 Second, without commitment to the truth of a “scientific” theory, Hume has conceptual elbow room for a distinction between the provable, experimental claims of common life (including some parts of natural philosophy) and the lesser, probable commitments of the more abstract parts of natural philosophy. This, too, is a result of Hume’s “science of man”. Recall (from  section 1)  that the Humean practitioners of “mitigated scepticism” will not 