ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Hume’s response to the relativist in detail, and offers a partial defence. The most pressing question for Hume’s account is why the sentiments of his true judges should constitute the standard of taste for everyone. Why not prefer the sentiments of some other group of people? Or why not allow, along with the relativist, that everyone sets their own standard? The answer to these questions, it is argued, depends on the viability of Hume’s science of criticism. The aim of this science is to uncover the general rules of art governing the emotional effects that artworks have on all human beings, and the true judges are those in whom these rules of art operate fully, unimpeded by causal noise from other psychological principles. This interpretation of Hume as a sceptical generalist also helps to solve—or rather, to avoid—the so-called real problem with Hume’s account, as recently highlighted by Jerrold Levinson.
