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Record W1509904696 · doi:10.1353/hms.2001.a383327

Hume's Recantation Revisited

2001· article· en· W1509904696 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueHume studies · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophical Ethics and Theory
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhilosophyPersonal identityEpistemologyIdentity (music)PerceptionCausationReflexive pronounConsciousnessNothingPsychologySelfAesthetics

Abstract

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Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 2, November 2001, pp. 279-300 Hume's Recantation Revisited VIJAY MASCARENHAS In the Appendix to the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume famously recants his position on personal identity. There he confesses: "upon a strict review of the section concurring personal identity I find myself involv'd in such a labyrinth that... I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent."1 By his own admission, then, something has gone wrong in Hume's account of personal identity, something that, at least to his eyes, did not go wrong in his accounts of body and necessary connection. For those accounts were not grossly inconsistent or patently absurd. The case is different, however, with personal identity. There his philosophical enterprise suffers shipwreck, and it is important to understand why. Unfortunately , however, Hume confesses thathe finds his former opinions false as well as inconsistent, but neglects to specify how or why he came to this conclusion . This paper is an attempt to address just that question.2 First we must observe the general philosophical tasks that Hume takes on in the Treatise. These I take to be three. First, he must assess and delineate the landscape of the human mind. In what does consciousness consists? Here his answer is simple: perceptions and perceptions alone, that is, impressions and ideas. To this Hume adds only a handful of associative processes by which the mind navigates from perception to perception: these are contiguity, resemblance , and causation. Having assayed the psychological apparatus available to the human mind, Hume's second task is to determine whether certain beliefs —i.e., those concerning body, causation, and personal identity—are epistemologically justified, that is, well founded and rationally grounded. His answer, of course, is no.3 No matter how irresistible and useful such beVijay Mascarenhas is Lecturer in Philosophy, Yale University, PO Box 208306, New Haven, CT 06520 e-mail: vjmasc@mindspring.com 280 Vijay Mascarenhas liefs may be, nothing available to human experience justifies our accepting them. The last task Hume takes upon himself is more properly psychological than philosophical: this is to provide an account of how we are able to form such beliefs given their irrationality and given the rather narrow confines of human experience. Impression, ideas, and the association of ideas are all that Hume can rely upon in constructing an account of the psychological origin of these beliefs. Now, I believe that Hume was able to deal fairly deftly with beliefs in body and necessary connection. Those beliefs were unfounded, but their psychological origin could be explained by "idealizing" them, that is, by attributing their formation to the association of ideas. There is no real necessary connection between perceptions, but we can come to believe in causality, because we associate the ideas of those perceptions. Similarly, perceptions do not enjoy continued existence when unperceived, but we come to believe they do because of the easy transition between the ideas of those perceptions . In short, Hume's tactic seems to be to deny real connections between perceptions and then to resolve them into associations between the ideas of these perceptions. This ploy, however, fails him when it comes to the issue of personal identity. To see exactly why this is so, one must turn first to the "former opinions" that Hume ultimately came to reject. In Book I, he asks how we can form the belief in personal identity despite the absence of any constant and invariable impression of the self. To arrive at an answer, he says "we must take the matter pretty deep, and account for that identity which we attribute to plants and animals; there being a great analogy betwixt it, and the identity of a self or person" (T 253). Here Hume takes a wrong turn in the labyrinth: in positing a "great analogy" between personal identity and the identity of animals, plants, and the like, he adopts an objective view with regard to something essentially subjective, the self. But more on this later. For now, let us follow Hume, even where he strays. Concerning the identity of plants and animals, he mostly just repeats what he said in...

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.911
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.203
GPT teacher head0.346
Teacher spread0.143 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it