Is Hume really a reductivist?

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 33 (2002) 407–423 www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Is Hume really a reductivist? Michael Welbourne Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, 9 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TG, UK

Abstract Coady misrepresents Hume as a reductivist about testimony. Hume occasionally writes carelessly as if what goes for beliefs based on induction will also go for beliefs obtained from testimony. But, in fact, he has no theory of testimony at all, though in his more considered remarks he rightly thinks, as does Reid, that the natural response to a bit of testimony is simply to accept the information which it contains. The sense in which we owe the beliefs we get from testimony to experience, according to Hume, is this: we each learn about the business of testimony from being exposed to it, and in particular to cases where what is told is manifestly true. Hume is also interested in the question of how we may be prompted to view some testimonies with suspicion, and how we should then respond to them. It is wrong, however, to take his thoughts about this as embodying an implicit theory of the basic mechanism of testimony. In fact he has a problem accounting for the human propensity to accept extraordinary testimonies within the general framework of his doctrine; the Treatise solution is wisely abandoned in the Enquiry.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Hume; Reid; Coady; Testimony; Reductivism; Knowledge

1. Preliminaries Hume is one of the few mainstream philosophers to have acknowledged the high importance of testimony to human beings. That this importance is noticed by so few should strike us as odd, not to say shocking, since the truth is that every one of us owes huge numbers of her beliefs and a good deal of what she thinks of as knowledge to the say-so of other people. This is true in all spheres of life, in the practice of science or history as much as when we are gossiping with our friends. Perhaps the epistemic individualism inculcated by Descartes has caused philosophers either to

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neglect or to despise testimony. At all events, it is not unusual to find philosophers, even those who have noticed the extent to which human beings use testimony, disparaging it. Consider, for example, these remarks by Jonathan Barnes, which refer to some rather sensible observations of Myles Burnyeat’s: He means that if x knows that p and x says to y that p, then (normally) y thereby comes to know that p. Now I think that that is quite false—it is a lot harder to acquire knowledge than Burnyeat imagines. No doubt we all do pick up beliefs in that second hand fashion, and I fear that we often suppose that such scavenging yields knowledge. But that is only a sign of our colossal credulity; the method Burnyeat describes is a rotten way of acquiring beliefs, and it is no way at all of acquiring knowledge.1 I think this is false on every count. Like other animals capable of locomotion, we need true beliefs about the world around us for the successful conduct of our lives, and, given the kind of creatures that we are with our hugely various interests and our capacity for shared endeavours, our belief-needs are far greater than those of other locomotors. It is plausible to say that the practice of testimony—i.e. the business of sharing information through the use of language, of telling one another what is what—has evolved as our need for an enlarged repertoire of true beliefs has grown. Through this practice we are able to exploit the work of our fellow beings so as to get the true beliefs we need, and we can contribute the fruits of our own work to the common pool. Furthermore (though this is not the topic of this paper), I maintain that the practice of testimony constitutes the environment within which the very idea of knowledge took root and where it has its first home; through testimony we are able to escape the subjective domain of our own perceptions, the world of mere seeming, as Plato would put it, so as to access what we conceive to be (essentially shareable) knowledge of public, objective realities. Among us sophisticates, beliefs obtained from testimony are standardly obtained under the banner of knowledge; you tell me that it is raining and I begin to believe this for no other reason than that I take it that you have (as we say, at least) let me know that it is raining.2 Our concern in this paper, however, is with Hume, and his engagement with testimony derives from his interest in it as a source of beliefs; beliefs matter to us as such because, as such, they guide our practical engagement with the world. For the purposes of this paper we shall follow Hume and set aside the separate, but important question of how the idea of knowledge fits into the context of testimonial practice. According to his own profession, Hume addresses the subject of belief as the would-be founder of the Science of Man,3 and his aspirations owe more, it seems, to the ideal of Newtonian science than to the Cartesian ideal of epistemic autonomy. 1

Barnes (1980), pp. 199–200. I first adumbrated this idea in Welbourne (1986); it is further developed in Welbourne (2001), Ch. 7. The type of view in question was originally championed by Vendler (1972), esp. Ch. V; see also Vendler (1979). 3 Hume (1978), pp. xv ff. 2

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At all events, the primary question which shapes his philosophy of the understanding is the question of how beliefs are generated in human minds. What principles can we observe to be at work in this process? This is, above all, a question about mechanism. It is not to be confused with epistemological questions about how beliefs might be rationally justified or how their certainty might be secured. Hume’s stance is that, when it comes to the crunch, the regular mechanisms of ordinary human nature will always prevail over considerations of conventional rationality. Thus he contends that however cogent arguments in favour of scepticism may be in terms of the usual canons of rationality (entirely cogent, as he thinks), human nature will prevail over ‘Reason’, and we shall go on believing, whatever the arguments of the sceptics may seem to demand: Nature, by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity, has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel; nor can we any more forbear viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller light, upon account of their customary connexion with a present impression, than we can hinder ourselves from thinking, as long as we are awake, or seeing the surrounding bodies when we turn our eyes towards them in broad sunshine.4 The controls on belief are not Rational, as this is usually understood; and it falls to a philosophical scientist of human nature like Hume to try to discover what they really are. It has become fashionable to credit Hume with a supposedly bad theory about how testimony in particular produces in its hearers beliefs in the contents of testimony. On the interpretation in question he is a reductivist: that is, he thinks we characteristically obtain the beliefs we do from testimony by treating the various testimonies (informings, tellings, reportings, announcings and so on) to which we are exposed as essentially bits of inductive evidence bearing on the truth of the propositions we get to believe. So, according to this interpretation, his official account of how we obtain our inductively based beliefs may be pressed into service to explain how we get our testimony-based beliefs; there is no real difference between the two cases. The position ascribed to him is perhaps the same as that once sketched by D. H. Mellor: when Pooh hears Rabbit tell him that there’s honey for tea, he gets to believe that there’s honey for tea in the same way that he gets to believe that there is honey to be had when he sees the bees. In both cases what really matters is the same: that the sign he observes directly— the bees, Rabbit’s saying ‘[there’s honey for tea]’—should be correlated with honey.5 Against this, it has become common to maintain (correctly, as I believe) that testi-

4 5

Hume (1978), p. 183. Mellor (1990), p. 88.

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mony constitutes a distinct, sui generis, species of evidence, which is absolutely not to be assimilated to inductive evidence.6 Now this paper is not intended to be a root and branch defence of Hume; some of his references to testimony are unthinking, careless. As I see it the position is this. In Treatise Book I, Part III, Sections iv–viii, he very carefully develops a simple and ingenious schema which purports to present the fundamental principle involved in the formation of factual beliefs on the evidence of inputs of experience, a schema for induction; and sometimes it seems that he carelessly assumes that this schema will apply straightforwardly to the formation of all factual beliefs, not just those we acquire on the basis of ordinary inductive evidence but also those we get when the experiential input is constituted by the say-so of other people. In fact we cannot represent the normal process whereby we come to believe that P on the basis of someone’s telling us that P in precisely the same way as the process whereby we come to believe that there’s a fire, say, on seeing smoke, or that there’s honey available on seeing bees. To this extent Hume’s critics are right and we may suspect that he is misled by an infatuation with his elegant explanatory schema. What he can legitimately maintain, however, is that testimony-based beliefs, like his paradigmatic inductively formed beliefs, are in some sense owed to Experience—what, in the first Enquiry, he calls ‘that great guide of human life’.7 Hume’s critics are wrong if they think that the formation of beliefs on the basis of testimony cannot be accommodated within the general framework of his empiricism. Moreover, his most considered remarks about testimony suggest that he understands what his critics claim he failed to see, that, considered as a species of evidence, testimony really is sui generis. What I am going to argue, against the prevailing fashion, is this: 1. Hume has no theory of testimony, properly so-called; hence not even a bad theory. Rather he takes the practice of testimony for granted as a highly familiar source of beliefs and does not enquire into its mechanism (see Section 4). 2. It is not hard to construct an explanation of our engagement in the practice of testimony which fits Hume’s broadly empiricist stance and which is almost certainly along the right lines. This, however, suggests a very different kind of account of the generation of particular testimony-born beliefs from that apparently espoused by Mellor. Interestingly enough, it will have some resemblance to an account which is often hailed by Hume’s enemies as exemplary, in contrast with Hume’s own, viz., that of Thomas Reid (see Section 5). 3. The (quite copious) material in Hume’s oeuvre which is often taken to reinforce

6

This fashion was started, I believe, by Coady (1973). Hume (1975), p. 36. When he wrote the first Enquiry, it seems that Hume may have become a little queasy about applying his schema straightforwardly to testimony: ‘This species of reasoning, perhaps, one may deny to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. I shall not dispute about a word. It will be sufficient to observe, that our assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses’ (Hume, 1975, p. 111). 7

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a reductivist interpretation of his account of testimony is really addressed to a quite different kind of issue (see Section 5).

2. Hume’s general theory of belief-formation The broad outline of Hume’s general theory of belief-formation in terms of the association of ideas is well known, though there is a complication which is not always given proper weight and which deserves a passing mention. The complication is this. The factual beliefs we form as often as not include metaphysical components which cannot be attributed to habits of association, the engine of belief-formation which Hume most wishes to highlight; thus, when I form the belief that the cat is out hunting, I conceive of the cat as an enduring and reidentifiable particular. It is not until Treatise Book I, Part IV, Section ii that Hume tells his story about how I come by such strictly metaphysical elements of ordinary belief as this; they can owe nothing to association since the property of enduring through perceptual gaps, ex hypothesi, is not an observable property, and thus is not capable of becoming associated in the mind of an experienced observer with another observable. The story which concerns us, however, the story which is supposed to provide the model for the generation of testimony-based beliefs, is one about how we form beliefs concerning unobserved observables. This is the familiar story which dominates Treatise Book I, Part III. On seeing a fire I form a belief that I shall be warmed, because experience has habituated me to associate fire with warmth. On seeing smoke I infer that there is a fire somewhere, having regularly experienced fire along with smoke and thus come to associate them in my mind; or Pooh, on seeing the bees, infers that there is honey for the taking. As is well known, there are two things involved here. The first is our propensity to form associations of ideas on the condition that we have regularly experienced items of the associated types occurring in conjunction with each other. The second is that liveliness—the quale which characterises all those ‘perceptions’, in Hume’s generic sense,8 which are received as some sort of apprehension of reality (i.e., sense-perceptions, memories and beliefs)—is always transmitted from a triggering ‘perception’ which possesses it to any ‘perception’ which occurs in virtue of being of a type associated with the trigger-type. This fundamental dual mechanism is implicated, one way or another, in the formation of all factual beliefs. Very many of our beliefs, the great majority perhaps, including those obtained from the say-so of other people, contain metaphysical elements. When Oberon tells Puck that he knows a bank where the wild thyme blows, he is telling him of the existence of an enduring topological feature of the Athenian landscape. Now Hume famously says that ‘when we receive any matter of fact [for example, the existence of this thyme-blown bank] upon human testimony, our faith arises from the very

8

Hume (1978), p. 1.

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same origin as our inferences from causes to effects, and from effects to causes’,9 but Puck’s faith in the existence of this object, qua enduring object, cannot, for the reasons given, be derived from a causal inference as explicated by Hume; nor does Hume think it can. Rather, the idea of the endurance of the objects (even the unfamiliar ones) whose existence is referred to or affirmed in people’s say-so is part of the background understanding which enables hearers to take up the information contained in the testimony, and our beliefs in enduring existences need, as such, a different kind of explanation. Similar remarks, of course, will also apply to ordinary inductively based beliefs.

3. Hume on testimony With this caveat, let us now consider what sort of account of the origin of testimony-based beliefs Hume is committed to by remarks such as the one just quoted. One tempting model would map individual testimonial ‘inferences’ directly onto paradigm causal inferences. We need to be careful not to be misled by this word inference, much favoured by Hume. He uses it for any rule-governed passage of mind from input to output; for him it carries no necessary implication of conscious explicit reasoning. Thus Hume would be happy to say that Pavlov’s dogs infer that food is coming (they get to believe it) when they hear the bell. And, in fact, of course, many of our everyday causal inferences have this automatic character; I hear the door-bell ring and thereupon believe that there is someone on the doorstep. In exactly the same way, on the proposed model, if I am told that there is someone at the door, as like as not I get to believe that there is, just like that. This model for testimonial inferences reminds us of Mellor’s tale about Pooh. Here an association, so we may suppose, has been established in Pooh’s mind between two correlated items—utterances of the sentence ‘there’s honey for tea’ (or, possibly, Rabbit’s utterances of this sentence) and there being honey for tea. Thus, in hearing Rabbit utter ‘there’s honey for tea’, Pooh has a lively perception of the utterance—he is not, as it appears to him, imagining it; and the liveliness of this perception is transmitted to the idea which experience has led him to associate with that type of utterance and which shares the same content—honey for tea, thus constituting it as a belief. Now there are at least two reasons why this is a non-starter as a theory of testimony. First, not any old utterances of the sentence in question will count. The association has to be with testimonial utterances—tellings, reportings, announcings, informings and so on. For example, none of the utterances of the specimen sentence which have so far appeared in this paper would do; in producing them I have not told anyone that there is honey for tea, and you do not now, on their account at least, believe that there is honey for tea in spite of having had lively ‘perceptions’ of my utterances. And, of course, expressions of opinion, hunches, overt guesses and so on will not do either. The second reason why a theory of testimony cannot

9

Hume (1978), p. 113.

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be modelled along these lines is this. A hearer can obtain a belief from a bit of testimony when the uttered sentence is entirely new to her and, consequently, not one utterance of which can have become associated in her mind with whatever kind of state of affairs it appears to refer to. Whatever the associationist theory applies to, it requires that the subject should have had frequent and regular experience of the conjunction of items of the types which have come to be associated in her mind.10 If Hume were irrevocably committed to a theory which is exposed to these objections, that would be the end of the matter. And perhaps he does sometimes, incautiously, say things which may seem to favour such a reading. As noted earlier, it sometimes seems as if he were so beguiled by his schematic analysis of inferences from inductive evidence that he assumes it is going to apply universally to all ‘inferences’ which conclude in factual beliefs, thus dispensing him of the need to develop a special theory for those which are triggered by testimony. But interpretational charity requires that we consider whether there might not be some other way of reading Hume. And there is, a way which fits with his commitment to a broadly empiricist explanation of the mechanism of belief-formation in terms of the association of ideas, and which is supported by several of his more considered remarks on the topic. The consequence is, however, that, on this reading, Hume’s account of the genesis of testimony-based beliefs doesn’t map smoothly onto his account of the underlying mechanism of induction; and it doesn’t give us anything which even purports to be a theory of testimony, either. The crucial fact to keep in view is that we often obtain beliefs from hearing testimonial utterances whose content is radically unfamiliar, on condition that we understand them properly. For example, I now believe (and in fact I think I know) what I certainly did not believe until I read today’s paper, that scientists have recently succeeded in inserting the gene which makes jellyfish glow green into the DNA of a rhesus monkey. Never before had I encountered the sentence or string of sentences which conveyed this information to me. It follows that the content of this utterance must be excluded from the scope of any experienced conjunction of items whose association in my mind may be held to mediate my acquisition of the belief. But now, it may be asked, what is left to be associated with what? It seems that all we are left with is a rather high-level association between, on the one hand, the testimonial mode in which the sentence is expressed and, on the other hand, facts. The idea must be that we have learnt to associate testimony as such with reality. And this is exactly what Hume seems to say, on those occasions when he wants to insist that there is no a priori connexion between them. For example: . . . our assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses. It being a general maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connexion together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from one to another, are founded merely on our experience

10

Hume (1978), p. 87.

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of their constant and regular conjunction; it is evident, that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in favour of human testimony, whose connexion with any event seems, in itself, as little necessary as any other. (Hume, 1975, p. 111) Or, again, a little later: The reason, why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them. (Hume, 1975, p. 112) My belief about the altered rhesus monkey owes its content to the content of the testimonial utterance to which I was exposed; it is very important that in testimonial contexts content is preserved,11 i.e. that the auditor’s belief has the same content as the speaker’s utterance. But my belief owes its status as a belief to my acquired habit of associating testimonies (whatever their content) with actual states of affairs, together with the principle that liveliness is always transmitted from a lively triggerperception to any perception which occurs through association with it. This is the view I attribute to Hume in his wiser moments. Unfortunately, the theory I find adumbrated in the remarks just quoted from Hume is widely held to be completely unviable. C. A. J. Coady is the principal author of this critical opinion.12 The essence of his argument is this. Hume requires us to believe that we learn from experience that testimony correlates well with reality. But instances of this supposed correlation can only be observed, that is, it can only be an empirical correlation, if we are able to identify examples of testimony independently of the correlation. The idea must be, so it is claimed, that we spot bits of testimony and notice that more often than not the facts are as the various contents of these different testimonies specify. But, so Coady argues, this set-up requires that it is possible that we might have found no significant correlation at all between testimony and fact. There can only be an empirical discovery if we might conceivably have found an entirely contrary state of affairs. But it is not conceivable that we might have found there to be no significant correlation between testimonies and actual states of affairs. If it were, we could imagine a newly discovered community, with an alien tongue, whose members produce testimonial utterances, even though those utterances more often than not do not correspond with the facts. As a rule, these beings, when they utter testimonies, are either lying or are mistaken; and such might be the judgment of the linguists commissioned to interpret their language. But this is not a possible set-up. What grounds could there conceivably be for identifying these aliens’ utterances as instances of testimony, if there were no reliable correlation between them and the facts? Since it is not conceivable that we should find no significant correlation between testimony and reality, it follows that the Humean

11 12

This felicitous notion of content preservation is due to Burge (1993). Coady (1973, 1992).

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view of things, according to which we discover empirically that there is a correlation, is wholly wrong. This is a seductive argument and, I daresay, I am not the only one to have been seduced by it.13 But it is, surely, mistaken. Certainly the situation just described is impossible. However, in order to understand Hume’s rather simple point, we need to imagine the position of a young human child at the point where she is beginning to acquire language. She has been born into a world where testimonial utterances are common and by and large correspond with the facts. Indeed, a child’s environment is often rather protected, in this respect; her parents are careful to say ‘duck’ when there is a duck in the vicinity or ‘car’ when there is a car and not otherwise. And so on through the whole gamut of things and beasts she encounters in her early escorted forays into the world. Of course, what happens is not that she first identifies some of her parents’ utterances as testimonies, then notes a correlation between just those utterances and reality and thus comes to have faith in her parents’ say-so (the absurd scenario which Coady ascribes to Hume). Rather she notices a correlation between her parents’ as yet uncategorised utterances of ‘duck’ and ducks, of ‘car’ and cars and so on; and in doing so at one and the same time she both begins to learn the meaning of these words and begins to catch on to the idea of using words to report on external realities. She begins to learn at once both vocabulary and the practice of using vocabulary to say what’s what and how things are. I think this is how Hume sees it. It is consistent with his empiricist stance and it has the advantage that something like it is, in fact, presumably true. Of course, we are, no doubt, genetically programmed to learn these lessons (and, as parents, to teach them); but there is nothing in Hume’s empiricism which requires him to deny this—he believes in human nature and aspires to explain it.

4. Towards a theory of testimony This, then, is how, as I think, Hume for the most part envisages the situation. What follows, when we consider the status of testimony as evidence? Hume’s error, according to Coady, is to assimilate the evidence of testimony to ordinary inductive evidence when really it is sui generis. But on the view just sketched out testimony is sui generis and Hume, therefore, is wrongly described as a reductivist. The young child is drawn by her early experiences of language together with her natural propensities into a unique kind of practice whose exercises are all about her, in oral and written forms, and thus she learns, as no doubt she is programmed to learn, a certain way of using language, a certain family of speech-acts whose use is to communicate information. It is, of course, a further question, one on which Hume is entirely silent, how, in her maturity, she will recognise instances of these informative speech-acts, in particular, how she will discriminate them from other utterances in the indicative mood. The fact is, however, that we all do this, cued no doubt in all sorts of subtle

13

For example, when I wrote Welbourne (1986), pp. 33–36 and n. 10.

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ways, and generally speaking we get it right. Hume gives us one example of someone getting it quite wrong (see below). Now there is a tendency, manifest amongst those most keen to insist on the sui genericity of testimony when considered as a species of evidence, to contemplate this idea with inarticulate awe, as if there were nothing more that could possibly be said on the subject. But saying that testimony is a distinct kind of evidence, that it is specifically unlike the evidence of induction or demonstration or the senses, is clearly not characterising its way of working as evidence. There is no reason to think, however, that nothing can be said by way of characterising its distinct modus operandi. We still need a theory of testimony. Hume develops no theory in this sense, although, as we shall see, in the passage just referred to (p. 15), he shows some signs of understanding what the broad framework of a theory has to be. His chief interests, however, are differently focused. The missing theory, I suggest, will concentrate on the fact that the various exercises of testimony are speech-acts—specifically, acts of telling, informing, reporting, announcing and so on; and absolutely not such acts as opining, hinting, suggesting, surmising and so on, all of which can equally well be executed by utterances in the indicative mood. Like other speech-acts, testimonial speech-acts look for an appropriate response from their hearers. Generally speaking, understanding a speech-act involves understanding what the speech-act is intended to accomplish, and thus how the person to whom it is addressed is intended to respond. A drill sergeant on the parade ground looks for obedience with respect to his commands; and obedience is the response which the soldiers on parade understand they should deliver to these speech-acts. Obedience, let us say, is the default response to a speech-act of commanding the hearer to perform some action. This doesn’t mean that the response cannot be withheld by a hearer who understands the speech-act for what it is, still less that there are no circumstances in which it ought to be withheld. Particular commands can be unlawful or beyond the pale of acceptable morality. But you can only withhold a response if there is one to withhold. To understand what it is to issue a command is to understand that obedience is the expected response, the default, prescribed in the language-game. In an entirely analogous way the response which is looked for by someone who tells her audience that P is that the audience simply accept that P on her say-so. To understand the speech-act for what it is—an act of telling, informing or whatever—is to understand that this is the response which the speaker looks for. There is one passage where Hume reveals an intuitive grasp of this point. Although his remarks are differently directed, he clearly sees that our propensity to accept what we are told is not something which bears, externally, as it were, on the way we deal with testimonies. Rather it is partly constitutive of the practice: it is of the essence of the practice that the default response to an act of telling, informing, reporting or whatever should be that the hearer accept what she is told, that she believe the teller, just as the default response to a command is that it should be obeyed. This is what Hume says: If one person sits down to read a book as a romance, and another as a true history, they plainly receive the same ideas, and in the same order; nor does the incredulity

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of the one, and the belief of the other, hinder them from putting the very same sense upon their author.14 Here the one person thinks that what she is reading is intended informatively and accordingly she delivers the appropriate response—she accepts what she reads as fact, just like that; the other takes it that she is reading fiction and thus has no inclination at all to believe what she reads. But, again, to say that acceptance is the default response to say-so is not to say that the response cannot be withheld, and, in certain circumstances perhaps, should be withheld. It is the default in the sense that it is the response which an audience will deliver, in virtue of understanding the speech-act for what it is, when all goes smoothly in accordance with the speaker’s intentions. And just as it would be a mistake to confuse prudential or moral questions as to whether particular orders should or should not be obeyed with questions about the nature of the practice of ordering, and, in particular, about what response orders, by their nature, expect, so it would be a mistake to confuse questions about the nature of testimony and its correlative response with questions about the wisdom of accepting some particular item of proffered information on the basis of testimony. A full-blown theory of testimony will need to say more about acceptance. Often it is unreflective, automatic; for example, as often as not we simply uptake the information we are given about the prices of the goods we see for sale in the shops, without any thought. But, of course, sometimes we do reflect on whether to accept a bit of proffered information; we adopt the stance of historians or jurors. And when we do, we may think of ourselves as wondering whether to believe the speaker or writer (that is, to believe a person—the testimony-giver). It is wrong to think that the notion of believing a person analyses out in terms of believing that what they say is true; rather it is a matter of regarding them as reliably authoritative on the matter in question. When we reflect in this way we will often consider ancillary (inductive) evidence as to the credibility of the speaker or her information, with a view to deciding whether to deliver the default response to what is, in itself, evidence of a sui generis sort. Again, at a certain level of sophistication we may rationalise the acceptance of a bit of testimony in terms of knowledge, since, as we noted earlier, acts of telling are often thought of in terms of letting an audience know. It is a notable fact about our concept of knowledge that it supports what we might call the Principle of Communicability, viz., if A believes that B knows that P, then A believes that A knows that P. Thus, if I think that you are a knowledge-speaker, I am rationally bound in virtue of this principle to accept what you say as a bit of knowledge which I now possess as well as you, and I may rationalise my acceptance of your say-so in these terms. (That the concept of knowledge supports this principle I take to be a sign that there is a deep connexion between the idea of knowledge and the business

14

Hume (1978), pp. 97–98.

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of testimony. We have a concept supporting this principle just because we have evolved the communicative practice that we have, the practice of testimony.)15 Now to return to Hume. He, I suggest, takes it unreflectively, as a manifest given, that there is a family of speech-acts such as informing and reporting, which by their nature look for the acceptance of proffered information on the part of their auditors. When we initially learn these speech-acts, we don’t have to learn two separate lessons, on the one hand what it is to tell someone what is what and, on the other hand, what sort of response is normal for an act of informative telling. We learn the act and the looked-for response as a single package just as we do with ordering and obeying. Hume’s modest claim, for which he offers little argument—though perhaps not much is needed—is that we learn these things by being exposed to exercises of the practice. And, no doubt, for this purpose it helps if some of the exercises to which the beginner in language is predominantly exposed are controlled exercises, where what is told is observably what is the case—‘duck’ when there’s a manifest duck and so on. Finally, it should go without saying that you have to have learnt what telling is for and how the game is played before you can understand how you might be misled by being told something and thus prepared to adopt a more critical attitude, like the juror or the historian.

5. Hume and Reid As we mentioned earlier, recent writers have often supposed that there is a radical opposition between Hume and Reid, in this matter of testimony as in other matters. Hume is billed as the arch-reductivist; Reid, by contrast, is applauded for correctly recognising that testimony constitutes a quite distinct species of evidence. According to Reid, the proper response when faced with a bit of testimony is to accept it. For Hume, on the mistaken interpretation we are considering, the proper response is to weigh it, to evaluate it, just as we often find ourselves having to evaluate bits of inductive evidence. This supposed opposition is well summed up by Leslie Stevenson when he writes that ‘the criterial approach [= Reid’s] treats testimony as “innocent” (i.e., trustworthy) unless shown guilty; the reductionist [=Hume’s] treats it as “guilty” (i.e., not worthy of belief) until a good track-record is shown’.16 Now there are, I believe, some important differences between Hume and Reid on the matter of testimony; they are, however, subtler than this stark opposition suggests, and it’s not evident to me that, at the end of the day, the prize for merit should go to Reid. Some of their differences have a more theological than philosophical character. Reid is keen to proclaim that we owe our ability to inform one another through testimony to divine providence, whereas Hume is content to attribute the ability to our human nature and leave it at that. Famously, he regards the question of how we come to have the nature that we have as utterly beyond our philosophical (or

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These ideas were adumbrated in Welbourne (1986); they are further developed in Welbourne (2001). Stevenson (1993), p. 436.

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scientific) competence.17 Thus, we have the capacity to inform one another by means of testimony; that is our nature, but it is idle to speculate how it comes about that we have the nature we have. For our part, we may want to tell a story about evolutionary adaptation. Reid, on the other hand, is keen to find the hand of God where he can; and this is one place where he thinks it is conspicuous. Both Reid and Hume, however, believe that they can say something about the pertinent aspects of our nature. According to Reid, we have two inherent, Godgiven and co-ordinate propensities, propensities which tally. One of them he calls the Principle of Credulity—the propensity to believe what we are told; the tallying principle he calls the Principle of Veracity—the propensity to be truthful when we tell other people what is what.18 He seems to think of these as enabling conditions. Because God has equipped us with these principles we can make advantageous use of the available practice of telling one another what is what so as to communicate and share information. Now Hume, too, explicitly recognises the second of these fundamental principles, ‘an inclination to truth and probity’, as he calls it; but it has a different place in his scheme of things. He holds, as we have seen, that each of us learns from experience that people have this inclination, and, furthermore, he holds that if experience didn’t teach us this lesson, ‘we should never repose the least confidence in human testimony’. In fact we do tend to have confidence in human testimony, and thus engage in the business of testimony both as speakers and as hearers. So Hume also recognises Reid’s second principle. There is a difference between them, however; in Hume’s view the inclination to believe what we are told (Reid’s Principle of Credulity) is dependent on our having learnt that human beings tend to be truthful.19 For Hume these propensities are not co-ordinate. It is hard to reconcile Hume’s recognition of the propensity of human beings to believe what they are told with the thought that on his view we are supposed to regard just any bit of testimony as ‘“guilty” (i.e. not worthy of belief) until a good track record is shown’.20 Perhaps the suggestion is that Hume thinks we ought to view any testimony with suspicion until it has proved its worth. If so, I think that seriously misrepresents his position. To be sure, he is interested in normative questions concerning testimony, as we shall see. But his primary concern in his philosophy of the understanding is, as we noted at the outset, with describing the mechanisms whereby beliefs are engendered in the minds of human beings, and it is fundamental to his philosophical stance that the norms by reference to which normative questions about what we should or shouldn’t believe are decided derive from actual practice; there is, for him, no other external source of normativity. To apply this to the present case: in practice, we generally tell the truth and believe what we are told; for Hume, these are principles in accordance with which we actually operate and there just are no others by reference to which we might make the judgment that in general we ought not to believe what we are told. This stance is made totally 17 18 19 20

Hume (1978), p. 13. Reid (1983), pp. 93–95. Hume (1975), p. 112. Stevenson (1993), loc. cit.

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explicit, in connexion with causal reasoning, in the following remark in his ‘Rules for judging of causes and effects’: Here is all the Logic I think proper to employ in my reasonings; and perhaps even this was not very necessary, but might have been supply’d by the natural principles of our understanding.21 In other words, as Gilbert Harman once put it, ‘the valid principles of inference are those principles in accordance with which the mind works’.22 This, I believe, is Hume’s fundamental stance with respect to all norms, but, at one point, he says something which may appear to conflict with it, and which encouraged Stevenson to develop his contra-Reidian interpretation. Hume says: No weakness of human nature is more universal and conspicuous than what we commonly call credulity, or a too easy faith in the testimony of others.23 Two points about this. First, if he thinks that credulity is an universal weakness of human nature, a common failing which we should try to check, then surely, it seems plausible to say, he does oppose the Reidian view. Secondly, if credulity is common (universal, even), what is the basis for thinking it is a propensity which we ought to check? The valid principles are those we operate with; so where can the norms by reference to which we judge it a weakness come from? In fact, this remark of Hume’s does not go against my reading. Hume (unlike Reid) always uses the word ‘credulity’ in a bad sense; for him, as for us, it is the name of an intellectual vice, and does not refer, as it does in Reid, to the general propensity to believe what one is told. But there is nothing in the position with which I credit Hume which implies that there cannot be such a vice, and there is no reason to think that Reid did not recognise the vice either. One can hold that human beings, generally speaking, believe what they are told and that it is right that they should, that the natural response to a piece of testimony is, and ought to be, to accept it, and also hold that there can be particular circumstances in which the default should be overridden. And one can also hold, as Hume evidently does, that when such circumstances arise, too often the default is not overridden. Inevitably, this raises the question, under what circumstances is it right to override the default? And what is the source of the normative principles which overriding invokes? These questions are the focus of Hume’s famous section on miracles, though it is likely that the questions excited his attention also in his capacity as an historian, constantly having to evaluate reports and written records. Within the framework of Hume’s project there is only one possible answer to the second of these questions. The normative principles we deploy come from our usual practice. The

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Hume (1978), p. 175. Harman (1973), p. 18. Hume (1978), p. 112.

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point to hang on to is that our actual experience is not in fact anywhere near as regular or uniform as idealised versions of Hume’s theory suggest. The regularities which condition our expectations about the future are not always of the exceptionless variety which underlies what Hume sometimes refers to as proof.24 We also encounter ‘contrary experiments’ and, in such cases, consciously or not, but always guided by experience, we weigh evidence and conclude with a judgment of probability. Treatise Book I, Part, III, Sections xi–xiii is all about how we apply our hard-won practical wisdom in making such judgments in the field of inductively based beliefs. But something of the same sort applies also in the field of testimony. We know from experience that people sometimes lie or are mistaken; and when, as sometimes happens, what they report goes clean against the general tenor of our previous experience, as, notoriously, in the case of reports of miracles, our suspicions may be aroused and we may be prompted to ask whether in this instance the testimony should be accepted. In certain circumstances particular bits of testimony need to be weighed in the light of what we have learnt about the testimonial behaviour of human beings and the natural probabilities relevant to what the testimony reports. It would be hard to codify completely the practical wisdom which is deployed in making these evaluations, but Hume makes a good start: This contrariety of evidence, in the present case, may be derived from several different causes; from the opposition of contrary testimony; from the character or number of the witnesses; from the manner of their delivering their testimony; or from the union of all these circumstances. We entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are but few, or of a doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent asseverations. There are many other particulars of the same kind, which may diminish or destroy the force of any argument, derived from human testimony.25 In all these matters, as ever, experience is ‘that great guide of human life’. If previous experience triggers suspicion about some particular testimony we abandon the default mode of response and in fact begin to behave, as in these circumstances we should, more like jurors or historians. But there is nothing in this to suggest that the default response either is not or ought not to be, in Hume’s view as much as in Reid’s, to accept what one is told. Still, the fact that credulity (in Hume’s bad sense) is common needs an explanation, and Hume feels obliged to supply one which is consistent with his general position. The Treatise explanation proposes a somewhat far-fetched mechanism, which turns on the idea that resemblance, like causation, is a natural relation.26 A

24 25 26

Hume (1978), p. 124. Hume (1975), pp. 112–113. Hume (1978), p. 11.

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bit of testimony resembles the (alleged) fact it reports; in other words, the content of the testimony is identical with the content of the idea it induces in the hearer— the belief, in case there is a transmission of liveliness.27 As a natural relation, resemblance creates associations between ideas, which mediate transmissions of liveliness. Thus, it is natural for any testimony, perceived as such, to give rise to a lively idea, a belief in the content of the testimony, in the mind of a hearer. For all that, experience can, and should, counteract the effect of this natural relation when what is reported is clean contrary to the normal expectations to which experience gives rise. This explanation is wisely abandoned in the Enquiry, along with the overblown theoretical apparatus in which it is embedded. In the Enquiry, Hume is content to focus on a point, also noted in the Treatise, that it is a feature of our human nature that we are liable to be captivated by the marvellous and strange, that is, by things contrary to ordinary experience, the objects of credulity. Still, the wise amongst us will be guided in the formation of their beliefs by experience; strangeness will trigger suspicion and the wise will, thereupon, undertake a judicious assessment of probabilities.

6. Envoi The picture of testimony which emerges on this reading of Hume seems to me to be, broadly speaking, correct. It is partly constitutive of the practice of testimony that the default response which a speaker who tells someone something looks for from her auditors is acceptance, acceptance of the fact told, reported, announced or whatever. But it is in the nature of defaults that they can be overridden. Perhaps some people, or some people in some circumstances, may not override the default as readily as others; for example, some of us may easily be seduced by the pleasure to be had from believing scandalous or amazing reports about our friends and colleagues. Others will proceed more soberly and let experience be their guide. There is a rich field for research here, inaugurated by Hume, most notably in his section on miracles. Reid, for his part, seems to have recognised acceptance not only as the default response but also, like Hume, as one which may be, and in certain circumstances should be, overridden. Thus he says of his Principle of Credulity that it is ‘unlimited in children, until they meet with instances of deceit and falsehood: and it retains a very considerable degree of strength through life’.28 Compare Hume: As to the youthful propensity to believe, which is corrected by experience; it seems obvious, that children adopt blindfold all the opinions of their elders as

27 28

Hume (1978), p. 113. Reid (1983), p. 95.

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well as credit their testimony; nor is this more strange, than that a hammer should make an impression on clay.29 And now a last word about knowledge. We are apt to view beliefs obtained through the default mechanism of testimony quite differently from the opinions which, one way or another, we frame for ourselves independently of other people. Because testimony-born beliefs are acquired in the way they are, by communication from other people, they have an objective character. Necessarily, beliefs so obtained appear to transcend individual points of view. To think of one’s belief that P in this light is to think that one knows that P, and it is to think that P is a bit of knowledge, something essentially communicable, available to anyone, in virtue of the principle of the communicability of knowledge. Hence my suggestion at the outset, reiterated in Section 4, that the concept of knowledge is rooted in the practice of testimony. It is a great mistake to wonder how, if at all, it might be possible to get to know that P from someone’s say-so that P, as distinct from merely acquiring the belief that P from their say-so, as if knowing that P had to satisfy specially exacting conditions, entirely independent of the practice of testimony. On the contrary knowledge, in its primary application, is our name for what is communicated through the normal processes of testimony.

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Hume (1932), Vol. 1, p. 349.