Hume's Faculty-Based Account of Reasoning

Abstract

I resolve several longstanding disputes about Hume's view of reasoning and his faculty psychology by clarifying Hume's use of terms related to reasoning.After first arguing that Hume uses many terms in more than one sense without alerting his reader to this fact, I present a novel interpretation that takes the activity term "reasoning" and the faculty term "reason" each to have two distinct uses.I use this framework, along with my explication of why Hume posits the faculties that he does, to explain why the understanding-or, the faculty of conception-should be seen as the chief cognitive faculty.This means that all other faculties (e.g., imagination, memory, and both faculties of reason) should be seen as subfaculties of the understanding for Hume.Having explicated Hume's faculty psychology, I explain why his insights in this arena remain relevant today; put simply, I argue that Hume's claims about the mind stem directly from his scientific naturalism and that the theses derived from this naturalism fit together to form a coherent framework for studying the mind.I conclude by showing how this same framework appears in the Humean views recently articulated by Jerry Fodor, Peter Carruthers, and Jesse Prinz.I'd like to thank

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.