Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume 31, Number 1, April 2005, pp. 173-176 JERRYA. FODOR. Hume Variations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. 176. ISBN 0-19-926405-8, cloth, £16.99/$22.00. It is not uncommon for philosophers to seek the imprimatur of a great predecessor by attempting to show that the truths they proclaim have been perceived by the latter, even if only through a glass darkly. In this slim but rich volume, it is Jerry Fodor's turn to claim Hume as a philosophical ancestor, both for cognitive science, in general, and for the theory of the mind he has championed for some time, in particular. He writes: "Hume's Treatise is the foundational document of cognitive science: it made explicit, for the first time, the project of constructing an empirical psychology on the basis of a representational theory of the mind" (135). Others have endorsed the first of these claims without thinking that doing so is equivalent to signing on to the second. Thus, the chief interest of the present work, at least for readers of Hume, lies in Fodor's argument for the thesis that in Hume's hands the theory of ideas becomes, in essential respects, an early version of the representative theory of the mind (RTM). This means that we should see Hume, somewhat surprisingly, as being on the right side on the central question that divides theorists of the mind in our day into (a few) "Cartesian naturalists" and (many) "Wittgensteinian pragmatists." That question (actually, two closely related ones) is, what is a concept and what is it to possess one? The Cartesian naturalist answer is that a concept is a mental object that represents the thing of which it is a concept, and possessing one is being able to think about the thing it represents. The pragmatist answer is that a concept is a "construction out of dispositions to classify things and draw inferences," and having one is to be able to sort and to infer in the appropriate ways. For Fodor, the pragmatist has it wrong in at least two crucial ways. First, he is unable to give a coherent account of the causal role that a theory of the mind must ascribe to the concepts a thinker possesses. Second, he puts the cart before the horse: the epistemic abilities which he says constitute concept-possession presuppose what they are supposed to explain. Where does Hume come into this? According to Fodor, he "is entirely committed" to the Cartesian picture, as is RTM. Fodor has long urged that RTM is "the only game in town," if the game is developing "an empirically adequate theory of the mind." Here he sets out to show that "it is possible to regard [Hume's psychology] as an early attempt to construct a naturalistic theory of the mind within the assumptions of Cartesian Representationalism" (27). As Hume makes clear in the Introduction to the Treatise , developing a scientific account of the mind is his chief aim in that work. It is, then, just as well that he saw, with remarkable clarity, that only on the basis of the theory of ideas inherited from Descartes could he do so. Hume Studies 174 Book Reviews Complaints (by, for example, Stroud) that Hume was not enough of a pragmatist , besides being ironic, presuppose that pragmatism is right. Fodor finds a "remarkable and doomed consensus" to this effect in recent analytic philosophy, and much oÃ- Hume Variations is devoted to arguments against the pragmatist picture . Many of these will be familiar to habitual readers of Fodor; whether one finds them compelling or not, one has to admire their inventiveness, incisiveness and elegance. As always, Fodor is great fun to read. Students of Hume will be interested in the evidence he offers to make his enlisting Hume on the side of the angels plausible, and in what we can learn about Hume by reading him in this way, and what may be lost if we do so. First, a brief (and partial) list of other things Hume got right, according to Fodor, and one of some of the things he got wrong. He was right to be a realist about mental...