Abstract

To understand Hume, we must distinguish his deflationary arguments from his radically sceptical arguments. Using ideas from Chapter 1 about our cognitive norms and the commonsense assumption, Chapter 2 argues that some passages in the Treatise that are often interpreted as sceptical—for example, Hume’s “scepticism about induction,”—are instead intended simply to let the air out of the puffed-up views of some philosophers. The chapter describes the kinds of explanations that are at work in Book One, Parts 1, 2, and 3, showing how Hume uses a variety of strategies to defeat philosophical views with which he disagrees. It argues that Hume’s explanatory and argumentative strategies depend on using the cognitive norms of consistency, clarity, and evidence, and it shows that in key places they also depend on making the commonsense assumption that we have a large body of justified and true beliefs about the world.