Hume's (Berkeleyan) Language of Representation

European Journal of Philosophy

On its face, Hume’s account of mental representation involves at least two elements. On the one hand, Hume often seems to write as though the representational properties of an idea are fixed solely by what it is a copy or image of. But, on the other, Hume’s treatment of abstract ideas (and other similar cases) makes it clear that the representational properties of a Humean idea sometimes depend, not just on what it is copied from, but also on the manner in which the mind associates it with other ideas. Past interpretations of Hume have tended to focus on one of these elements of his account to the neglect of the other. But no interpretation of this sort is likely to capture the role that both copying and association play within Hume’s discussion. In what follows, I argue that the most plausible way of understanding Hume’s discussion involves attributing to him a unified account of mental representation in which both of these elements play a central role. I close by discussing the manner in which reading Hume in this way would alter our understanding of the relationship between Hume’s thought and contemporary philosophy of mind.

In a recent paper Karl Schafer argues that Hume’s theory of mental representation has two distinct components, unified by their shared feature of having accuracy conditions. As Schafer sees it, simple and complex ideas represent the intrinsic imagistic features of their objects whereas abstract ideas represent the relations or structures in which multiple objects stand. This distinction, however, is untenable for at least two related reasons. Firstly, complex ideas represent the relations or structures in which the impressions that are the objects of their simple components stand. Secondly abstract ideas are themselves instances of complex ideas. I draw two important conclusions form these facts. Firstly, contra Schafer and Garret (to whom Schafer responds), the Copy Principle, properly emended, constitutes the entirety of Hume’s theory of mental representation. Secondly, whereas paradigm examples of complex ideas, e.g. ideas of spatial and temporal complexes, are structured by relations of contiguity, abstract ideas are those complex ideas instead structured by relations of resemblance. As such, they represent their objects not as spatially or temporally contiguous, but rather as resembling.

Understanding the distinction between impressions and ideas that Hume draws in the opening paragraph of his " A Treatise on Human Nature " is essential for understanding much of Hume's philosophy. This however is a task that has been the cause of a good deal controversy that rocks the literature of Hume. There is an alternative reading to the distinction as being between original mental entities and copied mental entities. Hume takes himself to discover this distinction as that which underlies our pre-theoretical sorting of mental entities. Hume's reading on human nature make him a more philosophical robust one and avoids many of the difficulties of previous interpretations. The focus of this essay is to show how ideas which are abstract in nature come about. This work shows how we gained knowledge through impressions and ideas. Hume also pointed this out on his " A Treatise on Human Nature " when he said everything we are of can be classified under two headings which are impressions and ideas. It is the duty of this work to show how impressions and ideas constitute our knowledge of the world.

Hume Studies, 2011

In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seems to use the term "object" to refer to different things in different contexts, including impressions, ideas, perceptions, and bodies. Does he ever use the term "external bodies" to refer to things in the extra-mental world? I argue that what Hume means by external bodies when he affirms their existence is not externally existing, material objects that are somehow presented to the mind or presented in impressions. Rather, the bodies that Hume affirms are, at bottom, no different from perceptions, but they can be distinguished from merely internal perceptions like pain or pleasure in terms of their "different relations, connexions, and durations" (T 1.2.6.9; SBN 68). I conclude that in order to be consistent, given the various statements he makes throughout Book One of the Treatise, Hume must reject the philosopher's doctrine of double existence of perceptions and objects and affirm only the existence of perceptions, sometimes conceived as internally existing and mind-dependent and sometimes conceived as existing outside and independent of the mind.

This paper is devoted to the nature and roles of sense impressions in Hume’s account of perception. At first sight Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, a book written within the frame of reference of the Lockean ‘way of ideas’, is mostly devoted to the examination of ideas: ideas of memory and ideas of the imagination, general ideas, the ideas of space and time, the idea of cause and effect, etc. And it is true that in p. 8 of the Treatise Hume declares sense impressions to be beyond the bounds of his discussion, and only goes back again to issues directly relative to sensory perception as a source of knowledge towards the end of Book 1, in the 30-page section devoted to what he calls the ‘scepticism with regard to the senses’. Yet the pages of this work are full of vivid references to sense impressions: patches of colour such as a missing shade of blue, the purple surface of Hume’s own table, red and blue points, a hand spread against the blue colour of the firmament, the colours reflected in the clouds, a spot of ink, black characters on the white pages of history books—visual images prevail, but there are also the taste of a pineapple, the sweetness of a fig and the bitterness of an olive, the creaking of a door, a succession of notes on a flute, the warmth of the fire and the coolness of water, etc. Sense impressions are major protagonists of Hume’s theory of knowledge.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1988

Daniel Dennett has claimed that Hume is unable to adequately account for the representational character of perceptions. Moreover, Dennett claims that this failure is the harbinger of doom for modern representational theories of mind. In this paper 1 argue that an examination of Hume's account of self-ascriptions of identity shows that Dennett's criticism of Hume fails and that Hume is nor a harbinger of doom for modern representational theories of mind.

Synthese, 2006

Hume is a naturalist in many different respects and about many different topics; this paper argues that he is also a naturalist about intentionality and representation. It does so in the course of answering four questions about his theory of mental representation: (1) Which perceptions represent? (2) What can perceptions represent? (3) Why do perceptions represent at all? (4) How do perceptions represent what they do? It appears that, for Hume, all perceptions except passions can represent; and they can represent bodies, minds, and persons, with their various qualities. In addition, ideas can represent impressions and other ideas. However, he explicitly rejects the view that ideas are inherently representational, and he implicitly adopts a view according to which things (whether mental or non-mental) represent in virtue of playing, through the production of mental effects and dispositions, a significant part of the causal and/or functional role of what they represent. It is in virtue of their particular functional roles that qualitatively identical ideas are capable of representing particulars or general kinds; substances or modes; relations; past, present, or future; and individuals or compounds. Keywords Hume • Representation • Naturalism • Impressions • Ideas • Copy • External world • Resemblance • Bodies • Abstract ideas • Owen • Cohon There are many species of naturalism. Doxastic naturalism, we may say, is the doctrine that belief formation is an operation of nature. Epistemic naturalism is the doctrine that beliefs can have epistemic authority and be rightful objects of assent in virtue of the ways in which they result from operations of nature. Explanatory naturalism is the program of trying to explain phenomena without appeal to anything outside of

In this paper I aim to investigate Hume’s well-known distinction between impressions and ideas, following the methodology of the history of ideas, and showing its specificity and suggesting a possible source, which has not been given much attention by the scholarship, namely the logical doctrines of the physician and anatomist William Harvey, which provide the key concepts to understand Hume’s logic of ideas. After some introductory remarks, the second part deals with the many issues involved in Hume’s distinction, and in the third part I examine Harvey’s logic of ideas. In conclusion I assess Hume’s debt to the English physician.