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Hume on Stability, Justification, and Unphilosophical Probability LOUIS E. LOEB 1. INTRODUCTION A NUMBERor PASSAGESin the Treatise suggest that Hume thought in terms of a particular picture of the conditions under which beliefs are justified, or reasonable .' Hume did not develop the details of this picture, so that it constitutes more of an epistemological orientation than a systematic theory. For ease of exposition, however, I often write of "Hume's theory of justification" in referring to the way of thinking about justification that emerges on my reconstruction of Hume's position. In this paper, I argue for two general theses about Hume's theory of justification. One thesis is that Hume develops the theory in two stages, with opposite results: first, in order to ratify the theory as explaining or systematizing pretheoretical distinctions between justified and unjustified belief; and second, to show that these distinctions ultimately cannot be sustained with reference to the theory. The second thesis is that Hume tends to explain justification in terms of psychological stability. Although these theses are independent, the evidence for them is interconnected, so that I discuss them in a single paper. Hume's leading idea is that justification is to be explicated with reference to the psychological equilibrium of sets of doxastic states--sets of beliefs, inclinations to hold beliefs, and "quasi-beliefs" (see w4). Hume, I believe, prizes stability in doxastic states. Stability is a dispositional property, the tendency of a doxastic state to remain in place, not to change. Two broad types of instability are of interest to Hume. First, there is the instability of a doxastic state owing 1use an abbreviation, 'T', in citing the Treatise. Pagereferences are to L. A. Selby-Bigge,ed., A Treatise of Human Nature, second edition, with text revised and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).Quotations are from T. L. Beauchamp, D. F. Norton, and M.A. Stewart,Huraaext 1.o (Washington:GeorgetownUniversity,199o).This is (the first phase of) an electronic edition of Hume's works. [lOl] 102 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:1 JANUARY 1995 exclusively to characteristics of the mechanism that produces or sustains the state. For example, some doxastic states have a tendency to change abruptly; in Hume's terminology, they lack fixity. (Fixity, according to Hume, results from perception, memory, or a mechanism involving repetition.) Other doxastic states are infixed, but have a tendency to change gradually because of associationist degradation or decay. In both cases, the tendency to change is entirely a result of the mechanism that produces or sustains the doxastic state. Second, there is the instability of a doxastic state owing to disequilibrium in the set of doxastic states of which it is a member. A set of doxastic states is in disequilibrium insofar as one is inclined to revise the set solely as the result of consideration of the content of the doxastic states themselves. Even a doxastic state that is infixed can suffer from disequilibrium. Similarly, a doxastic state that is unstable because it is not infixed, or because it degrades, can have a further instability if it is a member of a set of doxastic states in disequilibrium. Hume thinks that a doxastic state that suffers from lack of fixity does not deserve to be called a belief(see w4)- And he thinks, roughly, that a doxastic state (whether or not it qualifies as a belief) that suffers from disequilibrium does not deserve to be called justified. I say "roughly," because Hume prefers to evaluate the justificatory status of a belief with reference to generic properties of the beliefforming mechanisms that produce the belief, so that a doxastic state isjustified just in case it results from mechanisms that tend to produce sets of doxastic states that are in equilibrium. ~ It is a picture of justification along these lines that is developed in two stages. The first stage is constructive. Hume draws some pretheoretical distinctions between justified and unjustified beliefs. He invokes his theory of justification , together with some claims about the properties of relevant beliefforming mechanisms, in order to explain the pretheoretical distinctions. He sees himself as having some success in doing so, so that...

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