ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to reconstruct David Hume’s account of the adequacy of theories. Hume’s meta-theoretical principles are of three kinds: principles governing the acceptability of theoretical terms, a principle of parsimony, and a principle of explanatory completeness. As shall see, each of these kinds of principle is relevant to considerations of the acceptability and epistemic status of scientific theories. There can be little question that Hume deemed the coherence and consistency of one’s claims to be of primary importance in both one’s theoretical undertakings and in common life. Hume the sceptic was never willing to assume that one’s impressions of sensation are caused by or resemble external objects. To do so, Hume devoted a significant amount of space to the refutation of the major competitor to a bundle theory of mind, namely, a substance theory. According to Descartes, Locke, G. Berkeley, and most philosophers of the modern period, a mind is a substance or substratum in which ideas.
