But no oak tree is one for two.
Scepticism with regard to the senses is a fantastically complex section.
It's complex, difficult, confusing.
Jonathan Bennett cites it as proving why HUME is such a great philosopher.
He says this one section.
The way in which HUME keeps control over such a complicated argument elevates him amongst above other philosophers of the period,
even though it's a deeply problematic section.
What I'm going to try to do is take you fairly quickly through the section showing you the highlights and the general geography of it,
how it's laid out. I'm not going to be going into detail in all of the arguments.
But we'll be looking seeing enough of the shape of it to make an assessment next time of how it fits into the overall picture of human scepticism.
So he starts out a very famous passage.
We may well ask what causes induce us to believe in the existence of body.
But tis in vain to ask whether there be body or not.
That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.
So again, we seem to get naturalism coming in as a response to potential scepticism.
He's saying, let's not even ask whether there are physical things, whether there is an external world.
That's something we just have to take for granted. We just naturally believe that.
And whatever the arguments may say, we're not going to be able to doubt that.
So the question is what brings about that belief?
But by the end of the section, you get a very different impression.
Having gone through his arguments, he says, Well, I begun with promising that we ought to have an implicit faith in our senses.
But to tell you the truth, I'm not feeling that way now.
I feel myself at present of a quite contrary sentiment and the more inclined to repose no faith at all in my senses or rather imagination,
than to place in it such an implicit confidence. So this is part of what's very confusing about this section.
He starts out saying, I'm going to take the existence of body, in other words,
external objects for granted and just ask what causes us to believe in them.
But the conclusions he gets on the way throw such doubt on that belief that by the end of it,
when he thinks about it, he's very much inclined to doubt the existence of body.
So you can see the question whether HUME actually believes in the external world is quite a tricky one.
He starts off saying, We all believe it. We can't help it.
He ends up saying, Actually, if you look at it from a philosophical point of view, maybe it's completely groundless and incoherent.
Well, he starts out, at any rate, pretty systematically.
He analyses the belief in body into two components one of them continued existence of objects, and one of them distinct existence of objects.
So suppose I look at the table. I look away.
I look back. I suppose that the table has continued to exist even while I wasn't perceiving it.
On the other hand, I also believe the table to exist distinctly from my perceptions is independent of my perceptions.
A separate thing. Moreover, it's external to me.
So those are different aspects of the belief in body.
But HUME argues that pretty much they all go together. Now the big question is where does our belief in the continued and distinct existence of body?
Where does it come from? Which faculty is responsible?
Now, you may remember a long time ago, we looked at Hume's theory of faculties,
and we'll be coming back to that next week because it's pretty crucial.
In several of his arguments. We've looked particularly at the argument concerning induction.
Now this argument, also his argument about the basis of morality.
It turns on the identification of which faculty is responsible for the particular type of belief.
And HUME clearly takes major consequences to follow from that.
Here, what he asks is,
is it the senses or is it reason or is it the imagination that's responsible for the belief in continued and distinct existence of body?
And notice also he says something interesting here.
These are the only questions that are intelligible on the present subject for us to the notion of external existence.
When taken for something specifically different from perceptions, we have already shown its absurdity.
Now he's referring back here to a section that we looked at some time ago.
Treat is 1 to 6 on the idea of existence and the idea of external existence.
And that was where he was applying his copy principle and saying that in in a sense,
the only ideas we can form of external objects are derived from our impressions.
So if we try to make sense of external objects as something specifically different from perceptions,
different in kind from perceptions, we can't where is it we're trapped within.
What our impressions give us. We have no ideas but deriving from those, and that is a theme that will recur again.
So does the belief in continued and distinct existence of body derive from the senses?
No. And that may seem paradoxical.
After all, the section is cold of scepticism with regard to the senses.
He's asking about sensory beliefs beliefs in the external world.
How can they not derive from the senses?
Well, it's clear if you look at this part of Hume's discussion that what he means by the senses is more or less better sources of impressions.
So we get certain impressions from the senses.
Can those give us the idea of body?
Well, he says clearly not. And if I look at the table and look away, I'd no longer got impressions of the table.
I only get impressions of the table while I'm seeing the table.
So it's absolutely obvious that I cannot get the idea of continued existence from the bare impressions.
The same sort of thing goes for distinctness.
So if our senses do suggest any idea of distinct existences, then it must be due to some fallacy or illusion.
It can't be that we are taking the deliverance of the senses at face value, because the deliverance of the senses just are what they are.
An impression is just what it is when you see an impression. There's nothing hidden.
That's it. So since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness,
they must appear in every particular what they are, and they must be what they appear.
The passage goes on. So the sense is, as sources of impressions cannot give us the belief in body.
Now you might think, hang on a minute. What about externality?
When I see the table, I see that as external to my physical body.
Isn't that at least given me by impressions?
Well, the trouble with that is it takes for granted that I've already managed to identify my body.
So we get the same problem again. And he goes on and discusses various impressions of the different senses,
including some discussion of the primary secondary quality distinction that I'm just going to bracket that for now.
Okay. So the senses are knocked out as a possible source of the idea.
The belief in continued and distinct existence of body.
Next we come to reason. Remember it senses reason or the imagination.
And as so often, HUME is working by elimination, he's eliminating alternatives to the imagination.
What about reason? Well, children and peasants, they believe in external objects, but they clearly don't do it on the basis of reason.
Moreover, philosophy informs us that everything which appears to the mind is nothing but a perception and is interrupted and dependent on the mind.
Whereas the vulgar confounds, perceptions and objects and attributes a distinct, continued existence to the very things they feel or see.
The sentiment, then, as it is entirely unreasonable, must proceed from some other faculty than the understanding.
Now. There's a lot in that passage. Notice, first of all, something that will come up repeatedly.
Who thinks that the ordinary person, the vulgar.
Confounds perceptions and objects.
Think of. George Barkley and what he had to say about Locke.
Um, Locke wanted to say that we we immediately perceive perceptions, impressions in Hume's terms, ideas in law.
And we suppose that there is some object which is the cause of that impression.
And that sets up a potential sceptical worry.
You've got the veil of perception. How do we infer there are objects beyond the impressions?
Now, Barclay agrees with Locke that the only things we're directly aware of are impressions.
But Barclay points out that the ordinary man thinks when he sees an apple, he's seeing the apple.
When he sees a tree, he's seeing the tree. And Berkeley says, Yeah, actually, the common man is right.
The tree just is an impression. The apple just is an impression.
A complex impression, of course.
Now one can think that Berkeley is rather implausible in claiming to take the view of the common man in favour of his in materialism or idealism.
But HUME seems to be agreeing with Barclay here that what the common man does is assume that when he sees a tree, it's the tree he's seeing.
It's not any impression. He's got direct acquaintance, as it were, with the tree.
As I say, that will come up quite a lot. And notice this last sentence.
Quite significant. I think this sentiment, as it's entirely unreasonable,
must proceed from some other faculty than the understanding that seems to suggest that something can derive from reason only if it's reasonable.
That will be significant next time. So much for the vulgar.
They clearly do not the base their beliefs about the external world on reason.
What about philosophers? Well, philosophers like John Locke and John Locke is absolutely the the paradigm of the philosophical view here.
They distinguish between perceptions and objects, as we've seen.
They think we have impressions of a tree, but there's a real tree, as it were, behind it, causing the impression.
But HUME comes out with an argument. Actually, the argument appears later where he says that.
That's in 142 47. It's quite a significant argument.
It's repeated in the inquiry. And what he basically says is, look, the only kind of argument that we've got that will assure us of any matter of fact,
beyond the evidence of our memory and senses, is an inductive argument, a causal argument.
We've seen that in one, three, six.
But establishing a causal connection means you have to be acquainted with both halves, both the cause and the effect.
You have to see followed by B again and again. And then when you see an AA, you can infer a b.
But if the only thing we're ever acquainted with is the perception, never the external object directly, then we cannot establish that causal link.
So actually, even if we adopt the philosophical view, the lockean view, we cannot justify by reason the belief in the external world.
So the belief must arise from the imagination. It doesn't arise from the senses.
It doesn't derives from reason.
So let's try and explain how the belief in the external world, the belief in continued and distinct existence of body, arises from the imagination.
And this takes up most of the rest of the section.
Well, first of all, he identifies constancy and coherence as the key characteristics of the perceptions that lead us to have the belief.
So constancy. I look at the table. I look away.
I look back. The impression I get is very similar, nearly identical to the one I had before.
So they return upon me without the least alteration.
And we'll see that.
HUME thinks that when that happens, when we see one, you get one impression, and then a little bit later we get another one that's almost identical.
We tend to run them together and think of them as the same impression.
They're not. But we make that mistake. Coherent perceptions are a bit different.
Coherent perceptions are where we get used to patterns.
So for example, I look at a fire blazing away.
And then I get used to the fact that after an hour or two it will have died down.
So another day I look at the fire, I look away.
Or maybe I leave the room and I come back to the room and there is the fire and it's died down in the usual way.
So that's not constancy. It's not that the impression of the fire is just like it was when I left the room.
But it's coherent in that there's a pattern,
a regular pattern to the appearance of the impressions and huge gestures towards what we call inference to the best explanation.
I mean, it's a shame he didn't take this further, really.
We've seen that he used this argument that the only way we can infer to something beyond the memory and senses is by causation, by induction.
And the only way we can establish a causal link is by seeing A and B.
It's a shame he didn't think further about inference to the best explanation because that gives an
alternative and he comes tantalisingly close to it in this passage where he's talking about coherence.
Okay. Now, a great deal of this section is devoted to explaining how the vulgar view remember,
that's the view that identifies objects with perceptions, how that comes about.
And I'm going to jump over most of that. But I want to draw your attention to this passage, which summarises the account.
When we've been accustomed to observe a constancy in certain impressions and have found that the perception of the sun or ocean,
for instance, returns upon us after an absence or annihilation with like parts and in a like order, as it at its first appearance.
We are not apt to regard these interrupted perceptions as different, which they really are.
But on the contrary, consider them individually the same upon account of their resemblance.
So I say. I look at the table. I look away. I look back. I get a very similar impression, and I am apt to confound those impressions.
I think of them as the same impression because they're so similar.
But as this interruption of their existence is contrary to their perfect identity and
makes us regard the first impression as annihilated and the second as newly created.
So when I think about it, I realise that I turned away that that first impression disappeared and when I turned back, the second one appeared.
That was a new impression. Oh, dear. There's a conflict. We find ourselves somewhat at a loss and are involved in a kind of contradiction.
In order to free ourselves. From this difficulty, we disguise as much as possible the interruption,
or rather remove it entirely by supposing that these interrupted perceptions are connected by a real existence of which we are insensible.
This supposition or idea of continued existence acquires a force and vivacity from the memory of
these broken impressions and from that propensity which they give us to suppose them the same.
And the very essence of belief consists in the force and vivacity of the conception.
Okay. It's a very nice potted account of what he's going to go on to explain.
He divides his account into four separate chunks the principle of individuation.
That is the way in which similarity leads us to identify things, how resemblance leads us to attribute identity to interrupted perceptions.
Why we unite interrupted perceptions by supposing a continued existence.
And then, as we saw, explaining how how that fiction,
the fiction of an external object that we built up in this way by supposing that the
some some unseen perception that somehow unites the things that we're trying to unite,
even though that we see that they're different, that fiction.
How can that constitute a belief? How can it derive the requisite force and vivacity?
Note, incidentally, when you're reading this, it can be a bit confusing over quite a large chunk of this section for about 15 or 16 paragraphs.
He adopts the policy of referring to objects and perceptions indifferently.
If you like speaking with the vulgar, adopting the vulgar assumption, and that can be a bit confusing.
I also think it's rather problematic because Hume's account of the vulgar belief is not based on reason,
it's based on the imagination, it's not based on the idea that the vulgar are, as it were, consciously reasoning the thing out.
It's rather some kind of scientific explanation of what's going on in their heads that seduces them into various errors.
So there's no reason why we should expect the explanation to be at the cognitive or rational level.
It could well be sub cognitive to explain why people think as they do.
We don't expect cognitive psychologists to be using the same language that we understand.
So there's something a bit puzzling about humans doing this, and you might find that the discussion is a little bit slippery for that reason.
Once he's explained how the Vulcan view arises, HUME explains how there are various faults with it.
It involves fallacies and fictions. We can see that it's false.
We can see that our perceptions and objects are clearly different because if you press an eye, you begin to see double.
If you see double. It becomes clear to us that at least some of the perceptions are not identical with
objects because we do not think that the objects double up when we press the eye.
And since all our perceptions are caused in a broadly similar way, it implies that none of them are identical with object.
So actually the vulgar view is rather trivially false.
Philosophers of course realise this, philosophers realise that the vulgar view is false.
So John Locke, for example, doesn't want to identify perceptions and objects.
But the problem is that philosophers are so seduced by the imagination to believe in
the continued and distinct existence of objects because they've acquired that belief.
In the vulgar way they are, after all human beings.
They've been seduced in the same way that we all are into thinking that there are continued in existence, distinct existences.
So they're reluctant to give that up. But when they realise that perceptions and objects are different, they invent a new kind of object.
They say, Oh, there's another kind of object besides perceptions, and they continue to exist even though our perceptions are interrupted.
So we get a double existence theory. However, HUME wants to say this theory has no primary recommendation either to reason or the imagination.
You can't actually argue in favour of it rationally.
Four. Because of what we said earlier about you can't get a causal link going, but nor does it have a primary appeal to the imagination.
The reason why people get to that belief is because they start with the imagination, pushing them towards the vulgar belief.
They see that the vulgar belief is wrong, and then they invent the philosophical belief as a way of reconciling the contradictions.
These various paragraphs that I've listed here, I'm simply pointing out what HUME is doing.
In those paragraphs. He's partly recapitulating what he said, partly pointing out implications of his argument.
And here is the despairing conclusion.
I cannot conceive how such trivial qualities of the fancy conducted by such false suppositions can ever lead to any solid and rational system.
So now we've reached the point that I mentioned right at the beginning.
He started off saying we're going to take for granted that body exists.
And now at the end of the section, he's saying, well, to tell the truth, having gone through all that, seems to me they don't.
The solution? Well, we just have to stop thinking about it while we are concentrating on the arguments.
We will realise that the belief in the existence of body is deeply problematic.
But if we stop thinking about it famously, we die and or go and play a game of backgammon.
We forget about all these problems and we restore our belief in external objects and go on in the same vulgar way.
So next time we'll be looking at how all this fits together within humans.
Response to scepticism. Thank you.