Sympathy in Hume's social epistemology

Abstract According to the reductionist interpretation of Hume on testimony, we come to believe what others tell us for the same kind of reason as we come to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow—both beliefs grounded in our experience of the respective regularities of testifiers and planetary motion. Hume's epistemology is explained in terms of one master mechanism—that is, causal or probabilistic inference, as this plays the role of an all‐purpose reliability detector. However, this way of thinking of Hume's epistemology obscures an important distinction between two ways that we come to acquire beliefs. Such probabilistic assessment is only carried out against a background of testimonial beliefs that do not have their source in causal inference and that are acquired via sympathy. These beliefs are of various kinds, and they include beliefs about the virtues and vices others take us to have, what is seen as virtuous in the societies in which we live, and all the various beliefs we as children and adults uncritically imbibe from those around us and from the testimony of history. In fact, sympathy has a good claim to the title of the master mechanism in that it integrates our capacity for causal reasoning with our evolving socially constructed selves and wider social and moral lives.