Hume’s Treatment of Denial in the Treatise

Thomas Reid’s and Barry Stroud’s discussions of David Hume’s work are separated in time by approximately 200 years. Nevertheless, there is a striking similarity between concerns they raise about David Hume’s theory of judgment (as presented in his Treatise of Human Nature). In short: both Reid and Stroud regard Hume’s theory as incapable of providing an adequate account of negative judgment, or what I will term cognitive denial. The project of this paper is to ask whether the account of judgment offered by Hume in the Treatise genuinely falls to this concern. My answer is that it does not, and I hope that Hume, despite his disavowal of the Treatise in favor of the later Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, would forgive this paper’s focus on his earlier work, especially as the project is to defend his early views from what I regard as unfair criticisms.1 The concern is simply this: Hume’s sparse resources for differentiating mental states leave him unable to properly distinguish and relate contrary beliefs, such as the belief that God exists and the belief that God does not exist. Generally speaking, there are two approaches one can pursue for making this distinction: either the beliefs in question can be treated as alike in content but differing (and conflicting) in the mental operation or activity involved, or the beliefs can be treated as alike in mental operation or activity but differing (and conflicting) in the contents they possess. In short: we can analyze a belief and its denial as contrary activities with a common content, or we can analyze a belief and its denial as a common operation on contrary contents. Reid and Stroud offer worries that Hume’s commitments about the composition of mental states will leave him unable to recognize any such distinction, or, at best, that if he is able to recognize some such distinction, the account will still be unsatisfactory as a treatment of cognitive denial. I argue that Reid and Stroud both