Psychology, epistemology, and skepticism in Hume's argument about induction

Do we yet understand Hume's project in his main argument about induction in Treatise I.iii.6? Is the argument skeptical? Is it even so much as epistemological, skeptical or otherwise? Or is it merely psychological? Although the literature has made much progress on these questions, we have not reached a full understanding of Hume's position. I hope to fill in some missing pieces of the interpretive puzzle. 1. THE SKEPTICAL INTERPRETATION OF I.iii.6 According to the skeptical interpretation of I.iii.6, the section advances the problem of induction, in the fashion of Russell in the Problems of Philosophy. This interpretation, which held sway for decades in the middle of the twentieth century, has its attractions. It is philosophically interesting. Also, it coheres with the Beattie-Reid tradition of interpretation, on which Hume is utterly destructive, an arch-skeptic with respect to causal necessity, the causal principle (that every new existence, or new modification of existence, has a cause), the external world, the substantial self, and so forth. Finally, the skeptical interpretation, unsurprisingly, has some basis in the text. Section I.iii.6 does supply key premises of the skeptical problem: first, inductive inference presupposes that nature is uniform (T 88-89); second, there is no demonstrative argument to show that nature is uniform (T 89); and third, no probable argument could show that nature is uniform, without begging the question (T 89-90). Hume would also seem to draw the argument's conclusion, that there is no justification whatsoever for belief in the uniformity principle and hence for inductive inference: he writes in I.iii. 6 that there is "no reason" (T 92; cf. 91, 139) to draw an inference from the unobserved to the observed.