Impact of Hume

Hume has been described as taking the process of sceptical questioning further even than Socrates (Howard,  2000 p. 181). In setting out to reconcile ”profound enquiry with clearness and truth with novelty” (Hume,  2006, p.  I0), Hume leads us to a pragmatic view of the extent and nature of our knowledge. He uses logic to question both the certainties of others (notably, in the area of religious certainties), and our confidence in observations of causal relations; yet his programme is not one of destruction. Rather it is about trying to see the world for what it is, to identify the limits or our perception and our reason, not to destroy beliefs, but to appreciate them for what they are.

This questioning of what is ‘given’ has a direct parallel in the question of where coaching practitioners might draw for the knowledge to support evidence-based practice (see Grant & Cavanagh, 2004; Drake, 2009). In a direct parallel to Hume’s opposition, we have argued elsewhere that the immediacy of unstructured personal experience is to be offset against the reliability of more systematic investigation (Jackson, 2008). Hume’s ideas do not entirely solve this problem, but they do highlight it. He points out the natural tendency to generalise and, although he cites quite arresting examples (how do we know the sun will rise just because it always has done?), it may also be true that this powerful urge leads to overgeneralisation. In the absence of any more certain information, we are all prone to evaluate our strategies on what is available to us, even to the extent of believing a particular technique is effective based on a single good experience.

This same human urge can be seen at the heart of the presentation in practice of phenomena such as overgeneralizing (Beck, 1967), ‘awfulising’ beliefs (Ellis, 1962), and the cycle of self-reinforcing experience (Bandura, 1994). The identification of these phenomena and the techniques to manage them have become more immediately available to coaching practitioners through cognitive-behavioural and rational-emotive behavioural approaches to therapy (e.g., Ellis, 1962; Beck, 1976) and later, similar approaches to coaching (e.g., Neenan &Dryden, 2002; Neenan & Palmer, 2001b).

For Hume, all a priori beliefs about the world were open to question. Against the spirit of the age (even to   the extent that much of his work was published either anonymously or posthumously) Hume rejects any rational basis for belief in a Christian God. He demonstrates that most people must be wrong in their religious beliefs, as for any particular belief there are always more people with opposing beliefs; and if at any one time, most religious beliefs are wrong, what, he asks, leads us to believe that it is only our own that are correct? The question Hume offers us is, can any a priori or ‘taken-for-granted’ beliefs actually be taken for granted? While it may be considered outside the scope of the coaching relationship to question the client’s religious beliefs, it is common to encounter deeply held cultural, familial and ethnic beliefs that need to be addressed in order for the client to make progress.

Coaching clients may express these beliefs in terms of obligations, necessity, or simple fact which they may equally relate either to their own behaviour or to others: “I don’t have any choice”, “he’s got to apologise”, “its just the way it is”. However, it follows from the above that these beliefs are open to question. Two common strategies to respond to this are to challenge the legitimacy of the belief or to challenge its utility. A response that is popular with our students is to ask whose voice we are hearing: “who is it who is saying ‘it’s just the way it is’?” By asking this question the belief is not contradicted, but the issue of whether it is correct is put into suspension; that is, it is seen as a belief rather than as a fact and the client is enabled to examine it from a more objective stance. A second popular response is simply to ask whether the belief helps or hinders the client’s progress towards their goals. Again, the truth of the belief is put in suspension, but this time so the client can examine whether or not they will be better off without it.