I. I'm now going to go on to Hume's faculty psychology.
Now, in the early parts of the treaties especially, you will find HUME referring to faculties a lot of the time,
and this can be very confusing for a number of reasons. First of all, he tends to use different words for the same faculty.
So he will talk about reason, the understanding.
Are they the same or different? The imagination, the fancy again?
Are they the same or different?
This kind of thing can be very confusing when you come to read HUME The first time can actually be confusing, even if you're rather familiar with you.
What I want to do is to talk through what I've discovered about his faculty psychology.
This is based on a pretty systematic investigation of his use of faculty terms throughout the treaties.
And my hope is that by presenting to you the results of that investigation,
you will be better able to read the early parts of the treaties and understand what's going on.
So let's look at some of those early passages and see the distinctions that human draws.
Well, a treatise one one, two, that's book one, part one, section two.
So very early on, he distinguishes between impressions of sensation and impressions of reflection.
So we have there a basic distinction between sensation and reflection.
In the next section, he distinguishes between ideas of the memory.
And imagination. Now, you might think that this is not going to be tremendously important.
I mean, ideas of memory. Well, that means their ideas that we are obviously remembering in a fixed order, ideas of the imagination.
We have more freedom. We can mix and match those. But is this of any great significance for understanding humans philosophy?
Well, we see some of the significance in the big famous arguments for which HUME is best known.
So the first quotation there is from the famous section on induction where HUME is
setting up his discussion of induction and giving the agenda for what follows.
The next question is whether experience produces the idea by means of the understanding or imagination,
whether we are determined by reason to make the transition or by association of perceptions.
So here what he's saying is when we make an inductive inference, an inference from past a future,
for example, we've seen one billiard ball hit another billiard ball and the second one move.
We've seen that again and again and again. We see a billiard ball moving towards another and we expect the second one to move.
So from the impression of the usual cause, we get a lively idea of the usual effect.
We're expecting that effect to come about. And here humans posing the question.
Which faculty is it that leads us to do that? Is it the understanding or the imagination?
Is it the reason or is it association of perceptions?
Now straight away that shed some light on Hume's notion of these faculties.
He seems to be equating the understanding with reason.
He seems to be treating the imagination as a faculty.
That has to do with the Association of Ideas. That is correct.
That is giving an appropriate impression of Hume's use here.
But you can see that he's he's the way in which he poses.
This question suggests that this is going to be absolutely central to understanding his conclusion.
The second quotation there is from Hume's discussion of the external world of scepticism with regard to the senses.
So here, another very famous one of Hume's arguments What is it that leads us to believe in the continued and distinct existence of body?
Why do we believe that there are physical things outside us that continue to exist, even when we're not perceiving them?
And again, he's setting the agenda. So this is right at the beginning of the session.
The subject then of our present inquiry is concerning the causes which induce us to believe in the existence of body.
We shall consider whether it be the senses, reason or the imagination that produces the opinion of a continued or of a distinct existence.
And after having set the agenda in that way, his discussion continues.
Accordingly, he looks to see whether it's the senses that produce this opinion.
No, it's not them. Looks at reason. No, it's not reason.
Well, then it must be the imagination. And here's how the imagination does it.
So again, we get a major discussion of Hume's philosophy being couched in terms of which faculty is responsible for some crucial mental operation.
Again with morality, it's a bit less explicit here, but the same thing is essentially going on.
So this is right from the beginning of book three of the treatise, the first section of Book three, where he's discussing the origin of morality.
We need only consider whether it be possible from reason alone to distinguish between moral good and evil,
or whether the must concur some other principles to enable us to make that distinction.
And here at the beginning of the moral inquiry, the inquiry concerning the principles of Morals, which was published in 1751.
There's been a controversy started of late concerning the general foundation of morals, whether they be derived from reason or from sentiment.
Okay.
So we've seen that three of the most famous positions for which HUME is known concerning induction, concerning the external world, concerning morals.
And all of them are phrased in terms of which faculty is responsible for a particular operation.
Now you might expect that it would be fairly straightforward,
given the importance that HUME accords to these faculties, to get clear on what he means by them all.
Actually, it's not very straightforward at all. In particular, the relation between reason and the imagination is quite tricky to untangle,
and we'll be talking about that in a lecture or two when we come to induction.
What I'm going to do now is as a preliminary, give you an outline of the theory of faculties, which seems to be implicit in the treaties.
And I'm going to try to avoid saying things that are too controversial and just go by the faculties he refers to and what he says about them.
So here is an enumeration of the faculties that HUME seems to endorse.
Well, first of all, we've got the external senses.
So the senses, the familiar five senses that their function seems to be to be to impress present impressions to the mind.
So as we've seen, ideas are copied from impressions.
What the external senses do is present visual or tactile or whatever impressions to the mind.
And we get ideas that copy them. Reflection we've seen is an internal sense.
And as I've mentioned before, HUME seems to put together two different kinds of reflection that perhaps he ought to have distinguished.
And one is feeling getting, for example, a feeling of heat or anger whereby I derive ideas of those sorts of things.
And another one is being aware, monitoring what's going on in my mind.
He puts those together under the heading of reflection.
Most of the time, when he talks about impressions of reflection, he means passions, desires, that sort of thing.
And we've seen that he talks about the memory. And the function of the memory is to replay our ideas, and it does so vivacious.
So when HUME distinguishes between the memory and the imagination, there are two big distinctions.
One of them, as we've seen, is that the memory replays our ideas in the same order as the original.
So when we're remembering things, ideas come back to our mind in a similar order as the impressions came.
So when we see an event happening, A followed by B followed by C, our memory will replay those ideas in the same order.
And it will do so vivacious. We are going to come across fulsome vivacity quite a lot in what follows.
And one of the things that Hugh wants to say is that when we get ideas of the memory, when we feel, oh, that's something that happened.
That's a more vivacious, a stronger idea than if we just imagine the same thing happening.
So that brings us to the imagination. And HUME uses the word fancy indistinguishable.
So just for elegant variation, sometimes he will talk about the imagination.
Sometimes he will talk about the fancy. Quite often, he will simply alternate between the two within the same sentence.
So be aware of that when you come across the word the fancy.
That really is just another word for the imagination. The imagination, unlike the memory, has freedom to change around our ideas.
You know, we can think of a unicorn by taking the idea of a horn and the idea of a horse,
even though we've never had the impression of those together. Our imagination has the freedom to transpose them.
But those ideas as a result are less vivacious.
They don't strike us with the force of belief.
When I imagine a unicorn that that isn't as though I remember having seen one.
It's quite different. Oh, sorry.
Let's go back. So that brings us to reason which HUME also calls the understanding, and I will give some textual support for that in a moment.
Now, understanding what Hue means by reason is very difficult and very controversial.
What I'm going to suggest for the moment is we take it to be something like the overall cognitive faculty,
that is the faculty by which we discover and judge truth and falsehood.
And that goes along with seeing HUME using the word, the understanding.
As equivalent. So when he talks about when he gives a title to one of the treaties of the understanding.
He's talking there about a general cognitive faculty which embraces all the various methods we have of discovering what is the case.
At least that's what it seems to be. But you can see that that causes a bit of a problem.
Because when HUME asks whether a particular opinion is derived from reason or not, he seems to be using reason in a rather narrower way.
So there's a bit of a problem in understanding exactly what the scope of reason is here.
Is he using the word ambiguously? Most HUME scholars have thought that he is.
But for the moment, at any rate, let's take reason in that broad sense of meaning, the understanding our overall cognitive faculty.
And contrast that with the will the cognitive faculty which forms intentions in response to desires and passions.
So we have this traditional distinction between reason or the understanding and the will.
And one of those is used to discover things about the world.
The other forms, intentions and acts upon them.
Here are some quotations which could be used to back up this general thought of reason as being the cognitive faculty we get.
Reason is the discovery of truth or falsehood. Now that occurs in his discussion of morality.
So what HUME is wanting to argue here is that morality is not a matter of discovery of truth and falsehood.
What he's going to say in brief is that moral judgements motivate us.
They have a cognitive element. They lead us to act, whereas mere discovery of fact can't do that.
Therefore, reason cannot be responsible for moral distinctions.
And you can see that it fits perfectly into that sort of argument.
To start off by saying reason is the discovery of truth of falsehood.
That faculty by which we discern truth and falsehood.
The understanding that a footnote that was in the first two editions of Hume's inquiry, 1748 and 1750.
It was removed later, but not, I think, because of any change of view.
Uh, I think he simply removed a reference to some other philosophers that had been there.
The dissertation on the passions. So that's a few years later.
Reason in a strict sense as meaning the judgement of truth and falsehood.
So again, we've got something very similar to what we saw in book three of the treaties, and there are lots of other passages that could be mentioned.
So we've got quite a few from the treaties there. EM Is the moral inquiry and map is the appendix here the first appendix to the moral inquiry?
What about reason and understanding? And bear in mind, this is a controversial claim.
Don Garrett, David Owen, for example, would want to deny this.
But I think there's very strong evidence that humans using reason and the understanding as completely equivalent.
Take, for example, this passage again from the discussion of induction.
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 seemed to have to the understanding we wouldn't be able to make those inferences.
That seems absolutely clear there that the term the ANC is being used as mere elegant variation for the imagination.
And there's plenty of other passages where he does this.
And I think it's equally clear that he's using the understanding as elegant variation for reason.
They seem to be referring to one and the same thing. And again, there's a host of other passages where he does this.
I think a particularly striking one is the footnote that you find in book two of the treatise 2 to 7 six.
Um hum. Actually gave instructions for this footnote to be removed, but it remains by mistake in the treatise.
He wanted to replace it with a longer footnote, which he reworded, and that's entreaties.
139 19. So that's one of the treaties.
So we have a footnote being reworded. And in the first one he said, by the understanding, I understand, blah, blah, blah.
And he got he was explaining what he meant by the understanding. Now that's obviously a bit inelegant by the understanding.
I understand he reworded it by reason.
I understand. Very strong evidence that for whom the two terms are being used completely, equivalently.
Now here are various passages which I shan't go through in detail.
I've simply listed them. These are all passages where HUME explicitly talks about faculties,
so he uses the word faculty or faculties and distinguishes the various faculties from each other,
either explicitly or implicitly, but nevertheless clearly.
And that, I think serves to support the itemisation that I given of the various faculties that HUME recognises.
He never distinguishes between reason and the understanding. He never distinguishes between reason or the understanding and the judgement.
I think that significant. Also,
there's an important footnote in treaties 1375 where HUME actually says it's
a mistake to distinguish between the different parts of the understanding.
He wants to say that conception and judgement and reason all ultimately reduce to the same thing.
So it would seem rather strange if he were drawing fine distinctions within the understanding between judgement and reason and so forth.
Again, there is potential controversy here.
I'm simply giving you the results of what I tried to make a fairly objective investigation into the language that HUME uses in the treatise.
Now. Let's take a look at that in the context, the historical context set by two predecessors.
Well, one predecessor, one contemporary, really. Now, John Locke talks about faculties, but expresses some anti realism about them.
So he actually suggests that talking about faculties is a source of error.
I mean, when you talk about the human understanding, it sounds like there's something in you that understands.
And he says, no, that's not right. When we talk about the human understanding, all we mean is our capacity to understand.
That's all the faculty of reason is not a it's not a separate thing that reasons.
It's our reasoning capacity. And he actually suggests maybe it would be better to do away entirely with faculty words because they're so misleading.
But he says that so much in fashion it looks like too much affectation wholly to lay them by.
So it would be a bit pretentious. It would seem very unconventional not to use faculty language, given how common it is.
But we do need to watch out for this era. We mustn't think of the faculties as distinct agents, and when we refer to the faculties,
it looks like Locke is not really making a big deal about it.
The understanding or reason, whichever your Lordship pleases to call it,
he's not making a big deal as to whether we call a particular thing the understanding or the reason.
Now. We'll see later that HUME also has some negative things to say about faculty language when he talks about the ancient philosophers.
This is treatise one for three. He has dismissive things to say about faculties.
And indeed, given Hume's background, uh, the fact that he's, as it were, he's empiricist.
So he's not going to think that we can, as it were, look in asset selves and intrinsically discover the parts of the mind by a priori reasoning.
Uh, he's generally metaphysically, rather modest.
You wouldn't expect that he would be a big fan of faculties in the light of Locke's sceptical view of them.
On the other hand, let's look at Francis Hutcheson.
Now, Francis Hutcheson is he was probably the most famous philosopher in Scotland and the most influential at the time that HUME was writing.
He was already a major figure.
HUME sent the treatise to Hutchison for comments, or at least he sent book three of the treatise in draft form to Hutchison to get comments on it.
This was in 1740. He was sent the first two volumes of the treatise, which had been published in 1739 by a friend of Hume's.
So we have those as well. Now, it's rather intriguing that in 1742, that's two years after seeing Hume's draft of the treaties.
Hutchison, in three different works, added comments about the faculties.
So it's not absolutely clear which way the influence goes here.
We've got Hutchison, an older contemporary of HUME. Maybe HUME discovered about faculty language from Hutchison.
Maybe he took it on from the milieu in which they were both working.
Or just possibly Hutchison's comments on the faculties in 1742 are intended to be a corrective to what he had found in HUME.
It's possible. We just don't know. Writers on these subjects should remember the common division of the faculties of the soul.
Now, is that saying to whom you should have remembered the common division of the faculties of the soul and take note of it?
Well, maybe. There is reason presenting the natures and relations of things antecedent to any act of will or desire.
And secondly, there's the will. The disposition of Seoul to pursue what is presented is good and to shun evil.
Below. These are the ancients, and we should follow them placed to other powers dependent on the body.
The sense is effectively and the passions and the senses answer to the understanding and the latter.
That is the passions answer to the will. Now, if you take a look on the blue handout that I've given you.
What you'll see at the top left is a diagram of what I call Hume's apparent faculty structure.
And I've put in brackets draft. And that's not a draft because I'm going to be working on this further and telling you something different.
It's because there are quite a lot of things there that are left undetermined and which are potentially controversial.
In particular, you can see that I've put the intellectual faculty, the understanding or reason or judgement on a level with the imagination.
No lines between them. I'm not implying any sort of hierarchy.
If you look at the diagram below.
That is the taxonomy of the faculties implied by what Hutchinson's Hutchinson's written up on passage there and filled out by a work,
another work he published in 1742. And I think it's fair to say that this gives the view of the faculties, the general view of the faculties.
Of those to whom HUME was writing. So we'll find that HUME has a rather an unconventional view of reason and the imagination.
Sorting out the relation between those becomes very thorny and pretty essential for sorting out what he means when he's discussing,
for example, induction. But the people he's addressing would have taken the view pretty much as Hutchison sketches it.
So the faculties divide into you've got the cognitive realm and the cognitive realm.
You've got reason, which, in Hutchison's words,
perceives and judges the deliverance of the other faculties to discover the natures and relations of things.
So that's how we discover what is the case.
On the other hand, we've got the cognitive realm, the realm of the will, and that's what decides on action, depending on our desires and passions.
Now notice that Hutchison puts subordinate to the reason he talks about them reporting to reason.
For faculties, which I've put down there, is reckless in imagination, memory and senses.
Okay. Now, three of those are familiar from human imagination, memory and the senses.
They all seem fairly straightforward. What's this other one ratchet situation?
Well, notice that Hutchison is drawing a distinction between the faculty of Reason,
the overall cognitive faculty and the faculty of Rattus in Asian rat assassination is a matter of
taking your ideas and putting them in order so that you could see the connections between them.
So Rattus in Asian, if you like, is the faculty of argument of reasoning step by step reasoning.
And one of the faculties that we have is to organise complex ideas in a sequence so that we can see their connections.
And Hutchison clearly has the view of reason as something that looks down on, if you like, surveys these other cognitive faculties,
these lesser faculties that report to reason and reason makes a judgement based on what these faculties present.
Okay. Now, look at the diagram at the top. Right?
Hutcheson is distinctive from most other authors in drawing a much more sophisticated structure underneath the senses.
So where human just distinguishes between the external senses and reflection.
You can see that Hutchison draws a distinction between the external senses and internal sense what he calls consciousness and reflexive sensation.
And under the reflexive sensation, he places a number of different, further senses and aesthetic sense sympathy that is,
fellow feeling for others, a sense of the fitting and the good and a sense of humour.
So Hutchison is treating all of these as cognitive.
And when we discuss HUME on morality, which we will do briefly,
because we've seen that's extremely relevant to Hume's overall philosophy and his view of the faculties.
HUME is going to dispute with Hutchison whether this discovery of moral distinctions actually belongs in the realm of reason.
He's going to say, actually, it doesn't. It comes from a notion of taste, which is an interesting amalgam of the two halves.
Okay. So I hope that when you read HUME referring to the various faculties,
you'll now be able to see how the terms he's using relate to the understanding of those terms of his contemporaries.
But you will nevertheless find some of what he says quite puzzling.
I hope that puzzle will be alleviated in a lecture or two when we come to discuss HUME on induction.