Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

more confident that they are true. Both are important. We want our beliefs to be true, because we use them to direct our actions, and actions directed by true beliefs are on the whole far more successful. (Compare the actions, and the success rate, of two people both wanting a beer: one believes—falsely—that the beer is in the fridge, the other believes—truly—that it is still in the car.) And it helps if we hold our true beliefs confidently, because then we go ahead and act on them, rather than dithering about.
Those are practical considerations, influencing all of us all the time. There may also be theoretical ones, having to do with our philosophical self-image: we (some of us, at certain periods of history) may like to think of ourselves as essentially rational beings in whose lives reason plays an absolutely central role. For a long time philosophers took rationality to be the crucial feature distinguishing humans from other animals. (You can see Hume contesting this view in Of the Reason of Animals, the section immediately before Of Miracles.)
The idea that reason is absolutely central to human life is a rather vague one, so it isn’t the sort of view one could ever prove, or definitively refute, and it would be a bad misjudgement to try. Nevertheless many things can be said that are relevant to it.
The first was well known to the sceptics of ancient Greece. Suppose you hold some belief (call it B), and you ask yourself what reason you have to hold it. So then you think of some reason (call it R). This R cannot be something you have just dreamt up. You must have a reason to think that it is true, if it is to give you a reason for believing B. This further reason can’t be B itself, or R again (that would be to give a belief as a reason for itself, which seems like nothing more than reasserting the belief, and is often called ‘begging the question’), so it must be something else—whereupon the same argument repeats. This suggests that the idea that we have reasons for our beliefs is just a local appearance, which disappears as soon as we try to look at the wider picture: ‘reasons’ turn out to be relative to certain other beliefs for which we have no reasons. The search for a satisfactory response to this argument has structured a whole area of philosophical inquiry known as epistemology or the theory of knowledge.
Add that some of our most basic beliefs, beliefs without which we just couldn’t get on with our lives, are very hard to find any decent reason for. A much discussed example is our confidence that things will continue much as they have in the past: your next breath of air won’t suffocate you, the floor won’t collapse when you take your next step—and hundreds of other things of that kind. With what reason do we believe them? Don’t answer: that sort of belief has nearly always worked. True, but that is just another example of what has happened in the past, and what we wanted to know was why we expect the future to go the same way.
So if the idea was that human belief can be made through and through rationally transparent, or that human life could run on reason alone, then it faces formidable obstacles. But it remains the case that human powers of reasoning, acquiring beliefs by inferring them from previous beliefs, are more than just important to us. Without them there would be nothing recognizably human left except the shape of our bodies, and the average chimp would run rings round us, literally and figuratively.The self
Chapter 4 introduced the Buddhist ‘no-self’ doctrine, according to which a person is not a simple, independently enduring thing but a composite, and an easily dissoluble composite at that, of the five ‘aggregates’, which are themselves complex things or states. But that is not the only tradition in which we find the view that a self is really a whole lot of separate things precariously holding together. It appears in the modern West as the so-called ‘Bundle theory of the mind’, and is almost invariably attributed to Hume. (In your guide’s personal opinion it is very doubtful whether Hume actually held it, but I’ll skirt round that controversy here.)
So suppose there is some simple, independently enduring thing—you—which just continues the same so long as you exist. Where is it? Look into your own mind and see if you can perceive it. What do you find? In the first place, you notice that you are experiencing a motley of perceptions: visual perceptions of the way your surroundings look, auditory perceptions of the way they sound, perhaps also a few smells, tactual sensations of pressure, roughness, warmth, and suchlike, from touching nearby objects. Then sensations of tension in certain muscles, awareness of bodily movements. All these are continually changing as your position changes and surrounding objects themselves change. You might also feel a slight ache in your foot, or in your forehead; and be aware of a train of thought, perhaps as images or a silent sequence of half-formed sentences. But there is no sign, in this shifting kaleidoscopic complex, of that object ‘the self’, just steadfastly persisting.
Why then suppose that there is such a thing? Well, someone will say, it’s clear that all these experiences, my experiences, somehow belong together; and there are other experiences, those that are not mine but yours, which also belong together but don’t belong with this lot. So there must be one thing, me, my self, which is having all my experiences but isn’t having any of yours, and another thing, your self, doing the reverse.
Supporters of the bundle theory reply that nothing of the kind follows. What makes all my experiences hang together doesn’t have to be a relation they all stand in to something else; it might be some system of relationships that they all stand in to each