Humean Reason and the Problem of Warrant

Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 2, November 2000, pp. 305-321 A Symposium on David Owen, Hume's Reason Humean Reason and the Problem of Warrant WILLIAM EDWARD MORRIS David Owen's new book invites us to take a fresh look at three major modern philosophers: Descartes, Locke, and Hume.1 Although Leibniz invented the familiar conception of proof as a formal relationship among sentences,2 reasoning for these three philosophers was a very different animal: they thought of it as a matter, not of form, but of content. They regarded proof—demonstration or demonstrative reasoning—as a process of stringing together chains of relations between ideas.3 That process appeals to the content of the ideas involved, and is thus a radically non-formal conception of reasoning, one that has as little to do with the syllogisms of Aristotle and the Scholastics as it does with the post-Fregean notion of deductive validity dominant today. In Hume's Reason, Owen argues that until we understand the conception of reasoning these philosophers employed, we are doomed to misunderstand them. All three, for instance, sometimes refer to demonstration as "deduction ," and as Owen stresses, "if, when we read [them], we think of deduction in the modern sense, we will fail to understand what is being said" (HR 6), which will aversely affect our reading of their central arguments. Hume's Reason is thus a welcome corrective to our tendency to misread these important figures. It should be required reading, not just for Hume scholars, but for any student of early modern philosophy. The core of Hume's Reason, however, is Owen's discussion of Hume's views about reasoning, to which he devotes his final five chapters. Rightly so, for as he states in his "Introduction," William Edward Morris is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL 61702-2900, USA. e-mail: wmorris@titan.iwu.edu 306 William Edward Morris many of the most famous problems that Hume discusses, and the positions he advocates, are expressed in terms of reason: whether probable reasoning or causal inference is founded on reason, scepticism with regard to reason, reason and the passions, whether moral distinctions are based on reason. To understand what Hume has to say about these issues, we must understand what his account of reason and reasoning is. (HR 1) In developing Hume's account of "reason and reasoning," Owen restricts himself to the first two problems he mentions, but those whose primary interests are Hume's views on the passions and morals will nonetheless find much helpful material here. I wish I could discuss all the facets of the issues Owen chooses to discuss, but I'll focus here on his approach to what he calls "the problem of warrant." Even this self-imposed limit, however, may take us well into "the neighboring fields" before we're done. The necessity for doing so is an unavoidable consequence of the close connections among the elements of Hume's thought, of which Owen is always keenly cognizant and which he handles with clarity and economy in Hume's Reason. I will offer an alternative to Owen's treatment—perhaps even to his understanding—of this problem. But I do so with acute awareness that, without the benefit of Owen's constructive criticism of my own work, and without our innumerable informal discussions on Humean topics over the years, I probably wouldn't have a view of my own to present as an alternative. I. The Problem of Warrant One of the central aims of Hume's Reason is to clarify what Owen sees as Hume's belated concern, in part iv of Book I of the Treatise, with the way questions of warrant and justification arise for the positive view of the nature of reasoning he has developed in part iii. Owen calls this concern "the problem of warrant"; he introduces it this way: I try to locate where in fact Hume does face the issue of warrant and to explain how he deals with it. I argue that, although Hume was not primarily concerned with issues of warrant and justification, he does, in Part 4 of Book I of the...