Scepticism - Lecture 8
8. Hume’s Naturalism and his Critique of Extreme Scepticism
The Relationship between the Treatise and the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
The Treatise concerning Human Understanding was completed by 1737, and published anonymously in 1739 (Books I and II) and 1740 (Book III). It was Hume’s first published work. Book II bears the title ‘ Of the Passions’ and seeks to explain the nature, origin, causes, and effects of these particular states of mind. In many ways, then, it is perhaps more a work of what we would call psychology rather than philosophy, though it certainly contains some significant philosophical content – including Hume’s immensely influential defence of a compatibilist account of free will and an exploration of practical reason that seems to deliver the conclusion that rational action is a matter of acting in a way that furthers the satisfaction of antecedently existing desires. Book III, on the other hand, concentrates on issues in moral philosophy. What are the origins of the moral distinctions we apply to people and actions? (Significantly, perhaps, the first section of this Book has the title ‘Moral distinctions not deriv’d from reason.) What do we means when we call an action or practice just; and what characteristics of people qualify as virtues? Book I ‘ Of the Understanding’, however, is the book that corresponds most closely to the content of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, and it is the ideas expressed in this portion of the Treatise that will form our main subject matter from this point on.
Book One of the Treatise contains a substantial quantity of material that is absent from the Enquiry. However not all of it is terribly helpful: the prose tends to be very dense and complicated, and it is also fair to say that several of the discussions missing from the Enquiry are ones that Hume himself regarded as unsatisfactory. Part Two of the Treatise, for example contains Hume’s rather confused discussion of the ideas of space and time. And in Section 6 of Part Four we find Hume’s influential discussion of personal identity: a discussion that struck Hume as sufficiently problematic to require the inclusion of an appendix to the Treatise in which he confesses ‘upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity, I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent.’
Some of the extra material included in the Treatise, however, is considerably more germane to our present purposes. In particular, Part Three of the Treatise contains a much longer treatment of causal reasoning and our idea of necessary connection. Moreover this eventually leads into a discussion of various dubious modes of reasoning that are conventionally thought of as unjustified. Part Four begins with a negative epistemological argument that has no direct counterpart in the Enquiry, but is presented by Hume as threatening the justified status of all of our beliefs. And this is immediately followed by an explanation of the way we form our beliefs about a world of mind-independent objects that is far more detailed than anything provided in the Enquiry. The Treatise also devotes considerably more space than the Enquiry to Hume’s associationist psychological theories, and the account in the final section of Book One of the impact that his philosophical studies have had on him has no parallel anywhere in the Enquiry.
Hence we can’t follow Hume’s own advice to ignore the Treatise in favour of the Enquiry, even though this might save us a considerable amount of pain and suffering!
The Treatise did not make much of an impact on publication despite Hume’s ingenious device of writing and publishing his own favourable review of the book – the Abstract. However Hume’s authorship did manage to ruin his chances of securing the chair of Physical and Pneumatical Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1745) even though Hume once again arranged for an anonymous pamphlet, A Letter from a Gentleman to his friend in Edinburgh, to be published defending his candidacy.
In 1741 and 1742 Hume brought out the Essays Political and Moral. He then reworked Book One of the Treatise as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748). These were subsequently given the new title of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. And in 1754 Hume published the first two parts of what ultimately became a very successful six volume History of England .
In 1770 the Scottish philosopher James Beattie published a book containing an intemperate attack on the philosophical views he claimed to discern in the Treatise, and this provoked Hume into placing at the beginning of new editions of the Enquiries an advertisement that included the pronouncement ‘Henceforth, the Author desires, that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.’
We have already noted why we cannot accommodate Hume’s wishes in this regard. However we also need to take careful account of the Enquiry. The discussion of different forms of scepticism in the final section of the Enquiry makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Hume’s attitude towards to scepticism. The reorienting of Hume’s discussion of causal reasoning and the way it is retitled (Section IV Sceptical Doubts concerning the operations of the Understanding, Section V Sceptical Solution of those Doubts) provide strong grounds for supposing that Hume does regard his thoughts in this area as being sceptical ones. Indeed even the simple fact that Hume continues to give a prominent place in the Enquiry to discussions of scepticism despite the trouble his alleged scepticism has caused him helps to confirm that Hume’s mature philosophical outlook has, to say the least, close connections to a radically sceptical outlook. It is also worth noting that Hume incorporates into the Enquiry anti-religious material he had originally excised from the Treatise. Thus the Enquiry provides us with a more rounded understanding of what changes in people’s beliefs and behaviour Hume hoped might be brought about by his approach to philosophy. And the opportunity to study the way in which Hume engages in anti-Christian polemic while safeguarding himself against charges of blasphemy also gives us a chance to understand how Hume might be adjusting his presentation of scepticism in order to give it the best possible chance of securing a fair hearing.
Some Initial Evidence
Even a cursory examination of the Treatise and the Enquiry suffices to uncover a large number of passages that appear, on initial scrutiny, to indicate that he is committed to an extremely wide-ranging and virulent form of scepticism.
In the Treatise, for example, Hume declares that he has shown that `the understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life’ (Book I, Part 4, Section 7 – hereafter I 4 7); and he also makes the following claim about the senses and the understanding: ‘ 'Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we endeavour to justify them in that manner. As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on those subjects, it always encreases, the farther we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or conformity to it. Carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy’ (I 4 2 ).
Moreover the sceptical import of the above comments seems to be confirmed by the remarks that Hume makes in the conclusion to Book One of the Treatise when he repudiates the supposition that abstract and metaphysical reflection never has any significant influence upon us. Hume offers this striking portrait of the results of his philosophical meditations: ‘The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd of the use of every member and faculty (I 4 7 ).
Similarly the Enquiries feature numerous remarks that seem to be manifestations of a commitment to a radical form of scepticism. On the issue of the justification of our beliefs about the external world, for instance, Hume appears quite uncompromising:
It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: how shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects. The supposition of such a connexion is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.
And when Hume is discussing broader forms of scepticism, he remarks that when the sceptic displays his more profound arguments, `he shows his force, or rather, indeed, his own and our weakness; and seems, for the time, at least, to destroy all assurance and conviction.' Indeed Hume insists that the force of this Pyrrhonean doubt is such that nothing but `the strong power of natural instinct' can free us from it. The arguments themselves, according to Hume, are simply ‘irrefutable’ (all Section XII)
Nor, moreover, does the scepticism that seems to emerge so strongly from Hume's writings consist merely of unsupported assertions about the weakness of our intellectual faculties. Within the Treatise Hume deploys some lengthy and highly complex arguments in favour of what are frequently interpreted as sceptical conclusions.
The best known of these arguments is Hume's argument in favour of the contention that `even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience' (I 3 12 – p.139) Hume claims that all such inferences are founded on the principle `that instances, of which we have had no experience, and that the course of nature continues uniformly the same' (I 3 6 – p.89), and he argues that it is impossible to justify this crucial presupposition.
Hume also seems to put before us a line of argument that ultimately yields the conclusion that we can never give any reasons for our belief in the existence of external objects. In the course of a discussion of the origins of this belief, Hume maintains that the immediate objects of the senses are always mind-dependent perceptions'. He then appears to argue that our resulting inability to observe a positive correlation between our perceptions and independently existing material objects means that we are completely unable to justify our belief in the existence of such objects:
'Tis impossible, therefore, that from the existence or any of the qualities of the former [i.e. perceptions], we can ever form any conclusion concerning the existence of the latter [i.e. external objects], or ever satisfy our reason in this particular (I 4 2 ).
Furthermore arguments virtually identical to the two arguments picked out above can also be found in the Enquiries. The argument that it is impossible to justify the uniformity principle can be found in Section Four of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, and a more compact version of Hume’s apparent argument that we can never justify the supposition that our perceptions are caused by external objects recurs in Section Twelve of the same work.
However the most wide-ranging negative epistemological argument to be found in Hume's writings appears only in the Treatise. Part Four of the Treatise is entitled `Of the Sceptical and Other Systems of Philosophy' and in the first section of that part, `Of scepticism with regard to reason', Hume presents a two stage argument that purports to show that even the conclusions reached in the demonstrative sciences cannot legitimately be regarded as more than probably true, and that no purportedly probable claim ever possesses any greater degree of probability than that possessed by its logical contradictory. Thus we are apparently confronted by an elaborate piece of reasoning which offers support to a radical and global form of scepticism: global because all our beliefs, even the most straightforward and cautious ones, seem to lie within the scope of Hume's argument, and radical because this argument attacks not just our claims to have certain knowledge but also our claims to have rationally justified beliefs. Moreover Hume's overt reservations about the argument at issue here are confined to his assertion that its power to induce genuine suspension of belief is very limited; and he conspicuously refrains from giving us any indication that he believes that the argument contains an inferential fallacy or a false premiss.
 Scepticism - Lecture 9a |
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