A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: David Hume–Observationalist and Associationist, Book Burner.

Views: 2107

Bertrand Russell finds in Hume a kindred skeptical spirit: a spirit that helped to shape the form of “modernism” we encounter in the twentieth century:

“To refute him has been, ever since he wrote, a favourite pastime among metaphysicians. For my part I find none of the refutations convincing: nevertheless I cannot but hope that something less skeptical than Hume’s system may be discoverable.”(p634)

Russell also acknowledges:

“Hume’s philosophy, whether true or false, represents the bankruptcy of the eighteenth-century reasonableness….. he arrives at the disastrous conclusion that from experience and observation nothing can be learned. There is no such thing as rational belief: “If we believe fire warms or water refreshes, ’tis only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise”. We cannot help believing, but no belief can be grounded in reason.”

One cannot but think of the warnings throughout the ages against the widespread acceptance of skepticism and one cannot wonder what role it played in the events of what Arendt called “this terrible century” in which two world wars were fought to the bitter end and two atomic bombs were dropped on civilian populations. Early signs of the “dismantling” of the moderating voice of Philosophy came from the Philosopher that attended the same school as Hitler, Ludvig Wittgenstein.

The work of the early Wittgenstein, especially the ideas we find expressed in his “Tractatus”(1922) were an attempt to undermine the philosophy of the time in a manner typical of the form of analytical philosophy that was most influenced by Hume’s logical skepticism. The spirit of the age of the twentieth century was well expressed in Hume’s unacademic response to metaphysics:

“If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school of metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”(An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)

The pictures from the gallery of events of the twentieth century surely include the burning, for example of the books of the Jews by the German spokesmen for the Philosophy of Positivism and ethical relativism. The “experiments” on Jewish children and events testifying to the flagrant disregard for the ethical and human rights of several ethnic groups are also to be found in abundance. The gallery would also include pictures of the indifference of men tried for the most heinous crimes against humanity of the century. Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem is one such picture. In this context, one should recall that Kant had warned us about the response of indifference to both dogmatism and skepticism. It produces men for whom anything is possible except thinking rationally about what they are doing.

Apart from these general observations on the consequences of widespread skepticism, one can also be confounded by what Hume meant when he pointed to the importance of “experimental reasoning” in philosophical inquiry. Did he mean experience and observation? If he did then we are left to ponder Russell’s claim that Hume believes nothing can be learned either of these activities. Fortunately, Wittgenstein in his later work questioned the skeptical relativism of a view that did not understand that a belief in the uniformity of nature was a ” reason” to believe in one’s predictions :

” 472. The character of the belief in the uniformity of nature can perhaps be seen most clearly in the case in which we fear what we expect. Nothing could induce me to put my hand into a flame–although after all, it is only in the past that I have burnt myself.

473. The belief that fire will burn me is of the same kind as the fear that it will burn me”

“No belief can be grounded in reason” Hume has claimed and perhaps Wittgenstein appears partly to agree with this, stating that the belief is a “ground” for ones refusal to put one’s hand in the fire. It is undoubtedly true that in pure logic my believing that the fire will burn me does not follow from the ground, but it is, according to Wittgenstein, nevertheless, what he calls an “inference”. Hume in his “observationalist” mood might counter by insisting that one cannot see the cause of the effect of the burned hand: there is the event of the fire burning and then the event of the burned fingers but no one can see the causal connection which is merely a consequence of a habit of the mind formed by the constant conjunction of events(for most people it suffices to be burned once for the fear /belief to be installed) All I can see is one event prior to another, an event that is spatially contiguous to another but there is no impression of either a causal relation or of any substance possessing causal power. But how, then is it possible to “infer” the connection of the cause and the effect with such apparent certainty? The certainty is illusory, argues Hume, the certainty derives from priority, contiguity, constant conjunction and a consequent association of ideas in the mind. The connection which we believe to be necessary is merely an impression of the movement of our minds.

It was Hume’s avowed intention to become the Newton of the moral and social sciences and what we have encountered in the above is a psychological account par excellence of the “grounds” for me refusing to put my hand in the flames of a burning fire. The connection of the impression of the event of the burning fire with an impression of the event of pain suffices for me to withdraw the hand that was initially attracted by the expectation of a pleasurable contact with the flames. Fire is of course not a substance but rather an element caused by the causal interaction of substances in an environment conducive to the existence of fire but it does seem almost perverse to suggest as Hume does, that we cannot observe the causal properties or power of the fire. One reading of Wittgenstein’s position on this issue is to claim that Wittgenstein would agree to the use of the term “reason” in this context if it was being used in the Kantian sense of the embracing of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the phenomenon in question. Kant would not deny that it is possible to put one’s fingers in the fire as a response to the attractive property of the flames but he would probably insist that this is more likely to be the action of a small infant who has had little experience and formed no concept or “idea”(to use Hume’s terminology) of the pain associated with one of the causal properties of the flames of the fire.

Kant would also have taken issue with the Humean claims that temporal priority or succession could be used to define causality. On Hume’s account if there were a constant conjunction of the events of my walking into a warm room and sitting on a warm radiator this would suffice for a belief that the warmth of the room caused the warmth of the radiator which we all know to be false because we understand the causal power of radiators to warm rooms. In this case, in contrast with the above example relating to the element of fire, we are dealing with a substance possessing causal power. Kant in his analogies of experience clearly states that substance, causal order, and coexistence of substances are the “ideas” or a priori concepts which create order in the flux of our experiences. Kant also claims that Time cannot itself be experienced or observed but is rather an a priori intuition of the faculty of Sensibility which also organizes our experiences. The example Kant uses to demonstrate this point is that of a steamship seaming downstream of a river. In this “experience” I am necessarily aware, argues Kant, of the irreversibility of the ship’s position upstream in relation to its later position downstream. I am necessarily aware, that is, that its position upstream(and its causal properties) are one of the “reasons” or justifications for its being downstream. In the absence of these apriori intuitions and apriori concepts of substance and causality the world, Kant argues, would be merely a play of representations in the mind relating to no object or reality. That is:

“it would not be possible through our perception to distinguish one appearance from another as regards relations of time. For the succession in our apprehension would always be one and the same, and there would be nothing in the appearance which so determines it that a certain sequence is rendered objectively necessary.”(A194)

There would, that is, be no reason to prioritize the representation of the warm radiator over the warm room or the ship upstream from the ship downstream. There would be no “ground” or “reason” for saying that the cause came after the effect. Invoking Aristotle’s theory of change in this context would require referring to his three principles of change which are:

1. That which a thing changes from(the ship upstream)
2. That which a thing changes to,(the ship downstream) and
3. That which endures throughout the change(the ship and its causal properties)

Humes account in the light of these three principles is deeply confusing. He appears to be claiming that we first experience temporal priority or succession between events and then as a consequence regard one event as the cause of the other on the basis of the priority (in time) of the first event experienced. This claim also, of course, flies in the face of the Kantian acknowledgment of the possibility of cause and effect coexisting simultaneously in our experience as is the case with something heavy causing an indentation when resting upon soft material.

Hume would, of course, deny that “perceptions”(“impressions”) and “ideas” can be organized by reason and he would regard with suspicion Kantian synthetic a priori judgments such as “Every event must have a cause”. For Hume, it suffices to use his law of the association of ideas and the imagination to explain how we, for example, “think” complex ideas that we have never experienced before, e.g. the idea of the streets of New Jerusalem paved with gold or the idea of unicorns.

In the case of the example above of my deciding not to put my fingers into the fire , Hume argues, it is the laws of the association of ideas in concert with the principles of pleasure and pain that account for the “new connection” between the fire and the event of my decision not to act. Here, however, we encounter another conflict with the position of Kant who would claim that the “reason” why the child(who has learned his lesson) did not succumb to the temptation of the “attractive” flames was not a passive connection of events but rather the “active” thought of wishing not to burn one’s fingers. For Hume ideas are copies of impressions and it is difficult to attribute to Hume the change of ontological category from passive impressions and ideas and a passive process of association to active ideas which themselves possess causal power. Add to this Humean cocktail of explanations the facts that Hume denied not only the conceptual activity of the mind but also the presence of a self that is enduring and creative throughout one’s experiences and one begins to see the limitations of psychology without a subject.

What was it, then, in Hume, which awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers? What was it about empiricism that brought about the project of Transcendental Philosophy with its claims that God, the world and the soul are both empirically real and transcendentally ideal? One possibility is the empiricist attachment to the axiom that there is nothing in the intellect that has not first been in the senses. Another possibility is the attraction of the role of the imagination in the building up of our experiences of the world. The imagination enables me to construct an “idea” of Paris that is not merely composed of my memories of my sojourns there. It almost seems sometimes as if the imagination is working freely without any constraints at all(that literally anything is possible) though Hume denies this and insists that it is subject to the laws of association in the mind. The mind, for Hume, simply moves mechanically from idea A to idea B in accordance with whether they resemble each other or are contiguous in space and time with each other. Ideas appear necessarily “relational” but what about relations in the world such as my books rectangular shape and its brown colour. Are these merely contiguous? Or are they simultaneously coexistent? Is the book brown because the bark of the tree is brown? What about pink books? The painter of a brown book might well be thinking about the causal property of the tree to produce books but Hume’s theory would be unable to explain this kind of relation. Indeed the general idea of a book is going to cause considerable problems for Humean theory simply because firstly, my senses have never brought me into contact with an impression of a book in general and secondly because if a complex idea composed of relations of ideas, and if these ideas are not “logical”(relating to substance and causal properties) but somehow related to quantity and number, then such a book is going to be very different to the books we experience in reality. Also, it is the case that in more senses than one a book is a denizen of the thought world, and belongs to the realms of understanding of the world and judgment about the world rather than the realm of sensibility which is only impressed by particulars.

For Hume, the connection of the shape of the book and its colour is tied together by constant conjunction and the mechanical work of the imagination functioning in accordance with the association of ideas. But how are we to account for the quality of abstraction of a general idea such as a book. In scholastic philosophy and perhaps also in Locke I abstract from particular impressions in accordance with a principle of “resemblance”. Hume both accepted and criticized this position, questioning the role of substance whilst agreeing over the role of the principle of resemblance in the process. In Hume, we also find interesting references to the role of Language in relation to our sensing particulars and understanding general terms. In some places in his texts, it appears as if a language is a set of names and a word functions as a label for an object. If we have impressions of the object the word is the name for a particular object, but on the other hand, if we have ideas of the object of a horse, for example, the associated word appears to function as a general term for all particular horses. So, saying that “Horses are quadrupeds” in modern logical discourse, is not a way of picking out a particular horse but rather a way of referring to a class of objects. Yet this is not the end of the matter for we also need to inquire into how this general term is constituted since in Hume’s work there is an explicit denial of the existence of general objects such as “horses”: so it appears that the general terms function in Hume is merely a label that we can apply to particular horses. Scholastic philosophy would have regarded “Horses are quadrupeds” to be conceptual truths relating the concepts of horse and quadruped to each other in an essential relation that provides us with a necessary truth about the substance we call “Horses”. In Hume, however, there are neither substances, natural kinds, nor concepts operating in a realm of thought ruled by reason and logical relations. Instead, we encounter the law of the association of ideas. Ideas are associated because of the “resemblance” of particular horses to each other but it is a commonplace observation of logicians that anything can literally resemble anything if we take relations into account. A sphere composed of black marble, for example, resembles both a sphere of white marble in terms of shape but also a square of black marble in terms of colour. This fact led many scholastic logicians to declare that resemblances must be concept mediated. A similar argument has been used by modern logicians (Peter Geach) to argue that differences are also concept mediated: identifying blue and yellow as different colours requires an understanding of the prior concept of the polychromatic. Concepts, then, appear to have the function of both allowing us to perceive resemblances and perceive differences. Modern logicians(e.g. Wittgenstein) claim that concepts require an active faculty of rules that will act as norms of representation enabling us to decide how we are to organize the sensible world of fleeting and transitory impressions.. There is no trace of such a faculty or power in Hume but perhaps we can find something resembling it in Wittgenstein’s later Philosophy where it appears as if Language can perform all the tasks that the Kantian faculties of the understanding and judgment can perform in the name of an “I think”. The only question to pose here is whether language can carry the burden of a discriminative power of a being that uses concepts to think and to judge.

This whole situation is further complicated by Hume’s view that since there is no possible impression of the self there can be no self that is active and thinking because there can be no impression of such a phenomenon. Just as I cannot perceive or reason that a stone has the causal power to shatter a pane of glass if thrown with some velocity so I cannot on Hume’s view perceive or reason about the active power of a self, thinking conceptually about the world or thinking conceptually about itself. One can neither have an impression of such a power nor arrive at it via the power of reasoning. Kant would claim that causation is an a priori concept of the understanding used in the reasoning process to organize what we see. He would also reject the idea that the operation of the reasoning process can be reduced to the operation of a power of the imagination not connected to the ideals of truth and knowledge in the same way(although it must be admitted that the imagination plays a role in associating impressions under the auspices of the conceptually oriented faculty of understanding) The imagination does not follow rules in the way in which the understanding does. If, for example, I see a horse and think of a unicorn which is also a quadruped these two events are sequential and contiguous and on Hume’s account, the one event causes the other if these two events are constantly conjoined. The resemblance of both being quadrupeds surely suffices insofar as the imagination is concerned to connect the unicorn thought to the perception of the horse, although unicorns do not exist! The truth/knowledge function of the understanding and reason minimally involves giving assent to the connection of events. Take the case of my seeing the event of glass shattering, here surely I must give assent to the thought that it must have been shattered by a hard object moving at significant velocity and this thought in contrast to the image of the unicorn in the imagination is a thought of something that exists!. In this example, we see both reasoning and understanding operating in the form of an inference that cannot be doubted in spite of the fact that it is only in the past that such a conjunction of events has been witnessed. Hume and Wittgenstein are of course to be applauded for drawing attention to an assumption that is being made when we are making inferences such as the one above and Hume is undoubtedly correct in claiming that we cannot prove(in a mathematical way) the so-called principle of the uniformity of nature. In a more chaotic universe, of course, unicorns might be horses. Whilst, however, I live in this universe I will never actively assent to the proposition that unicorns are horses.

Hume’s paradigm of factual knowledge is, of course, related to having an impression of something but it ought to be noted that merely associating the impression of a cause with an impression of an effect appears to be a rather passive mechanical process and does not do justice to the active nature of our thought which has the goals of organizing our world, understanding why the glass broke and controlling the world. Causal necessity must be involved in the above scenario yet Hume denies this notion as he denies the causal power of kinds of objects and their capacities to destroy kinds of glass. If the world is the totality of facts and the self is somehow standing outside of these facts in virtue of being defined as nothing but a bundle of impressions then this would seem to imply that there can be no knowledge of something enduring through and organizing these impressions. There is also the question raised by Kant as to whether causal relations, causal powers and kinds of substances can be real on Hume’s account: a serious question is also raised as to whether on Hume’s account there can be a belief in the external world which for Kant is an all-important necessary condition of possessing a self.

Hume’s ontology is one of events, and his world definition of “world” must consist of a totality of events ad our knowledge of these events is primarily perceptual. In contrast, we have Aristotle’s world where there are builders building, doctors doctoring, teachers teaching and craftsmen crafting and none of these actors have doubts about the nature of their causal efficacy as agents in a world in which they are busy constructing with their powers of discourse, reasoning, and understanding.

Hume wished to become the Newton of the Moral Universe and apply the principle of “experimental reasoning” to the minds of men but the question which looms for his account is whether a world composed of disconnected events and contingently connected impressions can create any universe that humans could recognize let alone survive in.

Professor Brett refuses to regard Hume as a skeptic. He sees Hume not as the author of the position from which the lonely self of the solipsist was justified but rather as the agent that is ushering in a new scheme of ideas into a new era of empirical Psychology:

“If Locke’s “sensation” pointed to a res extensa and his “reflection” to a res cogitans, our new terms will shut out all such implicit references and leave only psychic events differing in the mode of appearance. Impressions are more vivid, ideas are less vivid. Such is the formula by which Hume notifies us that if we enter into our minds we shall find neither matter nor self but simply events. Here, then, we have, at the best, pure psychology or an analysis of mind undertaken in the spirit of positivism with no pre-suppositions: it remains to be seen whether presuppositions can be eliminated or whether the process does not amount to casting out some presuppositions in order to substitute others.”

This interesting reference to positivism pre-dates the logical positivism of the 1930s and also the seeds of positivism captured in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus from 1922. We know with the benefit of historical hindsight that the positivist movement lasted barely a generation and its demise was the result of attacks on a variety of fronts upon the combination of assumptions of firstly the world being a totality of facts and secondly the self, being a solipsistic bundle of impressions and ideas.

Looking at this development from a historical perspective one should recall the moment of the “divorce proceedings” between Psychology declaring its intentions to henceforth concern itself with the “Science of consciousness” and Madam Philosophy who wished a broader commitment to a broader set of assumptions. The “new Psychologists” wished for an account of man that was clearly inspired by the empiricists and the naturalists of the time(the end of the 1800’s)

William James was clearly influenced by Hume but his definition of Psychology as “The Science of mental life, both its phenomena and its conditions” viewed the body(not a theme of Hume’s theory) as a vital condition of the mental phenomena we experience whilst James retained a version of an ancient philosophical animus of the importance of the organizing theme of knowledge in any account of mans nature and agency.. For James, both mental operations of discrimination and association are necessary functions of mental life. Instead of talking about events he refers to “objects” which can, in turn, be analyzed into parts and also be brought together to form new compound wholes. It is, that is, objects that are associated and not ideas:

“Association so far as the word stands for an effect is between things thought of–it is things not ideas which are associated in the mind. We ought to talk of the association of objects, not of the association of ideas. And so far as association stands for causes, it is between processes in the brain–it is these which, being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.”(p.554)

The reference to the brain actually provides a more believable mechanism of association and a more believable account of the way in which impressions and ideas are connected:

“If ABCDE be a sequence of outer impressions(they may be events or they may be successively experienced properties of an object ) which once gave rise to the successive ideas abcde, then no sooner will A impress us again and awaken the a, then bcde will arise as ideas even before BCDE have come in as impressions. In other words, the order of impressions will the next time be anticipated: and the mental order will so forth copy the order of the outer world.”

We see, then, what a slight change of conception of the term “association” can do for Hume’s theory especially when combined with a scientific naturalism that believes the brain to be the source of at least the lower mental operations such as perception, memory, and imagination. Moreover, we can see how James introduces activity into the mental world. Indeed, for him, activity is defining with respect to whether we can attribute mentality to any phenomenon of the inner world. For James, minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react. Mental activity is defined that is in the following terms:

“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of mentality in a phenomenon.”(P 8)

Both sensory and motor ideas combine to form the objects of the mind. A skill, for example, is represented by James in the brain as a sequence of muscular contractions of which there is a sensation of each contraction. These sensational impressions exist below the level of conscious ideation which otherwise is usually present at the beginning of the activity, (e.g. seeing the piano) and at the end when one becomes aware of the completion of the activity. According to James, it is a different matter when we are learning a skill where much work is then done at the conscious level of ideation: we test each sensation by consciously comparing, choosing rejecting, etc. Even moving on to the next component in the sequence of the learning process is a conscious act.

There is no thematic concept of consciousness in Hume although he does speak of the importance of forming habits, which on James’s account can only be achieved through the active conscious awareness of what is right and what is wrong. This allows James to use the concept of a will that can consciously envision the activity it is about to undertake before the fact. It is this consciousness of the whole of the activity that then subsequently when the activity has begun, enables us to know exactly where we are in the chain of events constituting the activity. If, for example, I am interrupted in the act of saying something I remember what I have said and what I am about to say in virtue of this initial conscious awareness of the whole. James also insists in this context that consciousness deserts all mental processes that no longer require analysis, i.e. comparison, choice, rejection, etc. But this is not to deny the fact that for James consciousness is essentially active, essentially, as he puts it, impulsive. If it is the case I become conscious of an act I will to perform and then fail to initiate the act, this can only be the consequence, James argues, of antagonistic thoughts urging us not to do the act. What results is a Hamlet-like state of indecisive deliberation until one settles upon one or other of the alternative actions. This deliberative process may be rational and logical where arguments for the respective alternatives are considered, or the decision may, on the other hand, be purely impulsive and motivated by unconscious elements that override conscious thought processes. Hume, we know, refers to pleasures and pains as the driving forces of behaviour but in the realm of the habitual which he finds to be so important there is no consciousness of pleasure or pain: there is, as James puts it merely ideo-motor action. Indeed it is claimed that:

“the pleasure of successful performance is the result of the impulse, not its cause.”(p.557)

James, in this context, prefers the broader term of interest:

The interesting” is a title which covers not only the pleasant and the painful, but also the markedly fascinating, the tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual, inasmuch as the attention usually travels on habitual lines…. the impelling idea is simply the one which possesses the attention..”(p.558-9)

The notion of “ideo-motor” is an important concept related to voluntary conscious willing for James. This form of Willing for James is the name for the power of the mind to attend to a difficult object of thought and hold it fast before the mind.

On the issue of the existence of the self which Hume questions, James accuses Hume of neglecting the role of the judging “I” and the presence of the “I think” in relation to ideas and although Hume is praised for the acknowledgment of the diversity of mental phenomena that constitute a self he is as James says “throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he denies that there is a thinking self.