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Hume and the enactive approach to mind

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Abstract

An important part of David Hume’s work is his attempt to put the natural sciences on a firmer foundation by introducing the scientific method into the study of human nature. This investigation resulted in a novel understanding of the mind, which in turn informed Hume’s critical evaluation of the scope and limits of the scientific method as such. However, while these latter reflections continue to influence today’s philosophy of science, his theory of mind is nowadays mainly of interest in terms of philosophical scholarship. This paper aims to show that, even though Hume’s recognition in the cognitive sciences has so far been limited, there is an opportunity to reevaluate his work in the context of more recent scientific developments. In particular, it is argued that we can gain a better understanding of his overall philosophy by tracing the ongoing establishment of the enactive approach. In return, this novel interpretation of Hume’s ‘science of man’ is used as the basis for a consideration of the current and future status of the cognitive sciences.

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Notes

  1. This paper will draw mainly on Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects (1739–1740a), An Abstract of ... A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740b), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Quotations taken from these works will be abbreviated by T, Abs, EHU, and DNR, respectively.

  2. Note that Hume’s critical opposition toward rationalism has arguably also received an experimental foundation in recent artificial intelligence research because in that field “the rationalist tradition had finally been put to an empirical test, and it had failed” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988).

  3. According to some anatomists of Hume’s time, ‘animal spirits’ were a kind of nerve fluid inside nerve-tubes, which was the material source of nervous transmissions in animals and humans (EHU, p. 235).

  4. Hume often does not make a proper distinction between the physical or causal impact on the senses (sub-personal level) and the sense impressions present to the mind (personal level). Moreover, it is also questionable whether such atomic sense impressions can even be given in our experience (cf. Sellars 1956). Nevertheless, at least in the case of our experience of an external world, he explicitly offers a personal level explanation that takes as its starting point “only a single existence, which I shall call indifferently object or perception, [...], understanding by both of them what any common man means by a hat, or shoe, or stone, or any other impression, convey’d to him by his senses” (T. 1.4.2.31).

  5. Subsequently the label ‘enactive’ has also been associated with the sensorimotor account of perception of O’Regan and Noë (2001), especially due to Noë (2004). Here we will be specifically concerned with the broader enactive paradigm that began with Varela et al. (1991). See Torrance (2005) and Thompson (2007, pp. 243–266) for a discussion of the relationship between these two approaches.

  6. There is one notable difference in that Hume does not attempt to explain the origin of valence: “Nature has implanted in the human mind a perception of good or evil, or in other words, of pain and pleasure, as the chief spring and moving principle of all its actions” (T. 1.3.10.2). The enactive approach, on the other hand, often attempts to ground valence in the precarious situation of the self-constituting identity (e.g. Weber and Varela 2002). This additional move should not be misunderstood as a scientific explanation or logical argument; it is more of a structural match based on existential characteristics (cf. Jonas 1966).

  7. Note that this distinction between natural and mind science does not hold with respect to quantum mechanics, which is essentially participatory and structurally similar to the study of mind (cf. Bitbol 2002).

  8. Hume reports that the limitations of human reason have made him ready to reject all belief and reasoning: “Where am I, or what? [...] What beings surround me? [...] I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself [...] inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty” (T. 1.4.7.8). It is worth noting the specific manner in which he finds back into the natural attitude: “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends” (T. 1.4.7.9). Here we have a first rudimentary phenomenological description of how the category of the real is grounded in intersubjectivity, a theme more fully developed by the later Husserl (cf. Zahavi 1996).

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Mike Beaton, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Joel Parthemore, Tom Ziemke, Charles Wolfe and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Much of this paper was written during a stay in 2007 at the University of Skövde funded by the euCognition network (www.eucognition.org), as part of the European Cognitive Systems initiative.

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    Tom Froese

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Froese, T. Hume and the enactive approach to mind. Phenom Cogn Sci 8, 95–133 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9111-5

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