The B Side of Imagination. Hume on Imperfect Ideas

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.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4, 2005, 197–207., 2005

Abstract. In Book I, Part I, Section VII of the Treatise, Hume sets out to settle, once and for all, the early modern controversy over abstract ideas. In order to do so, he tries to accomplish two tasks: (1) he attempts to defend an exemplar-based theory of general language and thought, and (2) he sets out to refute the rival abstraction-based account. This paper examines the successes and failures of these two projects. I argue that Hume manages to articulate a plausible theory of general ideas; indeed, a version of his account has defenders in contemporary cognitive science. But Hume fails to refute the abstraction-based account, and as a result, the early modern controversy ends in a stalemate, with both sides able to explain how we manage to speak and think in general terms. Although Hume fails to settle the controversy, he nevertheless advances it to a point from which we have yet to progress: the contemporary debate over abstract ideas in cognitive science has stalled on precisely this point.

PERI, 2019

According to David Hume the imagination is a mental faculty that forms, unites and separates ideas. This creative character puts it in a position to play a major role not only in fiction — once it’s due to the imagination that we conceive fantastic creatures like dragons and winged horses —, but also in the natural sciences — once it’s due to the imagination that we suppose that the course of nature remains the same through time. My objectives in this paper are to introduce the vocabulary that Hume elaborated in the Treatise of Human Nature and argue that the imagination operates by irregular and regular principles, culminating in the generation of beliefs that have a negative and positive epistemic status, respectively.

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.

Hume Studies, 2005

Hume's Copy Principle, which accords precedence to impressions over ideas, is restricted to simple perceptions. Yet in all the conceptual analyses Hume conducts by attempting to fit an impression to a (putative) idea, he never checks for simplicity. And this seems to vitiate the analyses: we cannot conclude from the lack of a preceding impression that a putative idea is bogus, unless it is simple. In this paper I criticise several attempts to account for Hume's seemingly cavalier attitude, and offer one of my own.

Springer: The New Synthese Historical Library, 2013

This book provides the first comprehensive account of Hume’s conception of objects in Book I of the Treatise. What, according to Hume, are objects? Ideas? Impressions? Mind-independent objects? All three? None of the above? Through a close textual analysis, Rocknak shows that Hume thought that objects are imagined ideas. But, she argues, he struggled with two accounts of how and when we imagine such ideas. On the one hand, Hume believed that we always and universally imagine that objects are the causes of our perceptions. On the other hand, he thought that we only imagine such causes when we reach a “philosophical” level of thought. This tension manifests itself in Hume’s account of personal identity; a tension that, Rocknak argues, Hume acknowledges in the Appendix to the Treatise. As a result of Rocknak’s detailed account of Hume’s conception of objects, we are forced to accommodate new interpretations of, at least, Hume’s notions of belief, personal identity, justification and causality.

The Cambridge Companion to Hume

By the time Hume started to work on his Treatise, the notion of an idea as the primary, most general sort of mental item dominated European philosophy. Although Descartes noted that, strictly speaking, only those "thoughts that are as it were images of things" were appropriately described as ideas, in practice he used "the word 'idea' to refer to whatever is immediately perceived by the mind." 1 Not only do we have ideas of trees and the sun, but we also have ideas of our own activities of thinking and willing. Locke characterizes 'idea' as "being that Term, which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks." Locke also thinks that we not only have ideas that derive from things or objects in the world (ideas of sensation), but also of the activities and operations of our own minds (ideas of reflection). Ideas of sensation are acquired through the operation of external objects on our sense organs, while ideas of reflection come from introspection, from thinking about what happens within our own minds. He also thinks that these ideas of reflection are of two basic sorts of mental activity, perception and willing, that correspond to two faculties of mind: the understanding (or the power of thinking) and the will (or the power of volition). 2 Hume introduced important innovations concerning the theory of ideas. The two most important are the distinction between impressions and ideas, and the use he made of the principles of association in explaining mental phenomena. Hume divided the perceptions of the mind into two classes. The members of one class, impressions, he held to have a greater degree of force and vivacity than the members of the other class, ideas. He also supposed that ideas are causally dependent copies of impressions. And, unlike Locke and others, Hume makes positive use of the principle of association, both of the association of 80 ideas, and, in a more limited way, of the association of impressions. Such associations are central to his explanations of causal reasoning, belief, the indirect passions (pride and humility, love and hatred), and sympathy. These views about impressions and ideas and the principles of association form the core of Hume's science of human nature. Relying on them, he attempts a rigorously empirical investigation of human nature. The resulting system is a remarkable but complex achievement. I. IMPRESSIONS AND IDEAS Hume begins Book 1 of the Treatise, "Of the Understanding," by saying: "All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS" (T 1.1.1.1, SBN 1). In his later Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (hereafter Enquiry) he says much the same thing, but adds an example: "Every one will readily allow, that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and when he afterwards recalls to his memory the sensation, or anticipates it by his imagination" (EHU 2.1, SBN 17). In neither work does he make an attempt to explain what he means by the phrase, "perceptions of the mind," but it would have been obvious to any eighteenthcentury reader that he is using that expression much as Descartes and Locke had used the term "idea": for anything that mind is aware of or experiences. As he put it later in the Treatise: "To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive" (T 1.2.6.7, SBN 67). Hume's initial step in the Treatise is to show that perceptions of the mind may divided into "two distinct kinds," impressions and ideas. These two kinds commonly differ, he says, "in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind." Among our impressions, those perceptions with the most "force and vivacity," are sensations (including those of pain and pleasure) and the passions and emotions. Ideas are described as "the faint images" of impressions that are found "in

Philosophy, 2002

History of Philosophy Quarterly, 27.3, 2010, 255-273.

Abstract: David Hume endorses three statements that are difficult to reconcile: (1) sympathy with those in distress is sufficient to produce compassion toward their plight, (2) adopting the moral point of view often requires us to sympathize with the pain and suffering of distant strangers, but (3) our care and concern is limited to those in our close circle. Hume manages to resolve this tension, however, by distinguishing two types of sympathy. We feel compassion toward those we perceive to be in distress because associative sympathy leads us to mirror their emotions, but our ability to enter into the afflictions of distant strangers involves cognitive sympathy and merely requires us to reflect on how we would feel in their shoes. This hybrid theory of sympathy receives a good deal of support from recent work on affective mirroring and cognitive pretense. Hume’s account should appeal to contemporary researchers, therefore, who are interested in the nature of moral imagination.

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.

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.

forthcoming in Philosopher's Imprint

Discusses two familiar objections to Hume's account of cognition - focusing on issues relating the normativity of thought and language use. I argue that Hume has far more resources to respond to these objections than might at first appear to be the case - focusing on the under-explored connection between Hume's of cognition, his account of public language, and his account of the artificial virtues.

The missing shade of blue is an alleged counter-example to Hume’s theory of “perceptions” raised by Hume himself (Hume, [1748] 2011: §2.16). This essay proceeds as follows; firstly, a brief summary of Hume’s ([1748] 2011) conceptual distinctions regarding perceptions and the empiricist principle; secondly, the problem of the missing shade of blue counter-example; responses to the missing shade of blue; assessing these responses and addressing other issues with Humean empiricism; finally, assessing the viability of a Humean empiricism. As a result, this essay will argue that Hume is correct in his assessment of the missing shade of blue and that, furthermore, the correct solution to this issue (and the correct account of the empiricist principle) is as a purely empirical claim that does not require any significant revision to Hume’s core position.

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.