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Hume's Argument for the Superiority of Natural Instinct*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Barbara Winters
Barbara Winters
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Extract

In book I of the Treatise Hume argues that we have no reason to believe what we do about matters of fact (139, 265); these beliefs are not “just conclusions” (89), nor are they “built on solid reasoning” (90). Therefore, all such beliefs are equally unjustified no matter how they are acquired. One might suppose, then, that he would hold that no ranking of ways of acquiring beliefs is possible; all are on a par, since all the resulting beliefs are unreasonable.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 635 - 643
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1981

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References

Notes

1 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Selby-Bigge, L., ed.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975Google Scholar. Page numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this edition.

2 E.g. at 179.

3 Hume discusses a further cause of belief: education (117). He says that one of the reasons it is rejected by philosophers is because it is an artificial and not a natural cause.

4 The fact that they are said to “reason” might appear to conflict with Hume's claim that reason does not determine us to have such beliefs. For a resolution of the apparent inconsistency, see my “Hume on Reason”, Hume Studies V, 1, 1979, in which I argue that “reason” and “reasoning” are used in two different senses in the Treatise. In this passage, the sense in which they “reason” is that their beliefs are produced by natural instinct.

5 The passage commits Hume to the view that normal reasoning is superior, even though the claim of the “modern philosophy” to rest on solid principles is false. He clearly thinks that having such grounding marks a superior theory and that his own philosophy has such a foundation and therefore wins over both the ancient and modern.

6 Árdal, Páll S., “Some Implications of the Virtue of Reasonableness in Hume's Treatise,” in Livingston, D. and King, J., Hume: a Re-evaluation, New York: Fordham University Press, 1976Google Scholar. While I agree with Árdal that in some cases beliefs may be useful even if false, my position is more qualified than his: their survival value, for example, does seem to be correlated with truth.