The problem of meaning
12.3 Example: Hume on the mind
‘To me it seems evident that the essence of the mind [is] equally unknown to us with that of external bodies’ (Int}8/xvii). Plainly, to say this is not to say or suggest that the unknown essence doesn’t exist. In the case of both body and mind we face the ‘impossibility of explaining [their] ultimate principles’ (Int}8/xviii). Plainly, to say this is not to say there are no such principles.‘Reason is . . . a wonderful and unintel- ligible instinct in our souls’ (179/1.3.16.9); the Imagination is a kind of ‘magical faculty in the soul, which . . . is . . . inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding’ (24/1.1.7.15);‘the uniting principle among our internal perceptions is as unintelligible as that among external objects’ (169/1.3.14.29). Plainly, to make these claims is not to claim that these things don’t exist—definitely don’t exist. When Hume writes ‘that other beings may possess many senses of which we can have no conception’ (20/2.7), he doesn’t mean to say that these senses neither do nor can exist.
—No. Hume held a ‘bundle’ theory of mind, according to which the mind is just a ‘heap’ of ‘perceptions’, and is, as such, wholly E-intelligible.’
But this can’t possibly be right. For how, in this case, can ‘the essence of the mind [be] . . . unknown’ (Int}8/xvii)? For ‘the perceptions of the mind are perfectly known’ (366/2.2.6.2). And how, in any case, can Hume, a strictly non-committal sceptic, wish to make any such definite negative ontological claim—to the effect that the mind is definitely (knowably) nothing more than perceptions? As E. J. Craig (1987: }2.5) shows, when Hume makes the apparently ontological claim that the mind is nothing but a heap of perceptions (he does so a number of times), his main concern is with the epistemological claim that all we can know of mind are its perceptions. His main claim is that the mind so far as we know about it is nothing but a bundle of perceptions—‘that we have no notion of it, distinct from the particular perceptions’ (635/App}18). His target is those philosophers who hold that we have some sort of a priori or in any case certain knowledge of its essential nature specifically insofar as it is considered as something more than perceptions (knowledge that it is a simple, indivisible, perduring substance distinct from material substance).13
13 Compare Kant:‘I know my mind only . . . by appearances which constitute an inner state [i.e. I know only my perceptions], and the essence of it in itself which lies at the ground of these appearances [or
‘The comparison of the mind [to] . . . a kind of theatre . . . must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind [so far as it is in any way at all an object of human knowledge]; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed’ (253/1.4.6.4). ‘The uniting principle among our internal perceptions is . . . unintelligible’ (169/1.3.14.29). We have no notion of these things. Yet no doubt there is such a ‘place’, and such ‘materials’; ignorance, not non-existence, is what is in question. And certainly there is some such‘uniting principle’. Yet we know nothing for certain about the ultimate nature of these things. All we know of the mind are perceptions:‘the essence of the mind [is] . . . unknown’. We are more ignorant than we suppose. The question of whether the mind is material or immaterial is‘utterly unintelligible’.14
The following point is also worth making: on Hume’s view, an idea of X can arise in the mind only if there has been a preceding impression of X.15But if the mind is nothing but a stream of perceptions, ontologically speaking, then there can be no possible mechanism whereby the prior occurrence of an impression of X provides any sort of basis for any later idea of X (e.g. one which occurs after a period in which many other different impressions and ideas have occurred). It must be a complete fluke that impressions of X always precede ideas of X.
Given that this is unacceptable, there must be something more to the mind than just a series of occurrent perceptions, something which as it were serves to preserve contents through time in such a way that an impression of X at time t1can somehow be the basis of—and accordingly be the basis of an explanation of—the occurrence of an idea of X at a later time t2. A similar point can be made about the operation of
memory. The idea that Hume simply didn’t think of this, or thought it didn’t matter, and claimed dogmatically that the mind is just a series of perceptions ontologically speaking, rather than merely claiming that all we can ever know or experience of mind is a series of perceptions, is ludicrous.16
perceptions] is unknown to me’ (Prolegomena, }49; cf. Critique B404). See also Locke: ‘’Tis plain then, that the Idea of corporeal Substance in Matter is as remote from our Conceptions, and Apprehensions, as that of Spiritual Substance; and therefore from our not having any notion of the Substance of Spirit, we can no more conclude its non-Existence, than we can, for the same reason, deny the Existence of Body’ (Essay 2.23.5).
14 240/1.4.5.17. Hume goes on to discuss it nevertheless, in the rest of 1.4.5, and it’s arguable that the meaning of‘unintelligible’, as applied here to ‘question’, is close to ‘undecidable’. The question is about aspects of reality which are real but utterly unencompassable by us. The second half of 1.4.5 contains some wonderful argument, and is in part fully anticipated in Locke, Essay 2.23.
15 I’ll stick to considering simple ideas. For a complex idea Y, composed of simple ideas Z, V, and W, the claim is that Y can’t arise unless there have been preceding impressions of Z, V, and W.
16 One might say insulting. Note that these points all gain purchase before one considers any of the consequences and commitments of his moral philosophy—his appeal to innate virtues, passions, and so on. Note also Hume’s neurological speculations (see p. 140 n. 5). Note also that Hume’s talk of the faculties of reason, sense, and imagination, which is as it stands incompatible with the bundle theory of the mind as ordinarily understood, does an enormous amount of work in his philosophy. Taken at face value, the
All this seems clear enough. It is, however, arguable that there is an ambiguity in Hume’s use of the word ‘mind’, an ambiguity which may explain why he has been misunderstood. On this view, he uses‘mind’ to mean, roughly, both (1) conscious mental phenomena considered just as such, just as mental contents, and (2) the mind considered as a whole, in all ontic aspects, and hence considered as something which may well have (certainly does have) some ontic nature over and above perceptions or conscious mental phenomena: some ‘unknown . . . essence’ given which it is, for example, appropriate to talk of it as containing or involving faculties of sense, reason, and Imagination, and so on.
With this distinction in hand, one can perhaps allow a respect in which Hume did assert a bundle theory in an ontological sense, even though he later doubted its viability (in his Appendix to the Treatise). On this view, what he asserted was a bundle theory of the mind in sense (1): all there are, so far as mental contents are concerned, are particular perceptions; there isn’t something extra called the ‘self ’ among the mental contents. But he did not assert a bundle theory of mind in sense (2).
Using ‘mind’ just in sense (2), one might restate the point as follows. What Hume asserted was a bundle theory of the self, not of the mind. Thus the mind, considered as a whole, presumably (surely) has some unknown, faculty-involving, ontically perception-transcendent nature; but there’s no such thing as the self, considered as something which features among the mental contents of the mind over and above all the perceptions that make up the mental contents of the mind: so far as the basic mental contents of the mind are concerned, all there are are perceptions.17
These are questions about which it’s difficult to be clear. Consider by way of analogy a pointille´ painting of a face. According to the analogy the whole painting is the mind (sense (2)), the points of colour considered just in respect of their colour- content are the perceptions, and the face is the self. The face (self) is nothing ontically over and above the points of colour (perceptions), but the painting (the mind) is indeed something over and above the points of colour, being a physical object, frame, canvas, paint—the ‘place’ and ‘materials’ of the mind, in Hume’s words.
12.4 Conclusion
I discuss this difficult question further in Strawson 2011. Here I want to return to the main issue. The central point, as always, is the simple sceptical point
bundle theory requires that these faculties be dismissed as definitely non-existent ‘fictions’ that we come to believe in (on introspection) on account of certain sorts of regularities and constancies in the sequence of perceptions. But then what about this coming to believe? To explain it in Humean terms one will again have to appeal to something like the effect of custom on the imagination. (For further powerful support for this view see Weissman 1965: 18–28, 50–1, 76–8.)
17 This is the sense in which someone like Parfit, say, is an ontological ‘bundle theorist’, while firmly believing that the mind is based in the brain (Parfit 1984: Part 3).
that we can’t know how things are in reality. We can’t even rule out the possibility that we’re Berkeleian minds—and something even stranger may be true. It’s intelligible (R-intelligible) to suppose that these unknowable (partly or wholly E-unintelligible) possibilities are actual; and it is of course also intelligible (to put it mildly) to suppose that we are in fact situated in a physical world in something like the way we ordinarily suppose.18The question whether there are realist objects is a‘question of fact’ (153/12.12), and it’s intelligible (to say the least) to suppose that if there are totally mind-independent external objects of some sort, affecting us roughly as we think they do and giving rise to our experience, then we do in fact refer to them when we talk about tables and chairs; even if we are in some sense limited—both as regards knowledge of reality, and as regards positively or descrip- tively contentful (E-intelligible) conceptions of it—to the contents of our own impressions and ideas.19
A clear parallel offers itself in the case of Causation. If there are such external objects, then it’s intelligible (not to say overwhelmingly natural) to suppose that our regular-succession experience is experience (relationally) of Causation in those objects, and, hence, that we do in fact refer to Causation in those objects, in talking of causation—to ‘the powers, by which bodies operate’ (652/Abs}15), ‘the principle, on which their mutual influence depends’ (400/2.3.1.4), ‘power, as it is in itself ’ (77 n./7.29 n.)—even if it is again true that we are in some sense limited by our epistemic situation, both as regards knowledge of reality and as regards positively contentful (E-intelligible) conceptions of it, to the contents of our impressions and ideas, and are therefore limited, so far as our experience of Causation is concerned, to experi- ence of regularity.
Thus the E-intelligible meaning of the term‘causation’ can only encompass certain aspects of the experience Causation gives rise to—its regular-succession content, on the one hand, and the feeling of determination that the experience of regular succession gives rise to in us, on the other hand. But the term may yet reach out referentially (if purely‘suppositionally’, in Hume’s terms) to the ‘ultimate cause’ of that experience, to what one might call the ‘real essence’ of causation—i.e. to Causation in the objects.
It may be noted, finally, that a large part of the point of Hume’s seemingly unenthusiastic comments about putatively referring terms that lack any content- bestowing impression-source is that such terms are of no use to science or natural philosophy, contrary to the beliefs of certain philosophers of the time. Such terms can have no role to play in the explanation or understanding of particular phenomena.
18 ‘Something like’ is designed to capture the sense in which it’s true to say that nothing in science’s view of the physical world undermines the ordinary view of it; both views count as realist views in the present sense.
19
Compare the situation of the‘brain in a vat’, who in talking about tables and chairs simply fails to be talking (‘talking’) about what it thinks it’s talking about in the way that we succeed in doing, given that we are indeed in a world more or less as we think we are.
The notion of Causation or power is of no use to physics. But to say that the notion of Causation is of no (explanatory) use to physics is not to say that it is not (R-)intelligible. It simply doesn’t follow—nor is it true—that it doesn’t make any sense. Nor does it follow that the notion of Causation, explicitly conceived of as something whose nature is in some sense unknowable, doesn’t have an indispensable role to play in any remotely plausible general philosophical account of things that takes epistemological problems seriously and at the same time takes reality (and its regularity) seriously. Granting, in line with R-intelligibility, that‘there may be several qualities both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted’ (there is nothing ironic about this remark), Hume says that ‘If we please to call these power or efficacy, ’twill be of little consequence to the world’ (168/ 1.3.14.27). And this is right, in the sense in which he intends it (it isn’t flippant). Such terms are of no explanatory use to science; nor, crucially, do they express any understanding of the nature of nature in the way that the philosophers who believe in‘intelligible causes’ think they do. Similarly, the idea that ‘the perceptions of the mind . . . arise . . . from some . . . cause . . . unknown to us’ (153/12.12) is R-intelligible although useless to science. If we speak of matter, and suppose that we have no positively contentful conception of it (not even as having primary qualities), then we leave it as a‘certain unknown, inexplicable something, . . . a notion so imperfect that no sceptic will think it worth while to contend against it’ (155/12.16), a notion that is in a clear sense useless. But it is still R-intelligible, and may in its way express the truth.
To hold that putatively referring terms that lack any content-bestowing impres- sion-source (Causation terms, expressions like ‘the real nature’ of bodies) do have such a role is fully compatible with holding, as Hume does, that thoughtless and over- confident use of such terms (use of them as if we could after all associate some theory-of-ideas-warranted, positively contentful conception with them) is disastrous, because it encourages the philosophically pernicious belief that the pseudo-subject of positive dogmatic metaphysics—‘nothing but sophistry and illusion’ (165/12.34)—is in fact a worthwhilefield of enquiry where definite answers can be had and substan- tive progress made. Referring uses of Causation terms, although perfectly legitimate, must always be closely accompanied, as they always are in Hume, by clear protest- ations of our entire ignorance of the nature of Causation or power. For they strongly encourage the false belief that we do after all have some positive conception of the nature of Causation or power.
At this point the reader may skip to Part 2 or indeed Part 3—to the detailed argument that Hume not only grants a proper use to Causation terms as applied to objects, despite the fact that they are E-unintelligible, so applied, but also takes it that there actually is such a thing as Causation. First, though, I will briefly develop the parallel suggested above between Hume’s use of (and explicit discussion of) the term ‘external object’ and his attitude to Causation terms, returning to some of the questions raised in 6.4–6.5.