The Inquiry in Hume's Treatise

Philosophical Review

The Inquiry in Hume's TreatiseAuthor(s): Janet BroughtonSource: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 113, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 537-556Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148001 .

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The Philosophical Review, Vol. 113, No. 4 (October 2004)

The Inquiry in Hume's Treatise

Janet Broughton

In the Introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume says he will make a careful empirical study of the human mind and produce a "science of man."1 This will provide us with knowledge of the principles of human nature, and these principles will explain "our reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas," "our tastes and sentiments," and the union of "men ... in society" (xv; Intro. 5). This seems to be a wholly constructive philosophical ambition, and yet Hume also claims to discover "manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason," and he confesses that an "intense view" of these discoveries "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" (268-269; 1.4.7.8). It is hard to imag- ine a more deeply negative outlook than this, or one more at odds with the outlook of the scientist of man.

Some readers of Hume have thought that only one of these very different outlooks was truly his. Thomas Reid, for example, interpreted Hume as primarily a negative philosopher, one whose philosophy is "a

system of scepticism, which leaves no ground to believe any one thing rather than its contrary,"2 and he treated Hume's seemingly optimistic and constructive outlook as inevitable backsliding. A very different

reading of Hume emerged in the influential work of Norman Kemp Smith,3 who believed that Hume's philosophy was authentically constructive, and that its aim above all was to show the central role that feel-

ing and imagination play in our lives. While many commentators in recent decades have agreed with Kemp Smith that Hume's naturalism

represents one of his most characteristic and original contributions to

philosophy, there has been little agreement among them about how, then, we are to understand the seeming skepticism.

I believe that Hume is both a naturalist and a skeptic: not a seeming skeptic, but a skeptic. I aim in what follows to address the question how he combined these outlooks. I suspect that he suggested different answers to this question in different works; my focus here will be on Book 1 of the Treatise. I propose that we read Book I as narrating a sort of inquiry. This allows us to see the naturalist and skeptical outlooks as combined, not by implying or presupposing a single and consistent set

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JANET BROUGHTON

of claims, but by belonging to different stages of a single philosophical endeavor. Saying that much would not be enough, however, for at least two reasons. First, I believe Hume arrived at skeptical conclusions by pursuing a naturalist inquiry, and if that is true, then we must see how Hume thought it was so much as possible to reach skeptical conclusions by following out a naturalist inquiry into the understanding. To do this, I will identify the norms that guide his inquiry and explain their role in generating the skeptical conclusions. Second, Hume occupies a naturalist's stance after he draws his skeptical conclusions as well as before he draws them, and so we must see how he can really have reached skeptical conclusions and yet also continue pursuing a naturalist project. To do this, I will identify a subtle difference between his naturalist outlook in the earlier phases of his inquiry and his naturalist outlook later on.

Let me begin by bringing out some ways in which I think Book 1 is like and unlike another remarkable inquiry, Descartes's Meditations.4 In some very general ways, the two texts are similar. The inquirer in both the Treatise and the Meditations begins by proposing to consider in a fresh way various aspects of life that are already familiar. And in both

books, the inquirer considers things afresh by making use of a distinc- tive method of inquiry. This method tells him which aspects of familiar

things he should pay attention to and how he should draw conclusions from them. Both books go on to describe the sequences of discoveries the inquirer makes, the ways in which these discoveries change his mind about some familiar things, and the ways in which these discoveries move him toward the goal with which he set out. Both inquiries are in some way transforming: they do not merely add to the inquirer's fund of information; they change how he understands the fund itself.

It is easy to see how this very general description fits the Meditations. The book is written in the first-person singular and represents successive bouts of meditation carried out by the narrating "I." He aims to discover the principles of first philosophy that can provide the founda- tions of lasting science. He attends to his familiar body of existing beliefs and resolves to suspend judgment wherever there is any ground for doubt. By using this method, he discovers new ways to conceive of his own states and powers, and he recognizes that God exists. He comes

to understand that his mind and body are distinct and that he conceives of the natural world best when he conceives of it in quantifiable terms. He thus achieves his goal, the discovery of a foundation for last-

ing science, but in the process he finds that he must transform some of

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THE INQUIRY IN HUME'S TREATISE

his most familiar and basic ways of thinking about himself and the world. For example, he must now think of himself as an immaterial

thing united with a parcel of matter in motion, and he must now refrain from attributing colors, sounds, and the like, to the objects of his senses.

Hume threads the first person throughout much of Book 1 of the Treatise, in many places shifting freely back and forth between the sin-

gular and the plural. Even where he uses the singular only occasionally, he is clearly laying out a sequence of discoveries, later ones depending on earlier ones. The personal and narrative character of the Treatise is most complex and striking in the last section of Book 1, where Hume

reports on his successive reactions to his discoveries, giving what Robert Fogelin has aptly called a natural history of philosophizing.5 The "I" of Book 1 sets out with the aim of discovering the principles according to which human nature works. He resolves to extend the

general methods of natural science into a study of human nature, assenting to principles only when they are supported by observation and experience. In using this broadly scientific method, he discerns

general patterns among the sequences of our perceptions by noting the varying degrees of force and vivacity of our states of mind, and the

types of contents these states have. As he discovers more and more of these principles of human nature, he first finds that we must deflate our conception of ourselves, and he then finds that we must absorb some far more negative conclusions, including the conclusion that vir-

tually all of our beliefs about the world around us are entirely unwar- ranted. These deeply negative conclusions leave their mark on the

inquirer: they leave him transformed, though exactly how is not obvious.

Even this schematic account suggests one important point. If I am

right about the genre of Book 1, then we must be open to interpreting some of its claims simply as the claims a person would make at such- and-such stage of a certain sort of inquiry and not as Hume's own con- sidered view of the matter. In the First Meditation, Descartes writes that "there is not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may not

properly be raised" (CSM 2:14-15; AT 7:21), but of course he himself does not endorse that skeptical claim. Rather, the claim expresses the view a person would hold at an early stage of a highly specific sort of

inquiry, and Descartes says it because he is describing what such a person would think. Similarly, in Part 3, Hume says or implies that many of our causal inferences and probabilistic beliefs are reasonable.6 But if

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JANET BROUGHTON

we read Book 1 as I propose, the fact that Hume makes such a claim does not entail that he ultimately endorses it. It may instead simply express the view a person would hold part of the way through Book 1's

inquiry. Despite these broad-scale similarities, the contrasts between the

inquiry of the Meditations and the inquiry in the Treatise are striking and

important. Descartes thought that his inquiry terminated in a correct

philosophical theory of God, human nature, and the physical world. We know we can attribute to Descartes himself the belief that this the-

ory is correct, because in other works and in his correspondence he

says he believes it. We can also attribute such a belief to the meditator, to the fictional person who is recounting his thoughts in the Medita- tions. Descartes believes that the theory yielded by the inquiry will become the meditator's own view, and that the meditator will adopt this theory as the result of his having conducted the inquiry. This is not a trivial claim. Someone could simply play an inquiry out, seeing which

propositions would be endorsed at which stage of the inquiry, and which would have a place in the theory with which the inquiry ends. But this would not entail the person's holding the theory, and indeed, even if someone thought that by its very nature his inquiry leads to a correct theory, he might not himself straightforwardly believe the the-

ory to be true. He might be prevented from believing it by holding con-

flicting opinions that are too deeply ingrained in him to be budged: for

example, that the human mind is somehow the same thing as the body, or that colors are among the inherent properties of physical things. But Descartes does not think his inquirer faces this uneasy predicament. As the result of working through his inquiry, the meditator finds himself

coming to believe that the correct theory is true. Thus for him, the

inquiry is, among other things, the process of changing his mind: root-

ing out some deeply ingrained beliefs, replacing them with others, and

ingraining the new ones as deeply as the old ones they displace. I think that Hume's inquiry is very different from Descartes's in

these respects. As I understand it, Hume's inquiry does not assemble considerations thatjustify accepting a theory of human nature, though in its earlier stages it seems as though it will. While the upshot of the

inquiry is to change the inquirer's mind-for a time, or in a way-the inquirer is not led by his inquiry to replace his prereflective beliefs with

a set of revised or new beliefs. The inquiry is launched from a perspec- tive continuous with that of common sense, but the inquirer's eventual

540




alienation from common sense is in some ways far more radical than that of the Cartesian meditator.

To develop this reading of Hume's inquiry, let me turn next to some more specific contrasts between the methods and starting assumptions of the Cartesian and Humean inquirers. Although Descartes does not

spend a great deal of time motivating his inquirer's use of the method of doubt, he does argue that only with this radical method can the

inquirer "establish" something "in the sciences that [is] stable and

likely to last," given the inquirer's recognition of the "highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice" of his beliefs (CSM 2:12; AT 7:17). The maxim of the method is a bold one: "I should hold back my assent from

opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as care-

fully as I do from those which are patently false" (CSM 2:12; AT 7:18). At the outset of his project, then, the meditator resolves to use a maxim for assent that is more demanding than his everyday maxims, and by using it, he soon finds himself withholding assent from virtually every- thing he had prereflectively believed. The reward for these extreme measures is large. From the start, the meditator knows that if he follows his maxim, and if his inquiry proves to be fruitful, then the propositions to which it will lead him to assent must be ones of whose truth he can be absolutely certain. Descartes believes that there will be an addi- tional reward for the meditator: carrying out an inquiry guided by the method of doubt will help him displace his prereflective beliefs in favor of the new or revised judgments at which he arrives in the end.7

Hume occupies a different position in the Introduction to the Trea- tise, and he has different ambitions. He aims to understand and explain human nature by discovering the principles of its operation. Once we have discovered the principles of human nature, we will be in a position to make "changes and improvements" (xv; Intro. 4) in the other sciences, by clarifying the ideas we use in them and by making our rea-

soning more cogent. Hume claims that the only way in which we can

develop knowledge, or "science," of any aspect of human nature is by "experimental philosophy," which locates the grounds for principles in

"experience and observation" (xvi; Intro. 7). That is, the inquiry into human nature is to be conducted by using the same general methods and standards that we use in natural philosophy. Thus Hume, like any experimentalist, cannot be absolutely certain about the conclusions he draws from his observations and experiments, no matter how cautious and observant he is.

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JANET BROUGHTON

Although he cannot have absolute certainty, at the outset of his

inquiry Hume expresses no worries about whether he will be justified in believing that his conclusions are correct. On the contrary: like any experimentalist, and indeed like any person forming beliefs about the

world, he takes himself to be justified in his beliefs when he reaches them by using his cognitive faculties aright. He takes it that he uses his faculties aright when he adheres scrupulously to the rules that express our norms for their use: norms of consistency for sets of our beliefs, of

clarity for our ideas, and of evidence, or empirical justification, for our inferences about causes and effects.8 Although he has little to say explicitly about consistency, it is clear that he frequently criticizes beliefs in light of an implicit norm of consistency (for example, 17-20;

1.1.7.2-6). He acknowledges norms of clarity and evidence in the Introduction and then articulates them in due course. He articulates the norm of clarity early in Part 1: we will achieve full clarity in our ideas

only when we trace them back to their origins in our impressions (15- 16; 1.1.6.1). He articulates the evidentiary norms for causal inferences after he has clarified the relevant ideas and principles of the mind: near the end of Part 3 he spells out how we may "choose the right way" (175; 1.3.15.11) in our empirical investigations by giving "[r]ules by which to judge of causes and effects" (173; 1.3.15).

In Book 1, Hume sets out to use his own cognitive abilities in accor- dance with our cognitive norms, directing his attention to the human

understanding itself. Part of his aim is to "explain the principles and

operations of our reasoning faculty" (xv; Intro. 5), and this requires him to discover the causal processes that produce, among other things, our beliefs. But the fact that beliefs have causes or explanations does

not, for Hume, show that they are unjustified. (Neither, for that mat-

ter, does it show that they arejustified.) One way to see this is to reflect on the fact that Hume's aim is to gain explanatory insight into the

workings of the human understanding, and that his own insights are themselves the causal products of the workings of his mind. Nowhere does he suggest that this fact undercuts the possibility that his evidence

justifies him in asserting the principles he discovers. Indeed, I will be

suggesting that Hume never repudiates the norms of evidence (or of

clarity and coherence) on any grounds, and that we can see them at

work in each of the several stages through which his inquiry passes. Hume's inquiry begins notjust with his acceptance of norms for the

use of our cognitive faculties but also with his acceptance of the commonsense assumption that many of our prereflective beliefs meet these

542




cognitive norms.9 That is, we are equipped in everyday life with a large body of clear, coherent, andjustified beliefs about the world around us. We have acquired these beliefs by adhering to our cognitive norms in

using our five senses, remembering past events, making discoveries by intuition and demonstration, and reasoning concerning causes and effects.

I think that Hume conducts his entire inquiry without questioning the authority of the norms of coherence, clarity, and evidence. But once his inquiry has uncovered the principles of the human under-

standing, he finds in Part 4 that these same cognitive norms dictate a

surprising verdict on the products of the understanding. That verdict is that the commonsense assumption with which he begins-the assumption that we have a large body of justified beliefs about the world around us-is not itself coherent, clear, and justified. To support this reading, I want now to consider in more detail how Hume's inquiry proceeds in just the first three parts of Book 1.

Let me briefly rehearse the discoveries he makes in these parts. In Part 1, he discovers the basic principles of how our minds work. Our mental states can be sorted into "impressions" and "ideas"; all simple ideas are caused by resembling simple impressions; some complex ideas are memories, and they have features that distinguish them from those that are ideas of "imagination"; if our imagination presents us with an idea, it is likely to be the idea of something associated by the relation of resemblance, contiguity, or causation with whatever had

just been in our mind; words are general in virtue of the complex asso- ciations between them and particular ideas, and between some particular ideas and others. In Part 2, Hume draws upon his basic principles to give an account of our idea of space. He claims to show that we cannot conceive of space as infinitely divisible and that we cannot conceive of it purely, apart from colored or tangible points. He concludes that in many respects geometry is not an exact science. He also gestures toward a similar account of our idea of time. In Part 3, he takes up the nature of intuition and demonstration, of causal reasoning, of belief, and of the idea of causation. He criticizes the principle that every event must have a cause; he claims that beliefs are just lively ideas related in a certain way to impressions; he identifies custom as the mechanism

driving our inferences from causes to effects; and he clarifies our idea of causation, and especially of necessary connection.

Hume does not treat these discoveries as showing that we are wrong to accord authority to our cognitive norms of clarity, consistency, and

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JANET BROUGHTON

evidence; nor does he treat them as showing that any large classes of our beliefs are unjustified. Another way to put this is to say that even at his most provocative and deflationary, he is not denying that our beliefs

arejustified if they meet the norms we accept, nor is he denying that on the whole our beliefs do meet these norms. Furthermore, Hume himself accepts these norms in using his own cognitive faculties as he

attempts to discover the truth about the workings of human nature. More generally, he accepts them as standards to which we all must hold ourselves if we aim to discover the truth by doing science of man.

I do not mean to say that Hume thinks his investigations of general ideas, geometrical reasoning, causal reasoning, and the like, leave those philosophical subjects unchanged. In fact, Hume thinks his

investigations allow him to criticize important claims made by various of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries. For example, no longer can we claim that it is impossible that an event should fail to have a cause, or that the occurrence of a particular effect can be dem- onstrated from the occurrence of its cause, or that we enjoy rational

insight into the quality in an object that is its efficacy. We can no longer credit ourselves with supernatural cognitive powers; we must instead settle for the modest and reasonable beliefs that our natures equip us to form. On this reading, the final section of Part 3, "Of the reason of

animals," gives the moral of the first three parts: we are like other crea-

tures; we are not halfway to the gods. In making these claims about the first three parts of Book 1, I am in

broad agreement with the growing number of scholars who reject the view according to which these parts climax in the radical skeptical claim that we cannotjustify our causal inferences.10 Such a view is difficult to square with Hume's cheerful tone, with his readiness to distin-

guish between reasonable and unreasonable causal inferences, and with his articulation of rules by which to choose "the right way" (175; 1.3.15.11) to draw our inferences. Unlike some of these scholars, how-

ever, I believe Hume does reach radical skeptical conclusions, though not until Part 4, where he musters considerations that were not available to him earlier in his inquiry, or considerations whose implications he had not drawn out.11 But in Part 3, I think he is simply arguing that when we make causal inferences, we are using our faculty of imagination, not our faculty of reason. Although this is deflationary of some

conceptions of human nature, it does not constitute deep or broad

skepticism about our beliefs.12

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If Book 1 had stopped at the end of Part 3, it would have resembled the Meditations in several ways. It would have been an inquiry that cul- minates in a theory: here, a theory of the human understanding. It would also have been an inquiry that leads the inquirer to embrace the

theory: by the end of Part 3 the inquirer has assembled and reflected

upon just the sorts of observations and experiences that lead him to believe the generalizations propounded in the theory. (And the theory itself handily explains just such believing.)

But Book 1 does not stop at the end of Part 3, and now I want to consider Part 4, focusing upon the inquiry into our belief in body that

occupies sections 2, 3, and 4.13 Unlike the inquiry of Book l's earlier

parts, this one results in a criticism of the underlying assumption that we have justified beliefs about the world. Hume considers the belief that the things we sense are mind-independent, physical objects that continue to exist when we are not perceiving them, and he argues first that our natural belief about the things we sense is inconsistent with other, reasonable beliefs that we hold, for example, that pressing one's

eye does not double the number of chairs in the room (see 210-11; 1.4.2.45). We naturally form the "opinion of the double existence of perceptions and objects" (211; 1.4.2.46) in order to avoid this inconsis-

tency, but this new belief fails to meet our norms of reasoning from effects to causes (see 212; 1.4.2.47). So our natural beliefs in physical objects require us to violate our norms of consistency or our norms of causal reasoning.14

In section 4, Hume says that if we reflect on some general features of our sense perception, we will find that there is a completely unexceptionable causal inference that leads us to distinguish between primary and secondary qualities.15 Then he argues that once we draw that dis- tinction, we cannot coherently conceive of physical objects: "nothing we can conceive is possest of a real, continu'd, and independent existence; not even motion, extension and solidity" (228; 1.4.4.6). So given the character of our sense perception, a reasonable causal inference leads us to conclude that a coherent belief in body can have no content. In the final section of Book 1, Hume reflects on his discoveries:

[The imagination] makes us reason from causes and effects; and 'tis the same principle, which convinces us of the continu'd existence of external objects, when absent from the senses. But tho' these two operations be equally natural and necessary in the human mind, yet in some circum- stances they are directly contrary, nor is it possible for us to reason justly and regularly from causes and effects, and at the same time believe the

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JANET BROUGHTON

continu'd existence of matter. How then shall we adjust those principles together? Which of them shall we prefer? Or in case we prefer neither of them, but successively assent to both, as is usual among philosophers, with what confidence can we afterwards usurp that glorious title, when we thus knowingly embrace a manifest contradiction? (266; 1.4.7.4)

We can give content to the belief in body only by denying the distinc- tion between primary and secondary qualities, and we can do that only by violating the norms of causal reasoning. What we cannot consis-

tently do is to adhere to those norms and so much as conceive of an

objective world. Our evidentiary norms thus require us to give up our commonsense

assumption that we have justified beliefs about the world around us. Hume's wording here suggests that he is also invoking the norm of con-

sistency: to avoid "contradiction" we must either give up drawing causal

inferences, or we must give up the commonsense assumption. He suggests that we will find it impossible to answer the question, "Which of them shall we prefer?" though it is not clear why. The obvious answer seems to be that we should prefer causal inference: we should continue

drawing causal inferences, at least when they accord with our eviden-

tiary norms, and we should discontinue holding any beliefs that involve the concept of an objective, physical world, since we cannot coherently form that concept except by violating our norms of evidence, given the course our experience has taken. If we adhered to such a policy, the beliefs we would hold would all accord with our cognitive norms.

But even if this is a coherent option and one we can rationalize, Hume is right to represent us as facing a predicament. The price we would pay if we adhered to this policy would be exorbitantly high: we would bejettisoning our basic, commonsense assumption that in everyday life we are equipped with a large body ofjustified beliefs about the world around us. We would then be left drawing causal inferences not about the world around us, but about our own future impressions. Indeed, we might after all agree with Hume that what looms here is a

"contradiction": we might think that the normative rules of causal rea-

soning are at the very least norms for forming sense-based beliefs about an objective, physical world. Such beliefs would have the good we aim at only when they were true of objects, and so although the evidentiary norms themselves would still be in order as they stand, the "opposition" Hume is reflecting upon would show that we cannot make any use of these norms to achieve the good that we aim at. While I hesitate to say that Hume has precisely this "contradiction" in mind, reading the pas-

546




sage in this way would help to explain why he does not simply endorse

good causal reasoning and disavow any conception of the physical world.

At any rate, Hume does himself go on to raise the question what, in

light of such difficulties, we "ought" to do (267; 1.4.7.6). His response to this question is that we cannot give it a reasoned and positive answer: we cannot find a way to justify holding any particular subset of our beliefs. Here he draws upon an argument he had given earlier about the diminution of probabilities under reflection, an argument that shows what the "rules of logic" require if we think in a sustained way about the fallibility of belief (183; 1.4.1.6).16 He puts its upshot this

way: " [w] e have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all" (268; 1.4.7.7). Once he sees that we cannot give any reasoned and positive answer to the question which beliefs we ought to hold, Hume finds that he "can look upon no opinion even as more

probable or likely than another" (268-69; 1.4.7.8).17 On this way of reading Book 1, Hume reaches his skeptical conclu-

sion only because he cedes authority to several broad cognitive norms of clarity, coherence, and evidence. A different philosopher might have questioned the authority of these norms rather than accept such a negative outcome. I would myself suggest that Hume's norms of clar-

ity and evidence are too crude, and that our beliefs, whenjudged by the norms of clarity and evidence that many of us would endorse, may not call for negative verdicts, even if Hume's theory of experience and of the understanding is broadly correct. But Hume took these norms to be the very broad and unexceptionable norms that must govern all our

inquiries, including his own, and all our beliefs. He finds them to be in order as they stand,18 even though full reflection on the nature of the mind in light of these norms forces us to see that our most basic

assumptions about the world do not deserve our assent.

Although in this way the inquirer reaches skeptical conclusions, Hume does not think it is an option for him actually to continue his life while at the same time foregoing his basic beliefs. This is not humanly possible: "[n]ature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel" (183; 1.4.1.7). The final few pages of Book 1 trace out these workings of nature within the inquirer's mind, as nature "cures [him] of [his] philosophical mel-

ancholy and delirium" (269; 1.4.7.9). His skeptical conclusions are

"quickly forgot" (268; 1.4.7.7).19 He then passes through a mood of "spleen and indolence" (270; 1.4.7.11), during which he resolves to

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JANET BROUGHTON

stop thinking about philosophy, and to think only about the things that he is naturally inclined to think about. But then he finds himself natu-

rally inclined to raise questions about at least some philosophical mat- ters: "the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclina- tions, which actuate and govern" (271; 1.4.7.12) us. So Hume finds that it is simply not humanly possible to stop inquiring and believing.

This raises the question how to situate Hume's naturalism in his

post-skeptical inquiry. I want to answer this question by explaining how and why I disagree with some interpretative claims that Don Garrett makes.20 Garrett thinks that Hume does not actually endorse the negative conclusions I have just discussed. Rather, Garrett reads Hume as

endorsing what Garrett calls the Title Principle, the principle that

"[w]here reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it

ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it never can have any title to operate upon us" (270; 1.4.7.11). That is the principle that Hume enunciates in his mood of spleen and indolence. For someone in that mood, endorsement of the Title Principle commits him to assenting to

propositions like "Fire warms" and "Water refreshes." But for someone in whom curiosity about philosophical subjects has revived, endorsement of the Title Principle also commits him to investigating many large philosophical questions. In fact, for someone of moderate senti-

ments, for whom religion has little appeal, observation-based investigation of large philosophical questions will recommend itself. So on Garrett's reading, the Humean inquirer finds that carrying on with his naturalist project is, after all, what he ought to be doing. That is what his endorsement of the Title Principle commits him to.

Although in the end I disagree with Garrett, I have some sympathy for his claim that Hume's most deeply negative verdicts about our basic beliefs are in some way not truly his own conclusions. They are certainly not his conclusions if what we mean by someone's "conclusions" are the ongoing beliefs he accumulates during his investigation. Hume's

ongoing beliefs, the ones he carries with him through Books 2 and 3, comprise our commonsense assumptions about the mind's relation to the world, along with beliefs about various principles of the human mind's operation. Hume's ongoing beliefs do not include the deeply negative verdicts he has reached. But those negative verdicts may seem

not to be his conclusions in another way as well. It is hard to understand Hume as committed to the negative verdicts: it is hard to understand them as what he really thinks, given how rapidly and completely he

548




"forgets" them. I want to sketch some claims about what it takes to be committed to a conclusion, and then I will argue that despite his readiness to carry on with the naturalist project, Hume is indeed committed to his deeply negative conclusions: they are what he really thinks.21

We all know people who oscillate in their convictions, and many of us know people who oscillate quite predictably within some sphere of life. Take, for example, Vera, who alternates between optimism and

pessimism about her work: one day she is sure that she is onto a novel

way of explaining demonstrative identification; the next she is convinced that her work is entirely unoriginal. If she announces at dinner that she will reshape the philosophy of language, we understand that she is convinced this is true, but we may find it hard to take what she

says seriously. We may find it hard to regard her as speaking definitively for herself. Of course, we may find it equally difficult to regard her as

speaking for herself the next day at lunch, when she tells us how deriv- ative her ideas are. And indeed, we may simply regard her as never able to speak for herself on this subject.

But not necessarily. We may have reasons to say that in one of her

moods, but not the other, she does really speak for herself. Many of the

things that might give us reasons to think this would concern her dis- tinctive structures of personality, emotion, and temperament. But some broader features of her case might matter as well: especially, how she herself thinks about and reacts to her own oscillating tendencies. She may recognize that she gives better reasons for her pessimistic convictions than for her optimistic convictions. She may also identify aspects of her structures of personality that cause her nonetheless to veer away from pessimism toward optimism. And in light of her self-

knowledge, she may herself come to treat her optimistic convictions in a detached way, as states in which she will of course find herself, but with which she cannot fully identify herself. For us, all of this might constitute grounds for regarding her as committed to the pessimistic view, even though we (and she) know full well that she will be a convinced optimist again by dinnertime, and even though her commitment to the pessimistic view may not be something that her pessimistic states alone can establish.

In Book 1 of the Treatise, the scope of the inquirer's normative judgments is far greater than Vera's, and unlike her, the Humean inquirer will not revert to his pessimism with any regularity. In fact, he can avoid

reverting to it ever again, by not reopening the inquiries of Book 1, especially those of Part 4. Nothing about the subject-matter of Books 2

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or 3 will force him back to such bleak conclusions. But the Humean

inquirer is like Vera in important ways. In Vera's case, we see her as committed to her pessimistic opinion if she recognizes that she gives stronger or fuller reasons for it, if she identifies aspects of herself that cause her to veer away from that opinion, and if as a result she treats her optimistic opinions in a detached way. The Humean inquirer meets these conditions too. Hume certainly depicts the inquirer as someone who regards himself as having given fuller and stronger reasons for his skeptical conclusion than for his resumption of scientific

inquiry. That is because he gives no reasons at all for his resumption of scientific inquiry, as he is well aware; he describes himself as simply shifting outlooks under pressure from the course of nature, in accor- dance with the principles of the human understanding. And I think that he treats his resumption of scientific inquiry in a detached way, as

involving convictions with which he cannot fully identify himself. Some of his language suggests such an attitude: for example, he describes himself as "diffident" (273; 1.4.7.14). But I think Hume's clearest and most effective way of communicating the inquirer's detachment comes with his authorial use of the literary device of irony, to which I will turn

presently. If I am right so far, then there are reasons to disagree with Garrett,

and to read Hume as endorsing his skeptical conclusions. Although Hume's inquirer expresses optimistic convictions-for example, through enunciating the Title Principle-he does so in a fashion

designed to show that he does not endorse them, even though he finds that he is once again convinced of them.

I want, then, to distinguish between what we might call Hume's antecedent and consequent naturalism. In section 12 of the first Enquiry, Hume distinguishes between two "species of scepticism": antecedent

skepticism, like Descartes's, and skepticism that is "consequent to science and enquiry."22 I am urging a reading of Book 1 of the Treatise upon which Hume is a consequent skeptic, in the sense that his "science and

enquiry" force him to conclude that we have no reasonable beliefs about the world around us. But of course he is not a consequent skeptic if by that we mean someone who spends the rest of his life looking upon "no opinion even as more probable or likely than another" (268; 1.4.7.8). Instead, the Humean inquirer finds himself rapidly evolving into someone who can declare that "Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected. 'Twill be suffi- cient for me, if I can bring it a little more into fashion" (273; 1.4.7.14).

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His state consequent to "science and enquiry" and further consequent to the skeptical outcome of science and enquiry is that of a scientific

inquirer, ready to investigate the passions and morals. I am arguing that we ought to distinguish this consequent natural-

ism from the inquirer's antecedent naturalism, the outlook he announced in the Introduction to the Treatise and that he used in the

explanatory and deflationary projects of Book 1. Hume says that the

inquirer's skeptical conclusions are "quickly forgot," and he certainly represents them as in some way left behind. But I do not think he represents his consequent naturalism as simply a reoccupation of the per- spective of antecedent naturalism. It is true that once again he takes it that through experience, reflection, and reasoning, we acquire many justified and true beliefs about the people and things around us, for

example, about human passions and morals. But he does all this with a difference, as I think he is at pains to point out.23

He points this out most clearly, I think, not at the end of Book 1, but at its beginning, through a special use he makes of the literary device of irony. To explain this, I want to compare, one last time, Book 1 of the Treatise to Descartes's Meditations. Both books are narratives of tempo- ral sequences of transforming discoveries and reactions. The Medita- tions shows the exemplary "I" turning himself from a person of common sense, ripe for scholastic delusions, into an apostle of the scientific revolution. Hume's "I," especially in Part 4, recounts the natural

history of his skeptical and post-skeptical thought. In both books, we must distinguish at least between the author of the

book and the "I" who is narrating his own thoughts, if for no other reason than because the author knows from the start how things will turn out and the "I" does not. But in the Meditations, the narrating "I" might simply be the author's own past self. (He wasn't, but he might have been.) Now that the author knows what he knows, he will tell what it was like not knowing and then finding out. The narrative aspect of the Treatise is more complex. In the Introduction, the "I" announces his intentions innocently: he will apply to human nature itself the methods of investigation that have proved so fruitful in the physical sciences. He

confidently expects to be able to discover the principles of human nature by gleaning up evidence from observations of human life. He cannot guess the appalling conclusions that await him. The author, of

course, can: the author knows how the book turns out. That much by itself, though, does not make the narrative structure of the Treatise more complicated than that of the Meditations. The extra complexity

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come from the fact that the author of the Treatise also cannot help iden-

tifying with the "I"'s initial intentions and from the fact that he knows

why he cannot help it. For in Book 1, the intellectual history of the "I" terminates in the state of mind in which he thinks he ought to search for principles of human nature by gleaning up evidence from observation of human life. So, although the author is distinct from the "I," he identifies with the "I"'s initial undertaking. The author cannot lay claim to the innocence of the "I," but neither can he simply put the "I"'s outlook behind him, as the author of the Meditations could (or claimed he could).

I think Hume indicates this narrative complexity to us by using irony in the Introduction. I believe Hume quite deliberately chooses words that the innocent "I" can say straight and that the author can also say- with belief, but with the rueful belief of post-skeptical self-understand-

ing. One good example of this ironic doubling comes in this passage:

'Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and cou'd explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings. (xv; Intro. 4)

These words express both the innocent "I"'s ambition to refine math- ematics and physical science through discoveries about the mind of the mathematician and scientist, and the author's dead halt at the question "how far we ought to yield to [our] illusions" (267; 1.4.7.6). The impossibility of telling what improvements we might make can of course be the impossibility of knowing already what we have set ourselves to discover, but it can also be the impossibility of adopting a rational policy for belief in the face of nearly global skepticism.

Another good example of ironic doubling is the innocent "I"'s criticism of people who are prejudiced against "abstruse" arguments of the

type he proposes to give. Such people, he complains, "commonly reject [metaphysical reasonings] without hesitation, and resolve, if we must for ever be a prey to errors and delusions, that they shall at least be natural and entertaining," a resolution that can arise, he disapprovingly says, only from "the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence" (xiv; Intro. 3). The author, like the "I," does not

number himself among such people, but for very different reasons from the "I"'s reasons. Indeed, he himself has experienced "sentiments of spleen and indolence," and he has given vent to his feelings in words reminiscent of the ones the innocent "I" used so censoriously: "[i]f I

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must be a fool, as all those who reason or believe any thing certainly are,

my follies shall at least be natural and agreeable" (270; 1.4.7.10). The reason he does not remain among the people the innocent "I" had crit- icized so roundly is not that "philosophy" can "oppose" his indolence; it is simply that his temperament eventually inclines him once more to undertake arduous inquiries (270-71; 1.4.7.12).

So I think that Hume uses irony in the Introduction and that he does this for an important philosophical reason. Irony is Hume's way of rep- resenting a special self-consciousness, detachment, or doubling: a tension between identifying oneself with one's projects and distancing oneself from them. This tension is in turn an essential part of what con- stitutes Hume's commitment to his skeptical conclusions; by seeing this, we can understand how he thought such a commitment could be

fully compatible with "forgetting" the devastating truth about the human understanding and taking up the naturalist project once again.

If we reach skeptical outcomes and do not regard them as being "insulated" from ordinary life,24 then what kind of life can we lead? I believe that Hume, like Sextus Empiricus, took this question seriously, and that his picture of belief modulated by ironic detachment is, as a

piece of philosophical psychology, far more plausible than Sextus's

suggestion that we can go forward in tranquillity without belief. Hume insisted that he was not a Pyrrhonist, and strictly speaking that is true. If I am right about Book 1 of the Treatise, though, he did share with Sex- tus the discovery that although life after the onset of skepticism does go on, it goes on with a difference.

University of California, Berkeley

Notes

This essay is the product of several decades of evolving thought, and I have benefited from exchanges with many people over the years. I fear I am not remembering all of this help as I should, but I vividly recall, and am very grateful for, comments and criticisms from Annette Baier, Don Garrett, Louis Loeb, Bethany Hoffman, Terry Irwin, David Owen, Barry Stroud, and Wai- hung Wong, and from discussants in several seminars, at several Hume Society events, and at conferences or colloquia at the University of Manchester, Har- vard University, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University.

1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1978, xvi. I will make further references to the Trea- tise in the body of this paper. Page references to the Nidditch edition will be followed by book, part, section, and paragraph numbers (for this passage, Intro. 6); paragraph numbers are provided in the edition of the Treatise pre-

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pared by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

2 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. Derek Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 4.

3Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy ofDavid Hume (London: MacMillan, 1941).

4 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings ofDescartes [CSM], vol. 2, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Oeuvres de Descartes [AT], vol. 7, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996). Subse- quent references to Descartes's works will appear in the body of the paper.

5 Robert Fogelin, Hume's Skepticism in the "Treatise of Human Nature" (Lon- don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 80.

6 For example, he says that a causal inference can yield "knowledge" (104; 1.3.8.14); he calls very strong causal arguments "proofs" (124; 1.3.11.2); he launches a complex piece of causal reasoning of his own by describing it as

"[j]ust" albeit "subtile" (135; 1.3.12.13). 71 develop these ideas in part 1 of Descartes's Method of Doubt (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2002). 81 argue at greater length for these claims, and for some related claims

later in this paper, in "Hume's Naturalism about Cognitive Norms," Philosoph- ical Topics 31 (2003): 1-19.

91 offer support for a related claim in "What Does the Scientist of Man Observe?" Hume Studies 18 (1992): 155-68.

10 Skeptical interpretations are offered, for example, in D. C. Stove, "Hume, Probability, and Induction," in Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Vere

Chappell (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), 187-212; Barry Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 54 ff.; Fogelin, Hume's Skepti- cism, ch. 4; and Kenneth Winkler "Hume's Inductive Skepticism," in The Empir- icists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, ed. Margaret Atherton (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 183-212. These readings tend to draw upon both the Treatise and corresponding passages in An Enquiry Concern-

ing Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), sec. 4, 108-118. Peter Millican has recently offered a vigorous defense of the claim that the argument in the Enquiry is skeptical in character; see "Sceptical Doubts Concerning Induction," in Reading Hume on Human

Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 107-173. Non-skeptical interpretations of the argument in the Treatise are offered, for example, in Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's "Treatise" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Don Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy (NewYork: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1997), chap. 4; and David Owen, Hume's Reason (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1999), chap. 6. 11 An early, clear statement of such a view appears in John Lenz, "Hume's

Defense of Causal Inference," in Chappell, Hume, 169-186. See also Louis Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume's "Treatise" (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2002), chaps. 1, 2, and 7 (although Loeb does not in the end

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attribute to Hume a commitment to a fully general skepticism about causal inferences), and Ira Singer, "Hume's Extreme Skepticism in Treatise I.iv.7," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 25 (1995): 595-622. I elaborated my view in "Hume's Skepticism about Causal Inferences," The Pacific Philosophical Quar- terly 64 (1983): 3-18.

12For a discussion of the broad conceptions Hume may be deflating, see sections 1-4 of Terence Penelhum, "Hume's Moral Psychology," in Themes in Hume: The Self The Will, Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 125-42.

13 In this paragraph and the next, I sketch a reading that I also offer in "Hume's Naturalism about Cognitive Norms."

14 Although I think this line of reasoning is itself skeptical in character, and

although at the end of 1.4.2 Hume seems to say that it is, he does not directly invoke it in the skeptical catalogue of 1.4.7.

15 Hume spells out the evidentiary norm on which the inference rests: "from like effects we presume like causes" (227; 1.4.4.4). This is the fourth of the "[r]ules by which to judge of causes and effects" that Hume had articu- lated in Part 3 (173; 1.3.15).

161 take it that the rules of "logic" in question here express standards of evidence (cf. 175; 1.3.15.11).

17Thus the structure of Hume's grounds for skepticism is different from the structure of Descartes's. Hume applies (what he takes to be) ordinary norms for cognition to various facts about our experiences and the workings of our minds, and this shows him that we have no warrant for believing any one thing about the physical world rather than some other. Descartes does not withhold assent from claims about the physical world because he finds we have no warrant for them, as we ordinarily understand warrant. Rather, he with- holds his assent only because he has decided to adhere to the very demanding rule that he will withhold assent wherever there is the least ground for doubt. I discuss this further in Descartes's Method ofDoubt.

18Here I am differing with several recent commentators. Annette Baier

argues that Hume accepts the norms of causal reasoning not because they are in order as they stand, but because they are self-validating. See A Progress ofSen- timents, 91ff. I explain my reasons for disagreeing with her in "Hume's Voy- age," in Passions, Practices, and Persons, ed. Christopher Williams and Joyce Jenkins (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 175-91. I am also

differing with Louis Loeb, who argues in Stability and Justification for a view on which Hume aims to ground the normative force of epistemological norms in our desire to relieve the discomfort that we experience when we have unstable beliefs.

19Hume's remark about forgetting actually comes before, not after, his

description of his "feeling and experience" in his skeptical crisis (268; 1.4.7.8), and he says that forgetting is what is "commonly done" (268; 1.4.7.7). I nonetheless think that he is anticipating his own reaction to his discoveries-who else had ever thought of "this difficulty" (268; 1.4.7.7) ?-and that the forgetting comes at the stage at which distractions manage to "obliterate all these chimeras" (269; 1.4.7.9). I do not mean to rest much on this, though; I would be just as happy to speak of the obliteration of skeptical conclusions.

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20 See Cognition and Commitment, chap. 10, and "'A Small Tincture of Pyr- rhonism': Skepticism and Naturalism in Hume's Science of Man," in Pyrrho- nian Skepticism, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

21 In addition to disagreeing with Garrett, I am also disagreeing with those who read Hume as what James O'Shea calls a "mood pluralist" (in "Hume's Reflective Return to the Vulgar," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 4 (1996): 285-315). O'Shea has Richard Popkin especially in mind; Popkin argued that Hume combines within himself "two moods" that together amount to a "split personality." See "David Hume: His Pyrrhonism," in Chap- pell, Hume, 98. Robert Fogelin expresses a related view when he describes Hume's "radical perspectivalism" in "Hume's Scepticism," in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 113. O'Shea offers a different way from mine of criticizing this

general sort of reading. 22 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 200 (sec. 12, para. 5). 23 In the Enquiry, Hume does not directly raise the question how a conse-

quent naturalism might differ from an antecedent naturalism. He first contrasts the mitigated skeptic with the unthoughtful dogmatist and then with the overambitious metaphysician (207-11; sec. 12, paras. 24-34).

24 See Myles Burnyeat, "The Sceptic in His Place and Time," in The Original Sceptics: A Controversy, ed. Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 92-126.

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The Inquiry in Hume's Treatise