Arguing by analogy: Hume's standard of time

Abstract

Hume's essay, Of the Standard of begins with declaration: The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under one's observation.'I I take sentence to be a philosophical joke, or if not a joke, at least an ironic announcement of the key terms in Hume's investigation of the standard of taste. Hume begins with what is obvious and observed by everyone, but in a paradox that resonates throughout the essay: what presents itself to everyone's eyes is the variety of taste and opinions. We all agree that we do not all agree. This is merely common sense, and Hume suggests that this variety of taste is obvious to the most careless enquirer (227). But the tension suggested in Hume's about every one's observation is already implied in the term standard, which ambiguously vacillates between a sense of what is common, average, and shared by all and the identification of a unique-or at least