Imagined Causes

The longest, and arguably the most difficult, section of Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature is ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses’, in which Hume explains how the imagination produces our ideas of objects. His account culminates with this statement of the conditions for an object's ‘perfect identity’: ‘the principle of individuation is nothing but the invariableness and uninterruptedness of any object, thro’ a suppos'd variation of time’. Stefanie Rocknak's Imagined Causes is a highly original, exceptionally thorough, and extremely controversial attempt to provide a comprehensive account of how Hume reaches that conclusion. As she reads Hume, objects are mind-dependent products of a special activity of the imagination that leads us to believe that they are the invariable and uninterrupted causes of the perceptions we naively take to be objects. Rocknak maintains that Hume gives three separate accounts of our ideas of objects and their identity conditions, but my brief summary of her main line of argument treats them as parts of a developmental story, since each succeeding account adds important elements to it.

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