Hume's Explanations of Meaningless Beliefs

Abstract

Hume's arguments to meaninglessness are too strong for his purposes; they are accompanied by psychological explanations of why we believe in entities that fall under the meaningless expressions. How can Hume consistently provide explanations of beliefs that are without meaning in the first place? Though not derived from experience in accordance with Lockean empiricism about meaning, the relevant expressions must possess some surrogate for meaning or content‐like features. For Hume, such quasi‐content is the product of a retreat, under the pressure of a conflict, from an illusion to a conceptual confusion that obscures the conflict; different quasi‐contents result from different illusions. The notions of material substrata, souls and external existence, which some commentators treat as tolerably meaningful ‘relative ideas’, are confused quasi‐concepts, defective in meaning. A reconstruction of Treatise I iii 14 shows that necessary connection may be seen as parallel to these other cases.

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