Bundle Theory

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Philosophy of Mind

Overview

Hume looked for the self that Descartes claimed the act of doubting secures, and reported that introspection never turns one up: whenever he examined "what I call myself," he found only some particular perception — a feeling, a color, a sound — never a bare self having it. Where Descartes reasons from the fact of doubting to a thinker that must underlie it, Hume treats that step as unearned: all that is ever actually observed is the perception, never anything behind it.

Without a substance to anchor it, sameness over time becomes something the mind supplies rather than discovers. Perceptions linked by resemblance and by cause and effect get called the same self the way a river or a nation gets called the same despite every part of it changing — a name given to a connected sequence, not a report of one thing enduring underneath it.

In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume himself confessed that this account of what binds the perceptions into one self had failed — he found himself "involv'd in such a labyrinth" — because he could neither give up that distinct perceptions are distinct existences nor find any real connection among them.

Position on

• Existence of the Self

  On whether a self exists: introspection turns up no impression of a simple, continued self, only a bundle of ever-changing perceptions, so there is no such entity to be found.

• Persistence of the Self

  On whether the self persists: identity over time is a fiction the mind builds from the resemblance and causation among perceptions; nothing simple endures to be re-identified.

Held by traditions

• British Empiricism

  This is Hume's view, not Locke's: looking inward, Hume reported that he could never catch himself without a perception, and could observe nothing but the perceptions themselves.

  Question scope: Persistence of the Self

Rival positions

• Substantial Self

  Question scope: Existence of the Self

References

• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.4.6
• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Appendix (1740)
• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.4.6 (no impression of a simple, continued self) against René Descartes, Meditations II and VI (the self as a simple, persisting thinking substance)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Personal Identity