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Welcome to the sixth Hume lecture. Today we're going to be finishing off with causation and talking about a few interpretative issues.

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And then we're going to be moving on to book one for looking at the sceptical problems that arise in one for one and a bit of one for two.

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So last time we looked in some detail at Hume's discussion of the idea of

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necessary connexion causal necessity that largely structures but one part three,

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of course, we noted some tensions in Hume's texts.

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We saw that Hume seems to be a clear believer in causation.

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He has positive things to say about causation.

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He's not just a negative sceptic about it, and he identifies what seems to be a legitimate impression of causal necessity.

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So his search for an impression of necessary connexion succeeds.

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So a note of sort of summary of causation significance for whom some of this goes back to what I was saying in the first lecture,

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causation is a crucial relation for whom it is the only way that we can get a legitimate inference from one thing to another,

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from observed to unobserved. The one three,

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which I've already noted is the longest part of the treaties and the one on which he focuses most in the abstract covers a

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lot of topics with which you is particularly associated topics that are very important to him and his analysis of causation.

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I'll be saying a little bit more about this later. Crucially, impacts on discussions in that come later in the treaties.

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So we've got generally from whom a positive picture of causation.

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Let's now look at some interpretative issues,

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and here I'm going to be expressing some scepticism about two popular trends in relatively recent human scholarship.

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So one of them is the so-called new Hume. This is a view of Hume that emerged in the 1980s.

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It's enjoyed quite a lot of vogue for a couple of decades. I think it's very much on the decline now.

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But the claim made by the new humans who differ in various ways, but in general,

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their thought is that when humans discussing our idea of causal necessity, he's not talking about causation as it is in itself.

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He's not talking about the meaning of causation. He's simply talking about our epistemological grasp on causation.

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And that normally goes along with the idea that causation, real causation would be something deeper,

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something that is inaccessible to us, something which, if we did know about it, would licence a priori inference from cause to effect.

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So here we've got the so-called ape conception. So the claim here is that when there's a real causal relation, a genuine one,

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there is something in the cause which is such that if we knew about it, it would licence a priori inference to the effect with total certainty.

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Now an obvious problem with this idea of or alleged idea of human causation is that it seems to conflict with the conceivable principle.

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Hume states again and again around 30 times, actually.

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He puts forward the conceivable principle that whatever we conceive is possible.

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Now, he also says repeatedly that whenever there is a cause and effect relationship, we can conceive of the cause without the effect.

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That's why for us, a priori inference from calls to effect is completely impossible.

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Now, if you put those two together, there is a clear tension in the new human account.

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The new humans have old John Wright and Peter Cahill have suggested possible responses to this, but their responses run together.

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The conceive ability and the inconceivable principle and they look at passages in which Hume suggests some limitation on the

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inconceivable principle and want to conclude that actually Hume is not a completely committed to the conceive ability principle.

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I think that's implausible simply because there are so many times that Hume appeals to it.

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The only significant evidence in favour of Hume having a conception like this is this

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passage from the treaties and various passages in the enquiry that I'll mention in a moment.

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So to be able to concede power in some particular being,

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we must distinctly and particularly conceive the connexion betwixt the cause and effect and be

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able to pronounce from a simple view of the one that it must be followed or preceded by the other.

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This is the true manner of conceiving a particular power in a particular body.

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Now, if you read that in isolation, it does suggest that a true conception of causation would be something that licence is a priori inference.

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And the problem is this passage comes from a section, a paragraph in one 314,

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where Hume is objecting to the thought that we might be able to get some abstract idea of causation.

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He's asking, how do we get the idea of a causal necessity?

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And he's dealing with the thought that we might go straight to an abstract idea,

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and he's saying we can only get an abstract idea where we've had a particular idea.

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And he's addressing that in this paragraph.

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Nevertheless, you might look at that and think, OK, that does suggest the AP criterion.

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If we look at the enquiry, what I've called the key move that Hume appeals to six or more times within the enquiry text.

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That's Enquiry Section seven, Hume seems to be saying, Can we get an idea of the necessary connexion in this particular case?

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If we could, then we would be able to make an a priori inference from one to the other.

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But we can't. Therefore, we can't get an idea of necessarily connexion from that.

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So, for example, my command over my body, if I think of raising my hand,

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would I be able to infer a priority from making that the intention of raising my hand or attempting to do so that my hand would actually rise?

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No, I can't. I only know that through experience. Therefore, I cannot get an idea of necessary connexion from that.

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So these are the passages in Hume's text that most support the a priori criterion.

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But crucially, these passages only occur in the first part of Hume's discussion of the idea of necessary connexion.

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They occur before he has considered the idea of repetition.

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So they all arise in a context where humans asking Can we get an idea of necessary connexion from a single case?

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Is there some impression there that will give rise to the idea?

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Now we know from other passages in Hume that he pretty much takes for granted that any a priori inference has to yield certainty.

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He thinks all probable inference is based on experience.

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So if there were an inference in advance of experience, it would have to be one that yields absolute a priori uncertainty.

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So I think that that explains why Hume uses that criterion in that part of the argument,

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and it's noticeable that once he does identify what he takes to be the true impression of necessary connexion,

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the one that comes from habitual inference, you'll notice that that doesn't satisfy the AP criterion.

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OK, so on the new human account, he sets a criterion for what would count as a genuine impression of necessary connexion,

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namely one that would licence a primary inference.

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But then, when he successfully identifies an impression, he identifies one that doesn't have this characteristic.

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So there's I think, more of a puzzle on the new human view than there is on mine.

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I can explain why he seems to apply in a pipe. AP criterion that that's because he has not yet considered repetition.

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Now, John Wright has a different approach. He doesn't go for the P criterion,

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but he like highlights texts that suggest that Hume takes our thinking about causation to involve a parent in conceive ability.

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Of course, without the effect. So this is a particularly favourite passage.

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It is natural for men in their common and careless way of thinking to imagine they

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perceive a connexion between such objects as they have constantly found united together.

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And because customers rendered it difficult to separate the ideas, they are apt to fancy such a separation to be in itself impossible and absurd.

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Well, OK, that does suggest that Hume thinks that ordinary people thinking about causation sometimes conflate it with conceptual connexion,

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but humour immediately goes on to say this is a mistake. So if you really thought that this was the correct way of thinking about causation,

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he would have to be a sceptic about causation rather than the believer in it.

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What else has supported the new? Well, I think actually the the main argument that made it popular, the new account was from Stralsund,

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and what Stralsund did was point out lots of cases where human seems to be referring to causation.

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Sincerely. So this is in a context where at the time a lot of people tended to think that Hume was a sceptic about causation.

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And so what Straw was doing was pointing to passages where Hume seemed to be referring to causal powers in a very positive way.

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So he really did believe in them. And Stralsund took it that because Hume was referring to causal power.

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Sincerely, Hugh must mean something like the new Hume type of causal powers.

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OK, so here are some of the passages that he referred to that take the one from 416 the secret powers of bodies,

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those powers and principles on which the influence of objects entirely depends.

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Yeah, it does look like Hume is referring to these powers as though they genuinely exist.

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So you can see if if your thought about Hume on the idea of necessary connexion is dominated by all those subjective statements in the treaties.

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You know that it's it's in the mind, not in objects and all that stuff, which we discussed last time.

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You can see that these passages might seem to be in conflict with that, and you might think, OK, humans got a view of causation,

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which is at odds with the official account he gives when he's discussing the idea of necessary connexion.

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Well, the same thought, interestingly, occurred to Henry Hume, Lord Keynes, and in his essays concerning morality in natural religion in 1750 one,

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he actually accused him of inconsistency because of precisely these references.

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Well, in the second edition of the enquiry to the very next sentence of the sentences that came, teams have picked out, Hume attached a footnote.

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The word power is here used in a loose and popular sense, the more accurate explication of it would give additional evidence to this argument.

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See Section seven.

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So I think that completely undermines the the evidence, the alleged evidence in favour of the new houM taken from those passages in the enquiry,

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humans saying look at section seven of the idea of necessary connexion to see my account, my precise account of what I'm talking about here.

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But there's another point as well, as you saw last time I mentioned that in the enquiry,

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humans got a more sophisticated view of causation than he has in the treaties.

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In particular, he starts talking about quantitative forces. And force is a concept like power.

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Remember when Hume starts his discussion of the idea of necessary connexion,

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he says that a whole load of causal terms are more or less synonymous, and that includes force and power.

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So I think there's an explanation of why in the enquiry, Hume starts talking a lot about powers in objects.

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It's because he's got a more sophisticated view of causation.

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Coming now to the most serious objection to the new Hume, and it's essentially to do with the whole drift of Hume's argument of the idea of

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necessary connexion and the way in which he applies the results of that argument.

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And my claim is that he clearly does rely on the idea that the two definitions,

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the culmination of his argument, do capture what genuine causal necessity is.

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So, first of all, just a brief summary here, the entire argument of the idea of necessary connexion is structured around the coffee principle.

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He's looking for an impression from which the elusive idea is derived.

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He describes the coffee principle as a tool for deciding questions of meaning.

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He says quite explicitly that he's looking for the meaning or significance of the terms.

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And the discussion, of course, culminates with two definitions.

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We've seen the definitions we've seen the corollary is that he draws from the definitions,

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so immediately after having presented his definitions, he says, here are some corollaries I can draw from it.

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For example, there is no distinction between moral and physical necessity.

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Now, how could you say that if you didn't think that these definitions captured the nature of necessity?

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If we search through the later text of both the treaties and the enquiry for references

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back to his discussion of causation and references back to the definitions in particular,

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we find that there are basically two uses that he or two main sections where he uses them.

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And one of them is of the a reality of the soul. And one of them is of liberty and necessity.

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We saw these in lecture one. In the first lecture,

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I was suggesting that a major imposition of Hume's philosophy is precisely to investigate the nature

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of our idea of necessary connexion in order to shed light on the question of liberty and necessity.

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The question of free will. And that's exactly what he does.

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And in both of the materiality of the soul and of liberty and necessity,

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the arguments turn on the claim that there is nothing to causal necessity beyond the two definitions.

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Now remember the new human claim? Is that humans two definitions only capture causation, as it is to us, causation in the object is something else.

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It's an unknown something which would licence a priori inference, for example.

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But in this argument, and this is the most pithy presentation of it that you can see, I've given up other references there.

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It's the argument is repeated in the treaties and in the enquiry. It's absolutely consistent in all three works.

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So Hume's opponents must allow this union and inference with regard to human actions, not human actions, satisfy the two definitions of cause.

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You get constant conjunction, you get an inference of the mind. They that's human opponents will only deny that this makes the whole of necessity.

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They will say there's something else.

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But then they must show that we have an idea of something else in the actions of matter, which, according to the foregoing reasoning, is impossible.

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Hume is clearly arguing against a new human position. He's denying there's anything beyond the two definitions,

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and I simply don't think there's any way to make sense of that passage on the new human account.

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Attempts have been made, suggestions made.

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If you want to see the gory detail of the discussion,

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I wrote a paper in 2011 in which I criticised Bebe Kael and Wright, who'd all attempted to deal with this problem.

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But I don't think they succeeded. And I think that the consensus.

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Even more in the abstract, it's very, very clear that Hume sees his solution to the problem of liberty in this city as turning on his definition.

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Our author pretends that this reasoning puts the whole controversy in a new light by giving a new definition of necessity.

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But it can own a definition can only solve the question of necessity if it actually does define what necessity is.

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OK, so much for the new him. Another popular view recently popular is the idea that humans some sort of projective

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twist about causation that he thinks that when we attribute causation to the world,

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what we are doing is projecting our own feeling of inference or something like that.

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Now, the idea that humans have rejected this is a popular one, because it seems also to fit with some things that he says about ethics and aesthetics.

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So it seems to give a nice unity to humans thought if we see him as being a project of is it about causation as well?

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Simon Blackburn is a key figure here.

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The two passages that people most often refer to when talking about Hume's projective ism are the two I've put here.

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One of them is in one three 14 concerned with causation and one of them is

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in the enquiry concerning the principles of morals where Hume is discussing.

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Is discussing ethics, so he's discussing moral taste.

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So the first passage is a common observation that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects.

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Okay, that sounds pretty project-based, right?

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Thus, the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained.

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The one that is reason discovers objects as they really stand in nature without additions or diminution.

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The other moral taste here has a productive faculty and gilding or staining

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all natural objects with the colours borrowed from internal sentiment raises,

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in a manner, a new creation. OK, that sounds very is right.

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You've got moral judgements raising a new creation because we feel more moral sentiments,

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approval or disapproval, and we kind of objectify them so we paint natural objects with those colours.

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Now, the problem here is that the first passage.

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Is not him giving his own theory, what he's doing is explaining why there is a bias against his theory.

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So he's given his account of the idea of necessary connexion.

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He talks about how people will be prejudiced against it, they will think it's ridiculous.

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And then he says the country bias is easily accounted for, and then he talks about the projection.

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So it's absolutely clear that the projection is a mistake. Whereas in the second case, it is a projection that he approves of.

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So I think there is projective ism of assault in the in the latter case,

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but it's a mistake to put the two together as though there's some common theme here.

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Moreover, in the second passage where he's talking about reason and taste, Reason presents objects without additions or diminution,

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as we've seen, he also says in the same paragraph that it's cool and disengaged.

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It's the domain of truth and falsehood. Whereas taste.

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Gives pleasure or pain and becomes a motive to action.

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He's drawing a distinction between reason, which is the domain of truth and falsehood and taste here.

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Making judgements that actually motivate us. Hence the colouring with internal sentiment is colouring things with pleasures and pains.

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The approval or disapproval? And crucially, in this discussion, it's absolutely unambiguous that causal judgements are on the side of reason.

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Causal judgements concerning the tendencies of particular mental qualities, those which is clearly causal.

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Right. That's how we identify virtues and vices by the tendencies of mental characteristics.

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And Hume here puts those tendencies unambiguously on the side of reason.

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So again, you simply can't say Hume has the same view about causation that he does about morality, it's it's quite different.

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You might still want to say, well, there is nevertheless a projective element in Hume's theory, and that's true.

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But it's not a deep projective element. It's not that humans doing some crazy realist construction of truth in the way that Simon Blackburn suggests.

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Incidentally, I think a modern human, you know, might want to go that way, but it's not, I'm saying it's not the way that human goes.

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I think the reason Kim's theory looks projective is still has a project of his tone is simply because he's an empiricist.

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And when he is trying to identify the source of ideas which are not straightforwardly sensory, he has to look inside.

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He's got to find the source of those ideas from reflection since they're not sensory ideas.

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So not surprisingly, he finds the impression of necessary connexion in something, in turn the tendency to make inferences.

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He finds our impressions of morality, moral and ethical,

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ethical that give rise to moral and ethical ideas in terms of certain sentiments, approval and disapproval and so forth.

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So there is an element of projection there, but I think it just comes from the empiricism, I don't think it's anything deeper.

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OK. So much for an interpretative points.

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I do want to highlight an important outcome from Hume's discussion.

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He's we've already seen that he comes up with two definitions. He applies them to draw corollaries.

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He applies them in order to solve problems like liberty and necessity.

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But he also comes out with a positive view about which we should ascribe.

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Causation, all objects which are found to be constantly conjoined are upon that account,

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only to be regarded as causes and effects, the constant conjunction of objects constitutes the very essence of cause and effect.

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Two particulars of essential to necessity is the constant union and the influence of the mind,

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wherever we discover these, we must acknowledge the necessity. So to sum up.

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This is not a sceptical account of causation. This is a positive account of its nature.

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So to finish off, then part one, part three, we get the reason of animals.

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Hume's discussion in the region of animals is basically saying that the.

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The animals in fur inductively in much the same way as we do, and this is used to corroborate his account of how we do it.

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He's given an account of inductive causal reasoning which appeals to habit or custom rather than any kind of rational insight.

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And he points out that that fits very, very well with the reasoning of animals.

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So the analogy between us and animals corroborates it.

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A point I just want to draw your attention to is that no fewer than three parts of the treaties end with sections comparing humans and animals.

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This is one of the three. And there's another section, treaties to three,

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which ends saying that the analogy between humans and animals is so obvious that there's no need to discuss it.

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So you've got four parts of the treaties, essentially where Hume hammers home at the end.

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This message of similarity between humans and animals It's not surprising to find that Hume inspired Darwin when he was trying to work out.

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The explanation for evolution came up with natural selection, of course.

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OK, so here is him pointing out the analogy between humans and animals.

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And that's how book one part three ends. And now we're going to go on to book one part for.

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We're just going to make a start on this in this lecture, we'll see once the argument of one for one,

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which is an extremely important argument from the point of view of human interpretation,

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less important in the sort of subsequent history of philosophy.

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And then we will go on and just start on one or two of scepticism with regard to the senses,

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which is one of the most famous discussions of humans and has been extremely influential.

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OK. So first of all, of scepticism with regard to reason.

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So the argument starts like this, suppose I am a mathematician and I come up with some demonstrative argument.

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Most of the arguments in maths, you think demonstrative and virtually all interesting demonstrative arguments are in maths.

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OK, so I solve some equation or whatever with maybe, say, 10 lines of reasoning or something like that.

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OK, let's accept that the rules of demonstration are certain and infallible.

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Does that mean I will be 100 percent confident of the result of my calculation?

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Well, no, because I probably have experience of having made mistakes from time to time.

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So I'm not going to be 100 per cent confident.

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So knowledge degenerates into probability, what you might have thought would give total certainty becomes uncertain.

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So we always to correct the first judgement derived from the nature of the object that is the mathematical judgement

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by another judgement derived from the nature of the understanding that is my experience of having made errors.

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But how much adjustment should I make? I mean, suppose I'm trying to solve a quadratic equation and suppose I am wondering how confident I can be.

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Maybe something depends on it. Maybe whether I get the result right or wrong will make a difference to me financially.

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Or maybe I'm trying to calculate how much I should be prepared to pay for insurance against getting it wrong.

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So it might matter to me what the probability is.

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Well, I'm likely to go by the history, you know, how have I done in the past and I might reckon, well, I've been 95 percent accurate.

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How confident can I be in that judgement of ninety five percent accuracy?

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Because now I think about it, although I think I've been 95 percent accurate.

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I might have judged that wrong. So I need to make another judgement about the accuracy of my judgement about the accuracy of my faculties.

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We're obliged by our reason to add a new doubt derived from the possibility of

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error in the estimation we make of the truth and fidelity of our faculties.

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Well. I reckon that second judgement, the 95 percent one, I'm kind of pretty confident about that,

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you know, plus or minus one percent each side by maybe two percent.

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Well, according to whom, this second judgement has to weaken the evidence left by the first judgement, this decision,

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though it should be favourable to our preceding judgement being founded only on probability must we can

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still father our first evidence and must itself be weakened by a fourth doubt of the same kind and so on.

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In infinitum. Even the fastest quantity must in this manner, be reduced to nothing.

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All the rules of logic require a continuing diminution. And at last, a total extinction of belief and evidence.

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Now that's rather quick. All right.

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That's extremely quick. He said. We've got to adjust our mathematical, you know, 100 percent judgement.

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To take account of our fallibility. That seems very reasonable.

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Yes, OK, I'm only 95 percent sure because 19 times out of 20 in the past, I have got quadratic equations right?

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But then he's saying, I should ask how confident I am about that 19 out of 20 judgement.

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And then I've got to ask how confident I am about the judgement of how accurate I am in that 19 out of 20 judgement and so on.

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So he's just taking it for granted now that we've gotten an iteration,

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set up a vicious regress whereby our confidence is going to be further and further diminished.

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We'll come back to that in a moment. Let's ask, does Hume actually accept the argument?

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Well, he says, no, he doesn't accept it. He actually thinks it's a good argument, but he finds himself unable to accept the conclusion.

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The conclusion you see is that we shouldn't have any belief at all because he started with a demonstrative argument.

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He showed that even in the case of demonstration, we shouldn't be 100 percent certain, and that kind of seems reasonable.

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So that reduces it to probability. And then, he says, whenever we make a probable judgement, either about a demonstration or about anything else,

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we should start iterating by asking ourselves how confident we are in the judgement that we've

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made and then asking ourselves how confident we are in that judgement of confidence and so on.

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But he himself finds himself unable to relinquish all belief nature by an absolute

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an uncontrollable necessity has determined to judge as well as to breathe and feel.

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Nor can we any more for better viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller

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light upon account of their customary connexion with the present impression.

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So when we see any followed by B again and again and we see a we cannot forbear viewing,

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be in a stronger and full of light expecting B than we can hinder ourselves from thinking as long as

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we are awake or seeing the surrounding bodies when we turn our eyes towards them in broad sunshine.

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So nobody is so sceptical as to be able to actually relinquish belief, and Hume can't.

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So why is he giving this strange argument, this sceptical argument,

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which suggests that we should relinquish all belief if he himself is then going to say,

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yeah, but I don't actually accept I can't actually act on this conclusion.

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Well, my intention in displaying so carefully the arguments of the fantastic set of Iranian sceptics is only to make the reader sensible

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of the truth of my hypothesis that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom,

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and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cognitive part of our natures.

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So. He's presenting this as backing up his argument about induction when discussing induction.

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He came to the conclusion that we can't help believing that the future will resemble the past, even though we can't provide any good reason for that.

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We just find ourselves believing things in accord with custom.

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He's now saying actually, a similar message applies in the case of reasoning in general.

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But if we were to follow logic, we would relinquish all our beliefs.

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But actually, we can't do that. Nature forces us to have beliefs.

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So what's Hume's explanation, then, of how the iterative argument fails to move us?

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I answer that after the first and second decision, as the action of the mind becomes forced and unnatural.

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And the idea is faint and obscure, though the principles be the same.

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Yet the influence on the imagination weakens. Now that does seem quite plausible, I leave aside whether it's a good argument.

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That you can see that the argument gets progressively more and more difficult to grasp and keep hold of

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when you're thinking about how confident you are in a judgement of confidence about how confident you are,

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about a judgement of confidence about, you know, dot dot dot.

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It really gets quite difficult to keep hold of what is what you're supposed to be thinking about.

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And it is plausible that when you get a very complex argument that has less effect on

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us than a very immediate argument because we find it more difficult to get hold of.

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So according to whom we are saved by a trivial property of the fancy.

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We're saved from total scepticism only by means of that singular and seemingly trivial

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property of the fancy by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things.

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Now that's going to be very important when we come to the final section of book one.

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That is the conclusion of this book. This result plays a very, very important role.

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So the argument of one for one, although, frankly, most people don't take it terribly seriously is a philosophical argument,

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does have a very big impact on humans attitude to scepticism in the treaties.

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OK. Is the argument actually any good? Well, no, I think the first stage is reasonable enough.

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OK, I make a mathematical judgement. Experience suggests to me that I go wrong about five per cent of the time, so I adjust my credence to 95 percent.

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That seems sensible. Then it occurs to me that my estimates of five percent might be wrong.

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But why should that make me assume that my estimate is likely to be too optimistic?

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It might be too pessimistic. It might turn out when I check that I've actually been ninety seven percent reliable.

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So why should thinking about how reliable my estimate was, make me adjust my credence down?

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Now, some defenders of human David Owen has written and heroically trying to defend Hume's argument, I don't think successfully, but I would advise.

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And it's a good, good piece to read if you want to see how it might be defended.

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I mean, he suggests that what Hume has in mind is that the more we, as it were, go down the iteration,

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our view of the probability sort of spreads out so it becomes completely indeterminate between zero and one.

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I don't actually think that fits with Hume's view of probability, Hume doesn't think in terms of ranges of probability,

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he thinks in terms of a particular level of diversity, for example.

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And it's not clear to me that it's it's coherent either. But in any case, the case for iteration seems very weak.

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I mean, when Hugh motivates the argument at the beginning and says we shouldn't be 100 per cent confident he does so

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by talking about how we should think of the history of the instances in which our reason has gone wrong.

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So when I solve the quadratic equation, Hume is saying, well, the moment think about all those occasions when you've gone wrong.

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Make a sort of history of the instances and adjust your credence accordingly.

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OK, so I did that. I remembered I was 19 out of 20 reliable with them, so I adjusted my credence to 95 percent.

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And there's no argument here that he's being sceptical about memory or about records.

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So it's not at all clear why I should get trapped in this iterative regrets.

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Ultimately, it seems I've got a good reason for some uncertainty about the original judgement.

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If my history of calculation shows that I sometimes go wrong, but there's no reason for going on to further and further levels.

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So I don't think Hume's argument is a good one. I mean, most people don't think it's a good argument,

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but it is an interesting one in the impact it has on Hume's philosophy will be coming back to that in the last lecture.

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OK, so much for one, for one, a very important section in terms of humans philosophy when he wrote the treatise.

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By the way, it's an argument that completely disappears after the treaties.

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I think Hume came to realise probably that it's not a very good argument.

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And given the destruction that it wreaks later in the treaties, I think he did well to try to dispose of it.

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Now on to scepticism with regard to the census, this is a very big section, it's a very complicated section, a very famous section.

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I'm just going to give a relatively brief account of its main highlights and will only

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be starting on it today will come back to it in the beginning of the next lecture.

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OK. So Hume starts out in one for two by repeating the message of one for one that the sceptic continues to believe,

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even when his beliefs cannot be defended. Sceptical arguments do not actually stop us believing.

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So we may well ask what causes induce us to believe in the existence of body, but tis in vain to ask whether there be body or not.

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That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.

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So. Here he's announcing that his intention is simply to investigate what causes us to believe in external bodies, external objects.

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He's not, he says, going to ask whether external bodies actually exist.

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But one of the things that's very confusing about this section is that by the end of it, Hume's attitude seems to have changed.

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I began with promising that we ought to have an implicit faith in our senses, but.

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To be honest, having gone through all this complex argument, I feel myself at present of a quite contrary sentiment.

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And the more inclined to repose no faith at all in my senses or rather imagination than to place in it such an implicit confidence.

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So when you read the section, it's important to realise that there's a dynamism in it.

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All right. It starts out in one place. Apparently complacently taking for granted, that body exists.

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But then it goes through the analysis of the causes that make us believe in body and when he's come to the end of that analysis.

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Hume actually feels that these have seriously sceptical implications.

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We end up believing in body for no good reason at all. And in fact, the conclusion is that the belief in body is completely incoherent.

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But the same kind of dynamism, incidentally, comes in the final section of Book one, the conclusion of this book where again,

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we see Hume's views apparently changing during the course of the discussion that makes it quite difficult to pin down exactly what his views are.

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And it obviously opens all sorts of interpretative questions.

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I mean is, is Hume deliberately choreographing things to go through a charade of changes of mind?

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Or is it genuine? Is it that as he's writing it, he is really changing his mind and this is something on which scholars can have different views?

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OK, then to go back to the beginning of 142 and how the discussion starts out, it is quite carefully structured.

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The belief in body gets analysed into two aspects. There is continued existence of body and distinct existence, so.

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When I if I look at something an object, turn away, look back.

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I believe that the object has continued in existence when I wasn't looking at it.

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And I believe that it's distinct from my perceptions of it. He remarks that these two characteristics plausibly imply each other.

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I think it continues precisely because I think it's distinct from my perception.

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Oop, sorry. He then goes on to to say what he's now going to try to do.

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He's going to consider whether it be the centrist reason or the imagination that produces the opinion of a continued or distinct existence.

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These are the only questions that are intelligible on the present subject for us to the notion

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of external existence when taken for something specifically different from perceptions.

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We have already shown its absurdity. OK, we'll come back to this.

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But notice that there's a reference there to treat one to six.

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That's of the idea of existence and of external existence. We've not said much about that yet.

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It becomes important later on.

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What he's saying here is that because all of our ideas are derived from impressions, when we try to think about an external object,

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the only ideas we have available to think about it are ones that are copied from impressions.

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So if we try to think of an an external object as something completely different from impressions, we can't do it.

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We simply don't have the ideas available. OK, so we've got this question, is it since his reason or the imagination that gives us the belief in body?

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Well, Hume says it can't be the senses.

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Now this can seem a little paradoxical because you think you know the discussion is of scepticism with regard to the senses.

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It's all about the senses aren't beliefs in external bodies a paradigm of the beliefs that we get through the senses?

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Well, at least in this part of the section, Hume is thinking of the senses purely as sources of impressions.

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So a way of parsing this is can we get the belief in external bodies purely from our impressions?

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And the answer is no, because impressions, just all bear impressions.

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They cannot point beyond themselves. And part of the reason that they can't do it is that our impressions have a sort of transparency,

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an impression just is the way something appears to the mind.

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So it is what it is when it is, as it appears, all sensations are felt by the mind,

386
00:47:29,480 --> 00:47:35,810
such as they really are, since all's actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness.

387
00:47:35,810 --> 00:47:40,280
They must appear in every particular. What they are.

388
00:47:40,280 --> 00:47:44,990
So Hume adopts a certain transparency towards our perceptions, impressions and ideas.

389
00:47:44,990 --> 00:47:55,780
And because of that transparency, it's not possible for an impression somehow to point beyond itself.

390
00:47:55,780 --> 00:48:03,770
Now, you might think that it's relatively unproblematic for our senses to present things as external to our body.

391
00:48:03,770 --> 00:48:09,350
But of course, that presupposes that we have identified our body to start with.

392
00:48:09,350 --> 00:48:19,680
And Hume points that out. And he adds various other considerations that I've alluded to there.

393
00:48:19,680 --> 00:48:25,260
Let's go on to reason. The senses can't give this belief in external bodies, he says.

394
00:48:25,260 --> 00:48:27,150
What about reason?

395
00:48:27,150 --> 00:48:39,840
Well, children, peasants, the vulgar in general believe in the external world, but they do so without consulting philosophical reason.

396
00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:47,250
So philosophy informs us that everything which appears to the mind is nothing but a perception and is interrupted in dependence on the mind.

397
00:48:47,250 --> 00:48:53,970
Whereas the Volga confound perceptions and objects and attributes a distinct continued existence

398
00:48:53,970 --> 00:48:59,970
to the very things they feel or see the sentiment then as it is entirely unreasonable,

399
00:48:59,970 --> 00:49:08,520
must proceed from some other faculty than the understanding. Notice that Hume seems to be equating here reason and good reason.

400
00:49:08,520 --> 00:49:17,630
But what he's saying about the Volga is this and you might initially find this very peculiar.

401
00:49:17,630 --> 00:49:23,000
He's saying that the vulgar equate impressions and objects.

402
00:49:23,000 --> 00:49:33,160
And you might think that means that the vulgar think that sensory impressions are objects.

403
00:49:33,160 --> 00:49:36,580
I would put it the other way round, I would say the vulgar on humans,

404
00:49:36,580 --> 00:49:48,470
do you think that we directly perceive external objects so they fail to draw a distinction between impressions and objects?

405
00:49:48,470 --> 00:49:56,210
Now, obviously, that could be debated, but it's perhaps plausible that they do do that it requires a bit of philosophical

406
00:49:56,210 --> 00:50:01,460
thinking to distinguish between the things that immediately appear to your mind,

407
00:50:01,460 --> 00:50:06,290
the impressions that is the sensory impressions and the objects.

408
00:50:06,290 --> 00:50:13,250
Anyway, Hume saying the vulgar don't draw that distinction. However, that means they're simply wrong.

409
00:50:13,250 --> 00:50:20,550
So. They're clearly not getting their belief from reason.

410
00:50:20,550 --> 00:50:25,380
But suppose we philosophers and we do distinguish between perceptions and objects.

411
00:50:25,380 --> 00:50:36,910
So when I see a chair, I have a perception in my mind of a chair and I postulate that there is an object which is giving rise to that perception.

412
00:50:36,910 --> 00:50:42,300
So I'm drawing a distinction between the the thing that is immediately present to my mind.

413
00:50:42,300 --> 00:50:44,370
That's the perception and the object.

414
00:50:44,370 --> 00:50:53,810
So this is the kind of indirect realism that's associated with, for example, John Locke, John Locke would have been the obvious example.

415
00:50:53,810 --> 00:51:01,430
But according to him, even in this case, we cannot justify the belief in the external object by reason.

416
00:51:01,430 --> 00:51:09,110
And here Hume is appealing to his own analysis of a probable reasoning.

417
00:51:09,110 --> 00:51:14,120
The only way we can reason from one object to another human thinks is on the basis of a causal relation.

418
00:51:14,120 --> 00:51:20,270
The only way we can establish a causal relation is by seeing a constant conjunction between A and B.

419
00:51:20,270 --> 00:51:27,410
But in this case, I'm directly acquainted with my perceptions, but I'm never directly acquainted with an object.

420
00:51:27,410 --> 00:51:33,500
I see a the perception, but never the object, so I can't establish a causal connexion,

421
00:51:33,500 --> 00:51:43,460
and therefore I cannot get an argument from probable reason for the existence of external objects.

422
00:51:43,460 --> 00:51:53,330
Notice that here Hume is clearly assuming that if we could get a probable argument from perceptions to objects,

423
00:51:53,330 --> 00:52:04,020
that would count as an instance of reason, so he's clearly treating inductive causal reasoning as an operation of reason.

424
00:52:04,020 --> 00:52:08,520
OK, so the belief in external objects can't come from the senses, it can't come from reason.

425
00:52:08,520 --> 00:52:17,330
It must be due to the imagination. And then the question is how does the imagination give rise to this belief?

426
00:52:17,330 --> 00:52:22,160
Well, according to him, there are two main factors in our perceptions that give rise to it.

427
00:52:22,160 --> 00:52:27,950
One of them is constancy. One of them is coherence. And here is where we'll end today.

428
00:52:27,950 --> 00:52:40,190
So we'll go on from the slide next time. Basically, humans account is that when I see an object and I turn away and I look back.

429
00:52:40,190 --> 00:52:46,670
There is a constancy, the perception that I get of that object is very similar to the perception I had before.

430
00:52:46,670 --> 00:52:56,130
And that leads me into the illusion that the perception the impression has continued in existence, even what while I was looking away.

431
00:52:56,130 --> 00:53:04,260
So that's constancy coherence. He gives the example of a fire where I light a fire.

432
00:53:04,260 --> 00:53:10,530
Maybe I fall asleep and then when I wake up, I look at the fire and it's changed, of course, but it's changed in a coherent way.

433
00:53:10,530 --> 00:53:13,980
It's changed in the way that fires standardly change.

434
00:53:13,980 --> 00:53:21,240
There's evidence of burning this charcoal there instead of wood and a smaller volume and so forth.

435
00:53:21,240 --> 00:53:31,050
So because I see constancy and coherence, that is what me leads me to believe in external objects.

436
00:53:31,050 --> 00:53:38,040
Notice that there is a passage where Hume seems to gesture towards the idea of inference that the best explanation

437
00:53:38,040 --> 00:53:45,210
that is the thought that postulating external objects gives the best explanation of this constancy and coherence.

438
00:53:45,210 --> 00:53:47,700
But human doesn't actually go that way, as we've seen.

439
00:53:47,700 --> 00:53:54,930
He says no reason can't be the source of this, because only constant conjunction and causal relations can do that.

440
00:53:54,930 --> 00:54:02,400
I think it's a bit of a shame that he didn't think in terms of inference the best explanation which might have provided a more plausible,

441
00:54:02,400 --> 00:54:10,830
rational account of how the belief could come about. But as we will see, Hume actually says the belief comes about through the imagination.

442
00:54:10,830 --> 00:54:17,160
But again, constancy and coherence leads us to towards that belief.

443
00:54:17,160 --> 00:54:23,722
So I'll explain that further next time. Thank you very much.