Hume’s Naturalistic Internalism

Abstract

This chapter has four major sections. In the first section I provide a brief initial account of the internalist/externalist debate and highlight how some of Hume’s inferences seem to rely on internalist presuppositions. As we have seen, because naturalism is oftentimes associated with externalism (and most believe that Hume is obviously committed to a form of naturalism that is incompatible with scepticism), some might instead be enticed by an externalist reading of Hume, as Loeb suggests: “… [it is] tempting to develop Hume in the [externalist] direction of a reliability, adaptivist, or proper function account of justification” (Loeb 2004, 371; see also Loeb 2006, 334–5 and Loeb 2008, 116–17). Despite the initial plausibility of such a reading, in the second section I give a more precise characterization of the internalist/externalist distinction to show why an internalist reading of key features of Hume’s epistemology is virtually unavoidable. In the third and fourth sections I expand my argument to show how Hume’s general views about causal inferences also provide a forceful case against reading Hume as an externalist.