Hume’s Science of Human Nature : Scientific Realism, Reason, and Substantial Explanation

This book updates our understanding of Hume’s scientific methodology by using a more sophisticated picture of science as a model. Landy argues that Hume is a kind of scientific realist who holds that science can and must employ theoretical representations of unobservable entities to explain the observed regularities of experience, and that we are justified in believing in the existence of such entities solely on the basis of their explanatory power. Given the long-standing tradition of interpreting Hume as eschewing such forms of explanation, Landy’s close and original reading of the Treatise has significant consequences for understanding many of his most famous arguments.

Hume’s Science of Human Nature is an investigation of the philosophical commitments underlying Hume''s methodology in pursuing what he calls ‘the science of human nature’. It argues that Hume understands scientific explanation as aiming at explaining the inductively-established universal regularities discovered in experience via an appeal to the nature of the substance underlying manifest phenomena. For years, scholars have taken Hume to employ a deliberately shallow and demonstrably untenable notion of scientific explanation. By contrast, Hume’s Science of Human Nature sets out to update our understanding of Hume’s methodology by using a more sophisticated picture of science as a model.