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Okay. Now what I'm going to do is to start right at the beginning with the theory of ideas,

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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.

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And we're going to be going on to book one Part two, where the theory of Ideas figures pretty heavily.

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But here are some preliminaries. I've already mentioned John Locke's essay concerning human understanding.

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He defines an idea like this whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks.

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And that's supposed to include all types of thinking, perception, feeling, contemplation.

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So when I see something, maybe I look at that light over there and I see it.

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I have an idea in my mind if I feel pain, that's an idea.

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If I think about what's going on in my mind or contemplate something else, that's an idea.

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Now? HUME I think reasonably thinks that this usage is too broad and he suggests a different terminology.

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So he coined the term impression, and an impression is a sensation or a feeling.

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So, for example, if I see the blue sky, I smell a flower, I feel angry.

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Those are impressions and they are distinguished from ideas, and ideas are essentially thoughts.

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So if I think about the sky, that's an idea as opposed to seeing it, which is an impression.

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Humaneness is the term perception for anything, which is either an impression or an idea.

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So where Locke could use the idea, the word idea for whatever is in the mind, what a man thinks.

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HUME uses the term perception. Perception is a more general term,

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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.

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Humour's using it more generally. Impressionism divides into two kinds ideas impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection.

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So some impressions come directly from sensation.

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If you look at something yellow, you get the impression of yellow.

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But other impressions only come when you think or reflect on what's going on in your mind.

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So those are impressions of reflection. For example, I may think about something I desire, and then that impression of desire.

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That feeling comes as a result of thinking about something else.

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So that's the secondary impression and impression of reflection.

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Now when he talks about impressions of reflection, he tends to say that they are all passions or emotions.

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And incidentally, HUME isn't terribly consistent on this terminology.

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You might think when he says they're either patterns or emotions, he must be drawing a distinction between passions and emotions.

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Unfortunately, sometimes when he writes about these things, he seems to be using the word pattern and emotion equivalently.

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This is not the last time that we will find humour using more than one word to mean apparently the same thing.

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And it can be confusing.

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But then he writes, when he talks about impressions of reflection, he normally is thinking about what we would call feelings or desires.

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And there's a little bit of a problem there, as we'll see later, because he seems to be leaving something out.

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Suppose, for example, that I suggest the notion of an argument or reasoning or belief.

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Those all look like the sorts of things that we are aware of going on in our minds.

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But they're not really feelings. They're not really desires.

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So there is a risk here that humans categorisation is a little bit narrow.

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He seems to be thinking on the model of sensation. Okay, sensation.

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Straight, straightforward enough. You see a colour. See the colour? Yellow. Right, fine.

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That just impinges on my mind and I get that sensation. Now, feeling is a bit like that.

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Okay. I feel hot. Hmm. Yeah. That's kind of halfway, isn't it?

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Halfway between a sensation and a feeling. Now I feel angry.

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Oh, a bit more complicated because I'm feeling angry at something.

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But let's leave that aside. But once you talk about things like belief, that doesn't look like a feeling at all.

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But we'll see that sometimes you just talk about it as a feeling.

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And I think what's going on here is simply that he's got a rather impoverished view of the contents of the mind.

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He started out with this model of everything being a perception, either an impression or an idea.

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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.

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He shoehorn it into the box of internal impressions, so we'll come up against examples of that later.

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So what's the distinction between impressions and ideas?

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Well, in his official statements, as it were, human tends to give the impression he used the word.

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But the distinction between them is based purely on force and liveliness.

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All of the sections of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct times, which are actually called impressions and ideas.

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The difference betwixt these consists in the force and liveliness with which they

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strike upon the soul and make their way into our thoughts or consciousness.

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Those which end with most force and violence, we may name impressions.

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But who owns teams? But if things aren't always that simple, sometimes our thoughts can be as vivid as our impressions.

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This example is inspired by my daughter during the recent vacation.

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One night I was woken by a blood curdling scream and it turned out that she was dreaming of being attacked by spiders,

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which for her would be about the worst thing that could possibly happen in the world.

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Now compare the force and vivacity of a thought like that.

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With the fulsome vivacity of a sensation such as watching paint dry, which is more forceful and vivacious.

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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.

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On the other hand, if you compare impressions and ideas in detail, it doesn't seem to hold up.

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A friend of Hume's put another similar problem to him, and he is textiles.

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Show some awareness of this sort of issue.

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So sometimes he says things like this, I believe it will not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction.

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Every one of himself will readily perceive the difference between feeling and thinking.

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Now, that gives the impression that the difference between the two is not just a matter of force and vivacity.

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Essentially, when he talks about impressions, he's trying to capture feeling and sensation.

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When he talks about ideas. He's trying to capture that thinking.

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And I think in general, we understand best if we take this as the real basis of the distinction rather than force and vivacity.

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Now some of our ideas can be divided up into components.

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So for example, suppose you see an apple and maybe you give it a smell, make you taste it,

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and all these different components of the Apple impression can be divided up.

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So when you when you sense an apple, you have a complex impression.

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But you can divide it up into simpler parts.

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We'll be seeing quite a lot more about that next week. Notice that the shape of an apple is itself complex.

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So you've got the round bit. Maybe you've got the store. And again, each of those can be divided up further.

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Having divided up our ideas into simpler parts. We can put those parts together in different ways.

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So, for example, we can take the idea of gold and a mountain.

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Put those together. Get the idea of a golden mountain. The idea of a horse and a horn.

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Put those together. We get the idea of a unicorn. And we can invent all sorts of strange, imaginary things.

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Like a banana. Or the shape of the banana.

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The taste of an apple.

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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.

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So I got the complex impression of a banana, most of which is copied from here.

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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.

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He suggests that if we do this business of dividing up our ideas into simpler paths,

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if we carry on doing that, eventually we'll come to ideas or impressions that are perfectly simple.

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This is not uncontroversial. If you actually imagine trying to do it in practice,

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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.

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Next week. That's any rate.

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He thinks in the treaties at least that this can be done.

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Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admits of no distinction nor separation.

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The complex of the contrary to these and make is to be distinguished into part.

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Interestingly, in the inquiry, he seems less committed to this. He does talk a little bit about simpler or more complex ideas,

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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.

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Back to the origin of Ideas and Locks essay the whole of the book.

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One of Locke's essay is devoted to arguing against innate ideas and principles.

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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.

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Locke wants to say against that that all of our ideas are derived from experience,

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and the bulk of the essay, or at least a major part of it, is in book two.

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Book2 is the part probably which you like to study most if you study Locke.

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What he's doing there is explaining how all the various ideas that we have can be explained is coming from experience.

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Many, myself included, actually think you're probably better off without one of Locke's essay.

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The real work is done in book two.

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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.

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If you can give a good example explanation for the origin of all our ideas,

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which explains that nature and how we get them and when we don't get them and so forth,

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we have then a good psychological account of what's going on, and there's no need to postulate any unique ideas.

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Incidentally, just in passing this distinction between those who think there are innate ideas and those who deny it is probably the biggest

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distinction between those who are commonly classed as rationalists and those who are commonly classed as empiricist within that period.

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Personally, I think it's a very misleading distinction, but if you want a basis for it, this would be the main basis.

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In general, trying to categorise philosophers in this way is not terribly helpful.

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And if you look at somebody like Malabar, who's a follower of Descartes in many ways classed as a rationalist.

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Look at Berkeley, who is one of the paradigm empiricists.

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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.

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But in this respect, when it comes to idea empiricism, that is our ideas innate or do they come from experience?

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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.

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All are simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions which are corresponding to them and which they exactly represent.

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Now, that's a pretty big claim, and he's making that claim in the very first section of the treatise, seventh paragraph.

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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.

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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.

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At the inquiry, HUME actually puts in a footnote saying basically that this doctrine that all ideas

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derive from impressions is essentially a clarification of what Locke was saying.

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Those who deny any ideas. This seems to be what they're saying, that really all our ideas come from impressions.

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Just to clarify this a little bit. I mean, suppose somebody were to say that anger is not innate.

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That seems a little bit odd, but it is very,

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very natural in certain circumstances for anger to arise or fear that you stand at the end of a precipice.

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What could be more natural than to feel fear? Possibly we have innate fear of spiders and snakes.

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So it seems rather strange to deny that our impressions, our feelings, have an innate character to them.

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So what you're saying is, look, Locke wouldn't have had any problem with that.

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The real essence of Locke's thinking when he says that all our ideas derive from experience,

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is that all our ideas, in Hume's sense, are derived from impressions.

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So when we send something, when we feel something that can give rise to an idea which we can then use to thinking.

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And that, HUME thinks, greatly clarifies Locke's empiricist doctrine.

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Now this is quite famous, the poppy principle, particularly because of the inquiry.

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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.

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So we get this famous passage.

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When we entertain. Therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea as is but too frequent,

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we need but inquire from what impression is that supposed idea derived?

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And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion.

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So it looks like what he was going to do. Armed with the copy principle.

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All ideas are derived from impressions. These philosophers come out with these supposed ideas.

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HUME I'm going to show that this idea cannot be derived from any impression.

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Therefore, it's bogus. That looks like he's going to do that.

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In practice, he doesn't. In practice, it's actually rather hard to find clear examples of him doing that.

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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.

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So, for example, the most famous case of this is the idea of necessary connection.

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And HUME does not say we have no idea of necessity.

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Not at all. He actually traces what he takes to be the impression of that idea, and he thus actually vindicates the idea.

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He says, There you are. That's the origin of the idea. Now we can see it's nature.

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Again, take the idea of substance. HUME is commonly thought to have dismissed the idea of substance on these sorts of grounds.

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But if you actually look at the text, it's not so clear at all.

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What he says is we have no idea of substance distinct from the collection of properties.

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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?

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This can be controversial, but there aren't that many clear cases where HUME says this is a completely bogus idea.

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I think essence and substantial form are probably the clearest.

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That's only right.

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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.

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What basis does he have for that? Well, he gets two arguments for the copy principle, both in the treaties and the inquiry.

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He seems to be pretty consistent on this. First of all, he says there are no counterexamples.

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All look at all your ideas. Can you see any for which there's not a corresponding impression?

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Well, maybe you've got the idea of a uniform that had no corresponding impression.

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You've never seen a unicorn. Sure. But the idea of a unicorn is made up of simpler ideas which all derive from experience.

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Okay, so have you got any simple ideas that are not derived from impressions that are not copied from impressions?

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I bet you haven't. You can't produce it. And you can, you know.

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Nor can I. There we are. That's a good argument.

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Moreover, not only do we find that there's this correspondence between simple ideas and simple impressions, the impressions always come first.

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They must be the cause of the ideas then, not the other way round.

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Second argument for the coffee principle is that if you take someone who doesn't have the appropriate senses,

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who have no means of getting the relevant impressions, we find they don't have the ideas either.

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So someone who's blind has no visual ideas.

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If you've never tasted pineapple, quite an exotic fruit in that time, of course you wouldn't necessarily have tasted pineapple.

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You can't form any idea of the taste of pineapple. So there we are.

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No impression, no corresponding idea. These arguments aren't actually that strong.

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I mean, I think amongst the arguments that make it into the inquiry, these are probably the weakest.

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And that's a bit of a puzzle. Why are they so weak? Why does he not see the weakness?

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And I suspect it's because, again, we have the lockean orthodoxies.

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More or less. All philosophers in Britain at that time seem to have accepted the doctrine that our ideas are derived from experience.

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Locke's essay had been extremely influential when Thomas read later, 1764,

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wrote his inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense attacking him.

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He saw himself as fighting against a tradition which accepted the theory of ideas and in particular this part of it.

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So maybe HUME was a little bit too complacent.

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Think about that first argument. Look at your simple ideas.

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You can't find any of them. That doesn't have a corresponding simple impression, can you?

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Yes. Well, which one? Essence.

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No, that's bogus idea. That's a bogus idea because it doesn't have a corresponding impression.

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Hang on. Do you challenge me to produce an idea which didn't have a corresponding impression?

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I've done that essence. And now you're saying it isn't a legitimate idea because it doesn't have a corresponding impression.

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You're just taking the question. So actually, that argument just doesn't look like a strong argument.

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It's no good throwing a challenge to people if immediately they rise to the challenge.

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You're just going to dismiss it on the grounds of the principle that you're arguing for.

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What about the second argument? Well, okay.

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It's plausible, isn't it? It's plausible that a blind man who's never seen Red has no idea of red.

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It's plausible. But how do we know? How could you possibly know?

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You go to the blind man and you say, Have you had an idea of red?

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What an idea. What red? Oh, I don't know what that word means.

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I mean, I had all sorts of ideas, but goodness knows what one you're talking about.

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How do you communicate with that person? How do you find out whether they have or haven't had an idea of red?

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There's another problem here, too. I mean, suppose a blind man dream is in red and maybe they do.

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They have a dream which includes some kind of red sensation, but it looks ever so much like humans just going to say,

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oh, well, that's that's an impression, not an idea, because that's what gives them the idea.

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So the first time the red appears in their dream, it's their mind creating an impression.

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What do you say that? I don't know. But it looks like his arguments really are pretty unsatisfactory.

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Certainly the very cursory way in which he presents them is nothing like sufficient to establish them.

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Now, some authors, Jonathan Bennett in particular, suggests that what's going on here is something different from what appears on the surface.

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You presents this as a sort of empirical hypothesis that our ideas derive from impressions.

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Here's some experimental evidence for it. Bennett suggests the arguments are so poor, actually, we ought to read them as doing something different.

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Think back to the blind man where you say to him, Have you got an idea of red?

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And he says, I've no idea what you're talking about. Precisely.

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You cannot understand the word red because you cannot tie it in with your experience.

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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.

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So it does look quite suggestive here, particularly in the light of 20th century logical empiricism and so on.

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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.

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Now. I'm not going to adopt that view. It's interesting that there's a lot of controversy here.

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Don Garrett in his book gave a citation of that, defends him on this.

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And it's an open question to what extent he can be defended.

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The problems don't end there. Immediately after he's presented his arguments, the principal HUME gives a counterexample.

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Very strange, he said. All our ideas are derived from Impressionist.

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Oh, hang on. Here's an exception. And the exception is the famous missing shade of blue.

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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.

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And you imagine all of these shades of blue put in a spectrum from the darkest to the lightest.

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Except there's one missing. There's one shade of blue that he's never encountered.

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This is a gap in the spectrum. And HUME asks, Could he fill that gap?

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Would he be able to form an idea of blue intermediate between the two sides of the gap?

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And he suggests, yes, he probably could. Okay.

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There's this little exception. Never mind. Let's leave that aside and go on.

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What seems a slightly strange way of proceeding.

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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.

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How would you defend him? What would you say about this? Well, I think the most obvious thing to say is something like this.

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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,

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which seems to be the gist of what human Locke's empiricism amounts to,

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then this particular idea is derived from experience, it's derived from mixing ideas,

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if you like, merging ideas which are themselves copied from impressionism.

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So where's the problem? Well, the problem actually comes in humans account of simplicity and complexity.

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The problem is that those two ideas on each side of the gap, those simple images of blue,

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slightly different blues, are both supposed to be simple ideas.

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So if you merge them, what you get must be a complex idea. But hang on a second.

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That idea surely has is just as simple as the others. They're just different shades of blue.

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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,

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at least HUME wants to hang on to the simple, complex distinction.

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But this kind of thing may be part of the pressure that seems to have made him less committed to it.

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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.

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The basic idea is roughly that thinking consists in having ideas or perceptions in human

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sense in front of the mind and to distinguish between the different kinds of thinking.

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Essentially what one looks at is the objects, the ideas.

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You don't think in terms of mental activity so much as these ideas that are on the mental state.

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So seeing a tree is having an impression of the tree in front of the mind.

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Thinking of a tree involves having an idea in front of the mind.

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Feeling a pain is having an impression of pain and so on.

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Now, the problem here is this is a very limited conception of human thinking, particularly when you combine it with the copy principle.

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Because humans copy principle says that all our ideas are direct copies of impressions.

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They just find two copies. And in thinking just is a matter of having ideas in front of the mind.

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Then thinking is just like a fainter kind of perception. So it looks like all thinking is essentially being reduced to perception.

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And again, we can see hints of that in Hume's use of the word perception for the general contents of the mind.

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So we'll see that this leads to difficulties later on.

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Another thing that will be very important later on is Hume's theory of the Association of Ideas.

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He introduces that in Treatise 114.

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In other words, Book one but one. Section four.

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And there he identifies three main principles of association.

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So he wants to say that when we dream, when we tell a story, when we think of one thing followed by another,

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typically our thoughts are led by these three relations and either resemblance,

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contiguity, in other words, closeness in time and place or cause and effect.

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And he is going to explain, as we shall see later, a lot of mental effects in terms of this association of ideas.

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In particular, HUME attributes the Association of Ideas with the formation of a lot of complex ideas.

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And he points out that different languages have very similar complex ideas.

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He suggests this is because there are natural associations of ideas which pull them together to form those complex ideas.

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And we'll be going on later to see what he has to say about these different kinds of complex ideas.

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I shall just end with a reference back to John Locke.

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A very important difference between human his predecessors is the positive role that human gifts to the Association of Ideas.

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And indeed, HUME trumpets this.

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In the abstract, when he's talking about what he's done in the treaties notes is the very strong contrast with John Locke.

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John Locke wants to say that the Association of Ideas is a kind of madness,

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something which leads our thoughts quite contrary to reason humans will see actually

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wants to explain a lot of our reason in terms of the association of ideas.

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That's it for today. See you next week.