T H E CONCEPT OF TRUTH IN HUME’S TREATISE Lilly-Marlene Russow Purdue University

Questions about induction, skepticism with regard to the senses, whether Hume’s ethical position was a form of emotivism, and many other familiar concerns, might naturally be expected to lead to an investigation of Hume’s views on truth-whether certain beliefs could be true or false, how one tells whether a given belief is true, and so on. But such an investigation reaches a major obstacle rather quickly: quite simply, Hume has almost nothing to say about truth. This is surprising, both because this lack of a carefully considered theory of truth is in sharp contrast to many other writings of the period (notably Locke’s Essay) and also because Hume’s concern with skepticism and justifica- tion would seem to lead quite naturally to an interest in thejustification of truth-claims, and from there to an analysis of truth itself. It is noteworthy then, and deserving of further investigation, that none of this goes on in the first book of the Treatise.

My concern will be to investigate this anomaly by considering three questions: (1) What theory of truth can we justifiably attribute to Hume, on the basis of his few remarks on the subject? (2) Is there any good explanation for the lack of concern about truth-why didn’t Hume think that it was necessary or appropriate to devote more atten- tion to this topic? (3) What implications might all of this have for our understanding of subjects like justification, skepticism, the distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and belief in the Humean system?

I

To begin with the first of these questions, we find two definitions of truth in the Treatise (neither one in Book I, however):

(1) “Truth is of two kinds, consisting either in the discovery of the pro- portion of ideas, consider’d as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence.*’l

(2) “Truth or falsehood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relation of ideas, or to realexistence and matter of fact.” (p. 458; emphasis Hume’s)

It is initially tempting to read these as entailing a two-part view of

Lilly-Marlene Russow received her Ph. D. from Princeton University in 1976; she is currentlyan associate professor at Purdue University. Her publications on Hume. imagi- nation, and Heidegger have appeared in American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophi- cal Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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truth paralleling Hume’s earlier distinctions between knowledge and probability, between relations of ideas and matters of fact. But this would not get to the real issue; even if we adopt the language of the first definition and speak of two kinds of truth, there still must be something in virtue of which they are, as Hume says (p. 448), both species of truth, and that is what we want to discover.

Definition (2) does more to emphasize the similarity between the two alternatives: both are described as instances of agreement with some- thing real-either a “real relation of ideas” or “real existence.” Although different in emphasis from definition (I), this does not seem to represent a substantial change; in the first definition, the “discovery of proportion”suggests that there really is something there to be discov- ered, and that a true belief reflects or agrees with that proportion. That is, when I discover a relation, I come to believe that two ideas are related to one another in a specific way, and in fact there is such a relation that holds between them. Assuming, then, that the two definitions are merely two attempts to express the same general view of truth, I will usually refer to definition (2) in the following discussion, with the understanding that the same points can be made about definition ( I ) with only minor changes in wording.

We can say, then, that Hume commits himself to a standard version of a correspondence theory of truth, which results in two classes of true judgments, depending on what the second term of the correspondence is, what the judgment agrees with. While we shall see that this fits well with Hume’s position on skepticism and on what we can and cannot know, the summary just given is not yet sufficient for an adequate understanding of Hume’s theory of truth. For that, we need to know precisely what is supposed to correspond to what, and whether, in fact, the two kinds of true judgments, propositions, or whatever, correspond to any of the distinctions mentioned earlier.

Thus, confronted with the two schemata, (a) ‘P agrees with real relation R’and (b) ‘Q agrees with real existence E’, we need to be able to specify what sorts of things might be substituted for‘P’and ‘Q’, whether schema (a) is appropriate for only some of those things while (b) is appropriate for others, and finally, we need to understand what the term “real” is meant to indicate.

To begin with the issue of what it is that might properly be said to be true or false, we can first note that Hume did not think that only propositions could be true or false. Even though this view had already been proposed-Locke, for example, had already argued that only propositions, not ideas, should properly be called true or falsez-Hume himself did not accept this restriction. On the contrary, he says at several points that “judgments of the understanding”are the only things that have reference to truth (pp. 415-416; cf. p. 459) and thatjudgments are a kind of idea (p. 97n., p. 456), thus implicitly admitting that a t least some ideas can be true or false.

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One might try to avoid any major difficulties over this point by thinking of judgments as acts of asserting a proposition to oneself. While such a description would be nominally acceptable, it would be quite misleading if we went on to interpret ‘proposition’ in this context in the familiar way. The problem we would encounter is this: for Hume, neither propositions nor judgments need be compound, and they need not involve a relation between two or more distinct ideas or the ascrip- tion of a predicate to a subject. This is especially obvious in the case of judgments or propositions about existence, in which the idea of ‘x existing’ is, for Hume, no different from a simple idea of x: “To reflect on any thing simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other” (pp. 66-67; cf. p. 96n.). In fact, although most judg- ments will probably be compounded in the sense of comprising two or more simple ideas, even these judgments must be thought of as, in another sense, simple:

Whether we consider a single object, or several; whether we dwell on these objects, or run from them to others; and in whatever form or order we survey them, the act of the mind exceeds not a simple conception; (p. 9711.).

Thus, even when I judge that a triangle is a three-sided figure, that judgment takes the form of conceiving of a three-sided triangle.

This view ofjudgment, especially when linked to Hume’s position on abstract ideas, suggests that it would be immaterial whether we des- cribed the content of a given judgment as “a triangle has three sides,”“a three-sided triangle is (exists),” or simply as “a three-sided triangle.” In each case, the mental event would be the same: having an idea (for Hume, an image or representation) of a triangle with three sides. Even the judgment that all triangles have three sides is not very different: it would involve the same idea, together with the revival of the custom of surveying similar (individual, particular) ideas to which the name ‘tri- angle’ applies (p. 20).

If the internal structure of a judgment is not important, as the previous remarks indicate, any further analysis of judgments which relies on differences in internal structure would not find a home in Hume’s general theory. Since most attempts to formulate an analytic- synthetic distinction do so on the basis of relations between internal parts of a statement or proposition (e.g., whether or not the predicate is ‘contained in’ the subject), we might well expect to find that Hume’s system cannot comfortably accommodate this distinction3-despite what is often suggested in popular or general works which comment on Hume’s theory.* Although Hume’s famous distinctions between knowl- edge and probability, and between relations of ideas and matters of fact, suggest some connection with an analytic-synthetic distinction, neither his view of judgments and their internal structure nor his definition of truth will support such a distinction; this point will be elaborated in Part 111.

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In order to conclude this description of Hume’s views on truth, it would be necessary to explain exactly what Hume means by real rela- tions and real existence. Unfortunately, Hume simply does not tell us what he means in this context, nor does he use these phrases in other contexts which might clarify their meaning. Unless we wish, then, to abandon the discussion of what Hume said about truth in favor of speculation about what he might have said or should have said, we must rest content with this very sketchy and incomplete analysis.

The conclusion just reached about Hume’s definition of truth might seem disappointing, stopping, as it must, short of completion. How- ever, the incompleteness itself serves to indicate an answer to the second question posed at the beginning of this paper, the question of why Hume did not consider the issue of truth in more detail.

We have seen that, in order to develop the definition of truth any further, Hume would have had to explain what it means to say that a relation is real, and what real existence is. But if we recall what the overall aim of the Treatise was, it is evident that such explanations would be irrelevant to an investigation of human understanding and the development of a “science of human nature”; the latter is a project which is concerned with understanding why we view the world in certain ways rather than asking what the world is really likes:

We may well ask, Whar induces us lo believe in rhe exisrence of body? but ‘tis vain to ask, Wherher there be body or nor?That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings. (p. 187).

An inquiry into the nature of real existence, which would be necessary of a complete account of the second part of the definitions of truth, would involve just those questions which Hume rejects as vain. Either we accept the ordinary attitude towards external objects6 or we do nothing at all. This choice that is really not a choice parallels the discussion-indeed, reflects and draws on it-of the natural or vulgar, as opposed to the philosophical, attitude. The vulgar attitudes and beliefs are unjustifiable by the use of reason but required of us by nature, while the philosophical position is based on reason but is doomed to skepticism and impossible to maintain.

We should not automatically assume, though, that the two defini- tions of truth are meant to sustain the vulgar attitude by declaring that whatever is consistent with this attitude is therefore true. This would be an accurate assessment only if a true belief were defined as one which agreed with what we naturally take to bea real relation of ideas, or with what we normally and instinctively accept as real existence. But Hume does not say this; on the contrary, by refusing to characterize real relations and real existence in any specific way, he refrains from choos-

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ing one or the other attitude as the correct or true one, but rather tries to show that the questions of which one is correct is ultimately meaningless.

The same reasons which block full discussion of real existence also apply to most, although not all, discussions of real relations. There are some relations which are not subject to the same difficulties: those that hold between ideas in virtue of the nature of the ideas themselves would seem to qualify as real relations, simply because it is not clear what else might be legitimately demanded by way of ‘reality’ in these cases. If so, the relations of resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and pro- portions in quantity or number (p. 70) would count as real relations between ideas. When I form a judgment about the contrariety between the idea of a triangle and the idea of a four-sided figure, that judgment would agree with the relation that actually holds between the ideas, and which is “discoverable at first sight” or revealed by intuition (p. 70). Thus, on either definition of truth, not only can I have a true idea or judgment in this case, but I am also in a position to compare my judgment of contrariety with the contrariety itself, as presented by intuition, and hence be assured that my judgment is true. Indeed, I can be absolutely certain of its truth, and this certainty provides a firm foundation for a knowledge claim. These facts coincide neatly with what Hume says about the possibility of knowledge of various relations

The three relations that do not fall into this class are identity, rela- tions of time and place, and most important, causality; Hume says that these relations cannot be the object of certain knowledge. Here, we have a situation that is similar to the one regarding real existence; since the relation is not determined by the ideas themselves, if we were to ask whether or not there really are causal connections, there must be something else-roughly, the way the world is-that must be demanded in the account of reality; our ideas and the relations between them that are fixed by the nature of the ideas themselves are not the only relevant factors. In such cases, as with real existence, Hume dismisses the metaphysical question and focusses on the epistemological ones; de- spite the casualness with which he switches back and forth between talk of ideas and talk of objects, he is in fact asking how we come to have the beliefs we do about causal connections, not whether there are any real connections of that sort in the world. As a result, we can only describe our beliefs, and explain where they come from. The fact that beliefs are analyzed in this way, not in terms of their relation to what is really out there, prevents us from applying Hume’s definition of truth, or even from making sense of questions about the truth or falsity of such beliefs. For, just as it is vain to ask about what it would mean for my belief to agree with something completely distinct from my ideas and their relations, so too does the possibility of disagreement remain a mystery.

The same restrictions apply to relations of place and time, and

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(P.70).

identity, although they receive less attention. One can, however, discern the same approach, for example, in his discussion of time:

But at present I content myself with knowing perfectly the manner in which objects affect my senses, and their connection with each other, as far as experience informs me of them. This suffices for the conduct of life; and this suffices also for my philosophy, which pretends only to explain the nature and causes of our perceptions, or impressions and ideas (p. 64).

A note in the appendix (p. 638) re-emphasizes this theme as it applies to space and time.

Thus, if we wish to decide whether a given judgment is true (if the judgment is not about one of the four relations of ideas), we are faced with a dilemma. The relation with which the judgment must agree is either a relation which holds between events or objects in the world, distinct from our impressions, or it is merely a natural conjunction of ideas, a relation that exists relative to our customary perception of reality. The latter, it must be remembered, falls short of a relation of ideas in the strict sense which characterizes resemblance and the others; the relations in question here are not determined solely by the nature of ideas, and are not a matter of intuition or demonstration. Thus, we must either find a means of venturing beyond our ideas and impressions to come into direct contact with real relations and existence distinct from those ideas, or we can retreat, and stipulate that the relations and existence referred to in the definitions of truth are to be understood as remaining within the scope of our perceptions-the vulgar attitude. But Hume is willing to accept neither of these alternatives. The first, we have seen, is objectionable because it is not a legitimate part of Hume’s project of investigating human understanding, and because it leads to radical and unsustainable skepticism.

The rejection of the second alternative is not so explicit, but the acceptance of a relativized concept of truth (relative to the customs and habits that determine how we think) would vitiate many of the major theses of Book I. If, for example, a belief that there is a causal connec- tion between A and B is true just in case the belief agrees with a customary relation between ideas of things like A and ideas of things like B, then we would be able to justify our belief in the causal connec- tion fully and adequately, simply by noting that the ideas are in fact customarily conjoined, that the idea of one ‘raises up’ the idea of the other. We would have knowledge and certainty, and there would be no difference in status between these beliefs and beliefs about relations like resemblance and contrariety; there would, in fact, be no motive for skepticism. Similarly, if a belief in the real (external) existence of an object is deemed true when and because it agrees with a series of coherent perceptions (cf. pp. 195-206), we would be able to demonstrate the truth of that belief merely by producing, describing, or rehearsing the series of perceptions, and there would be no argument for skepti- cism with regard to the senses. Thus, to accept a definition of truth

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which demanded only agreement between judgments and customary patterns of thoughts and ideas would undermine the underlying skepti- cism which distinguishes the doctrines of the Treutise from simple epistemological relativism.

The importance of rejecting a definition of truth that is relative to custom or habit can also be supported by an examination of the role of reason in Hume’s theory. Hume apparently uses the term‘reason’in two different ways. At times, reason is described as something like a cus- tomary way of thinking, operatingin a way that is not constrained by an abstract concept of truth:

To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations (p. 179).

It is presumably in this sense that probability and ‘proofs* about cause and effect are species of reason (p. 124). At other times, reason is distinguished from custom: “when we pass from the impression of one to the idea or belief of another, we are not determin’d by reason, but by custom or a principle of association”(p. 97). Reason in this second sense is the impotent faculty which is the slave of the passions (p. 415), which contradicts our belief in the external world (p. 231), which cannot give rise to any new idea (p. 164), but which, if left unchecked by nature, would “subvert entirely the human understanding” (p. 268).

The second sense of reason just described is “the discovery of truth or falsehood*’ (p. 458). Thus, if truth were defined only relative to our natural and customary way of viewing the world, then reason would be relative as well, and there would be no sense at all to the claim that our natural attitude, our customs and habits, are contrary to and unsuppor- table by reason. Since precisely this tension between reason and custom is one of the cornerstones of all three Books of the Treatise, we cannot lightly ascribe to Hume the relativized interpretation of his definition of truth that would undercut the difference between reason-the discovery of truth or falsehood-and custom.

Finally, we can see that a relativized definition of truth would be inconsistent with the equivocal nature of Hume’s skepticism. If a judg- ment is true just in case it agrees with something which must exist independently of ideas and impressions, we would expect Hume to be a thoroughgoing and unrelenting skeptic. If the truth of a judgment is entirely determined by custom, skepticism would be silly, an empty threat. Since Hume holds true skepticism to be both rationallycompell- ing and unsustainable, he must remain unwilling to accept either inter- pretation as the correct one. (Further connections between Hume’s definition of truth and his skepticism will be analyzed in Part 111.)

But this rejection of both alternatives comes at a high price: Hume cannot maintain his main epistemological theses and still complete an analysis of truth. I think it would be unfair, however, to conclude from

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this that Hume deliberately avoided the issue just to forestall possible conflicts. Rather, he simply did not seem to see a theory of truth as necessary, especially to the arguments in Book I. There are two points that suggest that this was the case.

First, it seems fair to say that the focus of attention in Book I is belief what it is, and why we come to have the beliefs that we do. But beliefs, according to Hume, are not determined by reason or considerations of truth; in this respect, they are “more properly [ acts] of the sensitive, than of the cogitativepart of our natures”(p. 183). An investigation of truth, then, might be ruled irrelevant to this sort of inquiry.

Second, Hume addresses the issue of truth only where it is essential to his project, not for its own sake. Thus, the first detailed discussion of truth is found when Hume begins to distinguish reason from passion (Book 11, section 3) and argues that passion, not reason, determines volition. At this point, it is sufficient for Hume’s purpose to indicate that passion “contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification,”and that representing is an essential part of truth and reason (pp. 415-416); no definition of truth is needed or given. The other distinction that hinges on a definition of truth is taken up at the beginning of Book 111. There, a definition is given in order to justify the contrast between reason and truth on the one hand, and “passions, volitions and actions”(p. 458) on the other; this is a preliminary to considering “how far truth or falsehood may be the source of morals” (p. 459).7

Toward the end of the previous section, I made some remarks about the relation of Hume’s definition of truth to his final stand on skepti- cism. In this final section, I wish to expand on these remarks, first by rejecting certain attempts to explain Hume’s skepticism, and then by exploring some distinctions between different sorts of judgments. The account of skepticism arrived at in this way will be neither novel nor surprising, but will emphasize how well Hume’s concept of truth dove- tails with more familiar aspects of his theory.

As a first attempt to come to grips with Hume’s skepticism, and given the paucity of remarks about truth in Book I of the Treatise, it is easy to see how someone might be tempted to think that Hume’s skepticism should be traced back to the fact that beliefs are completely divorced from considerations or judgments of truth and falsity; this line of reasoning quickly leads to an interpretation in which beliefs turn out to be quite odd, quite different from what we now mean by ‘belief‘. Thus, it has sometimes been claimed that beliefs, being sentiments or feelings, are for that reason excluded from the realm of truth.* If one thinks that beliefs cannot be true, and that knowledge requires true belief, it would follow that Hume is a skeptic simply because one cannot have knowl-

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edge in his system: “the impossibility of truth or falsity [of beliefs] makes knowledge impossible.’?

Since it is all too easy to misunderstand Hume’s intentions when he says that belief is a matter of sentiment, a closer examination of this idea, and of the argument which rests on it, seems appropriate. Hume does, of course, hold that beliefs are to be understood in terms of feelings or sentiment; the feeling in question is one of forcefulness or liveliness. However, even though he uses terms like ‘sentiment’ or ‘feeling’, it would be anachronistic to interpret these as synonymous with ‘sentiments’, ‘emotions’, or ‘feelings’, in their more modern usage; the modern sense of these words is closer to Hume’s ‘passions’. All of these concepts are closely related, even in Hume, but, for him, passions are distinct impressions (p. 275) while a belief or a similar feeling is a curious sort of idea which is at best related to an impression (p. 96). Therefore, it would simply be incorrect to slide from ‘feeling’ to ‘pas- sion’as if they were the same in Hume’s system. It would be correct to say that passions are neither true nor false, but there is no evidence for a similar view of the enlivened ideas which are beliefs.

Thus, Hume’s skepticism cannot be attributed to any incompatibility between his concept of belief and that of truth.

Since both of the definitions of truth given by Hume have two separate clauses, one dealing with relations of ideas and the other with real existence, and since Hume also makes much of the distinction between knowledge, about which we have absolute certainty, and prob- ability, one might, as a second attempt to get clear on this matter, think that Hume’s skepticism might result from something like an analytic- synthetic distinction, combined with a definition of truth on which one would have no way to determine whether any synthetic judgment were true or not.

It has already been argued that one cannot formulate an analytic- synthetic distinction in Hume’s system on the basis of the form or structure of a judgment, but one might still think that the two parts of the definition of truth sound as if they might serve as a basis for distinguishing analytic from synthetic judgments (with the “real rela- tion of ideas”going proxy for the relation of subject term to predicate term); if so, the definition might at the same time explain why we can have truth, and hence knowledge, in one case but not the other. That is, one might argue that if the truth of a judgment or proposition is appropriately explicated in terms of schema (a)-‘P agrees with real relation R’-then it is analytic, while synthetic judgments are to be evaluated in terms of schema (b)-‘Q agrees with real existence E’. While this interpretation of the source of Hume’s skepticism is more plausible than the first, it does not yet succeed in showing that Hume accepts or has the machinery for explicating a definitive sort of analytic- synthetic distinction. In order to show that, the two options would have to be mutually exclusive. For any given judgment, either (a) or (b), but

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not both, would have to be the right way of determining truth; but this is not Hume’s view of the matter. Instead, he suggests that some judg- ments can be evaluated both ways:

For these conclusions are equally just, when we discover the equality of two bodies by a pair of compasses, as when we learn it by a mathematical demonstration; and tho’in the one case the proofs be demonstrative, and in the other only sensible, yet generally speaking, the mind acquiesces with equal assurance in the one as in the other. (p. 449)

Hume goes on to imply that the demonstrative proof reveals that the judgment corresponds to a relation of ideas, while the sensible proof shows that it agrees with real existence. We should recall that in the latter case, Hume cannot mean ‘proof in the sense of‘logical proof, but in the sense that proofs fall short of certain knowledge. In any event, the same judgment can satisfy both clauses of the definition of truth. Clearly, then, the definition cannot be used to divide judgments into two distinct categories.

Even if we ignore those judgments which fall under both parts of the definition, it is still not at all obvious that by sorting judgments into groups by asking what that judgment might agree with would result in a grouping that even remotely resembles a group of analytic judgments and a group of synthetic judgments. The belief that something cannot both be and not be, to cite one of Hume’s examples, is an analytic judgment that would agree with a real relation of ideas. But the belief that a mouse is smaller than a cat is also a judgment that involves a relation that depends solely upon ideas, so it would presumably also be in agreement with a real relation of ideas, even though it is certainly not analytic. But if analytic statements cannot be distinguished from syn- thetic ones either in virtue of the internal structure or in virtue of the way in which they are true, then there is simply no way, in Hume’s system, to embrace the distinction.10

Where does all this leave us with regard to skepticism? It shows us that it would be a distortion to describe Hume’s skepticism as a position which follows from a belief that synthetic judgments can never consti- tute knowledge. If we pursue that line a bit further, we also discover something surprising about the areas in which we do have knowledge, the areas that are immune to the skeptic’s challenge: there is no underly- ing reason why the four relations of resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality and proportion in quantity or number are the object of certainty except that it just so happens that we can determine that a judgment involving one of these relations is true. That is, since they are deter- mined solely by our ideas, we can in fact tell whether a judgment involving resemblance agrees with the relation between the ideas in question, but there is no rational explanation given as to why these relations and no others depend on relations between ideas; this is merely a fact which experience reveals to us. This leaves open the logical possibility that there could have been beings for whom causality depends solely on the relation of ideas, but who could not determine

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degrees of quality just by inspecting the ideas involved. Hume simply observes that we do operate this way. The skepticism that results from the observation that it just so happens that not all relations depend solely on ideas must therefore necessarily be a very undogmatic variety of skepticism.

Finally, one can see that, at least for Hume, skepticism is a direct result of problems about justification. We can justify a belief if we can determine whether or not it agrees with a real relation of ideas, or with real existence. We can do this with beliefs about currently occurring impressions and ideas (the “real existence”in these cases is the existence of the impression or idea in question, and this is transparent for Hume; thus, we can tell whether the belief corresponds to rhar, which may explain why Hume was so certain about his pronouncements about the nature of impressions). Where we have no access to the relation or existence in question, we cannot have justification, and a fortiori, cannot have knowledge. This may sound trite, but it is worth pointing out, if only to discredit the alternative, quite popular, belief that Hume’s skepticism should be explained in terms of his claim that beliefs are “irrational, determined by certain natural instinctive forces resulting in certain emotional effects.”ll How the beliefs arise, or what their nature is, has no bearing on skepticism: the beliefs that result in knowledge, as well as those that do not, are all sentiments determined by “instinct.” The fact that beliefs are of this sort may help explain why nature can ensure that the skeptical position cannot be maintained indefinitely by any human being, but does not account for the skeptical nature of those beliefs.

To sum up, then: Hume’s skepticism can be linked to his definition of truth in several ways. First, the definition of truth carries with it certain implications for justification. We cannot have knowledge of matters of fact because we are just not in a position to determine how our beliefs about matters of fact might be true. Second, as noted in Part I1 of this paper, Hume’s refusal to complete his definition of truth by specifying exactly what would count as a real relation or real existence comple- ments his ambivalent attitude towards skepticism, neither rejecting it completely as running counter to common-sense, nor accepting it unre- servedly. Third, considerations of the role of truth, and possible appli- cations of the definition of truth, enable us to reject certain interpreta- tions of Hume’s skepticism that might otherwise be tempting- interpretations that concentrate on the nature of belief or on a distinction between different sorts of judgments. Finally, by consider- ing why we can be certain of the truth of those things Hume does say we can be certain about, we have discovered that this certainty is due to the facts about human nature, the way we happen to be constructed, rather than any insight into the power and limitations of logic or‘pure reason’.

IV A few of the discoveries which follow from careful attention to

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Hume’s definition of truth are unexpected: the factors that prevent the formulation of anything like an analytic-synthetic distinction, and the almost coincidental nature of the distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact. For the most part, however, the conclusions which follow from the account of truth developed in this paper are unsurpris- ing and do not challenge our traditional way of understanding Hume’s theory. What I hope to have added to this traditional understanding is the idea that Hume’s attitude towards truth, though cryptic and long ignored by commentators, is an integral part of his system, and deserves to be evaluated as such.

NOTES

1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge(ed.), Oxford, 1888, p. 448. All future references to this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

Cf. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 11, xxxii, 1. It might be thought that the distinction in the Enquiry between truths of reason and

matters of fact represents an advance and does not fall prey to the same criticism. Although Hume does suggest that truths of reason can be picked out by noting that their negations involve a contradiction, I think that it is still the case that this is not a function of the logical form of the proposition in question, or of a special subject-predicate relation. Rather, Hume seems to assume that “involving a contradiction” is the same as “being inconceivable,”and this seems once again to move away from anything that might serve as the basis for an analytic-synthetic distinction of the form we are looking for. See also note 10.

For example, see Keith Campbell, Metaphysics: An Introduction, Belmont. CA, 1976, p. 8: “Consequently, although we have three sets of distinctions [necessary/contingent, a priorila posteriori, analytic/ synthetic] they all divide truths into exactly the same two classes: those that are contingent, aposteriori, and synthetic on the one hand, and those which are necessary, opriori, and analytic on the other. This twofold division of truth is known as Hume’s fork.”

Cf. Barry Stroud, Hume, London, 1977, pp. 96-97. There is one instance in which real existence should not be equated with external

existence. Judgments like “1 a m now entertaining the idea of a purple cow”or“1 have the idea of the missing shade of blue”would be true if they agreed with the real existence of the ideas about which they were judgments. Here, too, one is able to compare the judgment with the object it is to agree with, and thus achieve certainty.

The definition on p. 448 is part of a discussion of’curiosity’; once again, truth is not the primary focus of attention.

8 This view has recently been defended by Ronald E. Beanblossom,“A New Foundation for Humean Skepticism,” Philosophical Studies, v. 29 (1976), pp. 207-210.

9 Beanblossom, p. 209. l o A further attempt to define analytic statements as those whose denial is a contradic-

tion might sound like something that isconsistent with what goes on in the Enquiry, if not the Treatise. This does not seem to carry the investigation much further, since either ‘contradiction’seems to be used as a synonym for ‘inconceivable’(see note 3) or else the contradiction arises when we compare the judgment to the real relation of ideas that is immediately or intuitively presented.

1 1 Richard H. Popkin, “David Hume: His Pyrrhonism and His Critique of Pyrrho- nism,” Hume: A Collection of CriticalEssays, Vere Chappell,(ed.), Notre Dame, 1968, p. 60.

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