Comments on Rocknak's Imagined Causes

Comments on Rocknak's Imagined Causes Donald L. M. Baxter (bio) Stefanie Rocknak has written an ambitious and challenging book1 in which she argues for a new interpretation of Hume's account of how we come to believe in external objects, and what it is we believe in. I am hampered by the fact that she and I seem to agree on so little. Thus, my criticisms run the danger of simply not seeing what she is up to. A preliminary terminological point: where Rocknak uses the word "object," I will often use the word "body," since I think Hume sometimes uses "object" in a more general sense that includes perceptions. If I understand correctly, Rocknak's Hume argues that we come to believe in bodies through a special kind of causal reasoning. We reason what must exist in order to cause sequences of sense impressions with constancy and coherence and in order to explain the fact that the impressions have these characteristics. Our conclusion is that bodies must exist and we come to the idea of body via an exercise of our transcendental imagination. Bodies are imagined causes, as she puts it: secret causes that we have never experienced and can never experience (118). To quote her, [B]y using a special kind of reasoning from causation—which is not based on experience—we "infer" that some continuous and distinct object must be the cause of the impressions … in order to explain the constancy and coherence that our impressions do clearly admit of. For how else, the idea is, could my impressions of say, a mountain, be constant and coherent, no matter how many times they are interrupted, unless there is some continuous and distinct object, causing those impressions? (117) As near as I can tell, the rhetorical question here is what guides her interpretation. [End Page 51] I myself do not see how the vulgar could feel the pull of the question when they first generate the idea of body as a result of tricks of the imagination. In my view, the idea that bodies cause impressions is much further downstream when the philosophers get into the picture, not at the origin of the idea of body (see T 1.4.2.43–46; SBN 209–12). In any event, I will focus on some passages in Hume that Rocknak interprets as descriptions of this process of transcendental reasoning and imagining, and will give alternate interpretations. First is the discussion in T 1.3.9.3–4 (SBN 107–108)2 of the two systems of realities (58–60). Rocknak takes the first system of realities to consist of impressions and memories of impressions, and takes the second system of realities to consist of transcendentally imagined causes of the first system. I have trouble squaring this interpretation with the context. It seems to me that Hume is just continuing the previous discussion of everyday causal reasoning. The first system of realities consists of the things we sense or remember sensing, and the second system of realities consists of the things that we believe exist because the ideas and memories transport our minds to causally related ideas and enliven them. Our belief in Rome, if we have not experienced that city, is an enlivened complex idea consisting of ideas with a customary association with impressions of words or stories about Rome. The enlivened ideas that compose the complex idea are copies of impressions of ordinary experience. If Hume is switching from a discussion of causation as customary conjunction to a special sort of transcendental causation, he is doing it without any warning and without any need. Rocknak seems to be inferring from the fact that we do not see and feel the realities in the second system, that they cannot be seen and felt, and can only be grasped by the transcendental imagination. But this inference seems inconsistent with the fact that Hume is continuing his discussion of how observed constant conjunctions and present impressions lead to belief in things not currently sensed. Because the constant conjunctions have been observed, both types of things have been observed. There is no indication that he has switched to talking of...

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