A New Humean Criticism of Our Inductive Practice

Abstract

Hume’s familiar sceptical argument against induction brands as irrational our practice of generalising from observed regularities because of its reliance on the assumption that nature is uniform, an assumption which is unjustifiable. The argument which I wish to consider focuses instead on the observed regularities that are required if we are legitimately to extrapolate from experience. According to Hume, the paradigm type of inductive reasoning involves a constant conjunction. But in fact we do not encounter such invariable uniformities: our experience is, almost invariably, irregular. So setting aside Hume’s sceptical qualms about the very attempt to form expectations about the hitherto unobserved, how can we justify our ignoring such irregularities? My conclusion is that, even if the principle of uniformity can be justified, our practice is irrational by Hume’s lights. This is a new Humean critique of our “causal reasoning,” for, although Hume does not present it, the ingredients are all his.

Notes

1. Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg, Annette Baier and Don Garrett defend non-sceptical readings. See Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg, Hume and the Problem of Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Don Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 4. For criticisms, see Kenneth Winkler, “Hume’s Inductive Scepticism,” in The Empiricists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley and Hume, ed. M. Atherton (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Peter Millican, “Against the New Hume,” in The New Hume Debate, ed. R. Read and K. A. Richman, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

2. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1.3.6.2, abbreviated as T, and A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2^nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 87, my italics, original italics removed; abbreviated as SBN; hereafter page references to these editions are cited in the text.

3. H. H. Price, Hume’s Theory of the External World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 7.

4. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 1.5.8, abbreviated as EHU, and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3^rd ed., revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 46, my italics, abbreviated as SBN; hereafter page references to these editions are cited in the text.

5. Price, Hume’s Theory of the External World, 7, original italics.

6. Baier, A Progress, 120–21.

7. Lewis W. Beck, “A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant,” in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978): 111–29.

8. Price, Hume’s Theory of the External World, 75, 60. MacNabb, Bennett, and Loeb agree. See D. G. C. MacNabb, David Hume (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 129; Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 323; Louis E. Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 179. Schnall and Black think constancy is an irreducible notion. See Ira Schnall, “Constancy, Coherence, and Causality,” Hume Studies 30 (2004): 33–50; Tim Black, “The Distinction between Coherence and Constancy in Hume’s Treatise,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (2007): 1–25. But we may here sidestep this (interpretative) dispute, since constancy is irrelevant to gappy induction.

9. See Schnall, “Constancy, Coherence, and Causality.”

10. See Paul Gomberg, “Coherence and Causal Inference in Hume’s Treatise,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 6 (1976): 696–97.

11. Bennett and Schnall offer this view to Hume by way of a friendly suggestion. See Bennnet, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 325; Schnall, “Constancy, Coherence, and Causality,” 46. John Wright thinks it is Hume’s; see John Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 62–64. Barry Stroud thinks Hume “half acknowledges” it; see Barry Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 259–60, n. 4.

12. See Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 321, 349; John W. Cook, “Hume’s Scepticism with Regard to the Senses,” American Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1968): 1–17; George Dicker, Hume’s Epistemology and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), chap. 5; Robert J. Fogelin, Hume’s Scepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 67; John Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature (London: Methuen, 1932), 150; Harold Noonan, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hume on Knowledge (London: Routldege, 1999), 164; Terence Penelhum, Hume (London: Macmillan, 1975), 64; Stroud, Hume, 111; Fred Wilson, The External World and Our Knowledge of I: Hume’s Critical Realism, an Exposition and a Defence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

13. See Robert F. Anderson, Hume’s First Principles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 40; John Bricke, Hume’s Philosophy of Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), chap. 1; Peter Kail, Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14, 18, 59; Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1941), chap. 22; Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 18.

14. See Henry Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 235; Garrett, Cognition and Commitment, 210; Loeb, Stability and Justification, 138–39; David Pears, Hume’s System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 152–53; Paul Stanistreet, Hume’s Scepticism and the Science of Human Nature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 180, n. 9; Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume.

15. Pears, Hume’s System, 153, original italics.

16. See Fogelin, Hume’s Scepticism, 68; Marjorie Grene, “The Objects of Hume’s Treatise,” Hume Studies 20 (1994): 163–77; Noonan, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook, 165; Price, Hume’s Theory of the External World; Wilson, The External World.

17. See Anderson, Hume’s First Principles, 40; Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 349; Bricke, Hume’s Philosophy of Mind, chap.1; Dicker, Hume’s Epistemology and Metaphysics, chap. 5; Garrett, Cognition and Commitment, 211; Kail, Projection and Realism, 59; Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, 152; Loeb, Stability and Justification, 164; Peter Loptson, “Phenomenological Skepticism in Hume,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 28 (1990): 367–88; James O’Shea, “Hume’s Reflective Return to the Vulgar,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 4 (1996): 290; Strawson, The Secret Connexion, 51; Galen Strawson, “David Hume: Objects and Power,” in Read and Richman, The New Hume Debate; Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume. I think Wright subscribes to the Materialist reading, because he suggests that Hume himself advocates a representative theory of perception (13) and “a firm belief in the independent existence of the material world” (42, my italics). I hesitate because Wright mainly speaks of the philosophers’ belief that bodies exist continuously and independently, which is consistent with the Idealist reading.

18. Strawson, The Secret Connexion; Kail, Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy.

19. Price, Hume’s Theory of the External World, 91, 190.

20. Frank Jackson, Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 81–87.

21. Robert F. Anderson, “The Location, Extension, Shape, and Size of Hume’s Perceptions,” in Hume: A Re-evaluation, ed. D. W. Livingston and J. T. King (New York: Fordham University Press), 1976.

22. See Michael Huemer, Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), chap. 7.

23. Since perceptions must, but cannot, be spatially located, the antinomy they engender shows, Huemer thinks, that there are no such things.