Reply to My Critics

Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 2, November 2000, pp. 323-337 A Symposium on David Owen, Hume's Reason Reply to My Critics DAVID OWEN I'd like to thank Don Garrett and Ted Morris, not just for these generous and interesting comments, but for their good will, encouragement and constructive criticism over the years I was writing Hume's Reason. And as I said in the book, much of the material contained therein was first presented in papers to the Hume Society. It is difficult to imagine a more critically sustaining audience . Section I In his comments, Garrett presents a fair summary of the project of the book: briefly, to understand Hume's account of reason in light of the non-formal accounts developed by, inter alia, Descartes and Locke. He also lays out, more clearly than I could do myself and with the succinct perspicuousness that anyone familiar with Garrett's work will immediately recognize, eight substantial, interpretative theses that I put forward and defend, and pleasingly announces his agreement with all of them. He does, alas, identify four rather important areas of disagreement, and I would like to say a little in this section about the first three. Garrett's first critical point concerns a very tendentious and difficult point in Hume scholarship: just what are Hume's views about body, and how are they constrained by his rigorous methodology?1 In my book, I made the strong claim that David Owen is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0027, USA. e-mail: dwo@u.arizona.edu 324 David Owen if experience is constituted by impressions, the cause of impressions cannot themselves be a subject for enquiry. So, for instance, we cannot sensibly ask whether our impression of a tree is caused by and represents a tree. Indeed, it is not even clear such a question makes sense, given Hume's methodology. (HR 72)2 Garrett agrees with a weaker version of this claim: Hume emphasizes that the general supposition that bodies cause our impressions cannot be produced or defended by reason, and he also makes the related point that alternatives to that supposition cannot be refuted with certainty. There is, therefore, a good Humean sense in which the causes of our impressions of sensation cannot be strictly or certainly "known"; and one might add that, in light of this impossibility of success, it would not be "sensible" even to try to support that general supposition or to refute its alternatives. (Garrett 295) So our disagreement lies only in this: I don't think it is clear that the question, whether our sense impressions are caused by bodies which they resemble, makes sense, given Hume's methodology. Garrett thinks it is clear that it does make sense, even though "the general supposition that bodies cause our impressions cannot be produced or defended by reason" (Garrett 295). I am glad that Garrett finds it clear; I find it baffling. Here's why.3 It is easy enough to find passages (Garrett gives reference to seven of them) where Hume speaks, not only as if the thought that bodies cause impressions makes sense, but also that we all (at least when we are in a certain sort of philosophical mode) believe it to be true. "To give a child an idea of scarlet or orange, of sweet or bitter, I present the objects, or in other words, convey to him these impressions" (T 5). It is perfectly clear what we all take this to mean, presuppose and/or imply: to convey to someone, whose relevant sense organs are functioning, the visual sense impression of "orange", we place in their visual field an orange-colored object. Through a process that can be examined by anatomists and natural philosophers (it would be inappropriate for moral philosophers to conduct such an investigation), the orange-colored object causes something distinct and quite different: an impression of orange. It is a matter of some debate what further relations hold between the physical object and the sense impression, e.g., does the sense impression resemble the object? It is undeniable that Hume speaks this way. Nonetheless, he is aware that there...