Welcome to the third lecture on David Hume. We're going to be dealing with some fundamental and sometimes quite tricky stuff today,
which is setting the scene for the very well known material that will be coming to mainly next time.
Just a reminder of where we've been. Hume starts from a broadly lock and theory of ideas.
He's got his own version of concept empiricism, but it's very much modelled on Locke.
He modifies Barkley's theory of general ideas, and he's quite distinctive in that respect.
Another way in which he's very distinctive is that he takes a positive view of the Association of Ideas.
Unlike his predecessors and we saw a sketch of his theory of relations that hasn't yet played a big role, but it will in this lecture.
Now treaties one point to space and time, I'm almost going to ignore here that you have an appendix to the handout,
which takes you through 24 slides on space and time more or less, as I delivered them in a series of lectures back in 2010.
Those are actually on the web. So if you want to cover space and time,
you can go to those that for the sake of having more scope within this lecture series to focus on difficult, well known controversial issues.
I'm putting that to one side. Here are some of the highlights of the theory.
And again, essentially what he's doing is applying his copy, empiricism,
the copy principle to ideas of space and time, he's explaining how we get those ideas.
And he's drawing some quite controversial conclusions from how we do that.
OK, so what I'm going to move on to now is Hume's faculty psychology.
Partly because this is one of the most potentially confusing aspects of Hume's philosophy.
We'll see that a lot of his arguments are couched in terms of faculties.
And if you don't know where he's coming from or indeed where he's going to, this can be very disorientating.
So first of all, we're talking here about three of Hume's most famous arguments, the most influential arguments in his treatise.
One of them concerned with induction. One can descend with the external world and one of them concerned with motivation and morals.
So first of all, we're told that inductive inference results from processes of the imagination and is not determined by reason or the understanding.
So humans attributing inductive inference to one faculty imagination rather than another reason or the understanding.
In one four two treaties, one for two, where he comes to deal with the external world.
Our belief in external objects is again attributed to the imagination rather than to reason or indeed since.
And then in book two and book three of the treaties,
we get a famous argument about motivation that reason cannot motivate us alone
and hence morals because morals do motivators cannot be derived from reason.
So three of the absolutely best known arguments of Hume all phrased in terms of what faculty is responsible for some operation.
So here are just some quotations illustrating this at the beginning of the argument concerning induction,
is it by means of the understanding or imagination that we make such inferences?
Are we determined by reason or by association? And then lower down.
We're going to ask the subject of our present enquiry about this is about belief in body external objects,
whether it be the senses, reason or the imagination that produces this opinion.
And in the case of morality, I've got a couple of quotes there from the treaties and one from the moral enquiry that 1751.
OK, so what I'm going to do now is start with a quick summary of the main human faculties in a way that I think is pretty uncontroversial.
Some of it, when we get into the complications about the imagination and reason, is more controversial.
So. We start with the senses, and when Hume talks about the senses, he normally means the external senses sight,
touch, sound, smell, gustatory, taste, and this doesn't mean artistic taste.
All right, we're talking about taste as in your mouth.
And what these faculties do is they provide the mind with impressions, sensory impressions, and of course,
given his coffee principle, those sensory impressions thus provide us with ideas that are copies of those impressions.
Along with the external sensors, we have reflection and reflection.
Hume talked about, as did Locke as a sort of internal sense, and we've seen already that he interprets it somewhat differently from Locke.
But this again presents to the minds impressions in this case.
Impressions of reflection. So we have sources of impressions of sensation and sources of impressions of reflection.
Those are the senses. Next, we come to the imagination.
Now, Hume often calls this the fantasy. So if you see the word fancy, it is typically absolutely a synonym for the imagination.
And Hume, somewhat frustratingly to his readers, goes in a lot for elegant variation.
So you can read a passage of Hume, where in every alternate sentence, he's using the word imagination and in the others he's using the word fancy.
He's simply doing it for the sake of variety. He wants to be an elegant writer.
It's a little bit frustrating to us these days.
When you are writing philosophical essays, your tutors will no doubt tell you use the same word if you mean the same thing.
It may not be as elegant, but it's much easier to understand. So be aware of that.
Now, very importantly, the imagination is interpreted in the early modern period as a faculty of representing quasar sensory ideas,
and Hume very much takes vision as the model.
I mean, vision is in many ways our most important sense when humans thinking about impressions and ideas.
Most of the time, I think he's thinking in terms of visual impressions and ideas.
So I likewise, when discussing these things, will focus on that.
But do bear in mind that you can have quasar sensory images of sound, taste, smell and so on as well?
OK, now, if our ideas are copied from our impressions and here we're talking, mainly let's let's focus on sensory impressions,
external senses, and it follows that all of our thinking is actually imagistic.
We do not have a faculty of pure intellect that the rationalist thought we did.
All of our thinking is being done in terms of queasy imagistic ideas,
in which case it follows that for whom all of our thinking actually is within the imagination as conceived in those days,
because the imagination is the faculty of having and manipulating quasars.
Sensory images. So the imagination not only is our main vehicle of thinking.
It also has certain powers, and the way Hume describes these differs actually in his different works.
But one of the crucial points is one of the crucial things we can do with the imagination is to take our ideas,
divide complexes into symbols, mix them up, form new complex ideas by putting the simplest together in new ways and so forth.
So the imagination plays a very big role in Hume's philosophy.
The memory that's another faculty that represents ideas to us, but it replays ideas to us in the same order.
It doesn't have the freedom of the imagination. Where is in the imagination?
We can cut and paste our ideas and put to get them together in all sorts of novel ways.
The memory replays ideas to us in the same order broadly that they appeared to us.
Of course, sometimes it can make mistakes. But it's not a matter of our choice.
Moreover, the memory presents ideas with more veracity than the imagination.
So we'll come back to that a little bit later.
OK, now the more controversial stuff, so I'm going to start here with the traditional division between reason and will.
So lots and lots of philosophers in in this period, both for quite a long time before and a long time after,
basically divide the human mind into two big domains.
The reason and the will and reason is the faculty by which we learn about the world the way things are.
That's our cognitive faculty and the will is our cognitive faculty.
The will is the faculty which governs our purposes, what we plan to do.
Now, Hume actually very rarely talks about the will of the faculty and what he says is actually a bit misleading,
so let's put that to one side, it's not a very much interest here.
That's much more significant when he comes to talk about the passions in Book two and morality in Book three.
So that isn't the main focus here, but we will have a lot to say about reason or the understanding.
So here is Frances Hutchinson, who had a big influence on Hume.
Hume wrote to Hutchison he sent him copies of the treatise to ask for his view on it.
Their relationship was not a straightforward one because Hume ended up with views that
were very much at odds with Hutchison in various respects and to some extent fell out.
But Hutchison here is writing in 1742. OK, so that he's actually writing.
Less than two years after book, three of the treaties disappeared, which is at the end of 1740.
Writers on these subjects should remember the common divisions of the faculties of the soul.
But there is reason presenting the natures and relations of things antecedent to any act of will or desire.
And the will or the disposition of soul to pursue what is presented is good.
And to shun evil. And then he's clear that we have the senses which report to the understanding or reason.
And we have the passions which report to the will. So you've got two general domains, this finding out about the world, those acting on the world.
OK, so now we're going to see that we've houM the picture with regard to reason and the understanding is a little bit more complicated,
but it's important to see this as the background to which he's reacting.
OK, so I want to lead up to this by raising an issue about the faculties, which is potentially quite puzzling.
Because empiricist, like Locke and Hume tend to be rather sceptical about self, about faculties.
I mean, Locke in his essay,
which is probably the single most influential book on this a lot logical background of Hume's thinking he ridicules faculties,
he says they're a source of error.
He says he wouldn't talk about faculties, except that it would seem like too much affectation not to, because talk about faculties is so fashionable.
One problem with talking about faculties is that it makes it look as though our mind is divided into so many distinct agents.
You know, our reason is doing one thing our imaginations doing something other,
as though we've got little agents in our mind, all acting semi independently.
And in fact, when we talk about the understanding, we should be very clear, we're not talking about a separate agent in the mind.
We are simply talking about the person's capacity to understand. So a faculty is just a name that we give to a power.
Now, Kim basically agrees on this.
And he criticises Scholastica Aristotelian us for using the word faculty as though it gave some insight into things.
So I suppose there's something the Aristotelian doesn't understand.
Well, they can just invent a faculty or occult quality.
They don't.
They need only say that any phenomenon which puzzles them arises from a faculty, and there is an end of all dispute and enquiry upon the matter.
And I've made clear in his play, La Mallard,
Imagineer Sixteen seventy three made a famous parody of this kind of thing, which I think is very vivid here.
He he has a doctor who is asked, Why does opium make one sleep?
And the doctor comes back very knowledgeably? Oh, it's because opium has a soporific faculty.
That's not an explanation. That's just saying opium has the power to make you sleep, so you've got a completely empty explanation.
You're giving a name to this supposed faculty. But that's all you're doing.
It doesn't give any insight. OK, so we would expect him both because of his empiricism and because of his the the lock in background,
we would expect him to be pretty dismissive about faculties.
And yet here he is, presenting three of his biggest arguments, absolutely in terms of faculties.
And the mystery deepens. To say that.
It is opium soporific faculty, which gives it the power to make a sleep that just is trivial.
It's empty. It's just saying opium has this power to make a sleep, and that's why it makes us sleep.
But the conclusions that Hume draws from his famous arguments aren't trivial.
For example, he says that causal inference is due to the imagination rather than reason.
And in one for two, he argues, at least apparently that our belief in objects does not arise from the senses.
It arises from the imagination.
Well, this is very peculiar, because surely our senses are precisely by definition the faculty by which we become aware of things outside.
So how can our knowledge of external bodies not be due to the senses?
Reason is, by definition, is it not a faculty which involves the production of arguments?
And here is Hume saying that some of our most important arguments and inferences, namely inductive ones, don't arise from reason.
So we have a sort of dilemma here, if we say that mental Operation X is due to our faculty of Xingu, that just looks trivial, vacuous, like Molly.
And if we say that X is due to some other faculty, why, it seems to be almost self-contradictory.
So I think it's important to realise that we've got a real puzzle in what's going on in Hume's arguments here.
And when you read these arguments, you can get easily get the wrong end of the stick.
What's going on? Where is Hume going? So I'm I'm addressing this difficulty right now at the beginning because I think having an understanding
of what the options are here will help us a great deal when we come to look at the arguments later.
So I'm going to focus mainly on induction here, so I've mentioned the external world.
We'll put that on one side for the moment. Focus on induction, which is much more immediate to us in one part three.
So an important point to note is one, three, six.
That's the famous argument concerning induction. We'll be looking at it in detail next time.
This argument seems to say induction is not due to reason, it's due to the imagination.
And many people have interpreted that as saying induction then is not an operation of reason.
It's an operation of the imagination. That's a natural way of reading it.
But actually, after one three six, Hume goes on, referring to induction, causal inference, you know,
reasoning from past to future, from observe to unobserved on the assumption that they resemble that kind of reasoning.
He carries on, referring to it as an operation of reason.
So I've given some passages here a human reason includes proofs and probabilities, proofs are just very, very solid.
Inductive arguments where all the evidence is,
is is on one side and very strong when humans discussing the belief in the external world in one for two and one for four.
He talks as though inductive inference is derived from reason.
He says the belief in body isn't derived from reason because it can't be reached by inductive inference.
And that clearly indicates that if it could be reached by inductive inference, it would be due to reason.
When he's coming up to discuss motivation and morality in Book two and book three,
he even says that reason is nothing but the discovery of cause and effect relations,
which is what we do with induction reason in a strict and philosophical sense, discovers the connexion of causes and effects.
And the operations of human understanding include the inferring a matter of fact.
So what's going on here? We've got an argument that seems to say that induction is not an operation of reason.
And then we've got Hume going on and referring to induction as though it is an operation of reason.
Well, there are two popular ways of resolving the paradox.
And the first way is to claim that when humans discussing induction in one three six, when he's saying induction isn't founded on reason there,
he's using some restricted notion of reason, a notion which isn't his own, some kind of rationalist notion of reason or something like that.
And he's saying induction isn't an operation of reason in that sense.
But it is an operation of reason in my David Hume sense. And you can see that various people, myself included, have favoured this interpretation.
Or this kind of interpretation. Very influential in the discussion of human doctrine.
Don Garrett has consistently stood out against this, he says in Hume's text.
You don't find any clear indication of such an ambiguity.
You don't find him saying, Oh, that's that notion of reason.
Now let me bring in my own notion of reason. You can argue that he does it implicitly, and I don't think it's completely implausible.
And evidently I used to believe it. But I have become persuaded over time that on this matter, Garrett was right and I was wrong.
The second possible method of resolution is to find a reading which without postulating any ambiguity and reason or at least any crude ambiguity,
can consider inductive inference to be both a bona fide operation of reason and at the same time, not determined by reason.
Now that you look at that and it seems to start with rather paradoxical, how can inductive inference be an operation of reason?
And yet not be determined by all calls, by all due to, in some sense reason?
It may look just look like a contradiction in terms, but we'll see that there are two ways at least in which you can go.
Garrett goes, one, I go the other. So Don Garrett reckons that when he talks about reason, he just means the faculty of argument or inference.
And when he said when we he says induction is not founded on reason, what he means is induction is a form of inference.
Which we do. But we don't do it because we've seen an argument for it.
So it's a sort of at the first level, it's an operation of reason, but there isn't a second level argument which causes us to do it.
So it's an operation of reason, which is not caused by reason in that sense, that's that's his claim.
And. I take a different view. This is my 2012 paper, and I take reason to be the cognitive faculty,
I've already explained that that is the standard interpretation at the time of people like Hutchison and lots of other philosophers.
And I think there is a way of seeing sense in what Hume says by saying, Here we have a cognitive operation which has a non-cognitive base.
So let's see a little bit about how that might work.
OK, first of all, to clear some ground, it is absolutely and completely clear,
I believe that for human reason and understanding reason and the understanding of one and the same, just like the imagination and the fancy.
There's no controversy about that. It's absolutely clear that Hume uses the imagination and the fantasy equivalently.
I think it's also equally clear that he uses reason and the understanding equivalently.
There are literally dozens of passages.
I've listed ones from the treatise down there, but we can see that in one three six where the argument concerning induction comes up.
When the mind makes an inductive inference, it is not determined by reason,
but by certain principles which associate together the ideas of these objects and unite them in the imagination.
Had ideas, no more union in the fancy than object seem to have in the understanding.
There you see clear, elegant variation. Right? In one sentence, he talks about reason and the imagination.
In the next sentence, he talks about the understanding in the fancy. It is simply a variation of terms.
And as I say, there are lots of cases where human does the same thing.
You see him alternating between reason and the understanding.
Moreover, there are passages which clearly put Hume in the tradition of seeing reason as the cognitive faculty.
So and in all of Hume's main writings, OK,
so in the treatise we've got reason is the discovery of truth and falsehood just the kind of thing that Hutchison would say.
It's the faculty by which we find out what's true.
In a footnote to the enquiry in the first editions, we've got that faculty by which we discern truth and falsehood, the understanding.
In the moral enquiry appendix, we've got reason conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood.
In the dissertation on the passions, we've got reason in a strict sense as meaning the judgement of truth and falsehood.
So we've got plenty of text which line Hume up with this tradition of seeing reason as our cognitive faculty and equivalent to the understanding.
I did a thorough analysis. It's on the David Hume dot org, if you want to look at it, it's not being published, but you can go.
You can see all the results of the analysis. I went through all the passages in Hume where he distinguishes between different faculties.
And there I've listed some of the main results.
Oh, sorry, I want to draw attention to that last one. Hugh never distinguishes between reason and the understanding.
He never distinguishes between either of those in the judgement. I think these are just synonyms.
OK. But what's confusing is that at various points in the treaties, Hume seems to blur the boundaries.
So here are a number of passages where Hume is blurring the boundary between reason or the understanding of the imagination.
The understanding or imagination can draw inferences from past experience will which you.
Look at the quote at the bottom, the understanding that is the general, the more established properties of the imagination.
What? You've been giving all these arguments, Hume, in which you've said,
is this mental operation due to the understanding or reason or the imagination as though these are complete opposites?
Right? Reason or the imagination apparently can't be both.
And now you're saying the understanding or reason just is the general, the more established properties of the imagination.
What's going on here? So you can see how confusing it can be to read these passages and I'm well,
I'm trying to do now is give you the wherewithal when you read these things to to understand what's going on.
OK, so let's go back to what I was saying about the imagination for Hume,
because all of our ideas are impression copy content, they're all images stick.
It follows that all of our thinking must actually take place in the imagination as
traditionally conceived because the imagination is what holds imagistic ideas.
And in that case, when we talk about reason as the cognitive faculty, the faculty by which we find out things about the world and.
That can't be some separate part of the mind, it's got to actually, in some sense, reside within the imagination.
And so when we start drawing distinctions between reason and the imagination, it's not to be drawn in terms of parts of the mind.
The sort of distinct agents that Locke thought of all or rather Locke was criticising humans on board with Locke on that.
It's not distinct agents. Rather, it is different types of principles acting on the ideas in our imagination.
So we need ultimately to draw the distinction between reason and the imagination,
not on the basis of parts of the mind, but on the basis of the kinds of principles that are operative.
And we'll see that plays an important role later on.
When we come to particularly looking at human scepticism and some of the ways in which he expresses the problems that he gets into there,
it's much easier to understand if you've got this clearly in mind.
So associative principles, the kind of principles, you know,
which lead our ideas by causation and resemblance and contiguity, those are paradigmatic, early, imaginative principles.
Our imagination is running on its own power as it were leading us to various thoughts.
Whereas reasoning in the sense of discovering things by putting our ideas together in logical order to to reach new conclusions,
that's going to be paradigmatic cognitive. But it's because the principles on which our ideas are operating are a different kind of principle.
And just to sum this up, the way I interpret human induction is that induction is a cognitive operation.
It's our only cognitive operation for discovering covering matters of fact that we are not perceiving or remembering.
But it is founded on an associative process.
And that's why you can make sense of it as being a cognitive process that has a non-cognitive basis.
And hence I think one can make reasonable sense of what a human is saying about the faculties here.
OK, I spent quite a lot of time on that because it's difficult, I pointed to a lot of passages which illustrate these things,
and it wouldn't be a good idea before the next lecture to go and look through some of those.
Make sure you're you're you're clear on this because I say it's one of the most confusing aspects potentially of Hume's philosophy.
OK, I'm going to be rather briefer about the rest of the content.
So we're moving on now to humans dichotomy and the conceive ability principle.
So we're going back to Hume's theory of relations, you may remember that Hume has a theory of relations.
I illustrated in the last lecture how it is derived from the theory of a of John Locke.
But I said that Hume has his own particular purposes, will now this is this is where we're going.
So Hume claims that all the different kinds of relation that Locke identified can be divided into seven categories.
And he divides the seven categories into two groups.
You've got four relations that I'm going to call constant relations constant is a term that Hugh uses here.
It's not absolutely clear that he means it is a badge for this distinction, but it's a convenient one.
So you've got four constant relations, which are relations that depend entirely on the ideas which we compare together resemblance control,
ryuichi degrees in quality, proportions in quantity or no? And you've got three inconstant relations.
And these are relations that may be changed without any change in the ideas and the
these are supposedly identity relations of time and place and cause and effect.
OK. And Hugh sketches a taxonomy of mental operations, I referred to the appropriate paragraphs.
Go and take a look at those paragraphs and you will see him doing this.
So resemblance control and degrees in quality, these are relations that are discoverable at first sight.
OK. You see one idea. Another idea you see at first sight.
Immediately, they resemble or they don't resemble. So you can be intuitively certain of those.
Proportions of quantity or number. Mathematical operations, mathematical relations are susceptible of demonstration.
OK. Hume has this view that demonstration demonstrative, deductive argument is pretty much confined to mathematics.
At least useful deductive argument is. Identity and relations of time and place are matters of perception rather than reasoning.
Now here you might think that's a little bit odd. Is that is that really true?
I mean, suppose I. I see you today and then I see you tomorrow.
Do I immediately see that you're the same person? Or maybe is that perception it could involve inference, right?
I might not see you so clearly I might. You're not quite sure whether it's you.
I might bring in my knowledge about where you would be, when you might.
Not so obvious that it's really just to do with perception, but anyway, that's what Hume says.
And one of the perhaps the most important upshot of all this is that causation turns out to be the only
relation that can be traced beyond our senses to existence is an object which we do not see or feel.
So Hume's arguing that causation is special. The relation of causation is the only one that can provide a basis for probable argument,
for inductive argument, for argument from observed to unobserved.
And I pointed out at the bottom there that that it helps to have that in mind when you come to one part three.
And it's called of knowledge and probability. And you look at section one and you say, Oh, yeah, well, all right, that's covering knowledge.
I can see that. And then you're expecting to have loads of discussion of probability,
and it goes straight into causation, and probability is hardly mentioned for quite a long time.
Well, in this argument, Hume has claimed to identify probable reasoning and causal reasoning.
OK, so he's got this rather simplistic categorisation of mental operations.
You can see nice, simple theory you might well think suspiciously crude,
but may be the kind of thing that can appeal to a young man who wants to make his
name as a philosopher and hasn't yet had long enough to reflect critically on.
It seems to me to be a pretty hopeless theory, but one that has some superficial attraction.
But you can analyse mental operations in terms of the relations that are involved.
But Hume's main motive for his dichotomy for dividing the relations into the constant
feeling constant is actually to give himself a criterion of demonstra ability.
And he uses it both in respect of the causal maxim and in terms of relations of virtue and vice.
He only uses it twice in the treaties and I've given you the references there.
And in these passages, he seems to be arguing it's not very explicit, but he seems to be arguing from the principle.
Any proposition that is intuitively or demonstratively certain can contain only constant relation.
That's what he seems to be saying.
So if we go back here, you've got the constant relations on the left resemblance, contrary 80 degrees in quality, proportions in quantity.
And no, you've got incompetent relations on the right. You want to know whether some proposition is demonstrable.
Well, one test you can apply is does it contain only constant relations?
If it does, then it may be demonstrable. Otherwise, no.
That seems to be how he's arguing on the causal maxim because it includes the relation of causation, therefore cannot be demonstrated,
remember the causal maxim which is used as a basis for the cosmological argument and is of great interest to you.
But sadly, this is nonsense. And there I have listed four propositions.
If A equals B and B will C, then A equals C. Now that includes the relation of identity.
It's intuitively true. Anything that lies inside a small building lies inside a building that includes relations of space and time.
It's intuitively true every mother is a parent.
That includes causal relations. He was quite explicit that family relations are causal, but it's intuitively true.
Anyone who's paternal grandparents have two sons has an uncle that's demonstratively.
Again, using causal relations.
So it's simply not true that you can assess whether something is demonstrable by looking at the nature of the relations involved.
And by the way, you will know that because you've all studied logic.
And you will be very familiar with the fact that moving around quantifies can change something that is demonstrable to something that isn't.
So take the first formula there. Getting there is some event X, which is such that for all events, y x x is before.
Why? You may think wait a minute, that's probably contradictory because it can't be before itself, but all right.
There is something that precedes every event, let's say therefore for all events, why there is something that precedes it.
OK. That that's that's going to be valid.
But for all why there is something that precedes it does not mean that there is something that precedes everything.
OK. Thomas Aquinas is often accused of making this quantifier a fallacy in one of his cosmological arguments.
Right. So the distinction between if everything had had a prior calls, it doesn't follow that there is something that is a prior calls to everything.
You could have an infinite sequence going all the way back and everything has something prior to it.
But it just goes on and on and on. So I'm just illustrating here that you can have two formulae with exactly the same relations.
One of them is demonstrable in one of them.
Isn't the idea of having a theory of demonstrable ability based on the relations involved is completely and utterly hopeless.
And Hume scholars who try to defend Hume here, as indeed Don Garrett does, I think, are just backing a loser.
We all know that if it was possible, then some great logician in the meantime would have would have done it and may have it.
So I don't think there's any doubt here that Hume is mistaken. Where's the mistake?
Well, actually, it's quite a subtle one. And Jonathan Bennett identified this back in 1971.
He wrote again in its on on it in 2001. I'd more recently added a twist to this.
I think, Ben, it's essentially right. Hume is confusing super vignettes, and analysts in City are not going to say much about this.
I'm just hinting at it there. I'd advise you if you want to delve deeper, go and read any or all of these.
I'm going to leave that on one side. So humans dichotomy.
His theory of relations from the treaties is junk.
It's a nice idea, really imaginative, looked wonderfully elegant way of bringing human operations,
you know, within the scope of a clear theory, but it doesn't work.
Far more significant philosophically is humans conceive ability principle, and that plays a very big role in his philosophy.
And unlike the theory of relations, it survives.
The theory of relations absolutely disappears after the treaties in the enquiry concerning human understanding of 1748,
the theory of relations goes, I just want to point out, by the way, that I am here disagreeing with other scholars.
For example, David Owen and Helen B-BBEE,
who think the theory of relations is the canonical human theory and that the theory you get in the enquiry is a sort of crude simplification.
On the contrary, the theory of relations in the treaties is rubbish.
The theory of logic that you get in the enquiry is actually strong and resilient.
And so I see clearer advance rather than simplification in Hume here.
So the conceivably see principle is pretty well known. Whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence.
Nothing we can clearly imagine is absolutely impossible. And if something is conceivable, if something is clearly conceivable,
not only is it possible, but that means you could not possibly demonstrate its falsehood.
So conceive ability becomes a proof of non demonstra stability.
So forget about the relations involved. Focus on conceive ability.
So very quickly,
I'm just going to refer to the ease in passing Hume's fork is the distinction between relations of ideas on the one hand and matters of fact.
I think you'll all be familiar with this from first your general philosophy.
And I sketched at some points the interesting question is Hume's thought defensible?
It's come under challenge since the middle of the 20th century, Quine, Kritsky,
Putnam and others have challenged it, and I wrote a paper last year, Hume's fork in his theory of relations,
which I go through the logic of Hume's thought in considerable detail all the relevant passages showing
they all fit together and actually discussing how far the recent challenges and there are others as well,
for example, from Girdle and Turing, how far they impact on humans fork.
The overall verdict Hume's four definitely faces challenges.
But it stands up pretty well. And for a theory that was derived in the middle of the 18th century.
It deserves the tremendous influence it had until about the middle of the 20th century
and a lot of the attacks that have come since damage in some ways around the edges.
But the essential message actually retain remains pretty strong.
OK, so I'm going to just going to put that on one side for now.
We will be coming back to the conceive ability principle and its use in humans arguments later.
The sort of take home message of this last bit is in the treaties.
There is a fair amount of logic. This is mistaken.
But fortunately, Hume's most important arguments do not depend on that dubious logic,
they depend on a much more robust logical theory which Hume honed in the enquiry and actually is extremely resilient.
OK, so now what are we going to do is just quickly review the path from here,
from where we've got to up until the discussion of induction, and that is what we're going to focus on next time.
So look, one, part three. Uh, as I said of knowledge and probability.
But actually, most of it, the bulk of it is focussed on trying to trace the origin and nature of our idea of cause and causal necessity.
And this starts in one three two. And it goes all the way to one, three, 14.
And this is just summarising some of the main points. There's no particular quality that characterises causes and effects.
You can't just look at something and say, Oh, it's got such and such a quality. Therefore, it will be a cause.
Cause and effect depends on a relation between the two. OK.
What sort of relation? Well, we normally find that causes are contiguous with their effects and causes are prior to their effects.
This is well known, but notice there are some caveats. I've put the caveats there.
Contiguity and priority turn out not to be quite so straightforward as they might seem.
But crucially, even with contiguity and priority, there's something missing.
Shall we then rest contented with these two relations of contiguity and succession, so succession is just priority, right?
The cause is prior to the effect. The effect succeeds the the cause, shall we rest contented with these as affording a complete idea of causation?
By no means an object may be contiguous and prior to another without being considered as its cause.
There is a necessary connexion to be taken into consideration,
and that relation is of much greater importance than any of the other two above mentioned.
OK, that's obvious, right? The fact that one event occurs prior and contiguous to another doesn't mean that the one is a cause of the other.
What's the extra element that makes that? That, of course, will human saying it's it's the necessary connexion.
It's the fact that that brought about that it was a necessary connexion between them and what?
What's that idea, this idea of necessary connexion? That's the crucial one that we need to hunt down.
We need to find out what impression that idea is derived from in order to understand it better.
And as I suggested in the first lecture,
Hume sees a lot of philosophical value coming out of that and achieving that result of pursuing that search successfully.
So where are we going to look and now Kim's text becomes somewhat odd.
I want to find this crucial element of necessary connexion.
Where shall I look? Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'll just hunt around some neighbouring fields and see if I find something.
Well, OK. That's a way, I suspect, of Hume giving some structure the semi-structured discussion.
He wants to talk about the goals of the maxim. He wants to talk about causal inference.
He can't quite think how to work these into the picture. So he says, Oh, well, let's just look around some neighbouring fields.
The first neighbouring field is the causal maxim we've talked about this before.
A general maxim in philosophy that whatever begins to exist must have a course of existence.
And in this section, Hume argues that it is not intuitively or demonstratively certain the causal maxim cannot be known with demonstrative certainty.
I'm not going to go through that in detail here.
What's confusing here is that the end of this discussion, having shown that the causal maxim can't be proved intuitively or demonstratively,
the next question then should naturally be how experience gives rise to such a principle.
How is it that we come to believe the causal maxim? But as I find it will be more convenient to sink this question in the following.
Why we conclude that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects and why we form an inference from one to another.
We shall make that the subject of our future enquiry will perhaps be found in the end that the same answer will serve for both questions.
OK. When Hume says things like that at the end, by the way,
you can take it as a definite indication that he thinks the same answer will indeed serve for both questions.
What's confusing is that he never comes back to this.
He never returns to the causal maxim. He never comes back and says, There you are the same answer server both.
So one, three, three of the treaties where Hume discusses the causal maxim has been misunderstood by some people.
People have been interpreting humans, denying the causal maxim.
He doesn't, he says, you can't prove it intuitively or demonstratively.
He hints that he thinks it arises from experience.
He hints that that's going to explain it, but he never comes back to it.
He forgets it.
His proofreader wasn't up to finding the missing link there, so there's been some discussion about whether actually human accepts the causal maxim.
I've written at length on this most the vast majority of human scholars down the years of thought that Hume is a determinist.
He does accept the goals maxim. I think that's absolutely right, but it has been contested briefly.
Here are a couple of quotations from letters that Hume wrote,
making clear that he has been misinterpreted by people who think that he denies the causal maxim.
OK, I'm not going to say more about that than. But we saw that he sinks the question of the causal maxim into another question.
And the other question, this is the second neighbouring field. How do we make inductive inferences, how do we make causal inferences?
The agenda is set out, as you see in that paragraph, at the beginning of treaties one three five.
Here, therefore, we have three things to explain. First, the original impression from which a causal inference is made.
Secondly, the transition to the idea of the connected cause or effect that is the causal inference.
And thirdly, the nature and qualities of that idea.
That is the believed idea. So what Hume is doing is saying, I've been looking for this elusive element of necessary connexion.
I've gone through the causal maxim. I didn't get any decisive result there, I'm going to sink that question in another one,
and the question I'm going to ask is what is it that leads us to make causal inferences?
And a typical causal inference starts from something we perceive an impression.
And our mind infers to an idea of an effect, we infer from the impression of the calls to an idea of the effect.
And we come to believe that the effect will happen. So we've got three things to discuss the impression the transition and the living enlivening
of the idea by which it becomes a belief and Hume will indeed follow that agenda.
Treat one, three, five. He talks about the original impression from which we make causal inferences.
It's a little bit confusing because he calls it of the impressions of the senses or memory.
So he's now saying actually that the memory, which we thought was a faculty of ideas actually is a faculty of impressions.
Well, what he means is they're very vivid ideas, the ideas of memory.
We can make causal inferences from memory, and our memory ideas are so vivid that they enable us to do that.
So we might as well call them impressions. And then in one, three six, we come to the famous section of the inference from the impression to the idea.
In other words, of causal inferences.
And this is where we get the issue of induction, which raises for the first time the notorious problem of induction.
And that's where we'll be going next. Thank you.