Cognitive Norms and Commonsense Assumptions

Abstract Chapter 1 introduces salient features of Book One of the Treatise and two ideas that are essential to the book’s argument. One is the idea that Hume’s description of his project makes clear his unshakeable commitment to basic norms for cognition concerning coherence, clarity, and evidence. The other is the idea that Hume starts his project by making the commonsense assumption that we have a large body of beliefs about the world around us that are justified and true. This is an assumption that he treats as having great authority: it is, as it were, innocent unless proven guilty. These two ideas fuel criticisms of several ways of characterizing Hume’s naturalist leanings—those of Louis Loeb and Peter Strawson—and they also make it possible to see a distinctive kind of naturalism in Hume’s philosophy.