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David Hume, Mary Shepherd, and the Princess Bride


Mary Shepherd is 'having a moment' and I am out of sympathy.

Yes, I agree that many women have been written out of the history of philosophy because the history is written by men.  I agree that it is worth our while to reverse this trend and recover the contributions of neglected women where we can. 

But Mary Shepherd, an early 19th century British thinker best known for an essay on the relation between cause and effect, doesn't really fill the bill here.

In response to Hume, Shepherd wrote thus: "We cannot imagine a beginning of existence to be wholly unconnected with any thing that went before it; and this is sufficient to refute the notion, that causes and effects are only conjunctions, or sequences observed by the experience of mankind."

She thus infers the necessity of causal relations from our inability to imagine the contrary. 

This sort of thing reminds me of the scenes in The Princess Bride, where the bad guy Vizzini keeps assuring his confederates that it is "inconceivable" that the good guy chasing them will overcome one or another obstacle to foil their wicked plan. 

And yet, Westley does overcome those obstacles. 

Eventually, Andre the Giant (at this point one of the bad guys) having heard "inconceivable!" too often, tells his boss, "you keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means." 

Indeed. And that is sufficient appreciation of Mary Shepherd for the day. 

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  1. HenryApril 3, 2025 at 8:20 AM

    There is a bigger problem than Shepherd's failure to refute Hume's notion that causes and effects are only conjunctions, or sequences observed by the experience of mankind. Hume never had that notion. He "took it for granted that there was more to causation than regularity of succession, claiming only that regularity of succession was all that we could ever know of causation." Galen Strawson wrote a book on the subject, and I've taken the words I just quoted from an abstract of the book: https://philpapers.org/rec/STRTSC-2

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    1. ChristopherApril 3, 2025 at 11:47 PM

      Yes, I read Strawson's book on the subject. If I recall correctly, he said that the view so often attributed to Hume WAS the view that would eventually by adopted by Mach, and those who were impressed about it then back-dated it to Hume to give it a beard, so to speak. But whatever else one might say of Shepherd's comment, this does seem to show that it was a reading of Hume that precedes Mach.

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  2. HenryApril 4, 2025 at 6:29 AM

    Christopher, according to your comment, Shepherd's reading of Hume does not precede Mach but was mistakenly backdated to precede Mach.

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