Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume XXI, Number 2, November 1995, pp. 237-254 Hume's Language of Scepticism IAN SIMPSON ROSS And how should I begin? sings that hopeless self-doubter, J. Alfred Prüf rock, contemplating the love of woman, but perhaps the task is easier for the student of literature and linguistics wishing to provide assistance to lovers of wisdom. He can focus on texts that puzzle them and give rise to their philosophical controversies, and offer his lights for interpretation and criticism by adducing new, perhaps even startling contexts, suggested by the concerns of his own discipline. A primary concern is language and therefore, with considerable trepidation, this student contributes a literary analysis of aspects of what is assuredly a problematic area for philosophers, Hume's language of scepticism. The meaning I am attaching to "language" in this context is the one advanced by John Pocock, neither a critic nor a linguist but a historian. Pocock wrote: we are to be concerned with idioms, rhetorics, specialised vocabularies and grammars, modes of discourse or ways of talking about politics which have been created and diffused, but far more importantly, employed, in the political discourse of early-modern Europe.1 Elucidating Hume's political thought, James Moore2 had already demonstrated that Hume used the language of classical republicanism, one of Ian Simpson Ross is at Bardscroft, West Bay, Gambier Island, RR #3, Gibsons, British Columbia VON IVO Canada. 238 Ian Simpson Ross the languages canvassed in Pagden's The Languages of Political Theory in EarlyModern Europe, and more recently John Laursen3 has attempted to connect Hume's scepticism with his politics traced in two specialized vocabularies of "politeness and manners" and "opinion and belief." I intend to cast a wider net and examine the idioms Hume uses as he pushes his principles of doubt and uncertainty as far as they will take him in exploring the limits of human knowledge; to see if he employs a specialized vocabulary or grammar or syntax; and to identify the nature of his rhetoric: how he reaches his audience, what kind of ethical appeal he makes to them, and how he seeks to arouse emotion through figurative expressions, as well as to win assent through logical demonstration. From this last sentence, it will be appreciated that I believe inquiry into the nature of Hume's scepticism, taking advantage of literary/linguistic insights, must be a more comprehensive activity than the one proposed by D. C. Stove: namely, demonstration, necessarily incomplete, that Hume's assessment of the conclusiveness of arguments is always less favourable than that of other philosophers.4 By the same token, I have to recognize, as did Pocock and his co-writers in Pagden's book, the difference pointed out by Saussure5 between langue and parole and, I would add, that meant by Chomsky6 in differentiating between linguistic competence and performance. In this instance, I am calling attention to the difference between the complete system of essential forms and structures that, setting aside issues of translation, could be assembled from the writings or recorded utterances of sceptics down to Hume, also his comprehensive knowledge of this, and his particular language of scepticism in use made up of the writing-acts constituting the sceptical texts that we seek to interpret. My thesis in this paper is that Hume had a lifelong preoccupation with religious scepticism and that, when dealing with this, and extending into other sceptical topics, in common with the proponents of the intellectual movement of his time we know as the Enlightenment, he turned satire to fashion, or perform in, the parole appropriate for his aims as a writer. A corollary to this procedure is that we find him employing techniques of composition such as innuendo, outright invective, paradox, parody, irony, bathos, and disingenuous conclusions, familiar to him and to us in satire, particularly in the writings of Swift, the great contemporary master of this genre, to reinforce, supplement, and compensate for the deficiencies of his logical demonstrations and assessments of arguments. To be sure, Swift wished to use satire to defend religious orthodoxy, but it is a double-edged weapon, and at the right moment, for example, in the essay "Of...