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The Necessity of “Necessity”: Hume’s Psychology of Sophisticated Causal Inference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Abraham Sesshu Roth
Abraham Sesshu Roth*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH43210, USA
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Extract

Much of what Hume calls probable reasoning is deliberate and reflective. Since there are aspects to Hume's psychology that tempt some commentators to think, on the contrary, that for Hume all such reasoning is simple and immediate, I will be concerned to emphasize Hume's recognition of the sophisticated sort of probable reasoning (section I). Though some of the details of my case may be new, the overall point of this section should not be news to recent scholarship. But once we recognize that this reflective and deliberate reasoning constitutes a significant portion of all probable reasoning, it becomes legitimate to ask how Hume accommodates this reasoning in his psychology, his ‘science of man.’ I believe that Hume has an answer to this question. I will explain in what way Hume could have thought that probable reasoning can be sophisticated: in short, sophisticated probable reasoning involves the use of the concept of evidence or epistemic support (section II). Hume's psychology, constrained by his empiricism, must therefore explain how we come to have this idea.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 263 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

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