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David Hume

Hume’s Image Problem

Marc Bobro scrutinizes how Hume thinks about thought.

David Hume believed that the mind represents the world by having contents that resemble it, such as having images of it. This way of thinking about thinking has been called imagism. But, as Bertrand Russell and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein noted much later, the same images can resemble different things, and may be variously interpreted. Such potential image ambiguity could be a serious problem for Hume. My aim here is not to defend imagism as a theory, but to determine how, if at all, Hume could defend his imagism in response to this potential ambiguity.

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