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Abstract
Hume inherits the spectator model of experience and knowledge, and inflates it to displace any other kind of experience-based knowledge. Thus he construes our knowledge of causation as no more than an observer’s knowledge of one thing’s following on, or attending, another. Construing causation in that way, he rules out consideration of our experience as agents and our knowledge of causation as efficacy, or making things happen. Yet if we did not understand causation as efficacy, we could not understand what it is that Hume says we cannot understand; we could not appreciate its proposed replacement by his one-thing’s-attending-on-another account of causation; we could not see that his proposed one-thing’s-attending-on-another account of causation is not an account of causation. Hume’s ultimate aim appears to be the exclusion of agency from the world, whether the agent is personal, material, or divine.
Notes
1. This essay is limited to a consideration of David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), abbreviated as T, and “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” Sections III–VII, in Enquiries, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), abbreviated as EHU. All page references are to these editions and are hereafter cited in the text. Hume, EHU, 64; see also T, 133 and 156 supra.
2. “ . . . as to those impressions which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason,” and so on (T, 84.) In a similar vein, see EHU, 54 infra.
3. “ . . . the actions of the mind . . . are the same with those of matter. We perceive only their constant conjunction; nor can we ever reason beyond it” (T, 633).
4. It is high time I confess that my criticisms of Hume are influenced by Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), chap. 2.
5. “When we follow only the habitual determination of the mind, we make the transition without any reflection, and interpose not a moments delay betwixt the view of one object and the belief of that, which is often found to attend it. As the custom depends not upon any deliberation, it operates immediately, without allowing any time for reflection” (T, 133).
6. See T, 159–60, 166, and EHU, 69–73.