ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with Hume’s account of what causes belief. Briefly, belief arises from a superior degree of vivacity. It can also depend on association. This chapter begins by looking at Hume’s position on vivacity and vivacity bearers (Section 6.1). It then considers how vivacity is transferred to associated ideas (Sections 6.2–6). Hume recognized that we are often determined to have beliefs that are not “received by philosophy” (Section 6.7). It is argued that Hume was more concerned with motivating philosophical belief than with justifying it and that he recognized an encounter with sceptical arguments as an effective motivator (Sections 6.8 and 6.9). The concluding sections of the chapter charge that Hume made a serious mistake in maintaining that belief can only be extended beyond the bounds of sense experience and memory by causal inference. He could have recognized that customary contiguity and customary identity can cause belief and should have recognized that they play an essential role in the recognition of publicly observable objects (Sections 6.10–12).
