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Does Hume Hold a Dispositional Account of Belief?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jennifer Smalligan Marušić
Jennifer Smalligan Marušić*
Affiliation:
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA02453, USA
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Extract

Philosophical theories about the nature of belief can be roughly classified into two groups: those that treat beliefs as occurrent mental states or episodes and those that treat beliefs as dispositions. David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature seems to contain a classic example of an occurrence theory of belief. Hume defines ‘belief’ as ‘a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression’ (Treatise 1.3.7.5 96). This definition suggests that believing is an occurrent mental state, such as judging, or thinking about something in a particular manner. However, at the same time, a number of Hume's readers claim to find elements in his writings that are suggestive of a dispositional account of belief. Moreover, these elements are sometimes taken as signs of the inadequacy of Hume's account of belief and his dissatisfaction with it. If Hume is not, in fact, wholeheartedly committed to a thoroughgoing occurrence theory of belief, one wonders just who is.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 155 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2010

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References

1 Hume, D. A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge, L.A. and Nidditch, P. H. eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978),Google Scholar and Hume, D. A Treatise of Human Nature, Norton, D.F. and Norton, M.J. eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000).Google Scholar References cited parenthetically with book, part, section and paragraph numbers from the Norton edition, as well as page numbers from the Selby-Bigge edition. On the next page, Hume paraphrases the definition as ‘a lively idea produc'd by a relation to a present impression’ (Treatise 1.3.7.6 97).

2 See, for example, MacNabb, D.G.C. David Hume: His Theory of Knowledge and Morality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1951) 69–81;Google Scholar Everson, S. ‘The Difference Between Feeling and Thinking,’ Mind 97 (1988) 401–13;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Price, H.H. Belief (London: George Allen & Unwin 1969), 186–8;Google Scholar Armstrong, D.M. Belief, Truth and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973), 70–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Stroud, B. Hume (London: Routledge 1977), 74.Google Scholar

3 See Stroud, Hume, 74Google Scholar and Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge, 71.Google Scholar

4 Loeb, L. Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Hume argues that belief alone is not sufficient to motivate action or to form a moral judgment, though it is necessary to motivate action and plays an important role in shaping our moral judgments.

6 Loeb claims that education infixes beliefs through repetition, forming steady dispositions, but dispositions that are prone to be unstable in their influence on our thoughts and behavior and are therefore unjustified. See Loeb, Stability and Justification, 74-9.

7 See Stroud, Hume, 9.Google Scholar

8 See, for instance, Price, Belief, 187.Google Scholar Nevertheless, Price holds that Hume remains committed to an occurrence theory of belief. Similarly, Kaveh Kamooneh distinguishes two types of theories of belief based on whether they emphasize the phenomenology of belief or the causal role beliefs play in producing behavior and he seems to assume that a theory's emphasizing the causal role of belief automatically suggests a dispositional analysis of belief. See Kamooneh, K. ‘Hume's Beliefs,’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11 (2003) 41–56,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 46-7.

9 Loeb, Stability and Justification, 33Google Scholar

10 Loeb also rejects the view that beliefs are dispositions to form lively ideas under particular circumstances. See Loeb, Stability and Justification, 70.Google Scholar

11 These two types of dispositions parallel a distinction frequently drawn in the literature between nominalist and realist theories of dispositions. My way of drawing the distinction most closely resembles Richard Wollheim's. Wollheim argues that beliefs, desires and the emotions are dispositions of the latter, realist type. R., Wollheim On the Emotions (New Haven: Yale University Press 1999), 2–4.Google Scholar See also Armstrong, D.M. The Nature of Mind and Other Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1980), 4–10.Google Scholar John Bricke draws a similar distinction in his discussion of Hume's treatment of mental dispositions. Bricke, J. Hume's Philosophy of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980), 46–58.Google Scholar

12 It may seem anachronistic to attribute to Hume this sort of view about dispositions, because Hume doesn't clearly distinguish between counterfactual and indicative conditionals. While I think it is more promising to understand such dispositions in terms of counterfactual conditionals, nothing I say in this paper depends on whether one analyzes such dispositions in terms of counterfactuals or indicative conditionals.

13 This view is exemplified by Ryle. Ryle offers a specifically behaviorist version of the view, but one may hold the lawlike-correlation view without being committed to behaviorism. For example, one may hold that dispositions are identical with lawlike correlations, but that what is correlated sometimes includes irreducibly psychological events. Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson House 1949). 14 D.Google Scholar Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Selby-Bigge, L.A. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1973) 7.1 73n.Google Scholar Subsequent citations cited parenthetically with the section and page number from the Selby-Bigge edition.

15 Textual support for this claim can be found at various places in the Treatise. For example, 1.3.10 is entitled ‘Of the influence of belief.’ In this section, Hume argues that beliefs influence our passions and our actions; the verb ‘influence’ clearly suggests a causal relation. The following is a representative passage:

Did impressions alone influence the will, we should every moment of our lives be subject to the greatest calamites; because, tho’ we foresaw their approach, we should not be provided by nature with any principle of action, which might impel us to avoid them. On the other hand, did every idea influence our actions, our condition would not be much mended. For such is the unsteadiness and activity of thought, that the images of every thing, especially of goods and evils, are always wandering in the mind…Nature has, therefore, chosen a medium…the effect, then, of belief is to raise up a simple idea to an equality with our impressions, and bestow on it a like influence on the passions. (Treatise 1.3.10.2-3 119, my italics)

16 For a similar argument, see Armstrong, Nature of Mind, 8-9.

17 Nevertheless, the question of whether someone believes that p would be an empirical question, to be settled by observation.

18 The claim that dispositions are psychologically real entities with causal powers is potentially misleading. I do not claim that a disposition's causal powers must be understood in some robust way, so that this position is incompatible with taking Hume to be a regularity theorist about causation. Taking beliefs to be dispositions of this type merely amounts to treating them as causes, whatever one takes Hume's metaphysical views about the nature of causation to be.

19 Hume's meaning empiricism and his theory of mind have been interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Some of these interpretations are incompatible with Hume's holding that there are any dispositions of the psychologically real type, but others are not.

20 Loeb makes use of second-order beliefs in his treatment of general rules. The second-order beliefs that Loeb focuses on generally concern the justification of firstorder beliefs, e.g. one might have a second-order belief that beliefs formed in a certain way are frequently undermined by subsequent experience. The secondorder beliefs on which I focus concern the causal influence of first-order beliefs. I have two reasons for claiming that Hume's account of belief must be able to accommodate such second-order beliefs. First, if Loeb claims that, according to Hume, second-order beliefs about justification play an important role in our reasoning, then Loeb should also allow that, on Hume's account, we can have secondorder beliefs about the causal influence of believing. Second, it is undeniable that we have a plethora of second-order beliefs about how believing influences us. An inability to account for how we can come to have such beliefs is a strike against any account of belief; thus, we ought to prefer interpretations that leave room for the formation of such second-order beliefs over those that do not.

21 I say ‘typically’ because I think Hume allows that there can be exceptions. Hume's rules for judging of cause and effect provide some guidance about when Hume thinks it is appropriate to infer that something has a hidden cause. I discuss the rules below.

22 For simplicity, I limit my discussion to behavioral manifestations of dispositional beliefs. However, dispositional beliefs would also cause other kinds of manifestations, including thoughts, feelings, desires, and passions. Powers to cause nonbehavioral manifestations would also be among the complex set of causal powers of a dispositional belief. The problems I discuss below are not unique to behavioral manifestations, but are problems about the manifestations of dispositional belief in general.

23 Hume argues that even our belief that motion is communicated by impact is based on experience. He is particularly concerned with arguing that this belief is based on experience, because he holds that it is so entrenched as to seem, to some philosophers at least, to be a priori. See Treatise 1.3.9.10 111.

24 The eighth rule is that ‘an object, which exists for any time in its full perfection without any effect, is not the sole cause of that effect, but requires to be assisted by some other principle, which may forward its influence and operation’ (Treatise 1.3.15.10 174). If one observes a temporal gap between an object and its purported effect, then one might infer that there is some additional, perhaps hidden, cause of the effect.

25 For example, Hume insists in the Introduction to the Treatise, ‘And tho’ we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible…‘tis still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical’ (Treatise Introduction 8 xvii). I take it to be uncontroversial that Hume thinks that hypothetical reasoning must be at least constrained by observation and experience.

26 I'm grateful to David Owen and Michael Liston for pressing me to develop this line of objection.

27 See Everson, ‘The Difference Between Feeling and Thinking,’ 406; Stroud, Hume, 74; and Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge, 70-2. MacNabb also discusses this passage, but does not claim that it is particularly suggestive of a dispositional theory of belief. See MacNabb, Hume, 72.

28 Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge, 71.Google Scholar Nevertheless, Armstrong holds that belief, according to Hume, is an occurrence. See Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge, 70.

29 Stroud, Hume, 74Google Scholar

30 Everson holds that force and vivacity are, on his reading, available to introspection, but they are not intrinsic, phenomenological properties of perceptions.

31 Loeb, Stability and Justification, 66Google Scholar

32 Everson, however, would disagree with this. He claims that ‘force’ and ‘vivacity’ are both functional terms and refer to exactly the same property. Everson's interpretation differs from Loeb's here in two respects. First, Everson thinks that the terms in both the stability cluster and the vivacity cluster describe ideas. Second, he thinks that the terms in both clusters describe a functional difference between mere thoughts and beliefs.

33 See MacNabb, Hume, 75.Google Scholar

34 Loeb concedes that Hume sometimes uses the adjectives comprising the stability cluster to describe the phenomenology of occurrent states, but he claims that this use is parasitic upon the use of these adjectives to describe dispositions.

35 Here my interpretation is similar to John Bricke's. See Bricke, Hume's Philosophy of Mind, 122.Google Scholar

36 Kamooneh, K. ‘Hume's Beliefs,’ 54Google Scholar

37 In the Enquiry, Hume writes, ‘Let us, then, take in the whole compass of this doctrine, and allow, that the sentiment of belief is nothing but a conception more intense and steady than what attends the mere fictions of the imagination, and that this manner of conception arises from a customary conjunction of the object with something present to the memory or senses: I believe that it will not be difficult, upon these suppositions, to find other operations of the mind analogous to it, and to trace up these phenomena to principles still more general’ (Enquiry V.2 126).

38 See Loeb, Stability and Justification, 67.Google Scholar

39 David Owen also emphasizes the importance of the analogy between beliefs and impressions of sensation. Owen claims that the analogy is important because it suggests that beliefs are quasi-sensory states; thus, Hume closely aligns believing with perception as opposed to reason. See Owen, D. ‘Locke and Hume on Belief, Judgment and Assent,’ Topoi 22 (2003) 15–28,CrossRefGoogle Scholar especially 22.

40 Price, Belief, 186-7

41 ibid.

42 Of course, I don't mean to suggest that this is an adequate account of pain. For one thing, this rough analysis fails to explain how pains can seem to be located. However, I hope that the analogy at least serves to make plausible the thought that an occurrent state can have dispositional properties without being a disposition.

43 Of course, we can still make mistakes, if we are misled about or lack relevant information about the individual's other beliefs, desires, or facts about the circumstances.

44 For example, Hume claims, ‘When any affection is infus'd by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection’ (Treatise 2.1.11.3 317).

45 It is important, here, to distinguish dispositional beliefs from dispositions to believe or dispositions to form lively ideas. I deny that beliefs, for Hume, are dispositions, but this does not entail that there are no dispositions to believe or form lively ideas. Hume's account of causal reasoning in Treatise 1.3.6, which explains how experience of regularly conjoined events leads us to form a lively idea of one of the events whenever we have an impression of the other, might be thought of as an account of how we acquire dispositions to believe.

46 Price offers a similar defense on behalf of occurrence theories in response to this objection. See Price, Belief, 21.

47 This example helps illustrate the difference between having a disposition to believe something and having a dispositional belief. The man who stops at the side of the river is disposed, upon seeing water, to form the belief that being submerged in water causes drowning, but this is not the same as the man's having a dispositional belief that being submerged in water causes drowning.

48 See Wollheim, Emotions, 8.Google Scholar

49 See Davidson, D. ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980).Google Scholar Davidson, of course, denies that beliefs are either dispositions of the psychologically real type or introspectible occurrent states.

50 I'm very grateful to Janet Broughton, John Campbell, David Owen, Wade Robison, Berislav Marušic´, and especially Louis Loeb for extensive comments on earlier versions of this paper. I’m also indebted to audiences at the California Conference for Early Modern Philosophy held at CSU Long Beach in October 2006, at the Rijeka International Conference in June 2006, at the Central APA in April 2007, at the 2007 International Hume Society held at Boston University, and at Brandeis University for helpful questions, comments, and suggestions.