Explaining general ideas

Hume Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 279-289

  Broughton, Janet ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 84880526819     PISSN: 03197336     EISSN: 19479921     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), xvii. Subsequent page references to this work, indicated as "T," will be provided in the body of the paper.
2. "What Does the Scientist of Man Observe?" Hume Studies 18 (1992): 155-68.1 am in agreement with Annette Baier about this, though I disagree with some of the conclusions she draws from it.
3. See A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), especially 32-33 and 117-120.
4. This is a question Margaret Wilson raises in "On Garrett's Hume," Hume Studies 24 (1998), 137.
5. Garrett replies in "Ideas, Reason, and Skepticism: Replies to my Critics," Hume Studies 24 (1998), 175.
6. For an argument that the image doesn't do any work, see Andrew Ushenko, "Hume's Theory of General Ideas," Review of Metaphysics 9 (1955): 236-251.
7. The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of Its Origin and Central Doctrines (London: Macmillan, 1941, reprinted New York: Garland Publishing, 1983), 257.
8. Kemp Smith, 259-260. For a similar criticism, see also H. O. Mounce, Hume's Naturalism (London: Routledge, 1999), 27-28.
9. See Hume's Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94-105.
10. In Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter 3, Don Garrett claims that in the distinction-of-reason passage Hume is invoking the associative mechanisms that, in the account of general terms, allow us to delineate a "revival set" (63) of ideas for a general term. While this nicely explains Hume's own claim to be having "recourse to the foregoing explication of abstract ideas" (T 25), I am struck by the fact that Hume does not explicitly invoke associative mechanisms in the account of the distinction of reason that he actually goes on to give. I am not convinced that he has these mechanisms in mind; he seems instead to be trying to account for a form of attention that we can exercise in response to our perceptions. Waxman (97-98) makes a claim similar to Garrett's.
11. In Hume's System: An Examination of the First Book of his Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), David Pears argues that these other elements will themselves also be perceptions of features; he thinks that for Hume the particularity of ideas consists in their being the counterparts of definite descriptions (18).
12. For a somewhat different account of the particularity of ideas, see John Tienson, "Hume on Universais and General Terms," Noûs 18 (1984), 311-330.