ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that David Hume championed a sophisticated form of dualism, that he drew categorial distinctions among perceptions and distinguished the mental realm from the physical realm on the basis of considerations of the spatial relations among the entities in each realm. If Hume’s theory of mind is adequate, it must explain why one holds certain beliefs that are unwarranted or false. The characteristics Hume seeks are constancy and coherence. Anything one will deem an external object generally tends to remain the same through time, and in so far as it changes, the changes are coherent: they follow certain ‘natural laws’ and can be predicted on the basis of past experience. Philosophical invention, spurred by the critical mode of thought, yields a representational theory of perception. An object is conceived as the thing that causes and resembles a certain positive perception, and continued existence is attributed to this object.
