Fiction And Content in Hume’s Labyrinth

Abstract

Abstract In the ‘Appendix’ to the Treatise, Hume claims that he has discovered a ‘very considerable’ mistake in his earlier discussion of the self. Hume's expression of the problem is notoriously opaque, leading to a vast scholarly debate as to exactly what problem he identified in his earlier account of the self. I propose a new solution to this interpretive puzzle. I argue that a tension generated by Hume's conceptual scepticism about real ‘principles of union’ and his account of fictions of the imagination is the defect identified in the ‘Appendix’.