In this paper I want to explore the skepticism about such beliefs that Hume

argues for in the Treatise. The final form of Humeian skepticism is the outcome
of the complicated interplay between two facts: that we can, by reflection, come
to see that many of our beliefs are unreasonable; and that we can, by reflection,
come to see that our nature determines us to have them anyhow. The question
I want to raise about causal beliefs concerns the first of those two facts. Just
what reflections about causal beliefs should lead us to see that they are
unreasonable? (3)

According to the standard interpretation of the Treatise, the answer to this

question is obvious. The skeptical reflections are in the famous argumentation
of 13vi. According to that interpretation, section six contains an argument
against the view that experience provides any reasons for our causal beliefs. If
experience did provide reasons for our causal beliefs, then we would have to be
able to offer reasons for each of the premises in the following argument:
1 The course of nature is uniform.
2. Whenever I have observed an event of kind A, an event of kind B has
followed. 3. I am now observing an event of kind A.
4. So an event of kind B will follow.
But we cannot offer a reason for believing premise (1), the uniformity principle.
We can neither intuit, demonstrate nor experience that it is true, and any other
attempt to offer a reason for it will be circular. Therefore my experience of As
and Bs provides no reason for my belief that a B will occur. I do inevitably have
such a belief. But my having it can be accounted for only by citing its causes.
Here, the causes are my experience and the operation of my imagination
according to principles of association. (3)

The objection is this: Hume must be presupposing, mistakenly, that to have a

reason for a causal belief is to have reason to believe the premises of a
deductive argument whose conclusion is the causal belief. According to this
objection, Hume thinks that there is just one way to have a reason for a belief,
and that is by having reasons to believe premises from which it follows. (I am
leaving aside as irrelevant to this problem cases where one simply intuits that
something is true.) But, the objection goes, our reasons may be deductively
insufficient, and reasons all the same. Especially, when our reasoning is
inductive, our reasons or evidence for our beliefs will of course be deductively
insufficient to our conclusions. But that does not entail that they are not reasons
—good ones, at that.
Now, Hume does not say in I3vi that he is evaluating our casual inferences and
beliefs. He states his aim very differently. He says he is inquiring into what
“produces” our beliefs about the unobserved, how “we are determin’d to form
such beliefs” (88). For Hume, these terms mark his inquiry as an investigation of
the causes of our causal beliefs. He wants to know what circumstances could
so much as get us to have causal beliefs, what mechanisms could effect the
having of such beliefs.
If we bear Hume’s stated aim in mind, we can read I3vi in a non-standard way.
Hume first argues that experience is a determining factor in the production of
our causal beliefs; we would not form them without it. The question then is
whether experience plus “reason,” or experience plus “imagination,” produces
these beliefs. In the famous argument, Hume tries to show thap experience plus
reason could not produce our causal beliefs. In the rest of the section he
explores the idea that experience plus imagination is what produces them.
According to this interpretation, Hume is simply not addressing the normative
question of whether what produces our causal beliefs also provides good
reasons for holding them. He is instead making a very important “application of
experimental philosophy to moral subjects” (xvi), an application which uncovers
the startling fact that “reason,” even aided by experience, could never produce
bur causal beliefs. But this startling result leaves standing the natural
presupposition that what does produce these beliefs can also give good
reasons for holding them. The argumentation of 13vi is not intended to drive a
wedge between reasons and causal beliefs, but between “reason” and causal
beliefs. (4-5)

This interpretation of 13vi undercuts the objection I sketched, for we need no

longer suppose that Hume is evaluating causal inferences in terms of an
inappropriate paradigm. He is not evaluating causal inferences at all. The ways
in which we evaluate them are left standing. What Hume means to have done
instead is to have rid us of the mistaken idea that “reason” has anything to do
with any of our causal beliefs. (5)

Let me turn now to section xv, titled, “Rules by which to judge of causes and
effects.” Again, the issue between the standard and the non-standard
interpretations is whether the rules are normative or not. According to the
standard interpretation, Hume has already argued that no causal belief is
reasonable. Following the rules in section xv, therefore, will not give one
reasonable causal beliefs. Following these rules would give one what are
(mistakenly) called reasonable beliefs. Hume is not saying one ought to follow
these rules because following them will lead to reasonable beliefs. Rather, he is
describing the rules of a certain practice. Its practitioners think it yields
reasonable beliefs, but it doesn’t.
According to the non-standard interpretation, Hume has not yet argued that no
causal belief is reasonable. He has argued instead that no causal belief is
determined by reason. At this stage of the argumentation in the Treatise, the
rules are normative. Hume is telling us that we ought to follow them, because
following them will lead to reasonable beliefs. (7)