I—Peter Millican: Humes Old and New Four Fashionable Falsehoods, and One Unfashionable Truth

Abstract

Hume has traditionally been understood as an inductive sceptic with positivist tendencies, reducing causation to regular succession and anticipating the modern distinctions between analytic and synthetic, deduction and induction. The dominant fashion in recent Hume scholarship is to reject all this, replacing the ‘Old Hume’ with various New alternatives. Here I aim to counter four of these revisionist readings, presenting instead a broadly traditional interpretation but with important nuances, based especially on Hume's later works. He asked that we should treat these—notably the first Enquiry—as his authoritative philosophical statements, and with good reason.

Excuses for Hume's Skepticism

“…Millican () makes similar remarks about these passages, in relation to Hume on induction. He writes, “Having identified custom as the ‘sceptical solution’ to his ‘sceptical doubts’, Hume's procedure is to follow through its demands systematically.…”

Hume's Fork, and his Theory of Relations

“… I have argued at length elsewhere—and will substantiate further in §3 below—that Hume's “demonstrative argument” is essentially the same as deduction , in the informal sense of an argument whose premises absolutely guarantee the truth of its conclusion (see Millican : 96–8, : §7.1, and especially : §V). Thus understood, “ P can be demonstrated” is broadly equivalent to “ P can be proved deductively”. …”

“…20–1) also accepts Owen's claim (p. 87)—inherited from Stove (: 35)—that “Hume says … frequently … that there are no demonstrative arguments with conclusions that are possibly false”. Owen (p. 87 n. 8) acknowledges that Millican () contests the claim (as in my previous paragraph), but unfortunately neither he nor Beebee (: 413) addresses this fundamental objection to their account, nor indeed takes any notice of Hume's repeated acknowledgement of applied mathematics, which has to be “the crucial test case” (Millican : 177).…”