptions to which it belongs and is thus transferable either to the external, material reality or to another psychical reality, another bundle of perceptions. Nevertheless, such transference (Hume’s word!) is entirely illegitimate, otherwise Hume’s argument against causal inference would have failed; furthermore, it violates private, psychical accessibility. I suggest a Humean thought experiment clearly demonstrating that, to the extent that anything within a psychical reality is concerned, no distinction leads to separation or transference and that private, psychical accessibility has to be allowed in the Humean argument for personal identity or unity. Private accessibility and psychical untransferability secure personal identity and unity. Referring to the phenomenon of multiple personality along the lines of the Humean argument for personal identity or unity, I illustrate both private accessibility and a possible notion of one and the same person distinct from his/her alters or psychical parts. Finally, I show why Parfit’s Humean argument against personal identity must fail.

Hume on Miracles: Interpretation and Criticism

AbstractPhilosophers continue to debate about David Hume's case against the rationality of belief in miracles. This article clarifies semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical questions addressed in the controversy. It also explains the main premises of Hume's argument and discusses criticisms of them. The article concludes that one's evaluation of Hume's argument will depend on one's views about (a) the definitions of ‘miracle’ and ‘natural law’; (b) the type of reasoning one ought to employ to determine the probability that a particular miracle claim is true; and (c) whether reasonable people proportion their beliefs about the occurrence of miracles to their evidence.

HUME ON KNOWLEDGE, CERTAINTY AND PROBABILITY: ANTICIPATING THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE ANALYTIC/SYNTHETIC DIVIDE?

Abstract: This paper contends that the first argument of Hume's “Of scepticism with regard to reason” entails that humans have no knowledge as Hume understands knowledge. In defending this claim, we also see how Hume's argument anticipates an important aspect of an extremely influential 20th century development: the collapse of the analytic/synthetic distinction.

Miracles in Enlightenment England

Miracles in Enlightenment England. By Jane Shaw. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006, Pp. x, 244. $45.00.) The conventional wisdom on the eighteenth-century English miracles runs something like this. The new learning of the seventeenth made belief in an interventionist God problematic at best, implausible at worst. That, combined with the relative freedom to publish which followed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, opened up miracles to intense public scrutiny from religious skeptics. The great debate concerning miracles, which began in earnest during the 1690s, drew into the fray most of the best minds of the day until David Hume put the matter to rest with the tenth chapter (Of Miracles) of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (HAS). Many now concede that Hume's argument against miracles was often derivative; John Earman even goes so far as to describe it as an abject failure from a philosophical point of view. Nevertheless, insofar as most historians are concerned, Hume's intervention brought an effective close to a that had run for the last seven decades. Miracles henceforth became a non-subject. Jane Shaw's Miracles in Enlightenment England challenges nearly every aspect of the conventional wisdom. To begin with, she cautions against taking an overly-restricted view of what constituted the miraculous, for, in the minds of early moderns, wonders, miracles, and providence were phenomena which were not always easily distinguishable. In addition, Shaw's a study of lived religion, rather than an intellectual history of the miracles debate. She gives primacy of place, in other words, to practice, not to ideas, so that doctrine is understood to emerge from and, in turn, inform particular practices (10). The premise that the primary lines of historical causation lead from action to intellection means that her starting point and her cast of characters differs markedly from more traditional studies of miracles. Where John Toland, Thomas Chubb, Peter Annet, Thomas Woolston, and others received the lion's chare of attention in previous accounts of the miracles debate, they are largely secondary figures in Shaw's study. Her story begins in the 1650s, during England's first sustained experiments with republicanism and with a less constrained market in religion. While traditional Protestant doctrine insisted that miracles had ceased sometime not long after Christ's life, there nevertheless were those, especially among those outside the Church of England, who claimed to be acting under divine inspiration or authority; indeed, Shaw shows quite convincingly that the number of people claiming to be miracle-workers increased rather than declined in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century (97). …

Hume on Religious Affect

Although various points of Hume's canonical works hint at a critique of religious affect, his most explicit attack on such sentiments occurs in a letter of June 30th 1743 to his friend William Mure. In this letter Hume sets out an objection to all affective attitudes that are putatively directed toward God, and maintains that the Deity is not in fact the ‘natural object’ of any human passion. I examine this claim and canvass three possible interpretations of Hume's challenge to religious affect, according to which Hume is, alternatively, (i) asserting the impropriety of all religious affect, (ii) denying that our affective states can secure reference to the divine, or (iii) rejecting the psychological possibility of affective states that take God as their object. Hume's argument may be best understood, I suggest, as a combination of all three criticisms. I close with an examination of Hume's diagnosis of the self-deceit involved in putative cases of religious feeling, and connect the argument of his letter to the similar analyses in Essays, Moral and Political and the Natural History of Religion .

Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas (review)

Reviewed by: Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas Brian Tierney Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas. By Francis Oakley. (New York: Continuum Press. 2005. Pp. 143. $29.95.) This excellent book provides a sophisticated but accessible introduction to some fundamental problems in the history of natural law thinking, and the writing throughout is elegant, lucid, and persuasive. Oakley's central argument is that a major shift occurred in the fourteenth century and that it influenced both the scientific and the moral philosophies of the succeeding age. A byproduct of the argument is a reminder that the traditional periodization of Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern is "more of a hindrance than a help" in the study of intellectual history (p. 81), an observation that will be applauded by many medievalists. [End Page 111] Historians typically treat the physical laws of nature as conceptually distinct from the natural law that directs our moral behavior. But Oakley challenges this sharp distinction. He is not concerned to refute Hume's is-ought argument, that we cannot derive moral propositions from factual ones. His argument is rather that the same underlying set of ideas informs both kinds of thinking and that the physical laws of nature can provide a sort of "intellectual template" to which the natural moral law conforms (p. 70). Underlying Oakley's whole argument is his concern with a persistent tension between the Greek and Hebrew sources of Christian thought. On the one hand we have the Greek idea of a divine reason immanent in an eternal cosmos, a reason reflected also in the workings of human reason. On the other hand stands the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, an all-powerful, willful God of untrammeled freedom who made the universe from nothing and out of his own good pleasure. Oakley shows how the church fathers, especially Augustine, and then the scholastic theologians, especially Aquinas, sought to reconcile the two ideas. Aquinas envisaged an eternal law, a manifestation of divine reason directing all created beings to their due ends, a ground of both the physical laws of the universe and the natural moral law known to man. As Oakley notes, in Aquinas the fit between the templates of moral and physical natural law is very close. But a later generation of theologians, prominent among them William of Ockham, saw in this way of thinking an unacceptable restraint on God's absolute freedom and omnipotent will. Ockham argued that the characteristics of the existing universe did not flow by any kind of necessity from the reason of God; God could have made a different universe with different laws of motion and different rules of morality. And this teaching, Oakley argues, helped to shape the new scientific thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a contingent universe one could not explain the way things behaved by pure reason, by hypothesizing about natural ends and occult essences. The only way to understand the material world was by observation and experiment and mathematical formulations of the resulting data. The problem is more complicated when we consider the moral natural law. Ockham's teaching that moral norms depended entirely on the will of God was reflected in some natural law theories of the early modern period. But alongside this doctrine Ockham also presented a "non-positive moral science" based on reason and experience, and this too had echoes in later thought. In Ockham's own later political writings, where he discussed explicitly the varieties of natural law, he appealed persistently to right reason as a guide to human behavior. Oakley explains the dichotomy by pointing to the common medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained powers of God. However, Oakley's argument here leaves open a much-disputed question that he raises but does not finally answer, the question whether Ockham's voluntarist theology did in fact exercise any significant influence on the content of his later political thought and his teachings there on natural law. [End Page 112] In a last chapter the author considers the emergence of a doctrine of...

Hume's Nuanced Defense of Luxury

The significance of Hume's positive attitude towards luxury might have been overemphasized by his commentators. In fact, arguments in favor of "moderate" luxury had already been entertained before the emergence of Hume's position. Therefore to argue that Hume's argument entailed the defense of moderate luxury is not to identify in it anything particularly unique. Thus, the first aim of this paper is to clarify the nature of Hume's contribution to the ongoing luxury debates. This does not consist merely of an assertion of the compatibility of moral virtue with the enjoyment of luxury, but lies rather in Hume's emphasis on two aspects of the beneficial interaction between morality and luxury. First, the historical process of the introduction of luxury is regarded by Hume as fostering new morals peculiar to the commercial age; and secondly, the enjoyment of luxury is seen as a condition favorable to the maintenance of morals. The second aim of this paper is to shed some new light on an aspect of Hume's thought that, so far, has been relatively neglected, namely, his distinction between "innocent" and "vicious" forms of luxury, as well as his acknowledgement of the possibility of the emergence of the latter, as well as the former, in the modern commercial world. However, this does not necessarily lead us to a more pessimistic interpretation of Hume's view of luxury than those accepted thus far; only to the awareness of how difficult and delicate, in Hume's view, is the maintenance of the balance between the interlinked concepts of industry, knowledge, and humanity.

Hume's Argument in Treatise 1.3.3.3: An Exposition and Defense

Hume's Argument in Treatise 1.3.3.3: An Exposition and Defense

David Hume's Account of Luxury

Scholarly discussions of the eighteenth-century luxury controversy invariably acknowledge the important role of David Hume, usually identifying him as one of the first to have made a strong case against the traditional view that luxury is morally corrupt and inimical to the survival of the state. But, having said this, they tend to treat Hume rather summarily, often focusing exclusively on the 1752 essay “Of Refinement in the Arts” and generally agreeing with one leading commentator that “Hume's arguments are straightforward, and can be dealt with briefly.” On closer examination, however, it appears that Hume's treatment of luxury was more complex in its historical development, and more subtle in its final form, than some have supposed. The first part of the following discussion considers the historical progression of Hume's thinking while the second consists in an analysis of “Refinement,” with particular attention to an important but overlooked distinction between the appropriate moral and political responses to luxury.

A posteriori Necessity in Singular Causation and the Humean Argument

The absence of a necessary connection in singular causation is a key step in the Humean argument against any form of necessity in causation. I argue that Hume's defence of this step is unsuccessful, and that the step could be skipped, accepting the possibility of necessary a posteriori truths. Still this does not suffice to guarantee a necessary connection in singular causation. Necessary a posteriori truths should be backed by necessary a priori truths. Thus, a main object of this paper is to argue that an a priori philosophical concept of causality involves a necessary connection between its terms.

X *-DOES HUME'S ARGUMENT AGAINST INDUCTION REST ON A QUANTIFIER-SHIFT FALLACY?

It is widely agreed that Hume's description of human inductive reasoning is inadequate. But many philosophers think that this inadequacy in no way affects the force of Hume's argument for the unjustifiability of inductive reasoning. I argue that this constellation of opinions contains a serious tension, given that Hume was not merely pointing out that induction is fallible. I then explore a recent diagnosis of where Hume's sceptical argument goes wrong, due to Elliott Sober. Sober argues that Hume committed a quantifier-shift fallacy, i.e. inferred a statement of ∃∀ form from one of ∀∃ form. The implications of this diagnosis for the traditional problem of induction are briefly examined. The author suggests that, were his philosophy received, we must alter from the foundation the greatest part of the sciences. Hume 1740

Butler's "Future State" and Hume's "Guide of Life"

In this paper I argue that Hume's famous discussion of probability and induction, as originally presented in the Treatise, is significantly motivated by irreligious objectives. A particular target of Hume's arguments is Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion. In the Analogy Butler intends to persuade his readers of both the credibility and practical importance of the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments. The argument that he advances relies on probable reasoning and proceeds on the assumption that our past experience in this life serves as a reliable and effective guide for our expectations concerning a future state. In the relevant sections of the Treatise Hume aims to discredit this religious argument and the practical objectives associated with it.

Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry (review)

Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 183-187 Book Reviews PETER MILLICAN, ed. Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+495. ISBN 0-19-875211-3, cloth, £57.50 / $95.00; ISBN 0-19-875210-5, paper, £17.99 / $24.95. Peter Millican's Reading Hume on Human Understanding is a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of the first Enquiry and of the secondary literature on that work. As Millican notes, the first Enquiry has standardly been received as "a watered-down version of Book I of the Treatise, a more elegant and less taxing easy-read edition for the general pubUc, with the technical details omitted and a few controversial sections on religion added to whet their appetite and provoke the 'zealots'" (40). To the contrary, Millican views the first Enquiry as the canonical statement of the mature Hume's views. In Millican's estimation it corrects mistakes made in the Treatise and refocuses attention on those themes and arguments that subsequent philosophers have found to be the most enduringly valuable. For this reason alone it deserves more attention than it has been given. Together with Stephen Buckle's Hume's Enlightenment Tract (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), Reading Hume goes a long way to remedying this oversight. Reading Hume incorporates contributions from a number ofthe people whose names have come to be closely associated with work on the different sections of the first Enquiry, but it is an unusual anthology given the extent of the contribution made by its editor. Millican contributes almost 200 of the book's pages, beginning Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004 184 Book Reviews with an introductory essay on the individual essays it contains, aimed at orienting those new to the study of Hume to the issues raised in those essays, to summarizing their main lines of argument, and to highlighting divergences and convergences in interpretation. Millican has further provided an introductory chapter on the context, aims and structure of the first Enquiry, in which he argues for that work's superiority to the Treatise. He also contributes a long paper on Enquiry 4, which provides a close exegesis of Hume's argument in that section, and is dedicated to demonstrating that, despite its skeptical conclusions concerning the warrant for causal inferences, Enquiry 4 provides the basis for distinguishing between good and bad causal inference, and so establishes the foundations for an inductive science. Finally, Millican has written an extensive bibliographical essay (running to over 60 pages) on the secondary literature on the first Enquiry. Works of this latter sort are few and far between, in large part because, while they are very time-consuming , the academic credit one receives for doing them does not sufficiently reflect the value they provide to the scholarly community. Because Millican has made that investment, future scholars will be able to review an outstanding collection of summary descriptions of books and articles on Hume and the first Enquiry, and will be that much more quickly able to focus their research and inform their reflections. We all owe him for that. I do have reservations about Millican's argument for the superiority of the first Enquiry as a work of philosophy. In good part, this argument rests on the claim that Hume largely abandoned the associationist psychology so proudly presented in the Treatise (43). But Millican is far from denying that what Hume called "custom" plays a central role throughout the Enquiry, and it is hard to see how Hume could have retained a commitment to this particular associative mechanism while simultaneously doubting or abandoning associative psychology in general. In fact, the Enquiry continues to invoke other associative mechanisms. Witness its appeal to "the passion of surprize and wonder," which, "being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards ... belief" (Enquiry 10.16, cf. Treatise 1.3.10.4), its claim that "nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation, which they occasion" (Enquiry 7.29 n.17; cf. Treatise 1.4.5.12), its various ways of accounting for differences in the cognitive capacities of humans and animals (Enquiry 9.5 n...

Part II: Applications of Process-Based Theories: Process and Emergence: Normative Function and Representation

Kim's argument appears to render causally efficacious emergence impossible: Hume's argument appears to render normative emergence impossible, and, in its general form, it precludes any emergence at all. I argue that both of these barriers can be overcome, and, in fact, that they each constitute reductions of their respective underlying presuppositions. In particular, causally efficacious ontological emergence can be modeled, but only within a process metaphysics, thus avoiding Kim's argument, and making use of non-abbreviatory forms of definition, thus avoiding Hume's argument. I illustrate these points with models of the emergent nature of normative function and of representation.

How Popper [Might Have] Solved the Problem of Induction

Popper famously claimed that he had solved the problem of induction, but few agree. This paper explains what Popper's solution was, and defends it. The problem is posed by Hume's argument that any evidence-transcending belief is unreasonable because (1) induction is invalid and (2) it is only reasonable to believe what you can justify. Popper avoids Hume's shocking conclusion by rejecting (2), while accepting (1). The most common objection is that Popper must smuggle in induction somewhere. But this objection smuggles in precisely the justificationist assumption (2) that Popper, as here undestood, rejects.

What is modern in Locke's account of substance

In this paper Locke's account of substance is interpreted. Locke analyzes different meanings of the notion of substance, the origin of the ideas of substances and problems concerning their justification and function within our knowledge. Two meanings of the notion of substance appear to be most important and at the same time confronted with each other: the complex idea of substance and the idea of substratum. Bennett's claim that Locke didn't decide whether to keep or discard the idea of substratum is refuted. Locke discards only the scholastic concept of substratum as an indeterminate support in which accidents inhere, due to its inutility as an explanatory model. The idea of substratum is kept because it is indispensable for explanation of the necessary coexistence of simple ideas in complex idea of substance. This feature differentiates ideas of substances from ideas of mixed modes. The importance of this distinction in Locke's epistemology validates the use of the idea of substratum. Ayers' claim that Locke identifies ontologically substratum and real essence is confirmed. But, it is claimed that this identification cannot be applied to the issues of origin and justification of these ideas. In the course of the interpretation it is shown that Locke's account of substance is modern insofar as it contains anticipations of Berkeley's, Hume's and Kant's arguments and claims, as well as contemporary philosophical topics such as multiple realizability explanatory gap and logico-linguistic argumentation.

Probabilistic Induction and Hume's Problem: Reply to Lange

Marc Lange has criticized my assertion that relative to a Bayesian conception of inductive reasoning, Hume's argument for inductive scepticism cannot be run. I reply that the way in which Lange suggests one should run the Humean argument in a Bayesian framework ignores the fact that in Bayesian models of learning from experience, the domain of an agent's probability measure is exogenously determined. I also show that Lange is incorrect to equate probability distributions which ‘support inductive inferences’ with probability distributions which assign probability to contingent propositions/events.

Hume's Argument for the Temporal Priority of Causes

In a section entitled Of Probability; and of the idea of cause and effect, Hume embarks on a search for the conceptual components of our idea of causation. Rejecting the possibility of analyzing the idea terms of the qualities of objects, Hume claims to discover two constituent relations. First, a cause and effect must be contiguous space and time because nothing can operate a time or place, which is ever so little remov'd from those of its existence (T 1.3.2.6; SBN 75).x Second, a cause must be temporally prior to its effect. Although experience is said to confirm this latter requirement in most instances, Hume goes on to present an argument purporting to demonstrate that the temporal priority of a cause is an essential feature of every instance of causation.2 Despite the extensive treatment that his analysis of causation has occasioned, Hume's argument for the temporal priority of causes has received comparatively little attention. In this paper I hope to remedy this neglect by providing a more accurate explication of the argument than has previously been offered. Hume does not argue directly for the claim that a cause must be temporally prior to its effect. Rather he offers an alleged reductio ad absurdum of the opposing view that 'tis not absolutely necessary a cause shou'd precede its effect; but that any object or action, the very first moment of its existence, may exert its productive quality, and give rise to another object or action, perfectly co-temporary with itself (T 1.3.2.7; SBN 76). This careful summary