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"The reasonable person redefines reason so as to give him- or herself a reasonable concept. Hume is reasonable in just this way: if reason is the capacity to grasp the reasons for things, then what he does is give an account of the reasons for things that rejects the long, traditional account of reasons defended by both the rationalists and the Aristotelians.
On this new concept of reason, our judgments about that world are all fallible. But this is not scepticism, at least not scepticism in any reasonable sense of that term – though it is a reason that does not come up to the standard of incorrigibility and infallibility of the rationalists and the Aristotelians. We all know the examples given by philosophers, of dreams and of square towers that look round in the distance: these establish the fallibility of our ordinary uses of the reason that gets us around the world where we find ourselves. But we do have precisely that same reason to help us correct these errors. As Hume put it in the first Enquiry: ‘These sceptical topics, indeed, are only sufficient to prove, that the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on ; but that we must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper criteria of truth and falsehood’ (E 124). ‘Within their sphere, [they, the senses, constitute] the proper criteria of truth and falsehood’: hardly the remark of a sceptic." (pp.3-4)
"But after so remarking, Hume goes on to note that there are ‘more profound’ arguments against reason. These are the arguments of the philosophers for the scientific picture of the world. There are our ordinary beliefs about the independence of the objects that we perceive in daily life – the tables, chairs, square towers, and so on, that are there in the world in which we find ourselves. But the new science has called this world into question. The real objects, those independent of the mind, are in fact, according to this view, quite unlike the objects of sense. As for the sensible appearances of things, these are dependent for their existence upon the state of our sense organs. There is, then, a gap between the world in which we all naturally believe, on the one hand, and the world to which philosophical – scientific – reasoning leads us, on the other." (p.4)
" [Hume] does not quell all the doubts of the sceptic. But he does show how we can bring together the worlds of the ‘vulgar’ – the world of ordinary experience – and the world of the ‘philosopher’ – the scientific picture of the world and of our place in it. [...]
In fact, I propose to argue, Hume in the Treatise systematically defends a version of that philosophical/metaphysical position once known as ‘critical realism.’ Hume is not a sceptic ; he is a critical realist, but one who recognizes the fallibility of human judgment." (p.5)
"Descartes is on the side of Aristotle and Plato and in that sense looks back towards the past. Hume is critical of them all: it is he and not Descartes who makes the radical break with the past (with, no doubt, the help of Locke and Berkeley)." (p.6)
"The view attributed to Hume is close to that of Russell in the Analysis of Matter as well as to that of Sellars père. It is argued that causal reasoning can be extended beyond the world of sense experience, provided we allow Hume the use of abstract relative ideas. Then we can, to use the language of Russell, form definite descriptions to refer to objects with which we are not acquainted." (p.12)
"Our study grants Hume’s attack on religion but aims to show how the sceptical arguments that achieve that end leave commonsense and science unscathed – its books escape the flames, they retain their utility for the ordinary reasonable person." (p.14)
"Commentators often studiously avoid, it seems to me, the Humean attack on religion. One cannot, of course, avoid the essay on miracles or the essay on God’s particular providence. But the overall attack is missed. Part of missing that point is missing the point about Pascal. It is important, it seems to me, to recognize that Hume is arguing for the socially pernicious nature of Pascal’s belief. The errors in religion, the errors that one finds in Pascal, are dangerous. It is not just that the ‘Dialogue’ concluding the second Enquiry deals with the relativity of ethical codes – which it does. But that is not all that it does. It is also an argument that some ethical codes – those of superstition – do not satisfy the principle of utility, nor do they fit in with the natural sympathetic tendencies of humankind." (p.16)
"It is often recognized that Hume argues that reason – that is, pure reason – cannot provide a justification of any causal inference, nor the inferences to the existence of bodies. The former is a matter of custom rather than reason – that is, pure reason. It does not follow that reason cannot provide reasons justifying one causal inference over another. Nor does it mean that one cannot have good reasons for believing – as we all inevitably do – in the existence of body and even in the existence of those bodies of which the new science talks. It depends on what one might reasonably refer to as reason. If reason is the capacity to grasp causes, then, if causation be a matter of regularity, as Hume’s first definition of ‘cause’ requires, then what other than custom could grasp those causes and what other than custom ought to be referred to as ‘reason’? Thus, having disposed of reason as providing knowledge of (‘ultimate’) causes (causes as necessary connections), but retaining as reasonable a set of ‘rules by which to judge of causes and effects’ (Treatise I, iii, 15), Hume enters, in the section that immediately follows, into a discussion of the reason of animals, a sort of reason that they share with us albeit to a lesser degree – reason in a sense of ‘reason’ that is other than the one that has just been rejected – but a reason in which conforming one’s thought to the ‘rules by which to judge of causes and effects’ is a case of reason and, in fact, is reason at its best. That Hume redefines the concept of reason to a more reasonable concept than that provided by the rationalists and the Aristotelians is something that any adequate reading must recognize. This is important because it allows us to characterize Hume as a philosopher who is more than a sceptic. He is a philosopher who does allow that inductive inferences are a matter of reason, and who does allow that some inductive inferences are more reasonable than others, and who even allows that it is reasonable to infer from our impressions the existence of body. It is precisely this recognition that there is a reasonable sense of ‘reason’ that enables him to draw the distinction between, on the one hand, theology, which reason (this reasonable sense of ‘reason’) condemns as useless, worthy of the flames, and, on the other hand, common sense and its extension, science, which reason judges useful, and worth saving – worth saving from the ravages of the fires of scepticism." (pp.18-19)
"In the Treatise, Hume provides a set of rules by which to judge of causes and effects. These rules define when it is reasonable to adopt towards a regularity (‘cause’ by Hume’s first definition of that concept) the attitude mentioned in the second definition of ‘cause.’ In the first Enquiry these rules are given in a rather different and more diffuse form, in a long footnote in the section dealing with the ‘Reason of Animals’ and just before the essay on ‘Miracles.’ The point of giving these rules in this context in the first Enquiry is to make clear that uniform experience of humankind justifies the inference to the principle that for every event there is a cause – that is, a naturalistic cause. An unusual and apparently miraculous event – for example, six days of darkness in the year 1600 or, perhaps, the effect of a thorn at Port Royal – in short, an example of an unusual event contrary to our expectations formed from nature yet to which there is strong testimonial evidence – on the basis of the causal principle such an event calls for the search for a naturalistic cause. That is, it does not call for the attribution of the event to the actions of a non-naturalistic deity. Hume clearly means for the reader to use these rules in his or her considerations concerning miracles. At least, that is what the reasonable person would do: use reasonable rules to provide reasoned judgments about the causes of unusual events.
It is, I shall be arguing, reason in this reasonable sense of ‘reason’ that Hume uses to defend his critical realism: the reason which is critical of religion is just that reason which defends the scientific picture of the world." (p.19)
[Chapitre 1 : Abstract Ideas and other Linguistic rules in Hume]
"Now, in the Treatise Hume repeatedly uses the language of cognition when discussing ideas. Thus, in discussing causal inferences generally, he appeals to the logical properties of ideas: ‘We may draw inferences from the coherence of our perceptions, whether they be true or false ; whether they represent nature justly, or be mere illusions of the senses’ (84). Again, we are said to ‘assent’ to ideas (94ff), another cognitive act, characterizing belief. The Treatise is stuffed with the language of eighteenth-century logics such as Crousaz or the Port Royal Logic, as for example when Hume speaks of the ‘simple conception of any thing’ (94), an act that is contrasted with the acts of uniting, separating, mingling, and confounding of our ideas which are cited later (94). Again, it is the mind that conceives and comprehends or understands (161, 162) ; this understanding is preceded by acts of conception or having ideas (164, 168). All of these Hume refers to as ‘actions of the mind’ (177) ; they are functions of the ‘intellectual faculties of the mind’ (138). This cognitive aspect of Hume’s account of ideas has been emphasized by such commentators as John Yolton.3 But at the same time, we also have the standard account of Hume’s views in which ideas are simply images and therefore lack cognitive functions. There is no doubt that there are both these strands in Hume. The usual response is that Hume was inconsistently trying to have the best of both worlds, in which ideas are simply images but at the same time also are intentional entities playing a cognitive role. The whole thing is treated as another example of Hume’s confused way of thinking.
What we shall argue is that the two sides of Hume’s account of ideas can be reconciled if we explore carefully the research methods of associationist psychology, and in particular the method of introspective analysis. Once this is understood, I shall suggest, we will be able to see that Hume can, in principle at least, have it both ways, quite consistently." (p.22)
"The utilitarian aspects of Hume’s account of morality are well known. The virtues are settled patterns of action and behaviour that are productive of good consequences, good either for the actor or for others. As Hume says, ‘every quality of the mind, which is useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others, communicates a pleasure to the spectator, engages his esteem, and is admitted under the honourable denomination of virtue or merit’ (EM, section IX, Part I, p. 276). There are on the one hand the natural virtues, which we would have even in a situation of non-scarcity, and on the other hand the artificial virtues of justice and property, or promising and contract, or allegiance (as well as the artificial virtues of chastity and modesty). The artificial virtues depend on the formation of social conventions, general conformity to which serves the interests of all in situations of general scarcity, or, more generally, of a common need.
The conventions of justice or property provide a social order for the distribution of scarce material goods, giving one the right to keep and to use goods that one possesses, and imposing on others the obligation to respect that right; and, correspondingly, giving others the rights to their goods, and imposing upon oneself the obligation to leave them free to keep and to use their goods. Hume’s account of the roots of these conventions of property provide the model for his accounts of the roots of the other conventions: those of promising and contract, and those of allegiance, as well as other norms." (p.23)
-Fred Wilson, The External World and Our Knowledge of It. Hume’s Critical Realism, an Exposition and a Defence, University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2008, 809 pages.
