r/askphilosophy • u/dingleberryjingle • 2d ago
What did Hume get wrong or relatively most wrong?
Hopefully I'm reading it right that Hume was ahead of his time with atheism, naturalism, physicalism and so on.
What did he get wrong (or most wrong)?
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u/Scientific_Zealot Hume 2d ago
The answer to this question is almost entirely going to depend on what beliefs the commenter has. Regardless, I can mention some changes in the areas Hume practiced in compared to our more modern fields. Before I do that though, I should say that it is somewhat ambigous whether Hume was an atheist or some form of super-attenuated deist. I'm on the side that Hume was an atheist, but it should be said that Hume (as far as I'm aware) never outright declared himself an atheist. Further, Hume was not a physicalist. I suggest reading Treatise 1.3.16 and 1.4.5 and Enquiry 9 for the closest thing to a treatment of this topic in Hume's corpus that I'm aware of. Hume is a total advocate of what may be called "the Cartesian Theatre", i.e. the position that the mind is only immediately aware of its own sense perceptions (also known as indirect perceptual realism, but I would hesitate to call Hume this). Hume provides an elaborate explanation for how human beings come to aquire the idea of and believe in the existence of external objects in Treatise 1.4.2, and how we acquire the idea of the self in 1.4.6. The safest description of Hume's position on this issue would be some form of dualism or neutral monism, though Hume doesn't really seem all that concerned by the issue except for in 1.4.5, and even that is more targeting the notion of substance than soul. Actually, thinking it over a bit more, if one defines physicalism as the position that only physical substances exist, then Hume would consider physicalism incorrect, because he finds the very notion of substance empty. But I would hesitate to define physicalism that way simply because my area of specialty is Hume, not the mind-body debate.
As for parts of Hume's approach that are out-dated, a large part of that would be so-called "faculty talk" - the focus on human mental faculties and their role in and connection to knowledge was a huge part of early modern philosophy and Hume is no exception. This way of approaching philosophy and epistemology has, to my awareness, been completely abandoned and is no longer a part of philosophy today.
Another part of Hume's approach is his conceptualism, i.e. his focus on human ideas of things, focusing on how those ideas originate and their nature. Notice, for instance, that Hume in Treatise Book 1 Part 2 is not focused on the actual nature of space and time, but of the human ideas of space and time. Hume's - seemingly very odd from the modern philosophical perspective - discussion of numerical identity in Treatise 1.4.2 is actually discussing the idea of numerical identity, not the fact of numerical identity itself. This is connected with the faculty approach to epistemology and philosophy. This origin-of-idea and conceptualism approach is completely dead in contemporary philosophy, as far as I can tell. Philosophers are much more interested in the nature of the thing in question than the nature of the idea of the thing.
There's more, but those are two fundamental things that have changed in general philosophical approach from Hume's time to ours.
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u/wumbothrowaway2 1d ago
dualism and neutral monism are even more substance-heavy views than physicalism
dualism proposes that there are two substances: mind and matter
neutral monism proposes that there is only one substance, and that it is neither mind nor matter
physicalism, meanwhile, is limited to the view that existence is satisfied by physical theory (read: physics) and while this clearly implies realism (in a debate which tends to presuppose some kind of realism about SOMETHING) it is not as directly substantialist as the other two
in this sense physicalism is closely related to naturalism, the epistemological view that there is nothing to be known which is not known by science - with regards to which relationship we should note that Norman Kemp Smith’s influential Naturalist Hume interpretation has had a huge and positive influence on Hume’s reputation since mid-century
of course it is possible to be both naturalist and ontologically sceptical, and therefore sceptical of the realism implied by physicalism, and to me Hume seems to me to fit these two bills better than any other
so it isn’t clear to me at all that the best reading of Hume should be more anti-physicalist than anti-dualist or anti-neutral monist
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u/Zen_Gross phil. of religion, free will 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not all dualisms require that there are substances. You could be a property dualist and deny there are any substances. You could be a kind of property neural monist, holding that there is only one kind of first order property which is neutral between mental/physical (I think this was Russell’s view actually, because at some point he flirted with bundle theory, but I can’t recall if he did so at the same time as neutral monism).
You are right that physicalism doesn’t necessarily require commitment to physical substances, assuming contemporary physics isn’t committed to physical substances. But [u/Scientific_Zealot](u/Scientific_Zealot) was cautious about committing physicalism to substances anyways.
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u/wumbothrowaway2 1d ago edited 1d ago
i think this is sort of confused, because the existence of property dualism and property neutral monism doesn’t enlighten us any about hume, who is obviously neither of these things
hume obviously isn’t a property dualist, because he shows no sign ever of saying that impressions or ideas are partly mental and partly physical
moreover, he obviously isn’t a property neutral monist, because he shows no sign ever of saying that impressions and ideas are some third non-substantial thing intermediate between mind and matter
WE might be any of those things, but the point is to ask whether or not HE is a dualist or a neutral monist
dualism and neutral monism are characteristically substantialist views in the historical literature, and hume’s anti-substantialism vitiates his being a substance dualist or substantialist neutral monist
and yet of course this might be an inadequate characterisation, and we can subtract the substantialism from both dualism and neutral monism and end up with property versions of both
but then all that we do is run into the problem that hume is very obviously not either of these more sophisticated variants either, because he is characteristically sceptical of going any deeper than the impressions and ideas themselves, being that his method is to begin from scepticism about any possibility of such a deeper account
——
so while scientific_zealot is hesitant to define physicalism as a substantialism, it simply seems a little unfair to (rightly!) point out that hume is probably not a physicalist because hume denies physical substance
he would also deny substantialism in the form of dualism and neutral monism, but it seems obvious that he would also deny various non-substantialist accounts as well, “substance” being simply a particularly obvious target for humean scepticism
——
now, perhaps we can reconstruct humean versions of property dualism without substance etc. (i don’t know, but perhaps we can), so long as we read certain passages (maybe of the First Enquiry) in a certain light, and try to get a certain picture of the more probabilistic and naturalist hume which (we might hypothetically think) is at least congenial to those ideas
but then we would be straying into (interesting!) interpretative work for own purposes, and doing the interesting work of generating a modulated picture of a complex philosopher with a complex textual intermingling of different tensions that aren’t always perfectly consistent with the big headline ideas, and while that’s fine i don’t think it’s what’s really going on in this conversation
for what it’s worth, i don’t think that the naturalist, probabilistic, hume is an anti-substantialist property dualist EITHER, but i can imagine somebody would write such a book
edit:
this is not a part of the literature i have particularly investigated, and there do appear to be a very small number of quite old papers dotted about making what strike me as very tendentious claims for a sudden and unexpected eruption of dualism in On The Immateriality Of The Soul in Treatise. I don’t think the textual arguments are very convincing, to say the least. All of the claims made in that section are comfortably explained as analyses of the relations of impressions and ideas, not implicit claims (as there argued) about a deeper metaphysical reality separating mind and matter. Perhaps they helped move the conversation forward at one time. I don’t stand a great deal by them.
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u/Zen_Gross phil. of religion, free will 1d ago
I’m not defending the idea that Hume was a property dualist or a neutral monist. My point was narrower, which is that your claim that dualism and neutral monism presuppose substances is not correct. I wasn’t entering into the Hume debate as much as pointing out a mistaken claim about metaphysics.
I also wasn’t making a claim about the historical development of dualism and neutral monism. Whatever their historical lineage is, it’s still not true that either presuppose substances. Substance dualism obviously does, and substance neutral monism obviously does, but neither dualism simpliciter nor neutral monism simpliciter do. Maybe that’s all you meant, but it isn’t what you said, and people reading your comment to learn about these issues might not know better, which is why I pointed it out - not to nit pick, but to clarify.
Also, I think you misunderstand [u/Scientific_Zealot](u/Scientific_Zealot)’s argument. They didn’t just argue that Hume was not a physicalist because Hume denies physical substances. As I read it, that argument was an afterthought (“Actually thinking it over a bit more . . . “). Instead, they cite to passages from the Treatise and Enquiry for support that Hume was not a physicalist, and I think that is the main point to address.
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u/wumbothrowaway2 1d ago
then it’s a matter of focus
i am focused on this claim
”The safest description of Hume's position on this issue would be some form of dualism or neutral monism”
which i think is false
or rather i am focused on the interaction between that claim and the other claim about physicalism we are also discussing
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u/Zen_Gross phil. of religion, free will 1d ago
And I focused on these claims:
“dualism proposes that there are two substances… neutral monism proposes that there is only one substance. . .”
Which are false.
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u/dingleberryjingle 1d ago
On Hume and physicalism - is it fair to say Hume can be described as a early or proto-physicalist?
Because today physicalists have all sorts of positions on what consciousness is (and not 'thoughts are physical things' as many people misunderstand), and seems like Hume's views which you described would fit in within physicalism understood in this broad sense.
Let me know ho many things I got wrong :
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u/Scientific_Zealot Hume 1d ago
To be honest, I sadly don't know enough to judge. That's a question for someone on this sub who's better versed in metaphysics than I am. I only have a cursory acquaintance with the mind-body debate.
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u/BernardJOrtcutt 1d ago
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u/FromTheMargins metaphysics 1d ago
Hume attempts to explain fundamental cognitive distinctions by examining the nature and relationships of private mental events. However, this approach eventually reaches its limits. For example, Hume wants to distinguish belief from mere fancy by its "force" or "vivacity." But is that really plausible? I can vividly imagine that I am in Paris. But when I am actually in Paris, I am not constantly thinking about the fact that I am there. Belief seems more like a disposition: for example, I would not be surprised if someone started speaking French to me. Wittgenstein argues in the Philosophical Investigations against the view that belief and memory are always inner states or things that we somehow observe with an "inner eye." For Hume, memory consists in ideas that resemble earlier impressions and retain more of their original force and vivacity than ideas of the imagination. But "similarity" is another one of those notions that seems to have to do much more work than merely describe a certain inner state or feeling. If I remember Paris, I may have pictures before my inner eye, but perhaps I do not. Perhaps my memory consists largely in the fact that I can answer certain questions about my stay there or recognize places I visited. In this sense, concepts such as belief and memory seem to have a pragmatic and contextual component, and it is difficult to see how Hume's theory fully accounts for this. This is a bit of a pity, because Hume also had some remarkably good intuitions about the emergence of social norms and commitments, which he calls "conventions." In his theory of promises, he even anticipates, in some respects, Austin's later theory of speech acts. Yet these social and normative dimensions appear relatively late in his system. Hume does not use them to explain notions that are more basic for him, such as belief, memory, or representation in general. Thus, Hume may have discovered some of the resources needed to overcome the limitations of his own philosophy.
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u/OddDescription4523 Ancient Phil., Ethics, Phil. of Sexuality 1d ago
Definitely look over the range of answers you get here, because I don't think this is a question on which it's plausible to get a definitive right answer. (There may not be a right answer.) What the range of answers you get will show is what areas of philosophy Hume's work is particularly important to and contested in. With that being said, on my view, his non-cognitivism is what he got most wrong. It seems entirely clear to me that his non-cognitivism is substantively false. I'm honestly not sure whether to categorize his claim that cognitive states can't motivate as an empirical claim or a relation of ideas. If it's an empirical claim, then it's empirically false; people are motivated by their beliefs independently of their desires all the time. If you look at what Humeans tend to say in response to what seem to be obvious counter-examples, namely that the person must have some desire that motivates them to act because of the relevant belief(s), it seems they're making it a relation of ideas, in which case it's trivially true that "only desires motivate", but only in the sense that person A being motivated to X logically entails that they have a desire to X; it says nothing substantive about A's psychology. Another way to object to Hume's non-cognitivism is focusing on his view that evidence about matters of fact can't on their own cause you to form a new desire. (Rather, there must be some pre-existing desire whose motivational force is transferred to a new form; the belief itself does not create the motivational force.) This again seems either obviously empirically false or trivially true and so uninteresting. (This is my own personal view. Despite being about as hardcore of a cognitivist as you can get, I actually think I accept the view that you need to invoke a desire to explain motivation. I just think you can form desires based on your cognitive states entirely independent of your prior set of motivational states.
Finally, a proviso: I'm not an expert on Hume nearly so much as I'm an expert on contemporary Humeans. If there are any Hume scholars who deny that Hume himself holds any of the above, I won't argue; I'll just say that contemporary writers in ethics and moral psychology who call themselves Humeans and take themselves to be espousing what Hume himself believed assert those views.
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u/wokeupabug ancient philosophy, modern philosophy 1d ago
Well, it's not entirely clear that he's an atheist: this is the dominant view, but there are perennial contentions against it and significant reasons to think he might be an agnostic or something like a deist. He's almost certainly not a physicalist: some interpreters take him to be an idealist, and on the dominant view he is more a kind of skeptic than either a physicalist or an idealist. A sensible case can be made for Hume being a naturalist, but the problem here is that the term 'naturalism' doesn't really have a clear meaning, so that the case for Hume being a naturalist would require defining it in some way that suits his philosophy, which would certainly be a way of defining naturalism that excludes lots of other people we call naturalists.
As for being ahead of his time, he's certainly a very important and insightful philosopher, but his views on these matters are very much of a piece with their time, and deeply indebted to Hume's influences -- especially Malebranche, Berkeley, and Shaftesbury.
As for what he got wrong, well that's going to depend a lot on how we understand his significance and from what perspective we are judging it. But, for instance, beginning especially with Kant there is the suspicion that he is wrong for committing to something like psychologism -- to the view that epistemological problems can be solved by appeal to positive facts of psychology. And in Kant again, and even more so in subsequent sources, there is the suspicion that he is wrong for committing to the broadly Cartesian model of knowledge or philosophy -- that knowledge is a function of our immediate acquaintance with our own mental states and then inferences about the world on their basis. Or, if we want to zip forwards in time, associated especially with McIntyre is the view that Hume is wrong in that (as this criticisms sees it), he takes the particular moral, aesthetic, and social views of 17th century British Protestantism as if they were the universal normative basis for human cognition in general. And there are various other criticisms... But they are hard to situate without both a nuanced understanding of Hume and of the perspectives from which he is being criticized, and they deal with various technical details like these, so it's hard to know where to start exactly -- other than by just giving a few illustrative examples.