Abstract
A contemporary debate concerning the epistemology of testimony is portrayed by its protagonists as having its origins in the eighteenth century and the respective views of David Hume and Thomas Reid. Hume is characterized as a reductionist and Reid as an anti-reductionist. This terminology has been widely adopted and the reductive approach has become synonymous with Hume. In Sect. 1 I spell out the reductionist interpretation of Hume in which the justification possessed by testimonially-acquired beliefs is reducible to the epistemic properties of perception, memory and inductive inference. This account of testimony is taken to be found in the section ‘On Miracles’ of Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. In Sect. 2 I introduce the distinction between global and local reductionism, and Coady’s interpretation of Hume as a global reductionist. He takes Hume’s position to be untenable. The rest of the paper explores alternative interpretations of Hume. Section 3 develops a local reductionist interpretation of Hume on testimony. It is argued, though, that such an approach is unstable and, in response, Sect. 4 turns to anti-reductionism in its contemporary forms and in Reid’s teleological account. In Sect. 5 I argue for an anti-reductionist account of Hume, one drawn from his discussion of the testimony of history in the Treatise of Human Nature, thus moving away from the usually exclusive focus upon the discussion of miracles in the first Enquiry, upon which the reductionist interpretation is based. Given the standard meaning of ‘Humeanism’ in the current debate, my interpretation amounts to the claim that Hume is not a Humean with respect to testimony.
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Notes
In earlier work I interpreted Hume as a reductionist (Bailey and O’Brien 2006), but I have now come to reject this interpretation.
For further discussion of Coady’s arguments, see Gelfert (2014, pp. 105–108).
Wilson argues that our knowledge of the principles of causation also depends on such collective experience. We accept the principle that ‘[t]he same cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause’ (THN 1.3.15.6), but ‘[t]he experience that supports the acceptance of this principle is not simply that of the investigator, the “artisan”, say, or the philosopher: it is indeed my experience that is relevant, but my experience is backed up by that of others—what is relevant is our experience, the experience of us taken collectively’ (Wilson 2010, p. 67).
We return to Campbell’s criticism of Hume in Sect. 5 below.
Such monitoring need only be ‘registered and processed at an irretrievably sub-personal level’ (Fricker 1994, p. 150).
It is the ‘vulgar’ and uneducated who ‘carry all national characters to extremes; and having once established it as a principle, that any people are knavish, or cowardly, or ignorant, they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censure’ (Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, E 197). Hume, however, allows that the vulgar can be educated and that prejudices can be overturned.
I return to unphilosophical probability in Sect. 5 below.
On Hume on Christian morality, see Bailey and O’Brien (2013, pp. 185–187), and on aesthetic judgement and testimony, see Hume’s essay, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (E 226–252).
See Fricker (1994, p. 125): ‘PR [Presumptive Right] thesis: On any occasion of testimony, the hearer has the epistemic right to assume, without evidence, that the speaker is trustworthy, i.e. that what she says will be true, unless there are special circumstances which defeat this presumption. (Thus she has the epistemic right to believe the speaker’s assertion, unless such defeating conditions obtain)’.
That this is a feature of the psychology of testimonial trust does not of course entail epistemological anti-reductionism with respect to testimony. We may ‘simply believe them’, but should we?
See, for example, Coady’s ‘Martian argument’ (1992, pp. 85–93), Stevenson (1993) and Burge (1993). Burge argues that intelligible propositions display rationality and are therefore prima facie credible: ‘A person is apriori entitled to accept a proposition that is presented as true and that is intelligible to him, unless there are stronger reasons not to do so, because it is prima facie preserved (received) from a rational source, or resource for reason; reliance on rational sources—or resources for reason—is, other things equal, necessary to the function of reason’ (1993, p. 467). For the Davidsonian background, see Davidson (1984).
Note that we now use ‘credulity’ to imply gullibility. This is not Reid’s intention. His claim is only that children are trusting and that they are right to be so, until, that is, they meet with deceit and falsehood.
For Hume’s rejection of teleological thinking, see Greco and O’Brien (2019).
It could be clearer, though, how Hume accounts for this notion of taking as. Jost notes Hume’s difficulties with respect to drawing a distinction between belief in history and the vivid ideas associated with reading fiction: ‘In his repeated attempts to describe belief in both the Treatise and the first Enquiry Hume is clearly gesturing toward a sentimental je ne sais quoi that is not simply identical to being impressed by a good story, but because he characterizes belief as a feeling, his language fails to draw a firm barrier between rhetorical or narrational suasion and epistemological conviction’ (2014, p. 150).
Also see Welbourne (2002, p. 421): ‘If previous experience triggers suspicion about some particular testimony we abandon the default mode of response and in fact begin to behave, as in these circumstances we should, more like jurors or historians’.
It is interesting to speculate about why Hume saw fit to bring the discussion of miracles back in the Enquiry. Selby-Bigge saw the miracles discussion as an opportunity to ‘spice up the work and provoke public notoriety’ (Millican 2011, p. 155). However plausible one finds this claim, this alone would not explain the reappearance of miracles. It must also be the case that Hume, for some reason, became less concerned about the offence his discussion would cause. One reason for this could be that the political climate may have changed. In a letter to James Oswald, Hume says ‘I have some thoughts of taking advantage of this short interval of liberty that is indulged us and of printing the Philosophical Essays I left in your hands. Our friend, Harry [Henry Home], is against this, as indiscreet. But in the first place, I think I am too deep engaged to think of a retreat. In the second place, I see not what bad consequences follow, in the present age, from the character of an infidel; especially if a man’s conduct be in other respects irreproachable. What is your opinion?’ (Hume 1932, I, p. 106).
Also see Hume (EHU 8.9): ‘Hence likewise the benefit of that experience, acquired by long life and a variety of business and company, in order to instruct us in the principles of human nature…. The general observations, treasured up by a course of experience, give us the clue of human nature’.
Even when I sympathetically acquire the emotions of another, it’s my sadness I feel.
Preferably, though, without focusing on miracle-testimony. There is a weary tone to Hume’s letter, and no engagement with Campbell’s accusation of ambiguity beyond the two quoted sentences above. This is because Hume finds Campbell ‘a little too zealous for a philosopher’ and, in contrast to the usual entertaining and instructive conversations between Hume and his clergyman friend, Blair, ‘when the conversation was diverted by you [Blair]…towards the subject of your profession; tho I doubt not but your intentions were very friendly towards me, I own I never received the same satisfaction: I was apt to be tired, and you to be angry.’ (1932, I, p. 351).
I accept that Hume’s letter to Blair is somewhat problematic for my anti-reductionist interpretation. There are other ways to interpret this letter, those that do not take it as an outright expression of Hume’s reductionism, but those that also do not take Hume to be an out-and-out anti-reductionist. One could, for example, accept that Hume acknowledges a collective notion of experience, but only if the experiences of others can be deemed trustworthy on the basis of personal experience. This is a natural reading of Hume’s claim that ‘[t]he experience of others becomes his only by the credit which he gives to their testimony; which proceeds from his own experience of human nature’. Further, Hume claims that ‘the youthful propensity to believe…is corrected by experience’ (1932, I, p. 349), and there is again a natural reading of such ‘correction’ that involves one’s mature, personal experience of human nature. See Millican (2011, p. 157) for such an interpretation, an interpretation that is itself more nuanced than the received reductionist interpretation; Millican claiming that ‘Hume has no need to dispute the claim that we must start by taking testimony for granted to build our knowledge of the world’ (2011, p. 158).
My argument in Sect. 3 builds on Gelfert (2009), a paper that argues for the instability of the contemporary local reductionist approach, not one concerned with interpretations of Hume. It should also be noted that Gelfert accepts that there are ‘limits to the similarities’ (2010, p. 74) between Hume’s approach and local reductionism.
I think he’s right about anti-reductionism, but for the wrong reasons. As Traiger himself notes, there is no direct evidence that Hume had legal fictions in mind in the context of abstract ideas, and, given the influence of Locke on Hume, Traiger needs to do more to show that Hume does not hold a private language conception of the meaning of words and ideas, as Locke does.
In terms of contemporary epistemology, my claim is that cognitive externalism does not entail epistemological externalism.
I agree with Traiger, though, that social factors play a much more extensive role in Hume’s epistemology of testimony than is supposed, even by anti-reductionists. Testimonial beliefs can also be acquired via sympathy and certain intellectual virtues are relevant to testimonial exchanges, virtues assessed according to social utility. I explore these facets of Hume’s social epistemology in O’Brien (2017, 2018).
Hume later goes on, in his History of England, to supplement his Treatise of human nature with an account of how our nature is revealed by social and political turmoil—A History of Human Nature, if you will.
Quine uses Neurath’s metaphor to illustrate his naturalized epistemology in which he sees philosophy as continuous with science and not as providing its a priori foundations: ‘There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy’ (Quine 1969, p. 127).
Fred Wilson has a related reading, contrasting Hume’s approach with that of Cartesian foundationalism: ‘Descartes gives us the impossible cognitive ideal of the AUTONOMOUS THINKER; for Hume the cognitive ideal is that of the RESPONSIBLE KNOWER’ (Wilson 2010, p. 66).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Tamas Demeter, Laszlo Kocsis, and Iulian Toader for the Humeanisms conference in Budapest, 2018, to those who helped improve previous drafts of related work at the Oxford Hume Forum and Hume Society conference in Budapest, and to three anonymous referees.
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O’Brien, D. Humeanism and the epistemology of testimony. Synthese 199, 2647–2669 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02905-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02905-8