Okay. Now what I'm going to do is to start right at the beginning with the theory of ideas,
and I'll be saying quite a lot more about the theory of ideas next week as well, when we're going to be talking about the theory of abstraction.
And we're going to be going on to book one Part two, where the theory of Ideas figures pretty heavily.
But here are some preliminaries. I've already mentioned John Locke's essay concerning human understanding.
He defines an idea like this whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks.
And that's supposed to include all types of thinking, perception, feeling, contemplation.
So when I see something, maybe I look at that light over there and I see it.
I have an idea in my mind if I feel pain, that's an idea.
If I think about what's going on in my mind or contemplate something else, that's an idea.
Now? HUME I think reasonably thinks that this usage is too broad and he suggests a different terminology.
So he coined the term impression, and an impression is a sensation or a feeling.
So, for example, if I see the blue sky, I smell a flower, I feel angry.
Those are impressions and they are distinguished from ideas, and ideas are essentially thoughts.
So if I think about the sky, that's an idea as opposed to seeing it, which is an impression.
Humaneness is the term perception for anything, which is either an impression or an idea.
So where Locke could use the idea, the word idea for whatever is in the mind, what a man thinks.
HUME uses the term perception. Perception is a more general term,
and you need to be a bit careful about that because it's quite natural for us to think of perception as meaning something like a sensation.
Humour's using it more generally. Impressionism divides into two kinds ideas impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection.
So some impressions come directly from sensation.
If you look at something yellow, you get the impression of yellow.
But other impressions only come when you think or reflect on what's going on in your mind.
So those are impressions of reflection. For example, I may think about something I desire, and then that impression of desire.
That feeling comes as a result of thinking about something else.
So that's the secondary impression and impression of reflection.
Now when he talks about impressions of reflection, he tends to say that they are all passions or emotions.
And incidentally, HUME isn't terribly consistent on this terminology.
You might think when he says they're either patterns or emotions, he must be drawing a distinction between passions and emotions.
Unfortunately, sometimes when he writes about these things, he seems to be using the word pattern and emotion equivalently.
This is not the last time that we will find humour using more than one word to mean apparently the same thing.
And it can be confusing.
But then he writes, when he talks about impressions of reflection, he normally is thinking about what we would call feelings or desires.
And there's a little bit of a problem there, as we'll see later, because he seems to be leaving something out.
Suppose, for example, that I suggest the notion of an argument or reasoning or belief.
Those all look like the sorts of things that we are aware of going on in our minds.
But they're not really feelings. They're not really desires.
So there is a risk here that humans categorisation is a little bit narrow.
He seems to be thinking on the model of sensation. Okay, sensation.
Straight, straightforward enough. You see a colour. See the colour? Yellow. Right, fine.
That just impinges on my mind and I get that sensation. Now, feeling is a bit like that.
Okay. I feel hot. Hmm. Yeah. That's kind of halfway, isn't it?
Halfway between a sensation and a feeling. Now I feel angry.
Oh, a bit more complicated because I'm feeling angry at something.
But let's leave that aside. But once you talk about things like belief, that doesn't look like a feeling at all.
But we'll see that sometimes you just talk about it as a feeling.
And I think what's going on here is simply that he's got a rather impoverished view of the contents of the mind.
He started out with this model of everything being a perception, either an impression or an idea.
So when he gets something that is clearly not a sensation but looks like like it's more than an idea, it's something that we're actually aware of.
He shoehorn it into the box of internal impressions, so we'll come up against examples of that later.
So what's the distinction between impressions and ideas?
Well, in his official statements, as it were, human tends to give the impression he used the word.
But the distinction between them is based purely on force and liveliness.
All of the sections of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct times, which are actually called impressions and ideas.
The difference betwixt these consists in the force and liveliness with which they
strike upon the soul and make their way into our thoughts or consciousness.
Those which end with most force and violence, we may name impressions.
But who owns teams? But if things aren't always that simple, sometimes our thoughts can be as vivid as our impressions.
This example is inspired by my daughter during the recent vacation.
One night I was woken by a blood curdling scream and it turned out that she was dreaming of being attacked by spiders,
which for her would be about the worst thing that could possibly happen in the world.
Now compare the force and vivacity of a thought like that.
With the fulsome vivacity of a sensation such as watching paint dry, which is more forceful and vivacious.
So there seems to be a problem here. HUME is saying on the one hand that impressions are more lively than ideas, more forceful and vivacious.
On the other hand, if you compare impressions and ideas in detail, it doesn't seem to hold up.
A friend of Hume's put another similar problem to him, and he is textiles.
Show some awareness of this sort of issue.
So sometimes he says things like this, I believe it will not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction.
Every one of himself will readily perceive the difference between feeling and thinking.
Now, that gives the impression that the difference between the two is not just a matter of force and vivacity.
Essentially, when he talks about impressions, he's trying to capture feeling and sensation.
When he talks about ideas. He's trying to capture that thinking.
And I think in general, we understand best if we take this as the real basis of the distinction rather than force and vivacity.
Now some of our ideas can be divided up into components.
So for example, suppose you see an apple and maybe you give it a smell, make you taste it,
and all these different components of the Apple impression can be divided up.
So when you when you sense an apple, you have a complex impression.
But you can divide it up into simpler parts.
We'll be seeing quite a lot more about that next week. Notice that the shape of an apple is itself complex.
So you've got the round bit. Maybe you've got the store. And again, each of those can be divided up further.
Having divided up our ideas into simpler parts. We can put those parts together in different ways.
So, for example, we can take the idea of gold and a mountain.
Put those together. Get the idea of a golden mountain. The idea of a horse and a horn.
Put those together. We get the idea of a unicorn. And we can invent all sorts of strange, imaginary things.
Like a banana. Or the shape of the banana.
The taste of an apple.
I'd be surprised if it turned out to be one, but I can imagine what it would be like to taste the banana, and it turns out to taste like an apple.
So I got the complex impression of a banana, most of which is copied from here.
And then I add to it an impression that I've got from elsewhere. So Hugh divides all ideas and impressions into simple and complex.
He suggests that if we do this business of dividing up our ideas into simpler paths,
if we carry on doing that, eventually we'll come to ideas or impressions that are perfectly simple.
This is not uncontroversial. If you actually imagine trying to do it in practice,
it becomes very tricky and we'll see that humans view of how it should be done or what it implies has quite profound implications.
Next week. That's any rate.
He thinks in the treaties at least that this can be done.
Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admits of no distinction nor separation.
The complex of the contrary to these and make is to be distinguished into part.
Interestingly, in the inquiry, he seems less committed to this. He does talk a little bit about simpler or more complex ideas,
but he doesn't seem to be so convinced that all ideas are either simple or complex, and I'll be suggesting a reason for that.
Back to the origin of Ideas and Locks essay the whole of the book.
One of Locke's essay is devoted to arguing against innate ideas and principles.
Here his target is clearly people like Descartes. Descartes wanted to argue that we have an innate idea of God and the idea of extension.
Locke wants to say against that that all of our ideas are derived from experience,
and the bulk of the essay, or at least a major part of it, is in book two.
Book2 is the part probably which you like to study most if you study Locke.
What he's doing there is explaining how all the various ideas that we have can be explained is coming from experience.
Many, myself included, actually think you're probably better off without one of Locke's essay.
The real work is done in book two.
If all our ideas can be explained as coming from experience, then the notion that any of them are innate just falls out is redundant.
If you can give a good example explanation for the origin of all our ideas,
which explains that nature and how we get them and when we don't get them and so forth,
we have then a good psychological account of what's going on, and there's no need to postulate any unique ideas.
Incidentally, just in passing this distinction between those who think there are innate ideas and those who deny it is probably the biggest
distinction between those who are commonly classed as rationalists and those who are commonly classed as empiricist within that period.
Personally, I think it's a very misleading distinction, but if you want a basis for it, this would be the main basis.
In general, trying to categorise philosophers in this way is not terribly helpful.
And if you look at somebody like Malabar, who's a follower of Descartes in many ways classed as a rationalist.
Look at Berkeley, who is one of the paradigm empiricists.
You'll find that they're much closer together than almost any other pairing, and yet they're tossed on different sides of this divide.
But in this respect, when it comes to idea empiricism, that is our ideas innate or do they come from experience?
Here, Lock and HUME are definitely on the imperious side, and HUME presents this this copy principle as the first principle of fits his philosophy.
All are simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions which are corresponding to them and which they exactly represent.
Now, that's a pretty big claim, and he's making that claim in the very first section of the treatise, seventh paragraph.
That's quite striking. I think part of the explanation why him goes to this so quickly is it is at that point a pretty orthodox opinion.
Most people are lucky, and most of Hume's audience will be taking Locke as the Orthodox position, not the discredited Descartes for various reasons.
At the inquiry, HUME actually puts in a footnote saying basically that this doctrine that all ideas
derive from impressions is essentially a clarification of what Locke was saying.
Those who deny any ideas. This seems to be what they're saying, that really all our ideas come from impressions.
Just to clarify this a little bit. I mean, suppose somebody were to say that anger is not innate.
That seems a little bit odd, but it is very,
very natural in certain circumstances for anger to arise or fear that you stand at the end of a precipice.
What could be more natural than to feel fear? Possibly we have innate fear of spiders and snakes.
So it seems rather strange to deny that our impressions, our feelings, have an innate character to them.
So what you're saying is, look, Locke wouldn't have had any problem with that.
The real essence of Locke's thinking when he says that all our ideas derive from experience,
is that all our ideas, in Hume's sense, are derived from impressions.
So when we send something, when we feel something that can give rise to an idea which we can then use to thinking.
And that, HUME thinks, greatly clarifies Locke's empiricist doctrine.
Now this is quite famous, the poppy principle, particularly because of the inquiry.
Actually, it was a bit of an irony here. He doesn't use it much in the inquiry, but on the other hand, he makes a lot of noise about it.
So we get this famous passage.
When we entertain. Therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea as is but too frequent,
we need but inquire from what impression is that supposed idea derived?
And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion.
So it looks like what he was going to do. Armed with the copy principle.
All ideas are derived from impressions. These philosophers come out with these supposed ideas.
HUME I'm going to show that this idea cannot be derived from any impression.
Therefore, it's bogus. That looks like he's going to do that.
In practice, he doesn't. In practice, it's actually rather hard to find clear examples of him doing that.
He employs the copy principle a lot in the treatise, but actually it's nearly always to clarify our ideas, not to say that there is no such idea.
So, for example, the most famous case of this is the idea of necessary connection.
And HUME does not say we have no idea of necessity.
Not at all. He actually traces what he takes to be the impression of that idea, and he thus actually vindicates the idea.
He says, There you are. That's the origin of the idea. Now we can see it's nature.
Again, take the idea of substance. HUME is commonly thought to have dismissed the idea of substance on these sorts of grounds.
But if you actually look at the text, it's not so clear at all.
What he says is we have no idea of substance distinct from the collection of properties.
Does that mean there is no idea of substance or does it mean the idea of substance just is the idea of a collection of properties?
This can be controversial, but there aren't that many clear cases where HUME says this is a completely bogus idea.
I think essence and substantial form are probably the clearest.
That's only right.
It looks as though from this very forthright statement in the inquiry, he's going to be using the copy principle as an aggressive weapon.
What basis does he have for that? Well, he gets two arguments for the copy principle, both in the treaties and the inquiry.
He seems to be pretty consistent on this. First of all, he says there are no counterexamples.
All look at all your ideas. Can you see any for which there's not a corresponding impression?
Well, maybe you've got the idea of a uniform that had no corresponding impression.
You've never seen a unicorn. Sure. But the idea of a unicorn is made up of simpler ideas which all derive from experience.
Okay, so have you got any simple ideas that are not derived from impressions that are not copied from impressions?
I bet you haven't. You can't produce it. And you can, you know.
Nor can I. There we are. That's a good argument.
Moreover, not only do we find that there's this correspondence between simple ideas and simple impressions, the impressions always come first.
They must be the cause of the ideas then, not the other way round.
Second argument for the coffee principle is that if you take someone who doesn't have the appropriate senses,
who have no means of getting the relevant impressions, we find they don't have the ideas either.
So someone who's blind has no visual ideas.
If you've never tasted pineapple, quite an exotic fruit in that time, of course you wouldn't necessarily have tasted pineapple.
You can't form any idea of the taste of pineapple. So there we are.
No impression, no corresponding idea. These arguments aren't actually that strong.
I mean, I think amongst the arguments that make it into the inquiry, these are probably the weakest.
And that's a bit of a puzzle. Why are they so weak? Why does he not see the weakness?
And I suspect it's because, again, we have the lockean orthodoxies.
More or less. All philosophers in Britain at that time seem to have accepted the doctrine that our ideas are derived from experience.
Locke's essay had been extremely influential when Thomas read later, 1764,
wrote his inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense attacking him.
He saw himself as fighting against a tradition which accepted the theory of ideas and in particular this part of it.
So maybe HUME was a little bit too complacent.
Think about that first argument. Look at your simple ideas.
You can't find any of them. That doesn't have a corresponding simple impression, can you?
Yes. Well, which one? Essence.
No, that's bogus idea. That's a bogus idea because it doesn't have a corresponding impression.
Hang on. Do you challenge me to produce an idea which didn't have a corresponding impression?
I've done that essence. And now you're saying it isn't a legitimate idea because it doesn't have a corresponding impression.
You're just taking the question. So actually, that argument just doesn't look like a strong argument.
It's no good throwing a challenge to people if immediately they rise to the challenge.
You're just going to dismiss it on the grounds of the principle that you're arguing for.
What about the second argument? Well, okay.
It's plausible, isn't it? It's plausible that a blind man who's never seen Red has no idea of red.
It's plausible. But how do we know? How could you possibly know?
You go to the blind man and you say, Have you had an idea of red?
What an idea. What red? Oh, I don't know what that word means.
I mean, I had all sorts of ideas, but goodness knows what one you're talking about.
How do you communicate with that person? How do you find out whether they have or haven't had an idea of red?
There's another problem here, too. I mean, suppose a blind man dream is in red and maybe they do.
They have a dream which includes some kind of red sensation, but it looks ever so much like humans just going to say,
oh, well, that's that's an impression, not an idea, because that's what gives them the idea.
So the first time the red appears in their dream, it's their mind creating an impression.
What do you say that? I don't know. But it looks like his arguments really are pretty unsatisfactory.
Certainly the very cursory way in which he presents them is nothing like sufficient to establish them.
Now, some authors, Jonathan Bennett in particular, suggests that what's going on here is something different from what appears on the surface.
You presents this as a sort of empirical hypothesis that our ideas derive from impressions.
Here's some experimental evidence for it. Bennett suggests the arguments are so poor, actually, we ought to read them as doing something different.
Think back to the blind man where you say to him, Have you got an idea of red?
And he says, I've no idea what you're talking about. Precisely.
You cannot understand the word red because you cannot tie it in with your experience.
So no matter what's going on in your mind, the idea of red, as in the meaning of the word red, is something that's unknown to you.
So it does look quite suggestive here, particularly in the light of 20th century logical empiricism and so on.
It looks quite tempting to interpret Hume's arguments here as to do with meaningfulness of terms rather than the occurrence of ideas in the mind.
Now. I'm not going to adopt that view. It's interesting that there's a lot of controversy here.
Don Garrett in his book gave a citation of that, defends him on this.
And it's an open question to what extent he can be defended.
The problems don't end there. Immediately after he's presented his arguments, the principal HUME gives a counterexample.
Very strange, he said. All our ideas are derived from Impressionist.
Oh, hang on. Here's an exception. And the exception is the famous missing shade of blue.
So the way this goes is you imagine somebody who's encountered lots and lots and lots of different shades of blue during their life.
And you imagine all of these shades of blue put in a spectrum from the darkest to the lightest.
Except there's one missing. There's one shade of blue that he's never encountered.
This is a gap in the spectrum. And HUME asks, Could he fill that gap?
Would he be able to form an idea of blue intermediate between the two sides of the gap?
And he suggests, yes, he probably could. Okay.
There's this little exception. Never mind. Let's leave that aside and go on.
What seems a slightly strange way of proceeding.
I mean, again, I think I think here actually, it's easier to defend him, but I think we can see little [INAUDIBLE] opening in his armour.
How would you defend him? What would you say about this? Well, I think the most obvious thing to say is something like this.
Look, this isn't really a serious problem. I mean, if what you want to say is that all the materials of our thoughts are derived from experience,
which seems to be the gist of what human Locke's empiricism amounts to,
then this particular idea is derived from experience, it's derived from mixing ideas,
if you like, merging ideas which are themselves copied from impressionism.
So where's the problem? Well, the problem actually comes in humans account of simplicity and complexity.
The problem is that those two ideas on each side of the gap, those simple images of blue,
slightly different blues, are both supposed to be simple ideas.
So if you merge them, what you get must be a complex idea. But hang on a second.
That idea surely has is just as simple as the others. They're just different shades of blue.
So actually, I think it's quite easy to defend. HUME If you're prepared, prepared to relax the simple, complex distinction in the treatise,
at least HUME wants to hang on to the simple, complex distinction.
But this kind of thing may be part of the pressure that seems to have made him less committed to it.
The theory of ideas. Well, the theory of ideas informs a lot of what is going on, both in Locke's philosophy and in humans.
The basic idea is roughly that thinking consists in having ideas or perceptions in human
sense in front of the mind and to distinguish between the different kinds of thinking.
Essentially what one looks at is the objects, the ideas.
You don't think in terms of mental activity so much as these ideas that are on the mental state.
So seeing a tree is having an impression of the tree in front of the mind.
Thinking of a tree involves having an idea in front of the mind.
Feeling a pain is having an impression of pain and so on.
Now, the problem here is this is a very limited conception of human thinking, particularly when you combine it with the copy principle.
Because humans copy principle says that all our ideas are direct copies of impressions.
They just find two copies. And in thinking just is a matter of having ideas in front of the mind.
Then thinking is just like a fainter kind of perception. So it looks like all thinking is essentially being reduced to perception.
And again, we can see hints of that in Hume's use of the word perception for the general contents of the mind.
So we'll see that this leads to difficulties later on.
Another thing that will be very important later on is Hume's theory of the Association of Ideas.
He introduces that in Treatise 114.
In other words, Book one but one. Section four.
And there he identifies three main principles of association.
So he wants to say that when we dream, when we tell a story, when we think of one thing followed by another,
typically our thoughts are led by these three relations and either resemblance,
contiguity, in other words, closeness in time and place or cause and effect.
And he is going to explain, as we shall see later, a lot of mental effects in terms of this association of ideas.
In particular, HUME attributes the Association of Ideas with the formation of a lot of complex ideas.
And he points out that different languages have very similar complex ideas.
He suggests this is because there are natural associations of ideas which pull them together to form those complex ideas.
And we'll be going on later to see what he has to say about these different kinds of complex ideas.
I shall just end with a reference back to John Locke.
A very important difference between human his predecessors is the positive role that human gifts to the Association of Ideas.
And indeed, HUME trumpets this.
In the abstract, when he's talking about what he's done in the treaties notes is the very strong contrast with John Locke.
John Locke wants to say that the Association of Ideas is a kind of madness,
something which leads our thoughts quite contrary to reason humans will see actually
wants to explain a lot of our reason in terms of the association of ideas.
That's it for today. See you next week.