Thomas Reid and Scepticism: His Reliabilist Response 0203166205, 0203260791, 0415263395, 9780203166208

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Thomas Reid and Scepticism

Thomas Reid (1710–96) was one of the most original thinkers of the eighteenth century. He saw that philosophy had been led by his great contemporary, David Hume, into a “coal-pit” of scepticism. Reid undertook to destroy this sceptical orthodoxy and to replace it with a ‘Philosophy of Common Sense’. Although his writings had considerable influence on nineteenth-century American Realist philosophy, and although Reid resembles such twentieth-century figures as Moore and Wittgenstein, his reputation until recently was in eclipse. This book is witness to the current reawakening of interest in Reid’s philosophy. It first examines Reid’s negative attack on the Way of Ideas, and finds him to be a devastating critic of his predecessors. Turning to the positive part of Reid’s programme, the author then develops a fresh interpretation of Reid as an anticipator of present-day ‘reliabilism’. Throughout the book, Reid is presented as a lively and powerful thinker with much to say to philosophers in the twenty-first century. The book will be of substantial interest not only to Reid scholars and historians of philosophy, but also to specialists and students in contemporary epistemology. Philip de Bary worked as a bricklayer for nearly twenty years before going to the University of Bristol to study philosophy. He now works for the Bristol publishing firm, Thoemmes Press, which specializes in republishing texts in the history of ideas.

Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

1 The Naturalization of the Soul Self and personal identity in the eighteenth century Raymond Martin and John Barresi 2 Hume’s Aesthetics Theory Taste and sentiment Dabney Townsend 3 Thomas Reid and Scepticism His reliabilist response Philip de Bary

Thomas Reid and Scepticism His reliabilist response

Philip de Bary

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2002 Philip de Bary All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data de Bary, Philip, 1952– Thomas Reid and scepticism : his reliabilist response / Philip de Bary. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Reid, Thomas, 1710–1796. 2. Skepticism. I. Title. B1537 .D4 2001 149′. 73—dc21

2001052015

ISBN 0-203-16620-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26079-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-26339-5 (Print Edition)

For Farida and Omar

Contents

Analysis Acknowledgements Abbreviations and references

Introduction

ix xiii xv

1

Notes 5

1 Kinds of sceptic

7

Polemic distinguished from reasoned argument 7 Reid’s intended audience 14 Against the “semi-sceptics” 17 Notes 19

2 The attack on Cartesian foundationalism

20

The three ‘i’s 25 The nature of Reid’s alternative foundationalism 29 Notes 31

3 The first principles of contingent truths

32

Reid’s rafts 32 Methodism, particularism, and begging the question 37 Notes 45

4 Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture Reid’s theory of perception 50 The allegation of inconsistency 56 Notes 62

49

viii

Contents

5 The structure of Reid’s reliabilism

64

1. Innateness and truth 64 2. Reid and God 65 3. Reid’s supposed “metaprinciple” 75 4. Reid’s reliabilist link 82 Notes 87

6 The slippery slope

90

Reid’s attack on ‘ideas’ 92 Notes 103

7 Was Reid tilting at a straw man?

105

Descartes 106 Malebranche and Arnauld 114 Locke 122 Summary 125 Notes 126

8 Reid’s further arguments against scepticism

130

Theory and practice 130 The Innateness Claim 138 Notes 149

9 The Truth Claim

152

Track record arguments 152 God and the Truth Claim 160 ‘Reflective equilibrium’ 161 Notes 163

10 Reid’s theism reconsidered

165

The ‘Image of God’ doctrine 173 Notes 189

Appendix 1: Reid’s First Principles of Contingent Truths Appendix 2: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, VI, chapter v (Facsimile excerpt from Reid’s MS 2131/1/II/7)

191

Bibliography Index

195 201

193

Analysis

Introduction (pp. 1–6) The value of ‘history of philosophy’. Brief account of Reid’s life and work. An assessment of his current standing. The aims of this book.

Chapter 1: Kinds of sceptic (pp. 7–19) Polemic distinguished from reasoned argument: Reid’s frequent complaint that sceptical practice is hypocritically inconsistent with sceptical precept is seen (pace Ferreira) to be merely polemical. Reid’s intended audience: to the “total” sceptic, he has nothing to say, but against “semi-sceptics” he can bring reasoned argument to bear. Against the “semi-sceptics”: two strands distinguished within Reid’s arguments to the semi-sceptics: (i) anti-Cartesian foundationalism; (ii) anti-‘ideas’. The former is best seen as prior to the latter.

Chapter 2: The attack on Cartesian foundationalism (pp. 20–31) Reid has three levels of objection to Cartesian foundationalism; together, they amount to the charge of ‘arbitrariness’. The three ‘i’s: can we see Reid as rejecting the three Cartesian shibboleths – infallibility, incorrigibility, indubitability? Reid entirely misses the self-verifying nature of the cogito; but this omission does not spoil his attack. The nature of Reid’s alternative foundationalism: we need wider, shallower foundations if we are to avoid scepticism.

Chapter 3: The first principles of contingent truths (pp. 32–48) These principles are ‘Reid’s rafts’ – but how should we characterise them nonmetaphorically? They may best be seen (following Marcil-Lacoste) as inductive generalisations of common sense beliefs, the products of Reid’s borrowed experimental method. Methodism, particularism, and begging the question: Reid’s ‘particularism’ is no more vulnerable to the charge of question-begging than is Hume’s ‘methodism’.

x

Analysis

Chapter 4: Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture (pp. 49–63) Is Reid’s fallibilism consistent with his foundationalism? Cummins says ‘no’. Test case: Reid’s theory of perception: Comparison with J.L. Austin’s account of perceptual error. Reply to Cummins – the perceptual first principle (like the other ‘faculty principles’) is offered by Reid as a general truth, not a universal one.

Chapter 5: The structure of Reid’s reliabilism (pp. 64–89) (i) ‘The Innateness Claim’ and ‘the Truth Claim’ distinguished. But how to close the gap between them? (ii) Not (at least not obviously) by God; (iii) nor by a “metaprinciple”; (iv) but by an externalist assumption (cf. Plantinga). ‘Reliabilism with one epicycle’: common sense beliefs are defeasibly justified – hence the prominence of Reid’s attack on ‘ideas’ which, in Hume’s hands, ‘globally’ defeat the beliefs of common sense.

Chapter 6: The slippery slope (pp. 90–104) Reid’s attack on ‘ideas’ (“the merit of my philosophy…”). His fivefold thrust. The two prejudices on which, he says, the theory rests: (i) the ‘immediate intercourse’ prejudice; (ii) the ‘really existing object’ prejudice. But, says Reid, there are no good arguments for the existence of ‘ideas’; and in any case they explain nothing. Therefore ‘ideas’ fall foul of both ‘the reality condition’ and ‘the adequacy condition’ in Newton’s First Rule.

Chapter 7: Was Reid tilting at a straw man? (pp. 105–129) Reid has a cogent attack on ‘ideas’, but does he have a proper target? The texts of (a) Descartes, (b) Malebranche and Arnauld, and (c) Locke, revisited. Summary: although ‘the ideal theory’ was more diverse than Reid allowed, recent revisionary interpretations are not compelling. The tendency to reify ‘ideas’ is present in important and unignorable places – hence Reid is not guilty of simplistically misreading his predecessors.

Chapter 8: Reid’s further arguments against scepticism (pp. 130–151) Are these arguments inconsistent with his ‘official’ position (that first principles neither need, nor can be given, positive argumentative support)? Theory and practice: in theory, ‘no’ (a consistent position is available to Reid); but in practice? Overwhelmingly, they concern the Innateness Claim. “Marks”, and arguments by elimination.

Chapter 9: The Truth Claim (pp. 152–164) To support the Truth Claim Reid gives track record arguments. These are ‘epistemically circular’ (cf. Alston), but they can work for the externalist. Moreover, Reid balances them with negative track record arguments, producing a sort of ‘reflective

Analysis

xi

equilibrium’ to contrast with Hume’s “whimsical condition”. But are theistic underpinnings needed for the Truth Claim, after all?

Chapter 10: Reid’s theism reconsidered (pp. 165–190) The extent to which Reid is committed to the “Image of God” doctrine. Close comparison with Plantinga. Unlike Plantinga’s, Reid’s reliabilism doesn’t need a supernatural garden for its very existence; but it may still “flourish best” in one.

Acknowledgements

I should like to record my gratitude to Bryan Magee (whom I have never met) for his series of television programmes, The Great Philosophers (BBC, 1987), which first got me interested in philosophy; to my friend Rick Gekoski for persuading me in 1993 that to become a university student in middle life was both a feasible and a respectable thing to do; and to my undergraduate tutor, the late Professor C.J.F. Williams, for his inspirational teaching which combined strict intellectual rigour with many opportunities for laughter. To come to Reid and the present book: by far my greatest acknowledgement is due to Dr Andrew Pyle of the University of Bristol, under whose supervision I wrote the Ph.D. thesis of which this book is a revised version. Both in my postgraduate days and during recent revisions, Andrew was most generous with his time and his learning (not to mention his library and his old computer). Without Andrew’s encouragement and enthusiasm, the process of research would have been far less enjoyable; and without his philosophical guidance, the resulting product would have been much the poorer. I should also like to thank Keith Lehrer for having encouraged my work on Reid at an early stage, and Alan Tapper for having read and commented upon portions of the book as it evolved. Others to whom I am grateful for their advice on this project at various times include Roger Gallie, the late David Hirschmann, Anthony Rudd, Mauricio Suarez, Michael Welbourne, and two anonymous readers for Routledge. I am indebted to the editors of Reid Studies and The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly for permission to republish those parts of Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, which first appeared in their pages. And to the former, Paul Gorner, I owe additional thanks for his generously allowing me to use the picture of Thomas Reid that adorns the cover of his journal. The copyright of this engraving is owned by the University of Aberdeen, which commissioned the portrait by Raeburn on which it is based, and I thank The Reid Project for granting formal permission for its reproduction here. I am also obliged to Iain Beavan of the Historic Collections section of Aberdeen University Library for permission to reproduce the page of Reid’s manuscript in Appendix 2; and James Van Cleve, from whose excellent article (Van Cleve: 21–2) I have stolen the idea of listing Reid’s “First Principles of Contingent Truths” separately in Appendix 1 for the convenience of the reader.

xiv

Acknowledgements

I must also thank Susan Frost and Ronald Haynes for the kind help they gave with word-processing (the former despite her view – held with unusual force and clarity – that all philosophy is a waste of time); and Martino Squillante for his bibliographical assistance. My work on Reid was made possible by grants from the University of Bristol and The Arts and Humanities Research Board (formerly The British Academy). As well as to these bodies, I am grateful for financial support (as for much else) to my mother and step-father, Margaret and Leslie Holland. The book is dedicated with love to my two children, Farida and Omar.

Abbreviations and references

CSM

The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press (1984–5)

CSMK

The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3rd vol., trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press (1991)

OC

Oeuvres Complétes de Malebranche, 20 vols, ed. A. Robinet, Paris: Vrin (1972–84)

Enquiries

Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1902)

References to Reid’s Works All references to Reid’s writings are to the Hamilton edition detailed below, and are enclosed in square brackets without name or date, thus: [449b–50a] The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D. Now fully collected, with selections from his unpublished letters. Preface, notes, and supplementary dissertations, by Sir W. Hamilton, Bart., 2 vols, 6th edn, Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, and London: Longman (1863). Facsimile edition, Bristol: Thoemmes Press (1994)

Other references References in parentheses are to items listed in the Bibliography, by name and page number, thus: (Brown: 157) Where the Bibliography lists more than one item by the same author, the publication date of the cited work is added, thus: (Lehrer 1998: 25)

Introduction

Among academic disciplines, philosophy stands in a unique relation to its own history. In any other subject old enough to have a history, it is generally true that the activities of its long-dead practitioners do not have any substantial interest for current workers in the field. A phlogiston chemist, for example, or a ‘catastrophist’ geologist entering a university department today would provoke mirth and curiosity, but no more than that. He would have nothing useful to contribute to the ‘cutting-edge’ advancement of the subject; nor, in all likelihood, would he be able even to understand its recent developments. He would not be treated in any sense as a colleague. In philosophy things are different. There is a real (if, of course, non-literal) sense in which Mill, Berkeley, or even Plato could walk into a present-day philosophy seminar and take part in the discussion. The revenant might, indeed, need to be taken quickly through Russell’s Theory of Descriptions (as well as having it explained to him that not to feminize the pronouns is nowadays considered ‘bad form’); but he would find that the subject as presently practised is recognizably the same as the subject which once engaged his own efforts. Some say that this intimacy between its past and its present is not to philosophy’s credit, because it reflects the fact that over twenty-five centuries the subject has stood still. No, say others: to deplore a lack of linear progression in philosophy is to misunderstand the nature of a subject which consists in the asking of the same questions by each generation – questions to which no once-and-for-all answers can be given. And moreover (say still others) there have been advances in philosophy, of which Russell’s, just mentioned, is only one. Whatever the merits of these various assessments of the discipline, the fact remains that in philosophy departments, great philosophers of the past are treated as contemporaries. Such questions as ‘how would Locke reply to Parfit?’ are considered not just to be intelligibly poseable, but to be capable of fruitful answer. With this said, there is a noticeable prejudice within philosophy against concentration on the subject’s history, such that a person presenting a work in ‘history of philosophy’ might feel bound to say something about. The prejudice is adverted to, and countered, by Jonathan Bennett when he writes of the assumption that the study of philosophers like Locke and Berkeley is only a marginally useful activity which may be adequately conducted with the

2

Introduction mind in neutral. In fact, it can be one of the most rewarding and demanding of philosophical exercises. (Bennett 1968: 87)

Bennett’s way (like that of J.L. Mackie, Bernard Williams, Michael Ayers, and others soon to be mentioned) of making good his claim is to do ‘history of philosophy’ as philosophy rather than as history – and the present book aspires to be a modest contribution in the same genre. In the case of our subject, Thomas Reid, the line between the history and the philosophy may seem particularly difficult to draw, for two reasons: first, because Reid’s entire philosophical programme is more than usually reactive in character; and second, because his subsequent reputation is bound up with that of ‘the Scottish School of Common Sense’ of which Reid is considered the founder. Nevertheless, in this study the attempt will be made to emulate Bennett and company by keeping the main focus of the discussion on those aspects of Reid’s philosophy for which some direct contemporary relevance can be claimed. In keeping with this manifesto, our remarks about Reid’s biography can be brief. The Reverend Thomas Reid, D.D. (1710–96) was David Hume’s exact contemporary, pre-dating his more famous fellow-Scot by one year, and outliving him (whether by better luck or a more parsonly life-style) by twenty. In comparison with Hume’s, Reid’s life was uneventful.1 After an education in philosophy, mathematics, and theology at Marischal College in Aberdeen, Reid was given a pastoral living in the nearby village of New Machar. At first the parishioners were hostile (going so far, it is said, as to duck their new minister in a horse pond); but Dugald Stewart recounts that Reid soon won them over by “his unwearied attention … to the duties of his office, the mildness and forbearance of his temper, and the active spirit of his humanity”. When the time came for him to leave, it seems that some of his flock were in tears. Reid’s departure came in 1752, when he quit the ministry to become Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, Aberdeen, remaining there until 1763, when what would nowadays be called ‘head-hunters’ from the University of Glasgow persuaded him to move south-west to fill the chair of Moral Philosophy, newly vacated by Adam Smith. Had universities in those days gone in for ‘student feedback’ questionnaires, it appears that Reid would not have got high marks for his lecturing style: In his elocution and mode of instruction, there was nothing particularly attractive. He seldom, if ever, indulged himself in the warmth of extempore discourse; nor was his manner of reading calculated to increase the effect of what he had committed to writing. Such, however, was the simplicity and perspicuity of his style, such the gravity and authority of his character … that … he was heard uniformly with the most silent and respectful attention. (Stewart: 10–11) This curious mixture of dourness and warmth in Reid’s personality is reflected in his obituary in the Glasgow Courier, which pays double tribute to his “ardent love

Introduction 3 of truth … [and] … rational piety” on the one hand, and his “amiable simplicity of manners, gentleness of temper [and] strength of affection” on the other. Although Reid’s dull classroom manner might have pulled down his departments’ TQA ratings somewhat, there is no doubt that his contribution to Glasgow’s ‘Research Assessment Exercise’ would have been very considerable.2 His first major philosophical work, “An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense” (henceforth the Inquiry), was published in 1764, the year he moved to Glasgow. The Inquiry grew out of papers presented by Reid to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society (also known as the ‘Wise Club’), which Reid had helped to found in 1758. The Wise Club was a fortnightly seminar, whose participants during its fifteen-year life included George Campbell, James Beattie, and several other members of what would later be known as ‘the Scottish School’. The chief topic of discussion in the seminar was the work of Hume.3 Reid’s two other main works were based on the lectures he gave while at Glasgow. Having retired from teaching in 1780, Reid prepared for publication first his “Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man” (1785), and then his “Essays on the Active Powers of Man” (1788) (hereafter the Intellectual Powers and the Active Powers respectively). The first and most obvious thing to say about this body of work is that it would never have come into being, had not Hume first written his Treatise of Human Nature. Reid many times expressed large and unfeigned admiration for Hume – “the acutest metaphysician of this or any age”. Reid regarded it as Hume’s especial merit to have brought out the sceptical conclusions which had lain hidden in the universally received philosophy of “ideas” since Descartes’s time. Reid could not accept these conclusions – it is almost not too much to say that he was revolted by them, for the “death and destruction” he saw them as dealing to all morality, science, and common sense. Hume thus defined Reid’s philosophical project for him – Reid now saw he must stop the war between philosophy and common sense by exploding “the ideal theory” and devising for its replacement a philosophy of common sense which lacked its sceptical consequences. On today’s philosophical Stock Exchange, the price of ‘Reids’ is low – compared to the blue-chip status of ‘Humes’, they are penny shares, if indeed they are listed at all.4 Most undergraduate students of philosophy know Reid only for his “brave officer” objection to Locke’s account of memory as a condition of personal identity over time. And even among teachers of philosophy, there are few who are aware of the scope of Reid’s output, and fewer still who acknowledge its quality.5 This is not to say that Reid has not had eminent supporters, for he has. Hilary Putnam, for example, has referred to Reid as an epistemologist of “genius”, and spoken of “the extraordinary depth and power of his analysis” (Daniels: i, vi). In fact there is now something of a revival of interest in Reid’s work. Perhaps the grandfather of this revival was Roderick Chisholm, whose own first-order epistemology in the mid twentieth century was much influenced by Reid. One of Chisholm’s former pupils, Keith Lehrer, subsequently took up the torch, and is currently Reid’s most prominent champion. To Lehrer, more than to any other individual, is due the present modest flourishing of the Reid industry. Although

4

Introduction

the industry is staffed mainly by people working in North America, it has its headquarters in ‘The Reid Project’ at the University of Aberdeen, where almost all of Reid’s papers are housed. The Reid Project hosts biennial ‘International Reid Symposia’, and publishes the twice-yearly journal Reid Studies, as well as providing research grants for visiting scholars. It is also supporting the production of a new scholarly edition of Reid’s writings under the series editorship of Knud Haakonssen.6 Accompanying this Scottish activity has been a slow but steady growth in the number of books on Reid, notably those by Grave (1960), Daniels (1974), Marcil-Lacoste (1982), Lehrer (1989), Gallie (1989 and 1998), and Wolterstorff (2001).7 Excellent examples of philosophical history of philosophy though these books are, it must be said that they still represent a minority view of Reid as a worthy object of study. Outside specialist circles (revivals notwithstanding), Reid is held in low esteem, when he is not disregarded altogether. One factor that has contributed to the general neglect of Reid is this: he suffers from guilt by association with some of his disciples in the Scottish School of Common Sense. Kant’s famous denunciation of the school in the Prolegomena8 is taken by many people to absolve them of the duty to read any of its writings before criticizing them.9 One thinks here also of Hume’s well-known (and this time, apparently well-aimed) reference to “that Bigotted Silly Fellow, Beattie” in his anonymous advertisement to the Enquiries. One of the subsidiary aims of this book will be to endorse the contrary view that, whatever may be true of his followers, Reid’s own response to scepticism does not deserve these hasty dismissals. This brings us to a statement of what the main aims of the book will be. By those who take the trouble actually to read Reid before damning him, he is frequently criticized in two distinct sorts of way. The ‘positive’ part of his antisceptical project – enshrined in “the first principles of common sense” – is said to be no more than a dogmatic begging of all Hume’s interesting questions. And the ‘negative’ part of Reid – his long and scattered attack on “the ideal theory” – is alleged foolishly to miss its mark because the theory as Reid understood it never in fact existed. Reid has been ably defended from both of these charges before. I shall try to add to those defences, sometimes by means of new interpretations, sometimes by using old interpretations in a new way (but always, I hope, in a critical spirit) as follows.10 We can distinguish within Reid’s critique of the ideal theory two separate strands: (a) arguments against Cartesian foundationalism, and (b) arguments against ‘ideas’ as the mind’s only immediate objects. Although Reid spends much more time on the latter, the former (so I argue) can be seen to be prior. Reid’s assessment of the failure of Cartesian foundationalism may be viewed as motivating his ‘particularist’ search for alternative first principles, which (following Louise Marcil-Lacoste) we can characterize as a Newtonian inductive ascent to epistemological ‘laws of nature’. About the first principles of common sense, Reid wishes to make two claims – an ‘Innateness Claim’ and a ‘Truth Claim’; and the most crucial question about Reid’s anti-scepticism is – how does he go about closing the gap between them?

Introduction 5 Opponents of Reid have tended to say that he does it in the tired old Cartesian way, by appealing to the non-deceptiveness of God. By contrast, his supporters (led by Keith Lehrer) have seen in Reid an innovative and successful gap-closing “metaprinciple”. We shall weigh both of these lines of interpretation and, in the end, reject them. If we want either to oppose Reid or to champion him, it will emerge, we shall have to find other ways of doing so. It is proposed that we do the latter by interpreting Reid as a respectable externalist – a ‘reliabilist’ whose reliabilism has one ‘epicycle’: common sense beliefs amount to knowledge provided only that they are undefeated by a known cause of error as general as themselves. This gives us a context in which to examine Reid’s second strand of anti-sceptical argument – against ‘ideas’ as intermediary entities: unless these can be argued down, they ‘defeat’ the beliefs of common sense on a global scale. We examine Reid’s arguments in this area, and judge them to be successful. Attention is then given to whether the ‘ideal theorist’, in this sense, was a creature of Reid’s own devising. Major texts in the “way of ideas” are revisited, and it is concluded (against John Yolton and others) that Reid was not tilting at a straw man. Next we consider some additional arguments which appear to be inconsistent with Reid’s ‘official’ doctrine (that first principles neither need nor can be given positive argumentative support). We find that although they mostly concern innateness rather than truth, the ‘track record’ arguments Reid gives for his ‘Truth Claim’ seem to betray a reliance on theism after all. So lastly, we return to the complicated question of the extent to which God is detachable from Reid’s epistemology. The verdict reached is that Reid’s reliabilist response to scepticism does not depend on his religious belief in any essential respect. Finally, a few words about the sub-title of this book. If the reader has gleaned from it the expectation that the contents will include any attempt to map Reid’s ‘reliabilism’ onto the highly complex work of Alvin Goldman, or the baroque quasi-reliabilisms of such as John Pollock or Ruth Millikan, he is in for a disappointment. In what follows, I have used the term ‘reliabilism’ only in the loose sense in which, as Carl Ginet says, it “may be used to refer to any position that makes this idea of reliability central to the explication of some important epistemic concept” (Ginet: 175). Perhaps this loose usage drains the term of some of its utility (for in a still looser sense, even Descartes and Locke are ‘reliabilists’). Yet I hope that, as a way of characterizing Reid, it avoids both vacuity and misrepresentation. Reid lived in pre-Gettierological times, and so needed no more than one epicycle on his reliabilism. What goes for Reid, one might humbly plead, may go also for commentary on his work – namely that (as Reid himself says of vulgar opinion in general) it should not be faulted for not containing distinctions “finer than [its] occasions require”.

Notes 1 To date, Reid’s life has only attracted one published book-length treatment (and that more than a century ago), namely A.C. Fraser’s Thomas Reid, Edinburgh and London, 1898. The other main biographical sources are (i) Dugald Stewart’s memoir, which is included in Sir William Hamilton’s edition of Reid’s Works [pp. 3–38], and (ii) a

6

2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

Introduction chapter in James McCosh’s The Scottish Philosophy (1875: 192–229). In addition, a detailed discussion of Reid’s life can be found in the second chapter of Paul Wood’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Wood 1984: 37–198). Wood is currently working on a new biography of Reid, provisionally entitled The Culture of the Mind: Thomas Reid and the Scottish Enlightenment. The London-run TQA, or ‘Teaching Quality Assessment’ programme (like the RAE) is currently a bane of academic life in British universities. Reid and Hume never met, but there is correspondence between them. Reid writes to Hume in 1763 of “a little philosophical society here … which … is much indebted to you for its entertainment.… If you write no more in morals, politics, or metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects” [92 a,b]. Benjamin Redekop points out that in M. Perry’s recent An Intellectual History of Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1992) “there is absolutely no mention of Reid” (Redekop: 32). Edward Craig, for example, speaks (or rather, sneers) for many Humeans when he says that to consider Hume and Reid side by side is to become aware of “a certain difference in stature between the two men” (Craig 1990: 183). At the time of writing, Haakonssen’s Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid is still in preparation, so for this study the eye-straining but widely available Hamilton edition has been used. In the text, all references to Reid’s writings are by page number [displayed in square brackets without a name] to The Works of Thomas Reid D.D., Sir William Hamilton (ed.), 2 vols, 6th edn, Edinburgh and London, 1863. Left- and right-hand columns are denoted by the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’. (In case the reader might have a different Hamilton edition to hand, I have checked with Martino Squillante, Reid’s latest bibliographer, that the pagination is uniform across all the two-volume Hamilton editions, i.e. the sixth, seventh, and eighth editions). The latest of these works on Reid (Wolterstorff 2001) appeared too recently for more than passing mention to be made of it in the notes to this book. It is, however, warmly commended to the reader. “Hume suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood. It is positively painful to see how utterly his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and lastly Priestley, missed the point of the problem” (Kant: 6). Evidence will be cited below which suggests that Kant himself had not read Reid (see Chapter 6, note 3 below). A more detailed summary is given in the Analysis on pages ix–xi, above.

1

Kinds of sceptic

Polemic distinguished from reasoned argument It is one of Reid’s most frequently reiterated objections to scepticism that its proponents do not practise what they preach: I never heard that any sceptic run [sic] his head against a post, or stepped into a kennel, because he did not believe his eyes. [234a] And he often adds that this lack of fit between sceptical precept and sceptical practice, though morally deplorable, is just as well for the sceptic’s prospects of survival: If a man pretends to be a sceptic with regard to the informations of sense, and yet prudently keeps out of harm’s way as other men do, he must excuse my suspicion, that he either acts the hypocrite, or imposes upon himself. [184a] But for all the frequency with which he puts them, these favourite anti-sceptical points of Reid’s can be seen to be shallow in a number of ways. First, and least importantly, Reid is strictly inconsistent in his characterization of sceptical practice. Indeed, in the Inquiry he himself adverts to the well-known anecdotal counter-example to his claim of sceptical hypocrisy: Pyrrho the Elean, the father of this philosophy, seems to have carried it to greater perfection than any of his successors … if a cart run against him, or a dog attacked him, or if he came upon a precipice, he would not stir a foot to avoid the danger, giving no credit to his senses. But his attendants, who, happily for him, were not so great sceptics, took care to keep him out of harm’s way; so that he lived till he was ninety years of age. [102a]

8

Kinds of sceptic

This is a small point, perhaps, since Reid’s purpose in recounting this story is evidently satirical. But it does suggest that the sort of anti-sceptical point we are considering, exemplified in the first passage quoted above in which the famous story is deliberately ignored, is more a rhetorical flourish than an argumentative objection. But second, even if Reid were correct, beyond the point of quibble, in what he so often says about sceptical practice, he would still be wrong about sceptical precept. Reid tends, with his broad commonsensical brush, to paint a picture in which sceptics of all stripes are indifferently committed, by their doctrinal recommendation to suspend judgement, to the paralysing equipoise of Buridan’s ass [238a]. In fact it is perfectly arguable that no sort of sceptic is so committed. To see this, it is helpful to refer to Hume’s division of the genus ‘scepticism’ into three species, in Section XII of his first Enquiry: There is a species of scepticism, antecedent to all study and philosophy, which is much inculcated by Des Cartes … as a sovereign preservative against error and precipitate judgement. It recommends an universal doubt … (Enquiries: 149) Now the ‘antecedent sceptic’ cannot be guilty of the hypocrisy alleged by Reid, both (a) because the doubt he recommends is not, pace Hume, a truly “universal doubt”, and (b) because it is intended to preserve only against “precipitate judgement”, not against all judgement whatsoever. Let us take these two restrictions in turn. Regarding (a), we have Descartes’s word for it that This doubt, while it continues, should be kept in check and employed solely in connection with the contemplation of the truth. As far as ordinary life is concerned, the chance for action would frequently pass us by if we waited until we could free ourselves from our doubts, and so we are often compelled to accept what is merely probable. (Principles; CSM I: 193) But even if we ignore Descartes’s restriction of the scope of his methodological doubt to the province of philosophical inquiry – even if, that is, we insist that in the Meditations, at least, he applies it across the board – we should remember that the doubt is only a starting point. It is this that is behind point (b). In Meditation VI, by which time he takes himself to have safeguarded his beliefs from systematic error by proving the existence of a non-deceiving God, Descartes recognizes that he is still liable to particular error, or ‘precipitate judgement’. But so long as he takes care to assent only to what is clearly and distinctly understood, he need no longer be sceptical of the general deliverances of his senses, and can go about his business in the normal way. There is nothing, then, in the upshot of Descartes’s “antecedent” sceptical doubt, which, for the sake of consistency, would force him into ass-like paralysis.

Kinds of sceptic 9 There is another species of scepticism, consequent to science and enquiry, when men are supposed to have discovered, either the absolute fallaciousness of their mental faculties, or their unfitness to reach any fixed determination … (Enquiries: 150) What this second species of scepticism is ‘consequent’ upon, for Hume, is the realization that there is no rational means of escape from the antecedent doubt. There is, to be sure, a “blind and powerful instinct of nature” which leads us to believe in an independently existing external world, But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are only the inlets, through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object … (Enquiries: 152) Hume makes it clear that by ‘consequent’ scepticism he means ‘Pyrrhonism’; and he raises against it his “chief and most confounding objection”: A Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society … all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence. It is true; so fatal an event is very little to be dreaded. Nature is always too strong for principle. (Enquiries: 160) There is a very striking parallel here between Hume’s objection to the Pyrrhonists and Reid’s ‘rhetorical’ objection to sceptics in general. Indeed, non-specialist contestants in a ‘Name That Philosopher’ quiz show would be hard put to it to say whether the last-quoted passage comes from Hume or from Reid. But the parallel extends to a double irony. The first irony, of course, is that, for Reid, the ‘consequent sceptic’ par excellence is Hume himself. And Reid has some excuse for this view; the “slightest philosophy” that soon destroys common sense beliefs is plainly ‘the ideal theory’, whose truths, Hume tells us, “are the obvious dictates of reason”. (Reid could have had some fun here with Hume’s choice of the word ‘slightest’.) For the second irony, Reid has less excuse and Hume, it would appear, none at all. The irony consists in the fact that part of their shared objection (Hume’s to the Pyrrhonist, Reid’s to the Humean) to ‘consequent’ scepticism – namely that its precept and its practice come apart – misses its mark.

10

Kinds of sceptic

Hume’s criticism of the Pyrrhonist misses its mark because it ignores the distinction within Pyrrhonism between judgements about appearances and judgements about how things really are. It is only the latter which the Pyrrhonist is committed to suspend as a matter of principle. In practice, he can be guided by “appearances”, and so avoid precipices and the like without being dogmatic. Sextus Empiricus addresses this sort of objection directly in Book I of Outlines of Pyrrhonism: Those who say that “the Sceptics abolish appearances”, or phenomena, seem to me to be unacquainted with the statements of our School. For … we do not overthrow the affective sense-impressions which induce our assent involuntarily; and these impressions are “the appearances”. … Adhering, then, to appearances we live in accordance with the normal rules of life, undogmatically, seeing that we cannot remain wholly inactive. (Sextus Empiricus: 15–17) If this Pyrrhonian distinction between, for brevity, the phenomena and the noumena1 were pointed out to Hume, he’d presumably say that the recommended suspension of judgement about what is not presently apparent is, as a matter of psychological fact, unattainable. He may or may not be right about that. But he cannot be right in saying that adherence to principle must force a consistent Pyrrhonist into “total lethargy” when it comes to practical affairs. We noted just now that Reid, in effect, regards Hume as the paradigm case of the consequent sceptic, and with good reason: Mr Hume, by tracing, with great acuteness and ingenuity the consequences of principles commonly received, has shewn that they overturn all knowledge, and at last overturn themselves, and leave the mind in perfect suspense. [438b] Recalling now Reid’s general objection to scepticism, namely that “it is one thing to profess a doctrine … another seriously to believe it, and to be governed by it in the conduct of life” [259b], it is easy to see why it misses its mark if that mark is Hume. Hume, in what Stroud calls his “positive phase” (Stroud: 68 ff.), has amply allowed for the fact that sceptical arguments triumph only “in the schools”. As soon as they leave the shade “they vanish like smoke” in the face of “the powerful principles of our nature” (Enquiries: 159). The Reidian charge of hypocrisy can hardly be made to stick to Hume when Hume, so far from professing scepticism outside the study, has made it his “chief and most confounding objection” to Pyrrhonism that scepticism can only survive within it. Hume’s objection fails, we saw, through ignorance or neglect of what it is that the Pyrrhonist actually professes. Reid’s objection fails for an analogous reason. Just as Hume omits to take account of the ancients’ distinction between theoretical and practical beliefs, so Reid quite ignores the way in which Humean scepticism is trumped by Humean naturalism.

Kinds of sceptic 11 Is this misreading of Hume deliberate on Reid’s part? Earlier, when examining his remarks about sceptical practice, we caught Reid conveniently suppressing the embarrassing story about Pyrrho and his minders. Now, it seems, we can catch him at the same game with respect to sceptical precept. To paint Hume a hypocrite, Reid needs to suppose that there is something phoney, by Hume’s own lights, in Hume’s “prudently keep[ing] out of harm’s way as other men do”. And this supposition is routinely made by Reid, whenever he raises the anti-sceptical objection under consideration. Yet Reid knows full well that this is not Hume’s position. In at least five places Reid notes Hume’s admission that instinctive beliefs predominate over sceptical doubts in ordinary life. For example: Mr Hume saw very clearly the consequences of this [ideal] theory, and adopted them in his speculative moments; but candidly acknowledges that, in the common business of life, he found himself under a necessity of believing with the vulgar. [432a,b] Sometimes Reid goes so far as to applaud this concession of Hume’s, and even to feign puzzlement about his tactical shrewdness in making it: In this acknowledgement, Mr Hume indeed seems to me more generous, and even more ingenuous than Bishop Berkeley, who would persuade us that his opinion does not oppose vulgar opinion … [299b]2 M.J. Ferreira puts a different and altogether more sophisticated interpretation on Reid’s procedure here. According to Ferreira, Reid’s “charge of inconsistency is clearly not so naive as to be the claim that the sceptic believes p and acts according to not-p”; rather, it is the more far-reaching “charge of inconsistency within the realm of theory”. The sceptic is not merely unable to make his unavoidable first-order beliefs consistent with his sceptical metabelief that such trust is unjustified – he is also unable “to sustain for any considerable time the metabelief” even in the closet: A suggestion of this particular charge of inconsistency is present in Reid’s claim that even Hume ‘ingenuously acknowledges, that it was only in solitude and retirement that he could yield any assent to his own philosophy’ [102a]. That Reid is here referring quite strictly to Hume’s failure to maintain assent to his own philosophy (except in solitude) as a lapse from the theoretical commitment (rather than a gap between theoretical and practical) is reinforced by the sentence immediately following which begins, ‘Nor did I ever hear him charged with doing anything, even in solitude, that argued such a degree of scepticism, as his principles maintain’ (101–2, ital. mine). Only the second sentence concerns the conflict between theory and practice; the first concerns the conflict between theory and theory. (Ferreira: 132, emphasis original)

12

Kinds of sceptic

However, we may well feel that Ferreira’s interesting interpretation is inadequately supported by the passage she quotes. For one thing, she misquotes Reid, whose adverb to describe Hume’s acknowledgement is not ‘ingenuously’, but the more sarcastic “ingeniously”. This, in turn, should alert us to the context of Reid’s remarks, which is not one of argument but of frank, if somewhat heavy-handed, mickey-taking. The gist of what precedes the two sentences lighted upon by Ferreira is this: Hume, “with a grave face”, promises us a science of human nature, but winds up removing both science and human nature from the world. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised – after all, this is an author who denies both his own existence and that of us, his readers – even though he evidently plans to be around long enough to reap the plaudits (not to mention the royalties) justly due to one of his “metaphysical acumen”. Indeed, so elevated is this acumen that it can exhibit itself in flouting the rules that those less gifted must observe, such as the rule of consistency. Now come Ferreira’s two sentences which, read in context, do nothing to argue that Hume, in an unguarded moment, has ingenuously revealed some intratheoretical inconsistency. Rather, they are part of an argument ad risum: Hume’s practical act of writing the Treatise is laughably inconsistent with the theories he propounds in that work – which is just one case of the more general inconsistency between theory and practice to which Hume “ingeniously” confesses. Reid does not have Hume’s talent for irony. Indeed here he trips over his own feet. When he concludes, “Surely if [Hume’s] friends had apprehended this, they would have the charity never to leave him alone”, Reid has evidently forgotten the point he has just made, namely that even in solitude Hume’s practice doesn’t match his principles. But Reid’s ironical intentions are clear enough; and they show, surely, that an argument as sophisticated as that which Ferreira imputes to him (much as one might like to find it) is simply not there in the text. To summarize: what has emerged from the discussion so far is mainly negative. It is that one of Reid’s favourite objections to scepticism – that sceptical conduct is deplorably inconsistent with sceptical principle – is superficial. Reid is disingenuous in his characterization of both the conduct and the principle; and it seems fair to conclude that his accusations of inconsistency between them are part of his polemic, not his reasoned arguments, against scepticism. These reasoned arguments we shall come to later, but before we do so, some further ground-clearing is necessary. For the other thing to have become apparent so far is that, although Hume is Reid’s prime target in his attack on scepticism, the opposition between them is more complicated than the straightforward sceptic/ realist tussle in which Reid often seems to see himself engaged. More needs to be said about the similarities between Hume’s and Reid’s positions3 before we can home in on the real nature of the dispute between them. Let us turn to Hume’s third kind of scepticism.

Kinds of sceptic 13 There is, indeed, a more mitigated scepticism … which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are, in some measure, corrected by common sense and reflection. (Enquiries: 161) Here, we might think, Hume is gesturing towards some middle ground on which Reid could happily stand. For Reid is no unmitigated dogmatist. There are many things which he admits, and indeed insists, that we do not know, such as the real “cause of any one phaenomenon in nature” [527a], the real essences of things (“a knowledge which seems to be quite beyond the reach of human faculties” [392a]), and how mind and body interact (“of this we are absolutely ignorant” [187a]). And Reid would certainly approve the tendency of ‘mitigated scepticism’ towards the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding. (Enquiries: 162) And its general prescription, in Hume’s words, of a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner (Ibid.) is thoroughly Reidian. But, like other ecumenical positions, mitigated scepticism can only bring warring parties together by being vague. In fact Hume’s mask of vagueness slips here and there in his remarks about this species of scepticism. He explains that the estimable “degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty” is the product, in part, of admissions which Reid could never be brought to make. The dogmatical vulgar arrive at it by becoming “sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state”; and the dogmatical learned get there by reflecting on “the universal perplexity and confusion, which is inherent in human nature” (Enquiries: 161). This is where Reid and Hume part company. If they are both ‘mitigated sceptics’, their scepticisms are mitigated in importantly different ways. They might seem to be at the same destination, but the paths they have travelled are so widely divergent that they couldn’t possibly have led to the same place. For Reid, the human understanding is not strangely infirm – it may indeed be fallible, but it is “such as the Author of our being saw to be best fitted for us in our present state” [335a]. And neither is our present state one of universal perplexity and confusion. Hume has said that reason and belief pull in opposite directions, bringing about the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves

14

Kinds of sceptic concerning the foundations of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them. (Enquiries: 160)

But Reid thinks that reason and belief can pull together, to produce what we shall later be calling a sort of ‘reflective equilibrium’ in epistemology: When Reason is properly employed, she will confirm the documents of Nature, which are always true and wholesome. [201a] In the more substantial, or non-polemical, part of his attack on scepticism, Reid will try to disperse the Humean whimsy by using reason both to satisfy himself concerning the foundations, and to remove the objections which may be raised against them.

Reid’s intended audience When Reid leaves his polemical assaults and begins on his reasoned objections to scepticism, he recognizes that there is one class of sceptic he cannot refute. Contrary to what we might expect, this class is not (or not only) the class of those who doubt the powers of reasoning and judging. To be sure, Reid thinks that these sceptics, too, cannot be refuted: If a sceptic should build his scepticism upon this foundation, that all our reasoning and judging powers are fallacious in their nature, or should resolve at least to withhold assent until it be proved that they are not, it would be impossible by argument to beat him out of this stronghold. [447b] But his opinion is that this particular sort of sceptic doesn’t really stand in need of refutation: … by what good argument [can he] plead even for a hearing; for either his reasoning is sophistry, and so deserves contempt; or there is no truth in human faculties – and then why should we reason? [104a] No; the class in question (i.e. of those sceptics who both stand in need of refutation, and cannot be refuted) is the class of radically obstinate sceptic who will not admit to any beliefs whatever. Reid doesn’t spend much time on this class because he thinks that, as a matter of historical fact, the class is empty. Discussing the first of his “first principles of contingent truths”,4 which vouches for “the existence of everything of which I am conscious”, he says:

Kinds of sceptic 15 This, I think, is the only principle of common sense that has never directly been called into question. It seems to be so firmly rooted in the minds of men, as to retain its authority with the greatest sceptics. Mr Hume, after annihilating body and mind, time and space, action and causation, and even his own mind, acknowledges the reality of the thoughts, sensations, and passions of which he is conscious. [442b] Now there might seem to be some oddity here. Is Reid saying that there is something especially irrefutable about a scepticism about consciousness? And what can the significance be of his pointing to this class of sceptic which, he says, has no members? Let us tackle these two questions in turn. Reid’s point about consciousness, I think, is not that it possesses any special immunity to sceptical doubt,5 but rather that it is typical of ‘intellectual powers’ in that its nonfallaciousness is unprovable yet self-evident: If I am asked to prove that I cannot be deceived by consciousness – to prove that it is not a fallacious sense – I can find no proof. I cannot find any antecedent truth from which it is deduced, or upon which its evidence depends. It seems to disdain any such derived authority, and to claim my assent in its own right. [442b] The fact that no sceptic has been daft enough to call consciousness into question is a matter of historical accident. For Reid, this accident is interesting, and dialectically useful,6 but it is strictly beside the present point, which concerns the possibility and the irrefutability of extreme scepticism. A scepticism which extended as far as consciousness (whether or not it has ever actually been propounded) would represent a complete abandonment of first principles. It would be irrefutable because refutation requires argument, and argument requires at least one principle held in common between disputants: For, before men can reason together, they must agree in first principles; and it is impossible to reason with a man who has no principles in common with you. [230b] This means that a sceptic who would deny even consciousness “must be left to himself, as a man that denies first principles” [231b]: If any man could be found so frantic as to deny that he thinks, while he is conscious of it, I may wonder, I may laugh, or I may pity him, but I cannot reason the matter with him. We have no common principles from which we may reason, and therefore can never join issue in an argument. [442b]

16

Kinds of sceptic

So much for the irrefutability of “total” scepticism, in Reid’s view. What does he say about its tenability? On the face of it (and in the light of his many polemical remarks in the Inquiry), we might expect Reid simply and dogmatically to deny that extreme scepticism is a possible position. But this is not his considered view, or rather it need not be. For one thing, Reid’s fallibilism ought to make him hospitable to the idea that blanket scepticism is at least coherent: Our senses, our memory, and our reason, are all limited and imperfect – this is the lot of humanity … . Superior natures may have intellectual powers which we have not, or such as we have, in a more perfect degree … [335a]7 And in two places (but only two, so far as I know) he seems openly to countenance the possibility that an extreme scepticism might be correct. Responding to a sceptic who questions his perceptual beliefs (but in a way which is clearly generalizable) he says: This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature … and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine … [183b, emphasis added] And again, when stressing the instinctive nature of common sense belief in general, Reid allows: If we are deceived in it, we are deceived by Him that made us, and there is no remedy. [130b] To be sure, Reid does not think that we are in fact deceived – “we have no reason to think that God has given fallacious powers to any of his creatures” [335a] – but in these isolated remarks, and more generally in his overarching fallibilism, we can see him conceding enough space for an extreme and irrefutable scepticism to inhabit, even if that is only the space of bare logical possibility. What is the significance of this concession for Reid’s programme? It is significant in two related ways, one philosophical and the other dialectical. Philosophically, it shows that Reid starts his reasoned attack on scepticism from a clear-eyed acknowledgement that in its most radical form, scepticism cannot be answered. This acknowledgement will motivate his important departure from Descartes’s kind of foundationalism. The acknowledgement is tantamount to the concession that there are no absolutely certain foundations for knowledge claims. Wider, shallower foundations must be sought – secure, not beyond all conceivable doubt, but beyond all reasonable doubt – if scepticism is to be avoided. Dialectically, Reid’s admission that the out-and-out sceptic can’t be beaten circumscribes the audience that he takes himself to be addressing:

Kinds of sceptic 17 To such a sceptic I have nothing to say; but of the semi-sceptics … [130a, emphasis added] And this is where Reid’s view of the history of philosophy becomes relevant. For him, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are “semi-sceptics” all. It is against the semi-scepticism implied and expressed in their tradition that the arguments in the Inquiry and the Essays are meant to tell. Reid thinks of the tradition as semisceptical because its adherents, unwisely and inconsistently, have taken at least one first principle for granted: Des Cartes took it for granted, that he thought, and had sensations and ideas; so have all his followers done. Even the hero of scepticism [Hume] hath yielded this point, I crave leave to say, weakly and imprudently. I say so, because I am persuaded that there is no principle of his philosophy that obliged him to make this concession. And what is there in impressions and ideas so formidable, that this all-conquering philosophy, after triumphing over every other existence, should pay homage to them? Besides, the concession is dangerous: for belief is of such a nature, that, if you leave any root, it will spread; and you may more easily pull it up altogether, than say, Hitherto shalt thou go and no further: the existence of impressions and ideas I give up to thee; but see thou pretend to nothing more. A thorough and consistent sceptic will never, therefore, yield this point; and while he holds it, you can never oblige him to yield anything else. [130a] We are now almost ready to begin examining Reid’s attack on this unthorough and inconsistent semi-scepticism, and his construction in its place of the philosophy of common sense. Before we start, one last distinction needs to be made, which will provide a rationale for our order of treatment in the chapters that follow.

Against the “semi-sceptics” We can only come to grips with Reid’s arguments against the semi-sceptics if we first distinguish, much more carefully than Reid himself ever does, between two distinct strands within them. These are (a) his arguments against mental representationalism, and (b) his rejection of classical, or Cartesian, foundationalism. Now Reid, especially in the Inquiry, gives far greater prominence to the former than to the latter. Indeed, he often speaks as if the job of exploding representative ‘ideas’ and the job of disposing of scepticism were one and the same: For my own satisfaction, I entered into a serious examination of the principles upon which this sceptical system is built; and was not a little surprised to find, that it leans with its whole weight upon a hypothesis, which is ancient indeed, and hath been very generally received by philosophers, but of which

18

Kinds of sceptic I could find no solid proof. The hypothesis I mean, is, That nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it; That we do not really perceive things that are external, but only certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon the mind, which are called impressions and ideas. [96a, emphasis original]

Exclusive concentration on passages such as this has led many commentators to suggest that Reid pays insufficient attention to, or is even unaware of, a basic fact of epistemological life, namely that analytical claims do not imply existential claims. As Steven Nadler puts it: The claim that the mind is capable of directly and immediately perceiving external things must be distinguished from the claim that such a relation does, in fact, ever occur. (Nadler 1989: 134) But against such commentators I think that we can, and should, say that it is precisely Reid’s recognition that direct realism doesn’t, of itself, defeat all scepticisms that leads him (reluctantly, we may suppose) to admit wider and weaker foundational first principles than Descartes’s. The second strand in his antiscepticism, in other words, is motivated by Reid’s proper recognition that the first strand on its own is not wholly successful. Our discussion will be clearer if we keep these two strands apart. Before embarking on it, one thing more needs to be said about the relation between the two strands, which, in turn, will dictate the order in which we tackle them. To anticipate for a moment: Reid’s eventual position will be a liberal reliabilism according to which the true beliefs of common sense are justified, and so amount to knowledge, provided only that the believer have no good reason to doubt them. Detail will be put on this account later, but already we can see that this is Reid’s replacement for the sort of sceptically tending foundationalism he attacks in strand (b). Now on this account, “vulgar” adults, and some children, being unaware of potential defeaters of their ordinary beliefs, can be said straightforwardly to know most of the things they think they know. “The learned”, however, are in different case. They, to a man, subscribe to “the ideal system”, the representationalist element of which presents them with a battery of sceptical defeaters of their natural beliefs – defeaters which Reid is concerned to argue down in strand (a). So although strand (a) – the assault on impressions and ideas – receives much the greater share of Reid’s time and effort (this because Hume’s purported ‘good reasons to doubt’ were what woke him, Kant-like, from his dogmatic slumbers in the first place), it is structurally subservient, in the finished work, to the anti-sceptical alternative foundationalism which he develops in strand (b). It is appropriate, therefore, to postpone examination of the attack on ‘ideas’, and to concentrate first on the rejection of Cartesian foundationalism which, we are saying, is implicitly prior to it.

Kinds of sceptic 19

Notes 1 Or, as the distinction may be, between present and future phenomena. 2 See also 121a, 234a, and 442b. 3 It is sometimes said by Reid’s enemies that his essential position does not differ at all from Hume’s. For example: “Sir J. Mackintosh relates that he once observed to Dr. Thomas Brown that he thought that Reid and Hume differed more in words than opinions; Brown answered, ‘Yes, Reid bawled out we must believe in an outward world; but added, in a whisper, we can give no reason for our belief; Hume cries out we can give no reason for such a notion; and whispers, I own we cannot get rid of it’” (quoted in Grave: 109). 4 For ease of reference, Reid’s complete list of twelve “first principles of contingent truths” is reproduced in Appendix 1. 5 Indeed, in our next chapter we shall be critical of Reid for his failure to attend to the special nature of consciousness in this respect. 6 It is useful in providing him with ammunition for his charge of ‘arbitrariness’ against the sceptics, which, again, we shall consider in the next chapter. 7 It might well be objected that his fallibilism doesn’t commit Reid to the possibility of the truth of blanket scepticism – the universal possibility of error doesn’t entail the possibility of universal error, except by a quantifier-shift fallacy. But such a commitment is not needed for the present point, which is merely that, for all Reid knows, the ‘limitation’ or ‘imperfection’ of our faculties might be such that our entire corpus of beliefs is riddled with error.

2

The attack on Cartesian foundationalism

Reid believes that Descartes is the unwitting father of modern scepticism: Des Cartes’ system of the human understanding, which I shall beg leave to call the ideal system, and which, with some improvements made by later writers, is now generally received, hath some original defect; that this scepticism is inlaid in it, and reared along with it. [103b, emphasis original] We have already noted Reid’s proneness to locate this “original defect” in the theory of mediatory ‘ideas’ alone. But the doctrine of ideas as the only immediate objects of thought doesn’t on its own generate scepticism. What generates scepticism is the theory of ideas in tandem with an extremely strict criterion of justification or warrant, which can be expressed like this. The only beliefs we have with enough certainty to qualify as foundational are incorrigible or indubitable ‘ideas’ about our own current mental states. All other beliefs (about the external world, for example, or the past) can be justified only if they are demonstrable (since only demonstration transmits certainty) from these foundational beliefs. It is plainly Reid’s opinion (correct or not1) that this austere foundationalism, equally with the doctrine of mediatory ideas, is part of “the ideal system”:2 The new system admits only one of the principles of common sense as a first principle; and pretends, by strict argumentation, to deduce all the rest from it. That our thoughts, our sensations, and every thing of which we are conscious, hath a real existence, is admitted in this system as a first principle; but everything else must be made evident by the light of reason. Reason must rear the whole fabric of knowledge upon this single principle of consciousness. [206b] Given the new system’s paucity of first principles and its stringent insistence that only deductive reasoning can build on its chosen foundation, Reid finds it unsurprising that

The attack on Cartesian foundationalism

21

Des Cartes, Malebranche, and Locke [should] have all employed their genius and skill to prove the existence of a material world … with very bad success … these three great men, with the best good will, have not been able, from all the treasures of philosophy, to draw one argument that is fit to convince a man that can reason, of the existence of any one thing without him. [100b–1a] Is Reid able to say quite why these arguments fail to convince? His diagnosis is scattered throughout the Inquiry and the Essays, and Reid nowhere crisply summarizes it. However, it clearly enough proceeds on three distinct levels.3 In the first place Reid says, in effect, that if we insist, with Descartes and his followers, that foundational beliefs be immune to all conceivable doubt, we shall have no foundations. No contingent proposition – not even the cogito – is certain in this high sense: If it should be asked how Des Cartes came to be certain of the antecedent proposition, it is evident that for this he trusted to the testimony of consciousness. He was conscious that he thought, and needed no other argument. … It might have been objected to this first principle of Des Cartes, How do you know that your consciousness cannot deceive you? You have supposed that all you see, and hear, and handle, may be an illusion. Why, therefore, should the power of consciousness have this prerogative, to be believed implicitly, when all our other powers are supposed fallacious? To this objection I know no other answer that can be made but that we find it impossible to doubt of things of which we are conscious. The constitution of our nature forces this belief upon us irresistibly. [463a] Reid’s second sort of criticism of Cartesian foundationalism moves up a level. Even if we grant the Cartesians the special certainty they claim for the cogito, their one foundational principle will not bear a superstructure unless further first principles, which they disclaim, are admitted: From the single principle of the existence of our own thoughts, very little, if anything, can be deduced by just reasoning, especially if we suppose that all our other faculties may be fallacious. [464b] And Reid complains, in what is obviously a version of Arnauld’s famous objection,4 that the typical way out of this difficulty is circular: Des Cartes certainly made a false step in this matter, for having suggested this [demon] doubt … he endeavours to prove the existence of a Deity who is no deceiver; whence he concludes, that the faculties he had given him are

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The attack on Cartesian foundationalism true and worthy to be trusted. It is strange that so acute a reasoner did not perceive that in this reasoning there is evidently a begging of the question. [447b]

Reid’s third kind of reason for saying that the failure of the Cartesian foundational project is inevitable is logical. Once again he can waive the previous objection – that is, he can grant that reliance on reasoning is somehow available to the Cartesian. Still the Cartesian faces the difficulty that a persuasive deductive argument must not only be valid and have true premises – it must have premises that are more certain than the conclusion it sets out to prove. Reid doesn’t actually spell this out, but he must be making an appeal to some such principle when he says, of the principles of common sense: When men attempt to deduce such self-evident principles from others more evident, they always fall into inconclusive reasoning. [231a] Why is their reasoning always inconclusive? It must be that there simply are no other principles more evident than the self-evident principles of common sense. Reid’s procedure here is strikingly reminiscent of one of G.E. Moore’s ways of combating scepticism. In view of Keith Lehrer’s remark, “Moore’s defence of common sense is so obviously indebted to Reid, it is somewhat tedious to trace the connections” (Lehrer 1989: 6), perhaps one illustration of this point will suffice: Russell’s view that I do not know for certain that this is a pencil or that you are conscious rests, if I am right, on no less than four distinct assumptions: (1) That I don’t know these things immediately; (2) That they don’t follow logically from any thing or things that I do know immediately; (3) That, if (1) and (2) are true, my belief in our knowledge of them must be “based on an analogical or inductive argument”; and (4) That what is so based cannot be certain knowledge. And what I can’t help asking myself is this: Is it, in fact, as certain that all these four assumptions are true, as that I do know that this is a pencil and that you are conscious? I cannot help answering: It seems to me more certain that I do know that this is a pencil and that you are conscious, than that any single one of these four assumptions is true, let alone all four. That is to say, though, as I have said, I agree with Russell that (1), and (2) and (3) are true; yet of no one even of these three do I feel as certain as that I do know for certain that this is a pencil. Nay more: I do not think it is rational to be as certain of any one of these four propositions, as of the proposition that I do know that this is a pencil. (Moore 1959: 222, emphasis original) Reid, then, has three levels of argument against what he takes to be the ideal system’s condition of justification – ‘deducibility from the deliverances of

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consciousness’. And common to all three levels is Reid’s claim that, all the faculties being equally “limited and imperfect”, it is arbitrary to trust any one of them over the others. The ideal theorists show this favouritism twice over – once in their choice of premise, and again in the entitlement they feel to draw inferences from it. We have already quoted Reid’s claim that the cogito doesn’t deserve the privilege accorded it as a foundational premise. He says the same about the power of reason to build upon it: The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe the existence of the external object which you perceive? … Reason, says the sceptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to throw off every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on reason. Why, sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of perception? – they came both out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from putting another?5 [183b] It is the charge of arbitrariness, too, that is behind Reid’s proto-Moorean point about the inevitable inconclusiveness of purported deductions from sense experience. P (the Cartesian justification condition) might indeed imply a sceptical Q; but why, except through favouritism, should we assert P? In sum, Reid’s view is that there is no relevant difference among the faculties which would warrant the preference of consciousness and reason over the rest: the faculties of consciousness, of memory, of external sense, and of reason, are all equally the gifts of nature. No good reason can be assigned for receiving the testimony of one of them, which is not of equal force with regard to the others. [439b] But we shouldn’t let this claim of Reid’s go unchallenged. An ideal theorist would want to insist that there are relevant differences, such that memory and perception are inherently less reliable than consciousness and reasoning. How might such an insistence be developed? A strong version would have it that incorrigibility, or even infallibility, attaches to consciousness and reasoning but not to the other faculties. A weaker version would say, more guardedly, that we have readier-to-hand examples of the failure of memory and the senses than of consciousness and reasoning – the former pair frequently yield conflicting results while the latter pair do not. I cannot find Reid directly addressing the question of comparative inter-faculty reliability. But William Alston has a helpful discussion of the topic which suggests replies that would be available to Reid here. The objection’s ‘strong’ version, as we are calling it, holds consciousness to be incorrigible or infallible; but Alston says:

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The attack on Cartesian foundationalism it seems possible that neurophysiology should progress to the point that we should have public evidence of a neurophysiological sort that a person’s sensations, feelings, or thoughts, are different from what he sincerely believes them to be.6 (Alston 1993: 128, emphasis original)

And the claim that reasoning has a special security is more vulnerable still: As for rational intuition, one would be hard pressed to find a contemporary defender of its infallibility or incorrigibility, and for good reason. It can hardly lay claim to complete consistency of output. (Ibid.) He concludes: If the strongest candidates for these “epistemic immunities” do not really enjoy them, then any epistemic superiority that some of our basic practices enjoy over others is just a matter of degree and hardly warrants our taking some for granted and requiring others to justify themselves by the output of the privileged few. (Ibid.) Regarding the ‘weaker’ version of the objection (which compares the oftenconflicting results of memory and perception with the consistency of reasoning and consciousness) Alston says this: even if certain practices never, so far as we can tell, issue mutually contradictory outputs, while others do suffer this disability from time to time, this will still not justify the Descartes–Hume procedure of taking the former, but not the latter without external validation. For the fact remains that, however internally consistent the former may be, they still share with the latter the crucial feature of being insusceptible of a noncircular proof of reliability. (Ibid.) The “crucial feature” which Alston points to here is much stressed by Reid: Every kind of reasoning for the veracity of our faculties, amounts to no more than taking their own testimony for their veracity; and this we must do implicitly, until God give us new faculties to sit in judgment upon the old. [447b] Indeed, it is recognition that the faculties are insusceptible of a non-circular proof that must drive us, in Reid’s view, to find wider, shallower first principles if scepticism is to be avoided. As Hume had shown, scepticism can’t be avoided once

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‘deducibility from the deliverances of consciousness’ is accepted as a necessary condition for knowledge of anything other than current mental states. In the arguments we have been reviewing, Reid is concerned to show that this condition is one that we don’t have to accept. We might, indeed, reject it simply because of its sceptical consequences – as Reid in his more polemical passages often seems to do. But this would be only to meet scepticism with dogmatic assertion. Reid has tried to go further than this and show that the Cartesian condition is arbitrarily chosen. Such grounds as we have for accepting it are grounds for accepting a much wider range of contingent propositions as first principles. Before turning to examine Reid’s alternative to Cartesian foundationalism, we need if possible to sharpen our analysis of his criticisms of it. In the next section we try to do this by attending to what may be called Descartes’s ‘three “i” s’.

The three ‘i’s Descartes’s foundationalist project is commonly expounded and criticized with the help of three alliterative terms: ‘indubitability’, ‘incorrigibility’, and ‘infallibility’. On the face of it, it seems obviously correct to say that Reid, in his alternative doctrine of first principles, simply rejects all of these elements of the Cartesian stock-in-trade. For example, we could see this wholesale rejection as starting from an abandonment of infallibilism. Infallibilism, Reid could grant, would stop the justificatory regress mentioned above if it existed. But Reid is a fallibilist about the outputs of all our faculties; although he holds the first principles to be true beyond reasonable doubt, he recognizes our fallibility in affirming them. But now, with infallibilism given up, we might interpret Reid as thinking that indubitability and incorrigibility become, in Jonathan Dancy’s words, “vices rather than virtues”; “the thought of some basic beliefs being incorrigibly [or indubitably] false is too horrific to countenance” (Dancy 1985: 64). There may be some merit in such a summary, but it is too quick. It turns out to be no easy matter to say which (or which part of each) of Descartes’ three ‘i’s Reid rejects and which he retains. To stalk up on this question, we need to borrow some definitions from Bernard Williams, adding to them where necessary. (1) ‘Incorrigible’: A proposition p is incorrigible when, if X believes that p, then p is true. (Williams: 49) (2) ‘Evident’: A proposition p is evident for X when, if p is true, then X believes that p. (Williams: 77) Williams does not provide a definition of ‘infallible’, but perhaps we can concoct one by conjoining (1) and (2):

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The attack on Cartesian foundationalism (3) ‘Infallible’: A proposition p is infallibly believed by X when X believes that p if, and only if, p is true.

Williams gives two further useful definitions, one of a property he calls “selfverifiability”, the other of a fourth ‘i’ much used by Reid: (4) ‘Self-verifying’: A proposition p is self-verifying when, if anyone asserts that p, then p must be true. (Williams: 73–4) (5) ‘Irresistible’: A proposition p is irresistible for X when, if X thinks of p, then X believes that p. (Williams: 306) For a particularly clear distinction between three kinds of “indubitability” we can go to Alston: (6) ‘Indubitability’: Either (i) a psychological impossibility of entertaining a doubt, or (ii) a logical impossibility of entertaining a doubt, or (iii) the impossibility of there being any (real) grounds for doubt. (In Dancy and Sosa: 200) The domains covered by Descartes’s cogito and the first of Reid’s twelve “first principles of contingent truths” are coextensive, so it is instructive to see how Reid compares them. Of the cogito he says: This enthymeme consists of an antecedent proposition, I think, and a conclusion drawn from it, therefore I exist. If it should be asked how Des Cartes came to be certain of the antecedent proposition, it is evident that for this he trusted to the testimony of consciousness. He was conscious that he thought, and needed no other argument. So the first principle which he adopts in this famous enthymeme is this, That those doubts, and thoughts, and reasonings, of which he was conscious, did certainly exist.7… It might have been objected to this first principle of Des Cartes, How do you know that your consciousness cannot deceive you? You have supposed that all you see, and hear, and handle, may be an illusion. Why, therefore, should the power of consciousness have this prerogative, to be believed implicitly, when all our other powers are supposed fallacious? To this objection I know no other answer that can be made but that we find it impossible to doubt of things of which we are conscious. The constitution of our nature forces this belief upon us irresistibly. [463a, emphasis added] Now Reid is doing two things in this passage, namely (a) commenting on Descartes’s position, and (b), towards the end, expounding his own. Regarding

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(b), Reid is telling us simply enough that, in his opinion, such certainty as attaches to the cogito does so solely in virtue of property (5) above, ‘irresistibility’. Or alternatively, and equivalently, Reid is saying that the cogito cannot pretend to any stronger sort of ‘indubitability’ than the merely psychological sort in (6)(i). So far so good. But then, as (a), a piece of commentary on Descartes, the passage is curiously inept. Reid shows himself quite unaware of two other replies to the objection he raises against the prerogative of consciousness which Descartes either did make or could have made – replies which need to be argued down, not passed over in silence. The first of these Cartesian replies might go like this: in the case of seeings, hearings, and handlings, there is always an ‘idea’ interposed between the mind and the objects seen, heard, and handled. But consciousness is an unmediated two-term relation between the mind and its ‘ideas’, and two-term relations are less problematic than three-term ones; therefore consciousness deserves its privilege. Perhaps we can pardon Reid for omitting any consideration of this reply since he takes himself to have exposed ‘ideas’ as “fictions of the philosophers”. Just as much, by his lights, is perception or memory a two-term relation between the mind and its objects as is consciousness for the Cartesians. The second Cartesian reply to the objection Reid makes is more complicated to explain; but it is nevertheless much harder to excuse Reid for having ignored it. Descartes, of course, agrees with Reid that the proposition “I am thinking” possesses the psychological irresistibility and indubitability mentioned in (5) and (6)(i) respectively. But he goes much further and says that it possesses the strong indubitability of (6)(ii) and (6)(iii) as well. Where does this enhanced indubitability come from, according to Descartes? Well, it comes in part, surely, from its being (1) incorrigible (if X believes he is thinking, he is thinking), and (2) evident (if X is thinking, he believes he is thinking). But it comes, too, from the property it has of self-verifiability (4): if anyone asserts that he is thinking, what he asserts is ipso facto true. And the proposition is also strongly indubitable, because it is verified not just by assertion but by the very act of doubting its truth: If it is true that I am doubting (I cannot doubt that), it is equally true that I am thinking, for what is doubting if not thinking in a certain kind of way? (The Search for Truth; CSM II: 415) Reid nowhere shows any awareness of this special status that at least one of the deliverances of consciousness may be said to have. His complaint against Descartes continues: This [irresistibility] is true, and is sufficient to justify Des Cartes in assuming, as a first principle, the existence of thought, of which he was conscious. He ought, however, to have gone farther in this track, and to have considered whether there may not be other first principles which ought to be adopted for the same reason. But he did not see this to be necessary, conceiving that,

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The attack on Cartesian foundationalism upon this one first principle, he could support the whole fabric of human knowledge. [463a,b]

But surely Descartes’s real reason for restricting his foundation to the antecedent of the cogito was not, as Reid suggests, complacency about his ability to support the whole fabric on top of it, but rather his conviction that mere irresistibility in beliefs or principles was nothing like strong enough to qualify them as fit for foundational duty. We could push Reid further in this direction and say to him – you, Reid, are not consistent in your fallibilism, for you admit that we are infallible with respect to some mental happenings, namely sensations. When you write, of the “agreeable odour” of a rose, “This sensation can be nothing else than it is felt to be”, what are you saying if not that the sensation is incorrigible? And when you continue, “and, when it is not felt, it is not” [310a], are you not calling it ‘evident’ as well? And these two things together add up to infallibility. How would Reid respond? He’d have to respond by saying that this infallibility attaches to sensations only as ‘ways-of-being-appeared-to’, and, as such, is quite useless as a sole basis on which to build beliefs about the world. Once we move from the agreeable odour itself to a conception of the rose and a belief that it presently exists (once, in his terms, we move from mere “sensation” to “perception”), we move outside the area of ‘incorrigibility’ and ‘evidence’, and open ourselves up to the possibility of error. Natural signs can be misread (perhaps our olfactory sense is disordered) and are in any case ambiguous (perhaps it’s a bottle of scent). They can only “suggest” beliefs with enough warrant to count as knowledge given the fallible assumption that our faculties are functioning properly in an environment appropriate to their design. On the Cartesian or ‘classical’ foundationalist model, infallible beliefs are supposed to be those on the basis of which all other beliefs are justified. But, Reid will say, beliefs about how we are being appeared to, to the extent that they are infallible, are too empty of content to be able to perform this foundational role. And to the extent that they can perform a foundational role, they are not infallible. In effect, Reid makes just this complaint against the narrowness of the cogito: From the single principle of the existence of our own thoughts, very little, if anything, can be deduced by just reasoning, especially if we suppose that all our other faculties may be fallacious … if it be not admitted as a first principle, that our faculties are not fallacious, nothing else can be admitted. [464a,b] To summarize Reid’s position: (1) incorrigibility, (2) evidence, (3) infallibility, and even (4) self-verifiability (he could concede) may be fine properties for a belief or a proposition to have. But if we insist that our foundations must have them so as to make them indubitable in sense (6)(ii) or (6)(iii), we shall have no foundations and

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the sceptic will have won. The only indubitability we can attain, and the only one we need, is the indubitability of (6)(i), and this is achieved by finding first principles characterized, among other things, by the irresistibility in (5). Here we must guard against a possible misinterpretation. Reid does say, as we noted above: “This [irresistibility] is true, and is sufficient to justify Des Cartes in assuming, as a first principle, the existence of thought, of which he was conscious” [463a]. And this remark can make it look as if Reid is saying that psychological irresistibility does, after all, imply the objective truth of first principles. Here, it might be thought, Reid says that because we cannot doubt first principles, therefore they are justified and true. But that is not his meaning. Reid’s position is that since first principles cannot be positively established by argument, there are bound to be differences of opinion about what is properly a first principle and what a “vulgar error”. However, “Nature hath not left us destitute of means” for settling these controversies. She has provided various “marks” or “criteria” by which we can sort the wheat from the chaff [435a]. Reid claims no more for irresistibility than that it is one such “mark”, others being early appearance in childhood and indispensability in conduct [439–41]. All that follows, then, from a universal inability to doubt a putative first principle is that it has some enhanced likelihood of being a genuine one.8

The nature of Reid’s alternative foundationalism First, let us establish by quotation that Reid is a foundationalist: When we examine … the evidence of any proposition, either we find it selfevident, or it rests upon one or more propositions that support it.… But we cannot go back in this track to infinity. Where then must this analysis stop? It is evident that it must stop only when we come to propositions which support all that are built upon them, but are themselves supported by none. [435a,b] This could be Descartes writing, or any one of a host of others. As could this, from the same chapter: One of the most important distinctions of our judgements is, that some of them are intuitive, others grounded on argument. [434a] These self-evident, intuitively known propositions are what Reid means by the judgements, or principles, of ‘common sense’. Like axioms, they “do not admit of proof”, but neither do they need it – they are self-evident, which is to say that they are no sooner understood than assented to, everywhere and always [230b, 434a]. Reid takes it as uncontroversial that there is such a class of non-inferentially known truths: “Nobody, I think, denies it.” What there is room for dispute about is the size of this class, Descartes, for instance, having so shrunk it that it contained

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only one member, the cogito. Part of Reid’s distinctive departure from his predecessors is greatly to increase the size of this class to the point where a nonexhaustive list of “first principles of contingent truths” can contain twelve members, ranging over questions of personal identity, other minds, inductive expectations, and the reliability of human testimony, memory, and sense perception.9 Modern civil engineers have, roughly, two ways of supporting buildings, between which they can choose, according to the terrain. If there is rock beneath their site, at whatever depth, they can excavate down to it and sit upon the rock a foundation which need be no larger, and in principle may be much smaller, than the superstructure which will eventually be seen from the ground upwards. Where the rock is either buried inconveniently deep or is absent altogether, they can instead support the same superstructure on shallow concrete ‘rafts’, provided that the rafts are wide enough. It seems that even skyscrapers have been put up on marshy and reclaimed land by this second means. In a very obvious sense, this engineering metaphor has application to the two kinds of foundationalism, Descartes’s and Reid’s: Descartes excavates while Reid builds rafts. Indeed Reid himself uses something like this analogy in several places. But two constraints need to be noticed on the size and make-up of these rafts. First, the wider the rafts are, the shallower not only may they be but the shallower they must be, if the extra weight is not to cause rafts and superstructure alike to sink, there being no rock underpinning them. Second, it’s no good if the rafts are at all ‘squashy’ in places; within the first constraint, they must be strong enough for the job. Reid seems to be aware of these constraints on his raft-building. Regarding the number of first principles to be admitted, he says we should assume that “Nature will be frugal in her provision”; and regarding their quality, he makes it a criticism of the Peripatetic philosophy that in it “many things were assumed as first principles, which have no just claim to that character: such as, that the earth is at rest; that nature abhors a vacuum; that there is no change in the heavens above the sphere of the moon …” [462b]. Reid sees that there are opposite errors to be avoided – and here he uses the building metaphor directly: [The Peripatetic] system was founded upon a wide bottom, but in many parts unsound. The modern system has narrowed the foundation so much, that every superstructure raised upon it appears top-heavy. [464b] As he sees it, his task is to provide for the first time foundational principles of the right size and strength. Cartesians, of course, will say that Reid’s foundations are nothing like strong enough for the job. To this Reid replies that no principle is strong enough in the extreme Cartesian sense of ‘strong’; and that even if, per impossibile, one such could be found, nothing could be built on it without the help of other first principles that are less strong. This basic disagreement (‘basic’ in both senses) between Reid and Descartes about the strength of foundational principles will be examined in the next chapter. Here we can simply note another

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metaphor frequently used by Reid in connection with his first principles, this time one drawn from the law courts. Since none of the faculties can be proved reliable (or, if we prefer, since none of their respective first principles can be demonstrated), then, if we are not to give in to scepticism, we have to treat them all (as in any case we do) as if innocent until proved guilty. Reid thus shifts the burden of proof from the defence to the prosecution, and then insists that although the prosecuting sceptic can show that first principles are not immune to all conceivable doubt, he cannot put them beyond reasonable doubt. We have now completed our survey of Reid’s criticisms of classical foundationalism, and taken a preliminary look at the character of his replacement for it. In the next chapter we focus on the twelve main ‘rafts’ that form his alternative foundations – the “first principles of contingent truths”.

Notes 1 Reid’s characterization of the foundationalist aspect of the ideal system (though far less often criticized than his opinion of its representationalist aspect) is open to obvious challenge. Locke departs from it to the extent of saying, in Reidian fashion: “He that in the ordinary Affairs of Life, would admit of nothing but plain direct Demonstration, would be sure of nothing, in this world, but of perishing quickly” (Essay 4.11.10). And Malebranche, too, thinks that the existence of bodies is non-demonstrable (see below, p. 115). 2 See Nicholas Wolterstorff’s useful discussion of this matter: “When Reid spoke of the Way of Ideas, he had in mind a commitment not only to mental representationalism but to classical foundationalism. Against this latter commitment – as well as the former – he launched a powerful attack” (Wolterstorff 1987: 406 ff.). 3 These levels are distinguished by Paul Vernier (Vernier: 19). 4 Fourth Objections to the Meditations (CSM II: 150). 5 Reid has an ‘error theory’ to explain this undue reliance on reason over the other faculties: “Perhaps the pride of philosophers may have given occasion to this error. Reason is the faculty wherein they assume a superiority to the unlearned” [339a; see also 330a]. 6 A Wittgensteinian might interrupt Alston to question the sort of “possibility” he envisages here. Since a person’s own introspective reports are the only criteria we possess in this area (the objector might say), it would make no sense to say he was wrong about them. To bring neurophysiological evidence to bear, therefore, would be to change the subject – to move to a different language game. Alston’s (and so Reid’s) best response to this move is perhaps to grant the Wittgensteinian some impossibility here, but then to insist that it is epistemologically irrelevant. (This response is developed in the next section.) 7 Compare Reid’s own first principle: “First, then, I hold, as a first principle, the existence of everything of which I am conscious” [442b]. 8 We shall give some detailed consideration to Reid’s treatment of these “marks” in Chapter 8 below. 9 See Appendix 1.

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The first principles of contingent truths

Reid’s rafts Reid offers his tentative list (“I shall rejoice to see an enumeration more perfect”) of what we are calling his ‘rafts’, and what he calls “the first principles of contingent truths”, in chapter v of Essay VI of the Intellectual Powers. At first sight, this list looks like an impatient begging, one by one, of all the questions that philosophers have found most important to ask and most difficult to answer. We have already encountered principle 1, Reid’s equivalent of the cogito, which he baldly asserts without going to any Cartesian trouble. Reid’s procedure appears to possess, in Russell’s famous phrase, all the advantages of theft over honest toil. Problems of the self are summarily dealt with by principles 2 and 4: 2. Another first principle … is, That the thoughts of which I am conscious, are the thoughts of a being which I call MYSELF, my MIND, my PERSON. [443b] 4. Another first principle is, Our own personal identity and continued existence, as far back as we remember anything distinctly. [445b] If you are worried about memory, principle 3 covers that: 3. Another first principle I take to be – That those things did really happen which I distinctly remember. [444b] Principle 5 sweeps away doubts about perception: 5. Another first principle is, That those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be. [445b]

The first principles of contingent truths 33 Troubled about the problem of free will? Reid can accommodate you with principle 6: 6. Another first principle, I think, is, That we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will. [446b] The reliability of the faculties of “reasoning and judging” is vouched for by principle 7: Another first principle is – That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious. [447a] The problem of other minds is dissolved by principles 8 and 9: 8. Another first principle … is, That there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom we converse. 9. Another first principle I take to be, That certain features of the countenance, sounds of the voice, and gestures of the body, indicate certain thoughts and dispositions of the mind. [448b–9a] Principle 10 confidently underwrites testimony: 10. Another first principle appears to me to be – That there is a certain regard due to human testimony in matters of fact, and even to human authority in matters of opinion. [450b] The predictability of human behaviour is spoken for by principle 11: 11. There are many events depending upon the will of man, in which there is a self-evident probability, greater or less, according to circumstances. [451a] And finally, principle 12 tackles the problem of induction in a sentence: 12. The last principle of contingent truths I mention is, That, in the phaenomena of nature, what is to be will probably be like to what has been in similar circumstances. [451a]

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The first principles of contingent truths

The extent to which, if at all, Reid’s affirmation of these first principles begs the question against scepticism will be the subject of the next section;1 and the precise location of the principles within Reid’s ‘reliabilist’ account of knowledge will be delayed until Chapter 5. In the present section of this chapter we are concerned simply to know which propositions Reid asserts as first principles (already indicated by the mere rehearsal of his list), and what sort of animal a Reidian first principle actually is. There is no consensus among commentators about this latter question.2 In the literature we can find Reid’s first principles variously characterized as (a) primarily, principles of truth,3 (b) “principles of evidence right from the start”,4 (c) principles of reliability,5 and (d) as logical preconditions for any rational activity, akin to Kant’s categories.6 Now each of these interpretations, we can say, fastens onto an important part of what Reid means his first principles to be; and so each will belong in an eventual account of his alternative foundationalism. But none of them, it can be suggested, provides a particularly good starting point for an investigation into the nature of the first principles. To take (d), the Kantian interpretation, first: this can certainly find motivation in some of the things Reid says about first principles and “common sense”. As T. Sutton (so far as I know, this interpretation’s inventor) rightly points out, Reid uses the term “common sense” in several distinct but related ways. “It can mean the universal consensus of mankind on a particular point or, more generally, the set of first principles (often called ‘dictates of common sense’)” (Sutton: 168). It can also mean, as Reid puts it, “that degree of judgment which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business [421b] … this degree that entitles them to the denomination of reasonable creatures” [425b].7 Now Sutton puts these two sorts of statement together to construe Reid as claiming “logical … priority for his first principles … Reid says in effect that … [they] … provide a framework of basic assumptions … without which no rational activity at all could take place” (Sutton, 178, emphasis added). But there are surely two things amiss with Sutton’s construal, either of which breaks the analogy between Reid’s first principles and Kant’s categories. First, the most that Reid can here be claiming as transcendentally necessary for rational activity is some set of first principles or other – the question which set is left open by this argument (which in any case is not explicitly Reid’s8). And second, even if an argument like this is implicit in Reid, it can speak only for the necessity of belief in such an unspecified set of first principles, not for its truth. So we see that to call Reid’s list of first principles of contingent truths ‘transcendentally necessary conditions for rational activity’, or even for rational engagement – and to leave it at that – is to fail to capture fully Reid’s intentions for the principles in two respects: Reid is offering us this list and not any other; and of the items on the list he wants to say, sooner or later, that they are true.9 What of the three other ways of characterizing the first principles that we mentioned earlier, namely that they are (a) primarily principles of truth, or (b) in the first instance principles of evidence, or that they are simply (c) principles of reliability? Why won’t any of these serve as helpful signposts towards a description

The first principles of contingent truths 35 of the status of Reidian first principles? The answer, perhaps, is that, as ways of characterizing the principles, they ultimately overlap if they do not actually coincide from the start. The commentators we cited are aware of this overlap – indeed they emphasize it. Keith Lehrer, who recommends description (a), writes: Why does Reid not give us any principles of evidence? It is because evidence for Reid just is information about what is true or false. (Lehrer 1989: 198) And James Van Cleve, who urges approach (b), points out that if Reid is a reliabilist, the distinction between … [principles of truth and principles of evidence] … threatens to collapse. … If first principles must be true, it follows … that [for example] consciousness is a reliable faculty, and if reliabilism is correct, it also follows that all deliverances of consciousness are justified (or evident).10 (Van Cleve: 16, emphasis added) Now, as its title-page advertises (in a promissory note still to be cashed), it is one of this book’s main contentions that Reid is a reliabilist – at least in a loose sense of that term. So we need a way of approaching the first principles which avoids this threatened collapse, and, moreover, one which, like descriptions (a) and (b), focuses on what the principles are to begin with. In short, we need an understanding of the way in which Reid can be said to have arrived at his list of first principles, consistent with his being, in the end, a reliabilist. Such an understanding, I think, can be drawn from the work of Louise Marcil-Lacoste. In a nutshell, Marcil-Lacoste argues that Reid’s first principles have the same status in his epistemology as do laws of nature in science. Of course, it is no secret that Reid professes inductivism – his many enthusiastic references to “the great Lord Verulam” and “the ingenious Sr. Isaac Newton” ensure that his commitment to ‘the experimental method’ is well known. But, says Marcil-Lacoste, almost11 exclusive concentration on his resulting doctrines, at the expense of his methodology, has prevented commentators from appreciating the sense in which “Reid’s appeal to common sense is an appeal to induction” (Marcil-Lacoste: 120). Alerted, perhaps, by Reid’s own declaration on page one of the Inquiry that “[Newton’s] regulae philosophandi are maxims of common sense”, MarcilLacoste develops an interpretation according to which Reid makes a general connection between common sense – which identifies the field of observation (judgment) – and induction – which provides means for investigating this field. (Marcil-Lacoste: 121) Common sense dictates that the field of observation be very broad – broad enough to include all judgements, everyday and theoretical. Anything less would

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be inductively unsatisfactory. And this suggests a reply to Somerville’s charge of confusion (which post-dates Marcil-Lacoste’s book, but which is mentioned in note 2): The reason that Reid does not try to delineate the differences between ordinary beliefs and first principles of knowledge … is not because he confuses these but because his aim is to discover what kind of continuity exists between common judgments and first principles of knowledge by undertaking a new experiment about judgments: the codification of self-evident propositions. (Marcil-Lacoste: 93, emphasis original) Reid treats self-evidence “on the model of an unknown efficient [i.e. ‘true’] cause whose effects are discernible in the ways we assent to certain propositions” (ibid., 102). But scientific causes aren’t efficient causes, for Reid. As Newton had taught: When natural philosophers pretend to show the Causes of Phenomena they either pretend to what is beyond the Sphere of Human Knowledge or by Causes they mean only Laws, according to which the unknown Cause Acts. (Cited in Marcil-Lacoste: 103) Hence, just as, in general, “to trace out the laws of nature, by induction from the phaenomena of nature is all that true philosophy aims at, and all that it can ever reach” [157b], so, in the case of self-evidence, the best we can do is to seek the most general laws by which we immediately assent to propositions upon understanding them, and without which (and beyond which) our assent is inexplicable. And these most general natural laws of assent are, of course, the first principles of common sense. Much interesting detail in Marcil-Lacoste’s analysis has been omitted in this brief summary.12 But, for present purposes, the basic idea is enough. Reid can be seen as starting from his anti-sceptical observation that common sense beliefs “force assent in particular instances, more powerfully than when they are turned into a general proposition” [448a]. Next, his borrowed experimental method tells him to look to his ‘data’ – all those particular cases (and particular kinds of cases) of self-evident belief, carefully gathered in the Inquiry and in Essays I to V of the Intellectual Powers – and then in Essay VI he generalizes from them to arrive at the ‘causal’ first principles without which it would be impossible to account for them at all. Reid, of course, doesn’t literally go out and do the ‘field-work’ that his induction of first principles might seem to commit him to. That would be quite unnecessary; it doesn’t take canvassers with clip-boards in Aberdeen High Street to establish whether individuals accept certain propositions as self-evidently true – ordinary experience suffices for that. And reflection on ordinary experience suffices for the inductive ascent to the first principles or ‘laws of nature’.13 Reid can

The first principles of contingent truths 37 lay down, as well-confirmed laws of our constitution, that for all X, if X is a healthy, unprejudiced adult, X will have irresistible and immediate beliefs in his own persisting personal identity, the existence of other minds than his own, the reliability of his perceptual systems and his memory, and much else. In this way,14 Reid gets to his provisional list of twelve ‘first principles of contingent truths’ – than which, he says (as we saw before), “I shall rejoice to see an enumeration more perfect” [441b]. Reid is not just being modest here. Because, by their nature, they “do not admit of direct proof”, there is always a risk that a proposed enumeration of first principles may be said to be either “redundant” (i.e. too inclusive) or “deficient” (i.e. not inclusive enough). However, in Reid’s view, “Nature hath not left us destitute of means whereby the candid and honest part of mankind may be brought to unanimity when they happen to differ about first principles” [437b]. Once instances of irresistible assent have been generalized into first principles, certain “marks” or “criteria” can be abstracted from the generalizations “whereby first principles that are truly such, may be distinguished from those that assume the character without just title” [435a].15 But now a most important question arises. Reid clearly takes it that the beliefs which come under first principles thus ‘marked’ are true beliefs (they are “first principles of contingent truths”); yet the marks (which are in any case suggestive, not conclusive) are marks of what are purely psychological states. Reid may be as correct as you please, descriptively speaking, about the range of beliefs that people instinctively hold true; and he may have arrived, by abstraction, at unerring criteria for identifying these innate beliefs. But, as the sceptic will quickly point out, such psychological description is beside the epistemological point. In the absence of some link between what we shall later call ‘the Innateness Claim’ and ‘the Truth Claim’ for first principles, the sceptical challenge to their warrant will not have been met. So the important question is: how does Reid forge such a link? We shall offer our answer to this, the most crucial interpretative question about Reid’s response to scepticism, in Chapter 5 (and our assessment of the adequacy of Reid’s link, thus interpreted, will occupy much of the remainder of the book). But there are two prior hurdles at which Reid’s whole antisceptical programme might be thought to fall. The first (mentioned at the start of this chapter) is that Reid’s enumeration of first principles may be no more than a systematic begging of all Hume’s questions. Whether it really is so or not, will be the subject of the next section. (We conclude that it is not.) The second is a prima facie difficulty in reconciling Reid’s foundationalism on the one hand with his fallibilism on the other. We get Reid over this hurdle in Chapter 4.

Methodism, particularism, and begging the question In his well-known treatment of ‘the problem of the criterion’ Roderick Chisholm distinguishes two pairs of questions:

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The first principles of contingent truths (A) “What do we know? What is the extent of our knowledge?” (B) “How are we to decide whether we know? What are the criteria of knowledge?” (Chisholm 1982: 65)

An epistemological sceptic, says Chisholm, will say that neither sort of question can be answered because an answer to question (A) presupposes an answer to question (B), and conversely. But Chisholm indicates, and gives labels to, two other possible views. By “methodists” he means, not members of a species of low-church Protestant, but those philosophers who believe they have an answer to (B) on the basis of which they can go on to find an answer to (A). And by “particularists” he means philosophers who have it the other way about: particularists start with instances of knowledge and on the basis of those go on to formulate general criteria for all knowledge claims (in exactly the way Reid does, according to the ‘inductivist’ reading of the first principles which we endorsed in the last section). Chisholm’s concern in “The Problem of the Criterion” is to argue for the superiority of particularism over the other two stances, rather than to use his labels to explore the history of philosophy. He contents himself with pointing out, in passing, that Locke and Hume were methodists, and Reid and Moore particularists (Chisholm 1982: 66–9).16 But for present purposes it may be helpful to make a more specific application of these terms to our period, particularly to the dispute between Hume and Reid. In what sense, then, is Hume a methodist? He is a methodist in that he begins, in both Book One of the Treatise and in the first Enquiry, with an answer to question (B). In a nutshell, his criterion of knowledge is what in the last chapter was called the ‘classical’ or ‘Cartesian’ criterion of justified or warranted belief: we can only be said properly to know the contents of our current impressions and ideas, and things deducible from them. This strict criterion, of course, yields an extremely limited answer to question (A). Beliefs about the existence of the external world, necessary connection, other minds, and even the persisting self, are none of them deducible from presently existing impressions and ideas, and neither are any other beliefs about objective matters of fact. Our knowledge, then, doesn’t extend beyond those current impressions and ideas themselves. Reid’s objection to this Humean methodism is twofold. First, he regards its sceptical answer to (A) as a reductio of its answer to (B). Any criterion which yields the result that the beliefs of common sense are unjustified must be a faulty criterion: A traveller of good judgment may mistake his way, and be unawares led onto a wrong track … but, when it ends in a coal-pit, it requires no great judgment to know that he hath gone wrong. [103b] Second, and more importantly here, Reid may be interpreted as holding that we shouldn’t be beginning with criteria at all:

The first principles of contingent truths 39 It is a bold philosophy that rejects, without ceremony, principles which irresistibly govern the belief and the conduct of all mankind in the common concerns of life; and to which the philosopher himself must yield, after he imagines he hath confuted them. Such principles are older, and of more authority, than Philosophy: she rests upon them as her basis, not they upon her. [102b, emphasis added] This seems to be an expression of as pure a particularism as one could expect to find in the eighteenth century. Reid clearly suggests here that an answer to question (B) must be based on an answer to question (A), and not vice versa. That is to say, any criterion that Philosophy might propose must conform to (i.e. must not disqualify as cases of ignorance) what in everyday life are accepted as cases of knowledge. What motivates Reid’s particularism? We have just noted Reid’s recoil, by modus tollens, from the sceptical outcome of Hume’s form of methodism. But the wish to avoid scepticism doesn’t on its own motivate particularism as such. After all, a methodism which begins with generous, perhaps naively realist, criteria and goes on to endorse the instances of belief covered by the principles of common sense is perfectly conceivable.17 So if Reid has a principled reason for eschewing all methodisms, it must lie elsewhere. Perhaps it lies in his already familiar commitment to Baconian induction and Newton’s Rules as the only legitimate means of scientific inquiry: Wise men now agree, or ought to agree, in this, that there is but one way to the knowledge of nature’s works – the way of observation and experiment.… [Newton’s] regulae philosophandi are maxims of common sense … and he who philosophizes by other rules, either concerning the material system or concerning the mind, mistakes his aim. [97b] The mistaken philosophizing that Reid means here is the invention of explanatory “hypotheses” and “conjectures”, to which “no regard is due” unless they are tried “by the touchstone of fact and experience” [236a]. In his strictures on the method of hypothesis, we can see Reid using the same language as would a Chisholmian particularist against methodism: how prone ingenious men have been to invent hypotheses to explain the phenomena of Nature … . Instead of a slow and gradual ascent in the scale of natural causes, by a just and copious induction, they would shorten the work and … get to the top at once. [472b] And similarly in his positive endorsements of scientific inductivism:

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The first principles of contingent truths The process of induction is more arduous, being an ascent from particular premises to a general conclusion.… The greatest part of human knowledge rests upon evidence of this kind. Indeed, we can have no other for general truths which are contingent in their nature … [712a]

Reid’s grounds for his particularism, then, are analogous to, if not the same as, his grounds for inductivism. Methodism and the way of hypothesis both get the order of explanation the wrong way round. Criteria for knowledge, if taken as starting points in epistemology, are “hypothetical” in a pejorative sense: they are untried human inventions, masquerading as established matters of fact. The proper way to proceed is to focus first on actual instances of belief – the beliefs which every man cannot but accept as self-evidently true, such as that ‘there is a tree in front of me’ when he seems to see a tree. Then, such of these beliefs as (i) appear too early to have been the product of inculcation or reasoning, (ii) are essential for the ordinary purposes of life, and (iii) the denial of which seems not only false but absurd, can be generalized into first principles of common sense. At this point, an externalist assumption18 is imported to the effect that these winnowed-down “original” beliefs are true beliefs and amount to knowledge, of a foundational kind. Now generalized first principles, of themselves, are not criteria – they are simply, as Louise Marcil-Lacoste puts it, “laws of assent to self-evident propositions”. But with the externalist ‘truth assumption’ in place, they can function like criteria. If pushed for an answer to Chisholm’s question (B), Reid will say that the sufficient conditions for knowledge are (roughly) that beliefs either be ‘original’ in his terms, or be derived from original beliefs by the non-fallacious “powers of reasoning and judging”. An objection to the foregoing account of Reid as a particularist might run like this: may we not as well say that he starts with his externalist criterion (namely, that ‘original’ beliefs and those properly based on them amount to knowledge) and then uses it to arrive at a lavish circumscription of the extent of our knowledge? In other words, the objection might go, there is at least as good a case for saying that Reid, if only implicitly, gives priority to his answer to question (B) over question (A), in true methodist fashion. If the objection is put in this relatively mild form, it can easily be countered. For Reid does not bring any criterion to the inquiry at all. Rather, as the last-quoted passage has it, he ascends “from particular premises to a general conclusion” (that is, from instances of belief to first principles), and then abstracts his “marks” or “criteria” from the general principles. His overall criterion – a multi-faceted affair comprising ‘originality’ (i.e. instinctiveness), plus self-evidence, universal acceptanceas-true, early appearance in childhood, and practical indispensability – only emerges once the generalization has taken place. Not until first principles have been formulated, as a result of inductive ascent, can their criterial marks be picked out. This reply may well not satisfy the objector: the ‘criterial marks’ which Reid is able to abstract after his ascent are criterial of innateness, not of truth – Reid cannot possibly have ‘discovered’ on his way up that innate beliefs are true

The first principles of contingent truths 41 beliefs; hence his claim that they are so must have been assumed all along, again in true methodist fashion. Indeed, the objector might push harder still: I grant (he might say) that Reid proceeds by induction in what looks like a particularist way. But is not his commitment to the inductive method itself a form of methodism? What should we say in response to these strengthened forms of the objection? Perhaps we should concede that the categorization of Reid as a particularist is not quite as clear-cut as we might wish. There is something of a “bird and egg” difficulty (to use a phrase of Reid’s) in saying quite where Reid’s assumption that ‘innateness implies truth’ comes in, and a consequent ambiguity in applying Chisholm’s notion of a “criterion” to either of these terms in Reid’s epistemology. And in the non-technical everyday sense of ‘method’ and its cognates, Reid, like anyone who tackles epistemology (or anything else, if it comes to that), must be counted a methodist. But if we allow that there is a real distinction, and one worth drawing, behind the terms ‘methodist’ and ‘particularist’, we shall find it hard to do anything but classify Reid as the latter. Chisholm’s distinction is, in fact, tripartite (between (a) scepticism, (b) methodism, and (c) particularism), and intended to be exhaustive. Plainly, Reid is (a) no sceptic; as regards (b), his refusal to lay down a priori conditions for knowledge definitely rules him out as a methodist; and (c), his dogged attention, from the start of his theorizing, to Chisholm’s question (A) – “what do we know?” – strongly suggests that he belongs in (what is in any case the only category left) particularism. If Reid isn’t a particularist, then nobody is; and since (we agree) there have been particularists, it follows that Reid is a particularist. In saying ‘there have been particularists’, we should say also that they are members of a rarer breed than methodists and sceptics. Most philosophers have seen an answer to question (A) – a delimitation of the extent of our knowledge – as the ultimate aim in the theory of knowledge. They would regard particularists as assuming the very point at issue in the epistemological enterprise. And this, of course, is where we come directly to the main task of this section – that of saying whether (and if not, why not) Reid’s mere enumeration of contingent first principles amounts to petitio principii twelve times over. Mathias Steup has a neat way of showing that particularists need be no more embarrassed by charges of question-begging than methodists or sceptics. He concocts two sample arguments: An Anti-Sceptical Argument (A) If the ‘deducibility from sense-experience’ criterion is correct, then I am not justified in believing that these are my hands. (B) I am justified in believing that these are my hands. Therefore: (−C) The ‘deducibility from sense-experience’ criterion is not correct. A Sceptical Argument (A) If the ‘deducibility from sense-experience’ criterion is correct, then I am not justified in believing that these are my hands. (C) The ‘deducibility from sense-experience’ criterion is correct.

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The first principles of contingent truths Therefore: (−B) I am not justified in believing that these are my hands.

Then Steup points out that particularists deny (C) on the basis of (B), and sceptics (B) on the basis of (C): Regarding question-begging, then, the situation is symmetrical: both beg the question against each other. Who, though, has the better argument? Particularists would say that accepting (B) is more reasonable than accepting (C) because the risk of making an error in accepting a general criterion is greater than in taking a specific belief to be justified. (Steup: 380) This last way of asserting the greater reasonableness of particularism over methodism is more characteristic of Moore19 than of Reid, but we may be sure that Reid agrees with it. In what ways does he signify his agreement? He several times says that common sense beliefs “force assent in particular instances more powerfully than when they are turned into a general proposition”, as we noted previously. But such remarks are directed more towards the inconsistency, as he sees it, between general sceptical precept and particular sceptical practice, than to the greater reasonableness of assenting to particulars than to generals. Reid’s subscription to this latter claim is to be found implicit in what he says about “conjectures” and “hypotheses”. These, by their nature, are general and uncertain – “the … best established of them may, for anything we know, admit of exceptions” [57b, Letter to Lord Kames]. It cannot, therefore, be reasonable to rely with the same degree of confidence on them as on the particular facts on which they are established, to the extent that they are ‘established’ at all. So when, as often, a general hypothesis and a particular fact conflict, the reasonable thing is to regard the hypothesis as disconfirmed. This point is used by Reid, for example, to counter Berkeley’s immaterialism: this acute writer argues from a hypothesis against fact … . That we can have no conception of anything, unless there is some impression, sensation, or idea, in our minds which resembles it, is indeed an opinion which hath been very generally received among philosophers; but it is neither self-evident, nor hath it been clearly proved; and therefore it hath been more reasonable to call in question this doctrine of philosophers, than to discard the material world. [132a] It is a fact – a datum in philosophy – that we believe not just in an external world but in a material external world;20 and the presence within us of other common sense beliefs provides further data: These facts are phaenomena of human nature, from which we may justly argue against any hypothesis, however generally received. But to argue from a hypothesis against facts, is contrary to the rules of true philosophy. [132b]

The first principles of contingent truths 43 The parallel between these anti-Berkeleian comments of Reid’s and Steup’s version of the particularist plea quoted above is close and obvious. Criteria, like hypotheses, are inherently general, purporting to apply to all cases in a given domain. Hume’s criterion, “(C)” above, is extremely general. And Reid would quickly agree with Moore that it is not “rational” to use it to undermine propositions such as Steup’s “(B)”: Methinks … it were better to make a virtue of necessity; and, since we cannot get rid of the vulgar notion and belief of an external world, to reconcile our reason to it as well as we can; … if Reason … will not be the servant of common sense, she must be her slave. [127b] In our attempt, so far, to characterize Reid as a particularist, we have tended to elide Chisholm’s distinction between methodism and scepticism. This has seemed fair because, for Reid, the methodisms of Descartes, Locke and Berkeley have implied the scepticism of Hume all along. But before we leave this topic we should consider whether a fourth attitude to his questions (A) and (B), not mentioned by Chisholm, might not more properly be said to be Reid’s. This is the view described by Steup as “a hybrid of particularism and methodism”, and he cites Goodman and Rawls as examples of people who have held it. What distinguishes this view from pure particularism is that, according to it, not only must instances be known to begin with in order to identify principles, but also “in the process of bringing principles and instances into agreement, principles may be saved by sacrificing instances” (Steup: 380). The aim of the process referred to is, of course, Rawls’s famous ‘reflective equilibrium’. And what prompts the thought that Reid might be anticipating this “hybrid” position is his recommendation, in the last-quoted passage, that we reconcile our reason (cf. criterion) to our vulgar notion[s] (cf. instances) as well as we can. But can we find evidence that Reid ever, let alone habitually, sacrifices instances in order to save a principle? Certainly, this is not his habitual practice. If we run down his list of twelve “first principles of contingent truths” we cannot find a principle that appears in any way to be out of kilter with vulgar notions. The only arguable sign of strain arises between a correct account of the plain man’s notion of secondary qualities, on the one hand, and the perceptual first principle, number 5, on the other. The strain arises, perhaps, as follows. The perceptual first principle states: That those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by the senses, and are what we perceive them to be. [445b] At first sight the principle appears to be a straightforward generalization of common sense perceptions of all kinds – including perceptions (had by everybody) of qualities both secondary and primary. This ‘comprehensive’ reading

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of the principle is encouraged by some of the things Reid says in the Inquiry. For example: the qualities in bodies which we call heat and cold are … only conceived by us, as unknown causes or occasions of the sensations to which we give the same names. [119b] … by the vulgar, the names of colour, heat, and sound, are but rarely applied to the sensations, and most commonly to those unknown causes of them … [131a] In passages such as these, it seems as if Reid is attributing to all of “us” – vulgar and learned alike – a sort of ‘Ramsey sentence’ conception of secondary qualities. The suggestion is that the man on the Clapham omnibus, when he thinks that ‘snow is cold’, thinks only that ‘for some X, X is a power in the snow to produce the feeling of cold in me’. This is most implausible. What the man thinks, surely, is that the snow is really cold, guv’nor, in the same way that flakes of the stuff really move when they fall towards the ground.21 When, however, he is being more careful (typically in the Intellectual Powers), Reid shows that he fully accepts that plain men are naive realists about secondary qualities: they do not … distinguish the primary from the secondary qualities, but speak of both as being equally qualities of the external object. [315b] Now Reid defends the primary/secondary quality distinction, albeit on grounds different from Locke’s.22 So he must regard vulgar notions of secondary qualities as strictly wrong (and therefore not generalizable into a first principle of knowledge). But Reid is too squeamish to come out and say this. The vulgar, he thinks, should not be blamed for failing to make distinctions “which have no connection with the common affairs of life”: to distinguish clearly the different ingredients of a complex notion, and, at the same time, the different meanings of an ambiguous word, is the work of a philosopher; and is not to be expected of the vulgar, when their occasions do not require it. [315b] So he finds a form of words that stops short of convicting the vulgar of error, but which effectively excludes their secondary quality judgements from the scope of principle 5:

The first principles of contingent truths 45 Of the primary qualities they have a distinct notion, as they are immediately and distinctly perceived by the senses; of the secondary, their notions, as I apprehend, are confused and indistinct, rather than erroneous. [315b, emphasis added] If we consider this passage side by side with the first principle, we can see how Reid has managed to bring the principle into agreement with its instances. And we have a choice of two ways to describe his procedure. Either (i) we can say he is adopting Steup’s “hybrid” approach – “saving” his principle by “sacrificing” some of the instances which would otherwise embarrass it. The vulgar may think they have as distinct a notion of the coldness of snowflakes as of their size and shape, but they don’t; so this and similar judgements have to be jettisoned for the purposes of the principle. Under this description,23 ‘reflective equilibrium’ – if we want to call it that – is achieved by sacrificing instances. Or (ii) we can say instead that Reid is not compromising his particularism in any way here. He starts with instances of primary quality perceptions had by everyone, learned and vulgar alike. Only these are “distinct”, and only these does he wish his principle to speak for. So he qualifies his principle with the word ‘distinctly’, to fit it to the instances he wants to generalize. It will be said that these two descriptions come to the same thing: under either of them the principle is restricted in scope – because under both, the secondary quality perceptions are excluded from it. And indeed the two descriptions are equivalent in the sense that they are alternative descriptions of the same piece of Reid. But all this shows, I think, is that we are under no pressure to interpret Reid as diluting his pure anti-sceptical particularism, even at the one point in his formulation of first principles where he might appear to do so. This is not to say that we shall find no use for the notion of ‘reflective equilibrium’ in Reid.24 In Chapter 8 we shall consider the significant extent to which Reid thinks it possible to give rational support to our instinctive beliefs. Hume thinks that reason and instinct are in radical disequilibrium. As we noted in Chapter 1, Reid’s disagreement with Hume on this matter will turn out to be fundamental.

Notes 1 Although we can note here, en passant, the justness of Keith Lehrer’s observation that “[Reid’s] contingent first principles are, for the most part, those principles that we must presuppose to avoid the scepticism of Hume but which we cannot account for, if Hume is right, by appeal to reason. In fact, the list of first principles Reid offers is strongly influenced by the arguments of Hume” (Lehrer 1989: 157). 2 No doubt this disagreement is partly due to Reid’s own apparent oscillation in this matter. He seems to want the first principles to do two different jobs at once: on the one hand, he wants them in the background, giving rise “immediately” (i.e. without inference) and “originally” (i.e. by instinct) to the judgements of common sense, in virtue of their self-evidence – they are “no sooner understood than they are believed” [434a]. On

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The first principles of contingent truths the other hand, he wants them in the foreground, functioning as premises “from which we may reason concerning … truths”, whether contingent or necessary [452a]. These mixed messages lead James Somerville, for example, to say “[Reid] confuses these principles of human nature with the beliefs they compel” (Somerville 1987: 425). Whether or not this is correct, it is true that any description of a settled role for the first principles has to be derived from the texts, rather than simply lifted from them. Lehrer 1989: 197. Van Cleve: 3. Alston 1985: 436. Sutton: 159 ff. Sutton also distinguishes two other senses of ‘common sense’ not immediately relevant here. These are (i) the ordinary worldly wisdom of the man who ‘has his head screwed on the right way round’, and (ii) its “most technical sense [in which] it refers to a distinct faculty of the human mind whereby we have knowledge of first principles” (ibid.). The only argument in this neighbourhood that Reid does explicitly present is the argument we noted in Chapter 1, in relation to ‘total scepticism’. But there Reid says only that common first principles are necessary for rational engagement in argument, not for “rational activity at all”. This is not to say that we shall find no further use for the notion of transcendental argumentation in Reid. We shall see below that, at a more local level, he argues in this way for his doctrine of natural signs in perception, as well as for our conceptions of external objects and their primary qualities (Chapter 4); and he argues similarly for the truth of principle 9 (Chapter 9). The reader is referred to Van Cleve’s important paper for the fullest discussion in the literature of the status of Reid’s first principles. Marcil-Lacoste notes that Larry Laudan is an honourable exception to this. Laudan writes: “Reid was the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions … seriously. … Reid … was a well-read, capable physicist who knew Newton’s work first-hand and could see that there was more in it of methodological interest than the popularised work of Newtoniana could begin to suggest” (Laudan: 106–7). See also Alan Wade Davenport, “Reid’s Indebtedness to Bacon” in The Monist vol. 70, no. 4, (1987): 496–507. In particular, Marcil-Lacoste has light to shed on Reid’s implicit use of Newton’s ‘First Rule’, which will illuminate our discussion of Reid’s attack on ‘ideas’ in Chapter 6, and of his ‘unofficial’ positive arguments for his list of first principles in Chapter 8, below. We had better say that in the absence of sceptical threat ordinary experience would suffice for these processes. Post Hume’s Treatise, however, the philosopher of common sense is needed as well. In discussion, Roger Gallie has expressed a worry about circularity in this characterization of Reid’s collection of first principles, as follows. Reid is here being interpreted as using inductive method (a) to arrive at, and (b) to legitimate the first principles, among which is the inductive principle (number 12) itself. And it gets worse: many, if not all the first principles must be presupposed by Reid in order to start the inductive ascent described here – and this is not how a good inductivist should behave. By way of preliminary reply, we can argue that Reid necessarily cannot get outside the first principles of common sense and science, and so the suggested circularity is not embarrassing. Indeed the real embarrassment for Reid would have been to be caught using other first principles on his way to establishing the principles he lists. A more thorough reply to Gallie, however, has to wait upon our distinction between the Innateness Claim (which describes first principles) and the Truth Claim (which legitimates them) in Chapter 5, below. Once it is allowed that these two claims (on our interpretation) occupy different levels in Reid’s response to scepticism, we can grant him the use of

The first principles of contingent truths 47

15 16

17 18 19

20

21

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23

inductive method and the claim that its principle has normative force at the same time, without circularity. See especially pages 132 and 138 below. As we saw in the last chapter, a genuine first principle is marked by its universal acceptance-as-true, its early appearance in childhood, its practical indispensability, and the felt absurdity of its denial [438–41]. We shall return to these “marks” in Chapter 8. In a subsequent article Chisholm admits that the classification of Reid as a particularist is not so straightforward, and he appeals to Keith Lehrer for help (Chisholm 1990: 34–5). Lehrer pronounces that Reid is neither a particularist nor a methodist in Chisholm’s senses of these terms. Particularists hold that we derive general principles of evidence from propositions saying that this or that particular belief is evident; methodists hold that we derive the latter propositions from the former. But Reid holds that there is no derivation in either direction, since both types of proposition are immediately evident (Lehrer 1990: 40 ff.). But pace Lehrer, we may think there is considerable merit in persisting with Chisholm’s earlier classification for two reasons: (i) because it fits well with our interpretation of how Reid inductively arrives at his first principles (developed in the last section); and (ii) because it offers the means of defending Reid from the charge of question-begging in its most extreme form – even if Reid is a pure particularist (so we shall argue in the present section) the charge cannot be made to stick. However, this assumption of Reid’s pure particularism for the sake of argument will be partially retracted at the end of the chapter; see notes 23 and 24. Perhaps indeed it is actual, in the antics of some of Reid’s followers in ‘the Scottish School’. It may be that the tub-thumpings of “that bigotted silly fellow, Beattie”, for example, can be construed in this way. A great deal more will be said about this assumption in Chapter 5. But it is mentioned here in passing so that the overall shape of Reid’s procedure may be brought into view. “There is no reason why we should not … make our philosophical opinions agree with what we necessarily believe at other times. There is no reason why I should not confidently assert that I do really know some external facts, although I cannot prove the assertion except by simply assuming that I do. I am, in fact, as certain of this as of anything; and as reasonably certain of it” (Moore 1955: 163, emphasis added). Thus Reid would have vigorously rebutted the following: “Berkeley did, J.F. Ferrier remarks, what Reid talked about doing: Berkeley showed that the material world is directly perceived” (Grave: 56). In Edward Madden’s terms, Berkeley offends against one of three desiderata implicit in the Scottish “Metaphilosophy of Commonsense”: “[philosophical analyses] must not contravene the meaning of an ordinary proposition discernible to a non-philosopher” (Madden 1983: 23 ff.). Hume expresses the same complaint in the “New Letter to Hugh Blair” [July 1762], discovered by Paul Wood and published by him in Mind, vol. 95 (1986) pp. 411–16: “The Author supposes, that the Vulgar do not believe the sensible Qualities of Heat, Smell, Sound, and probably Colour to be really in the Bodies, but only their Causes or something capable of producing them in the Mind. But this is imagining the Vulgar to be Philosophers & Corpuscularians from their Infancy.” As Keith Lehrer helpfully emphasizes, Reid draws the distinction on conceptual and phenomenological grounds, rather than in terms of the nature of the qualities themselves: “We have a distinct [and direct] conception of primary qualities … while the conception of secondary qualities is relative only [i.e. as an unknown cause in relation to a known effect in us]” (Lehrer 1978: 186). Phenomenologically, the sensations get noticed in secondary quality perceptions, whereas in primary quality perceptions “they carry the thought [directly] to the external object, and immediately disappear and are forgot [315b]” (Lehrer 1989: 104). Under this description, some ‘methodism’ is creeping into Reid’s procedure, the ‘method’ being something such as this: ‘Consult the best available science – only that can tell you the extent of our knowledge.’

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24 There is a sense in which all epistemologists are seeking ‘reflective equilibrium’, just as (as we remarked above) they may all be seen as ‘methodists’. But these terms need not thereby become vacuous. We can think of ‘methodism’ and ‘particularism’ as representing, not fixed positions, but the extremes of a continuum – a philosopher’s place along it depending on how many common sense beliefs he is prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve ‘reflective equilibrium’. This idea (which I owe to Andrew Pyle) combines the Chisholmian and Rawlsian terminology in a new way, which enables us to say something definite about the space between Hume and Reid.

4

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture

In his book on Reid for The Arguments of the Philosophers series, Keith Lehrer observes at one point: Reid is an interesting combination of a fallibilist, who concedes our faculties are fallible and insists we have no proof that … [they] … do not deceive us, and a foundationalist, who maintains our faculties yield some beliefs … that are justified without argumentation or reasoning. (Lehrer 1989: 198–9) Many friends of Reid would agree with the gist of this remark. Part of what makes him an interesting figure, they might say, is Reid’s way of successfully accommodating these two historically uneasy bedfellows, fallibilism and foundationalism, in his philosophy. But in his important article “Reid’s Realism”, Phillip D. Cummins has arguments that call this favourable evaluation into question. Cummins notes an apparent conflict between Reid’s foundationalist doctrine of first truths on the one hand and his theory of perception on the other. The fifth of Reid’s ‘first principles of contingent truths’ – “that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be” – if interpreted as a “universal truth, as Reid encourages us to [interpret it]”, is inconsistent with his admission elsewhere that perception is fallible. Cummins considers several ways of reconciling these two doctrines, but, finding them all either unsatisfactory in themselves or not available to Reid, concludes that the inconsistency remains and “runs deep”. This is a serious charge against Reid, and one which, if it can be made to stick, ramifies well beyond his theory of perception. For one thing, as Cummins justly observes at the outset of his paper: “His position on perception is in many ways the keystone of Reid’s philosophy” (Cummins: 317). But further, the faculty of perception is not the only fallible Reidian intellectual power which is vouched for by an apparently universal first principle. The faculties of reasoning and judging are said jointly, by principle 7, to be “not fallacious”; and the memory principle is worded in a way exactly similar to the perceptual: “that those things did really happen which I distinctly

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remember”. This means that if Cummins is correct in saying that there is a ‘deep inconsistency’ between Reid’s fallibilist account of perception and its corresponding foundational principle, the same will be true across the board in his epistemology. So if we want to continue to hold, with Lehrer, that Reid’s fallibilist/ foundationalist mixture is an “interesting” one and one not vitiated by inconsistency, we must try to see where Cummins’ arguments might be resisted. That task will take up the second section of this chapter. Before turning to it directly, we need to sketch the outlines of this important test-case, Reid’s theory of perception.

Reid’s theory of perception In Reid’s view, all previous philosophies of perception (with the praiseworthy exception of Malebranche’s) have “split upon the rock” of conflating perception and sensation: the distinguishing [of] these operations seems to me to be the key that leads to a right understanding of both. [312b] Reid distinguishes sensation, not just from perception but from all other mental acts, on the basis that it alone “hath no object distinct from the act itself”. What may have prevented recognition of this, thinks Reid, is the grammatical similarity of sensation-statements and perception-statements: The same mode of expression is used to denote sensation and perception; and, therefore, we are apt to look upon them as things of the same nature. Thus, I feel a pain; I see a tree: the first denoteth a sensation, the last a perception. [182b, emphasis original] Reid continues: The grammatical analysis of both expressions is the same: for both consist of an active verb and an object. But, if we attend to the things signified by these expressions, we shall find that, in the first, the distinction between the act and the object is not real but grammatical; in the second, the distinction is not only grammatical but real. The form of the expression I feel a pain, might seem to imply that the feeling is something distinct from the pain felt; yet in reality there is no distinction. As thinking a thought is an expression which could signify no more than thinking, so, feeling a pain signifies no more than being pained. [182b–3a, emphasis original] It is frequently pointed out that Reid’s comments here closely foreshadow C.J. Ducasse’s ‘adverbial’ theory of sensation, which suggests that what it is to

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture 51 sense, for instance, a blue appearance is best brought out by saying that it is “to sense bluely just as to dance the waltz is to dance waltzily” (Ducasse: 259). Reid says that of all mental acts other than sensation (perception, memory, imagination, conception, and judgement or belief), the following is true: There must be an object, real or imaginary, distinct from the operation of the mind about it.1 [292b] The highest common factor in all these object-directed mental acts – and that element which gives them their intentionality – is “conception” (or “simple apprehension”2), the special property of which is that its intentional objects need not exist.3 With these distinctions made, Reid can give a more exact account than any predecessor of the mental act of perception: If … we attend to that act of our mind which we call the perception of an external object of sense, we shall find in it these three things: – First, Some conception or notion of the object perceived; Secondly, A strong and irresistible conviction and belief of its present existence; and Thirdly, That this conviction and belief are immediate, and not the effect of reasoning. [258a] Regarding the nature of these objects perceived, Reid’s view is, of course, that they are directly the qualities of real external objects, and not mediatorial ‘ideas’ or sensations that in some way represent them. But if these conceptions and beliefs in which perceptions consist are not the product of any inference from ideas or sensations, how are they produced, according to Reid, and what part do sensations play in the processes that generate them? Reid’s general answer is that: by our constitution … every different [object of] perception is conjoined with a sensation that is proper to it. The one is the sign, the other the thing signified. [312b] But there is a qualification to make: Reid does not hold that every different perception is conjoined with its proper sensation. Visual perceptions of primary qualities (for example, perceptions of “visible figure”) are anomalous in this respect, since the only kind of visual sensations we have are ones that signify a secondary quality, namely colour. Exceptionally, the primary qualities perceived by vision are signified directly by physical impressions on the retina, not by sensations in the mind. On Reid’s account, then, human beings are so constructed that, in general, whenever a material impression is made on a sense organ by an external object, directly or via a medium, a mental sensation is immediately caused4 which thereupon produces the conception and conviction appropriate to the perception of the object. Beyond this, perception is not further analysable. Reid doesn’t pretend to

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be able to explain how the perceptual process works – “this, I am afraid, is hid in impenetrable darkness” [326b] – but he thinks he can do better than simply posit the constant conjunction of sensation on the one hand with conception and conviction on the other. In the Inquiry he takes over the Berkeleian term “suggestion” to characterize the way in which, “by our constitution”, sensation and perception are related. In the later Intellectual Powers this term is largely dropped in favour of more straightforwardly causal-sounding talk (now perceptions are “occasioned” or “raised”, “by means of” sensations – sensations are those things “by means of which we have notice of … qualities”). Common to both accounts is Reid’s use of what would nowadays be called ‘semiotics’. Sensations are “signs” which “signify” the qualities in objects which the suggested conceptions and convictions are conceptions and convictions of. Reid doesn’t intend this as a metaphor; sensations are not ‘as if’ signs – they are a species of sign, natural signs, part of nature’s endowment to us to enable us to pilot ourselves about the world. According to one persistent line of criticism, Reid’s talk of sensations as “signs” of the properties of objects introduces an irremediable indirectness into his theory. Thomas Brown, indeed, said that, despite himself, Reid had reintroduced ‘ideas’, simply relabelling them ‘sensations’. Similarly, Hamilton asks what a sensory sign can be except an intermediary between perceiver and object that prevents the immediate awareness of the latter that direct realism requires [820b]. But Edward Madden replies that the relation that matters here is not from sign to thing signified (as Hamilton and Brown imagine) “but from the native constitution of the intellect to the sign”. The relation is unlearned and unanalysable, an original endowment of the constitution. The mind is keyed so as to interpret sensations as signs of perceptual objects. Reid says “Our faculty of perceiving an object lies dormant, until it is roused and stimulated by a certain corresponding sensation” [186b]. Sensations, therefore, are triggers for the actualisation of a potentiality, but the resulting act of perception is no less immediate for that. As Madden puts it: “The nativistic ‘reading’ of the sensation, constituting, as it does, a new mental act, reveals clearly that sensation is a condition of perception but not its intermediary” (Madden 1986: 263, emphasis added).5 For any system of signs to work, there must be a correspondence between the signs and the things they signify. Reid takes language as the paradigmatic system of signs and distinguishes within it two kinds of sign, according to the way in which, in each case, this correspondence is established: First, such as have no meaning but what is affixed to them by compact or agreement among those who use them – these are artificial signs; Secondly, such as, previous to all compact or agreement, have a meaning which every man understands by the principles of his nature. [117b] So in the case of language we have natural signs (“modulations of the voice, gestures, and features”), innately understood, on the one hand, and words, learned by experience, on the other.6

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture 53 In the perceptual case there is a distinction parallel to this, between “original” and “acquired perceptions”. In original perception the mind passes immediately from tactile sensations – the signs – to the primary qualities in the objects which they signify “by a natural kind of magic” [122a], while in acquired perception the sign/signified correspondence is “discovered by custom”. In acquired perception it typically happens that what was originally signified subsequently becomes a sign.7 Auditory perceptions are like this, as “when I hear a certain sound, I conclude immediately, without reason, that a coach passes by” [117b, emphasis added]. So are visual perceptions, as when I learn that “the variation of colour is an effect of spherical convexity, and of the distribution of light and shade” [331b].8 The ways in which we acquire knowledge through sense perception and through the language of others are so similar that Reid uses the same word, ‘testimony’, for both. And since the analogy between them extends beyond their shared use of signs, he considers them, in the Inquiry, together. We can single out three particular points of correspondence. First, they have this feature in common: Our original perceptions are few, compared with the acquired; but, without the former, we could not possibly attain the latter. In like manner, natural language is scanty, compared with artificial; but without the former, we could not possibly attain the latter. [195b] Reid assumes that “Nature will be frugal” in her provision of original principles; so he thinks we have to posit learning mechanisms such as his in order to explain the linguistic and perceptual competences that in fact we have; as artificial signs presuppose natural signs, so acquired perceptions presuppose original perceptions.9 Second, Reid gives parallel accounts of the ways in which original principles underwrite the reliability of “the testimony of Nature given by the senses … [and] … human testimony given by language” [194b]. Both rely ultimately on the inductive principle; in the former case: When we have found two things to be constantly conjoined in the course of nature, the appearance of one of them is immediately followed by the conception and belief of the other … [because] … we have, by our constitution, an anticipation that there is a fixed and steady course of nature … [197b–9a] Similarly with human testimony: its reliability depends on the “early anticipation … that our fellow creatures will use the same signs in language, when they have the same sentiments”, as well as on the principles of “veracity” and “credulity” [196b] – instincts to tell the truth and to believe what we are told, respectively. Third, Reid’s account can yield the same explanation of what may be happening when things go wrong in either kind of testimony: just as natural signs in acquired perception can be ambiguous and lead to misperception, so the ambiguity of artificial signs can make human testimonial transactions misfire.

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This last analogy is not explicitly drawn by Reid. His own explication of erroneous ‘acquired’ perception does not mention ambiguity of sign, but is integrated into his general treatment “Of the Fallacy of the Senses” in Essay II of the Intellectual Powers. Reid’s procedure in this chapter is strikingly prefigurative of J.L. Austin’s treatment of the same subject in Sense and Sensibilia. His aim, like Austin’s, is to show that most of the things called “deceptions of the senses” are nothing of the kind. Austin gives a rather off-hand threefold classification of these so-called deceptions which “even the plainest of men” would want to make (Austin: 13). While it cuts across Reid’s more careful division, there are points of exact correspondence. Reid’s classification is fourfold: (1) “First, many things called deceptions of the senses are only conclusions drawn rashly from the testimony of the senses” [335a]. These are Austin’s cases “(c) … where a wrong inference is made or a wrong construction put on things”. Reid illustrates: if I’m taken in by a counterfeit coin, I’ve drawn a wrong conclusion from what my senses have truthfully told me; indeed, it’s only by taking a second and closer look, or perhaps by biting it, that I can find out that it’s a fake at all. (2) Mistakes in acquired perception. It is Reid’s view, already noted, that “in all our senses, the acquired perceptions are many more than the original, especially in sight” [185a]. So although he doesn’t speak of the relative sizes of his four classes of ‘deceptions’, we can take it that this second class is much the largest. It is also Reid’s view (as we have seen) that no process of reasoning is involved in acquired perception, but he will not go to the stake for it here; if others want to insist that acquired perception is inferential, then its errors “will fall under the first class mentioned. If not, it makes a distinct class by itself”. Either way, “the errors of acquired perception are not properly fallacies of our senses” [336b].10 We can see that this latitude is reflected in Austin’s class (c), “where a wrong inference is made (cf. Reid’s first class) or a wrong construction put on things (cf. Reid’s second class).” Into this more or less commodious class go all the cases of trompe l’œil which artists can exploit. Reid gives his favourite example of the painting of a globe which tricks us because it has the distribution of light and colour which we are accustomed to see only on a real sphere [337a]. Again, Reid might have pointed here to the analogy he draws elsewhere between the contextual ambiguity of natural and of linguistic signs. He says in the Inquiry: “the same appearance to the eye, may, in different circumstances, indicate different things. Therefore, when the circumstances are unknown upon which the interpretation of the signs depends, their meaning must be ambiguous” [194a]. The point is that “the language of nature” is not telling us lies – we can in principle avoid the deception by attending to the circumstances of the appearance (as Austin insists we typically do by seeing, for instance, the frame as well as the picture). However, the great majority of members of this class are not deliberately contrived optical illusions but ordinary ‘acquired’ misperceptions, like the moon illusion, and mistaken judgements of the size and proximity of objects – seen, perhaps, through fog. We know how to explicate these from the Inquiry. Fog

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture 55 degrades colours and makes outlines indistinct, so that the same visible appearance can “suggest”, indifferently, a sea-gull at seventy yards or a man on horseback at half a mile [191b]. The conditions deprive us of the subliminal clues we need to know whether magnitude or distance is basic. Again, ambiguity of sign comes in, but this time there’s a disanalogy with language; words are only arbitrarily connected with what they signify, but, pace Berkeley, the same is not true of the connections between magnitude (real and apparent) and distance. This common sort of case overlaps Austin’s class (b), “where the medium – or more generally the conditions – of perception are in some way abnormal or off-colour” (Austin: 13). (3) “A third class of errors, ascribed to the fallacy of the senses, proceeds from ignorance of the laws of nature” [337b]. Reid has some colourful examples of this kind of error (those produced by “whispering galleries, speaking trumpets … [and] … Gastriloquists”), but the most familiar sorts of ‘illusion’ that belong here are those old friends, the straight stick that appears bent when partly immersed in water, and images seen in mirrors. Such effects result when rays of light, which normally run straight, are “reflected, refracted, or inflected in their passage from the object to the eye, according to certain fixed laws of nature”. Reid and Austin have very similar things to say about such cases. On sticks, Austin asks “what is wrong, what is even faintly surprising, in the idea of a stick’s being straight but looking bent sometimes?” (Austin: 29); and Reid points out that harpoon fishermen quickly learn to allow for displacement and ‘aim off’ when throwing their spears. And on mirrors, Austin says that only “a baby or a savage” would be tempted “to go round the back” to look for his mirror-image (Austin: 31), while Reid says that “even a child soon gets the better of this deception, and knows that he sees himself only” [338b]. ‘Upon the whole’, as Reid would say, “the ignorant may be deceived by … [these cases]; but to those who are acquainted with the principles of optics, they give just and true information” [338b]. (4) Reid’s fourth and final class comprises the only “deceptions of sense” which he allows are properly so called; these are “such as proceed from some disorder or preternatural state, either of the external organ or of the nerves and brain, which are [the] internal organs of perception” [338b]. This group corresponds to Austin’s class “(a), cases where the sense-organ is deranged or abnormal or in some way or other not functioning properly” (Austin: 13). Reid’s view is that once these cases of genuine perceptual error have been isolated, they can be seen not to trouble an account of the overall reliability of the senses. As exceptional, as pathological, they cannot be used as a basis from which to generalize, after the manner of the argument from illusion. Austin makes the same point, but with a distinction not used (and apparently not noticed) by Reid. The argument from illusion, he says, trades on not distinguishing ‘illusions’, where things appear otherwise than they are, from ‘delusions’, where things appear which have no basis whatever in reality. These latter “are a much more serious matter – something is really wrong, and what’s more, wrong with the person who has them” (Austin: 24). In other words (and as Reid would certainly agree), we may expect a philosophical theory of perception to be able to explain,

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or explain away, the ‘illusions’ in classes (1), (2), and (3), but for the ‘delusions’ in class (4) the proper treatment is not philosophical but medical. We now have the bare bones (and some of the flesh) of Reid’s theory of perception in front of us. But before turning in the next section to examine Cummins’s argument that the fallibilism inherent in it is inconsistent with Reid’s foundationalism, we should pause to spell out exactly what Reid’s ‘fallibilism’ about the power of perception consists in. Plainly, it must consist in his denial that perception is infallible. Let us recall our definition of ‘infallible’ from Chapter 2: A proposition p is infallibly believed by X when X believes that p if, and only if, p is true. In the case of a perceptual belief – say the belief ‘there is a tree before me’ – I infallibly believe it when, and only when, there really is a tree before me. The tree’s presence, in other words, is necessary and sufficient for my infallible belief. Clearly Reid, like any man of common sense, denies both these conditions of infallibilism. The tree’s presence is nowhere near sufficient for my perception because adverse conditions may stand in the way (sometimes literally) of my omnipercipience. Neither is it necessary, because I might be subject to one of Reid’s class (4) “disorders”. So Reid’s fallibilism about the perceptual faculty amounts to the commonsensical denial that it is perfect. It generalizes: “Our senses, our memory, and our reason are all limited and imperfect – this is the lot of humanity … .” But imperfection doesn’t imply fallaciousness: Superior natures may have intellectual powers which we have not, or such as we have in a more perfect degree, and less liable to accidental disorders; but we have no reason to think that God has given fallacious powers to any of his creatures. [335a]

The allegation of inconsistency We are now ready to come to grips with Cummins’s contention that there is a ‘deep inconsistency’ between Reid’s fallibilist theory of perception and its foundational first principle: Reid’s statement that perception is a first principle of contingent truths cannot be squared with the fact of perceptual error. (Cummins: 333) Cummins, we noted, examines several ways of reconciling the theory with the first principle, but finds them all either unsatisfactory in themselves, or not available to Reid. Only some major revision of the first principle, not attempted by Reid or, says Cummins, by anyone else, would suffice to resolve the difficulty.

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture 57 Such a revised principle would have (i) to reflect the fact of perceptual error, and (ii) to do “justice to men’s ability to discover and discount non-veridical perceptions” (Cummins: 339–40). Our aim in this section will be to show three things: first, that the alleged inconsistency in Reid is only superficial; second, that in any case two of the three escape routes from it which Cummins rejects are viable; and third, that Cummins’s two important desiderata for an analysis of perceptual knowledge are already largely present in Reid’s work. The first of the ways out of the alleged inconsistency examined by Cummins (which we shall call ‘Escape Route I’) focuses on the word “distinctly” in Reid’s principle, and claims that the principle is intended to apply not to all perceptions but only to distinct ones. “It could then be said that Reid admitted fallacious acts of perceiving, but only those which are not distinct” (Cummins: 337). Cummins says that this route is blocked by two obstacles: (a) ‘distinctness’ is, for Reid, a matter of degree; and (b) Reid was highly critical of Descartes’s attempt to use distinctness as a measure of truth. But surely these obstacles are not insuperable? We might say, provisionally, against (a) that the fact that distinctness is a matter of degree does not of itself rule it out as a perceptual criterion, since the veridicality of perception need not be an all-or-nothing affair. And against (b), there may be quite unCartesian senses of ‘distinct’ available to Reid (one such will be suggested below). We should note that Reid’s complaint is not against Descartes’s use of ‘distinctness’ as such, but against the vagueness that results from giving “the name of perception to every power of the human understanding” and then laying it down as a maxim that whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive is true [376b]. “It is difficult to know what [Descartes] understands by clear and distinct perception in this maxim” [328a]. Evidently there is nothing in this complaint that rules out the possibility, for Reid, of usefully applying ‘distinctness’ to the narrower class of sense perceptions. Whether he can fend off the objection that some maximally distinct perceptions may still be erroneous is, of course, another matter. But, on this proposal, Reid can at least state his fallibilism and his foundationalism without inconsistency. Escape Route II aims to keep Reid consistent by shrinking the class of perceptual acts so as to exclude the non-veridical. On this proposal, Reid regards only veridical perceptual acts as perceptual acts at all; his principle becomes an analytic truth which can sit undisturbed by the admission of so-called misperceptions, since these fall outside its scope. Although Cummins is surely right to reject Escape Route II, we may well feel that he rejects it for the wrong reason. To argue for Escape Route II is, he says, “to attribute to Reid the view that all so-called cases of perceptual error are actually cases in which an inference based on perception goes askew” (Cummins: 338). But, says Cummins, while this attribution represents an important part of Reid’s real view, it doesn’t represent it all since Reid also admits cases of “genuine perceptual error” including one of “original” perception. These extra admissions, for Cummins, are enough to block Escape Route II, conflicting as they do with the first principle. The objection to Cummins’s procedure here is that Escape Route II does not require the attribution to Reid of the view that all so-called cases of perceptual

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error are actually erroneous inferences, but only that some of them are.11 The remainder – Cummins’s embarrassing “cases of genuine perceptual error” – are just as non-veridical (and so just as excluded from the scope of the principle, on the interpretation being considered) as the fallacious inferences. They “proceed” (as we saw) “from some disorder or preternatural state, either of the external organ or of the nerves and brain, which are the internal organs of perception” [338b].12 Indeed, these two classes of excluded misperceptions suggest a possible extension for the class of ‘indistinct’ perceptions required by Escape Route I – we might define an indistinct perception disjunctively as one either arrived at inferentially, or proceeding from some disorder, etc. This definition, though rather unwieldy, at least manages to be more precise than Descartes’s, and to admit of degree – inferences can lead one more or less astray, and disorders can be more or less severe. Moreover, whether and to what extent a perception is indistinct in this sense is something that we, as perceivers, can often be aware of, at least in principle. So even if the defeating conditions occasionally go undetected, Reid’s account, on this interpretation, does make room for the discovery and discounting of most non-veridical perceptions. Whatever the merits of this last suggestion, Cummins looks in the wrong place for a reason to reject Escape Route II. The right place to look is Essay VI of the Intellectual Powers, Chapters 5 and 6, where Reid distinguishes between ‘first principles of contingent truths’ and ‘first principles of necessary truths’, before going on to give his enumerations of each kind. He puts first principle 5, with which we are concerned, firmly in the former class which means that he cannot be attempting, whether successfully or not, to protect his principle from counterexample by making it analytic in the way that Cummins suggests. This point is well made by T.J. Duggan, using Rylean terminology: “if he had been using “remembers” and “perceives” in their achievement senses, the opposite of these first principles would be impossible (contradictory) and consequently we would not have first principles of contingent truths, but rather first principles of necessary truths” (Duggan: 215). In other words, Reid is not after securing the infallibility for perception that could be cheaply bought by packing ‘success’ into its definition. When he talks of ‘perceptual acts’, he intends all perceptual acts, the failures as well as the successes. But this, of course, brings the alleged inconsistency into sharper focus: given that Reid is a fallibilist about perception, how can he at the same time lay down a first principle which apparently implies its infallibility? The failure of Escape Route II to make the theory of perception fit the first principle makes it urgent to see if, contrariwise, the first principle might be made to fit the theory of perception. This third possibility (Escape Route III) is, as Cummins puts it, “to deny that Reid’s statement that whatever is perceived is the case should be taken at face value” (Cummins: 338). But Cummins suggests only one way in which such an interpretation might be supported. We might choose, he says, to portray Reid as a purely descriptive epistemologist, whose interest is not so much in whether perceptual beliefs are true as in whether they are accepted as true; his first principle could then “be taken as the assertion that human beings structure their beliefs about the material world on or in accordance with the

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture 59 principle that basic perceptual beliefs are always true [whether in fact they are or not]” (Cummins: 338). But, as Cummins correctly observes, this interpretation will not do; it “resolves the original contradiction, but only by foisting on Reid a position he undoubtedly would have rejected. … [The] conclusion … that the ordinary man’s system of beliefs may be shot through with error … would have delighted Hume [but] Reid would not have knowingly accepted it” (Cummins: 339). However, to say this is not yet to dispose of Escape Route III. There is another way of making Reid’s first principle consistent with his fallibilism which does not involve him in any further inconsistency. To see this we need to go back to Essay II and to spell out what Reid takes to be going on when perceptual error occurs. The immediate objects of acts of perception, for Reid, are presently existing external objects. This threefold qualification distinguishes them from the objects of other mental acts: presently marks them off from the past objects of memory; existing separates them from the sometimes imaginary objects of conception; and external distinguishes them from the internal objects of consciousness [222a]. As we saw in the last section, for Reid, an act of perception contains two ingredients: an apprehensive conception of the object, and an immediate (i.e. non-inferred) belief in the object’s present existence outside him. This, in outline, is the full extent of his analysis of the objects and acts of perception; to say that X perceives Y is to say that X has a conception of and a belief in the current existence of an external object Y. And it is obvious that the analysis is comprehensive enough to include misperceptions – since “simple apprehensions” can have non-existent objects, and since beliefs can so plainly be false as well as true, the analysis might be said to be tailor-made to cope with illusory or delusive as well as veridical perceptual experience. Besides saying what, in his view, perceptions are, Reid offers a quasi-causal account of how they are produced. We cannot call the account straightforwardly causal because Reid thinks that, in strictness, it is not.13 Nevertheless, one cannot understand Reid’s account of the production of perceptions in any except causal terms: “our perception of objects is the result of a train of operations; some of which affect the body only, others affect the mind” [186b]. The last link in the train on the physical side is an impression on the organ of sense and the first link on the mental side is (except in the case of perception of visible figure) a sensation which then immediately “suggests” a conception (i.e. an apprehension) of and belief in the external existence of the perceived object. Although “we know not at all how they are connected together” [186b], we can say that “the perception and its corresponding sensation are produced at the same time. In our experience we never find them disjoined” [318b]. In veridical perception the sensation will be traceable back to the external object via the material impression which the object makes on the organ of sense. And the belief suggested by the sensation will be a true belief. But Reid stresses that the train of operations does not need an external object to start it: If the sensation is produced, the corresponding perception follows even when there is no object, and in that case is apt to deceive us. In like manner … when

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Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture the impression is made, from whatever cause, the corresponding sensation and perception immediately follow. [320b]

Here, once more, is ample evidence that when Reid talks of “perceptions” he means to include non-veridical as well as veridical ones. To be in a perceptual state of either sort is to be aware of certain ‘internal’ hallmarks – to be sensing in some way or other, and to have a conception of and belief in the present existence of some external object. But the fact that, exceptionally, some of these beliefs are false14 does not put in doubt the truth of most beliefs acquired in perception. On the contrary, Reid’s account of what sometimes goes wrong with the train of operations is parasitic on his account of what typically goes right with it – when, that is, “the proper circumstances concur” [328b]. Ignoring here the larger question of how adequate this is as a reply to the argument from illusion, we can put again Cummins’s more limited question how Reid’s first principle can be made to accommodate the fact of perceptual error. The first principle, we recall, states “that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be”. And Cummins remarks about it that “if we interpret this as a universal truth, as Reid encourages us to do, then there can be no non-veridical perceptions” (Cummins: 337, emphasis added). Then, as we saw, Cummins looks for, and fails to find, an adequate way of denying “that Reid’s statement that whatever is perceived is the case should be taken at face value” (Cummins: 338). Now, in an interesting paragraph at the end the second chapter of Essay II of the Intellectual Powers, Reid provides what is in effect an elaboration of the first principle which appears in Essay VI: we have reason to conclude in general – that, as the impressions on the organs, nerves, and brain, correspond exactly to the nature and conditions of the objects by which they are made, so our perceptions and sensations correspond to those impressions, and vary in kind, and in degree, as they vary. Without this exact correspondence, the information we receive by our senses would not only be imperfect, as it undoubtedly is, but would be fallacious, which we have no reason to think it is. [248a,b, emphasis added] Here is the qualification needed to Reid’s first principle to save him from inconsistency: we need to interpret it as a general truth, not a universal one. If we do so, we get something like the following paraphrase: we may assume without argument (since there are no good arguments against the assumption) that our perceptual beliefs in the main are true beliefs; to be in a perceptual state is to have good evidence for the truth of the beliefs involved in that state. The typical reliability of perception is consistent with its occasional unreliability. This is the most natural interpretation of the first principle if attention is paid to its context. For in Essay VI, chapter 5, many of the other eleven first principles

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture 61 of contingent truths are offered by Reid as holding only for the most part. Principle 6 says not that we have unlimited free will but only “that we have some degree of power over our actions”. In principle 9 the ability of ‘body language’ to express thought is restricted to “certain features of the countenance”, etc. and “certain thoughts”. Principle 10 has it only that “a certain regard [is] due to human testimony”, not that everyone always tells the truth. And principles 11 and 12, concerning the predictability of human behaviour and the course of nature, speak only of “probability, greater or less, according to circumstances”. It is clear, then, that Reidian first principles in general need not be all-or-nothing affairs. Cummins’s claim that Reid “encourages us” to interpret this one as a universal truth now looks implausible. It will be said, however, that this interpretation does depart from the “face value” of the first principle as worded, for there Reid does not make the qualification just recommended. He may not, indeed, explicitly emphasize its universal scope by saying “all those things do really exist”, but neither does he restrict it by saying “most of those things do really exist” as he should have done if that was what he meant. No doubt this is correct. But to concede this is to concede at most an authorial oversight on Reid’s part, not a deep inconsistency of the kind that Cummins has in mind. In sum, we can see that Reid keeps his fallibilism consistent with his foundationalism by writing foundational principles none of which implies infallibilism. Reid’s first principles lack the certainty that ‘classical’ (or more particularly ‘Cartesian’) foundationalists in the way of ideas claim for theirs – and we can hazard that this is a matter of regret for Reid. No doubt he would have liked it if his first principles could have been made absolutely demon-proof; but they cannot be, and so he offers them anyway, faute de mieux. The three first principles that expressly vouch for the natural faculties say of those faculties, not that they are infallible (that way lies unanswerable scepticism) but that they are “not fallacious”. ‘Fallacious’ faculties would be faculties that tended in general towards error – they might, for all that, yield some truths. But just as the overall unreliability of fallacious faculties would be consistent with their sometimes getting things right, so the claimed overall reliability of non-fallacious faculties is perfectly compatible with their occasional error. Reid’s claim for the intellectual powers, then, enshrined in principles 3, 5 and 7, is not a hopeless claim for their infallibility, but a more guarded claim for their overall reliability. But it is none the less a foundationalist claim for that. ‘Foundationalism’, as a generic term, simply describes a structural feature common to certain theories of knowledge – it imposes no constraints on the nature of the foundations referred to. A position is distinctively foundationalist simply if it provides that some beliefs are justified (or known) only by depending in some way on other ‘basic’ beliefs which are justified (or known) without support. Reid’s position plainly fits this bill. Just as much can common sense beliefs be ‘foundational’, in this sense, in springing from merely reliable human faculties as from infallible angelic ones. This is not to say that a ‘reliabilist’ epistemology will be easy to make out in Reid’s texts,15 or – once established as his – be easy

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to sustain in principle against sceptical attacks. To the detail of these matters we turn in the next chapter.

Notes 1 A.N. Prior calls this “Reid’s first ‘master-thesis’” (Prior: 116). 2 In his recent book, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, Nicholas Wolterstorff warns against the danger of misunderstanding what Reid means by “conception”: “Between us and Reid looms Kant, who powerfully shaped our understanding of what we call conception. We automatically connect conception with concepts. But much of what Reid says makes no sense if that is how we understand his locution, ‘having a conception of ’” (Wolterstorff 2001: 9). The correct understanding of the locution, in Reid’s own terms, is ‘simply apprehending’ – or in Wolterstorff’s helpful phrase, “having a mental grip on” (passim). 3 Reid’s “second ‘master-thesis’” (Prior: 117). 4 Reid distinguishes at least three senses of the word ‘cause’: (a) a ‘strict’ sense in which a cause can only be an agent; (b) a ‘scientific’ sense in which causes are the antecedents in laws of nature; (c) a mistaken ‘popular’ sense in which, for example, bricks are thought to cause windows to break. It is of course the nomological sense (b) that he intends here. (See note 13 to this chapter, and note 1 to Chapter 10 below). 5 I find Maddens’s ‘nativistic’ interpretation of Reid’s sign-language persuasive, but I still have some residual sympathy for the thought behind Hamilton’s complaint. This, I think, is Reid’s fault – his analogy between artificial linguistic signs and natural sensory signs invites such complaints. To take an example of Reid’s: neither the word gold nor the tactile sensation of hardness has any similitude to what it signifies, yet, says Reid, the only difference between these two signs is that in the first the suggestion is the effect of habit and custom while in the second it is instinctive [121b]. But this is not what Reid should have said; there is this further difference that in the linguistic case, though not in the sensory one, we perceive the word ‘gold’, either by sight or by hearing. It is true that in so doing we come into a kind of cognitive contact with the substance, gold, but the contact is patently less ‘direct’ than when we see or feel the precious stuff itself. Reid intends us to ignore this feature of linguistic signs, and to concentrate on how they, like sensations, lead the mind beyond themselves to what they signify while themselves going unnoticed. But his readers can hardly be blamed if they spot this other quite obvious feature of verbal signification and think it applies also to sensory significatory signification, the two being exactly analogous according to Reid. 6 Reid here anticipates H.P. Grice’s distinction between ‘natural meaning’ (e.g. red sky at night means fine weather), and ‘non-natural meaning’ (e.g. a red light means ‘stop’) (See “Meaning”, Phil. Review, vol. LXVI, 1957: 377–88). 7 It may need stressing, however, that in Reid’s view there is no process of inference involved in acquired perception: “Perception, whether original or acquired, implies no exercise of reason; and is common to men, children, idiots, and brutes” [185b]; “This power which we acquire of perceiving things by our senses, which originally we should not have perceived, is not the effect of any reasoning on our part: it is the result of our constitution, and of the situations in which we happen to be placed” [332b]. 8 Jonathan Bennett writes in Locke, Berkeley, Hume: “Someone should write a book on the epistemology of the sense of touch” (Bennett 1971: 102). In view of the primacy given to tactile sensations in the Inquiry, perhaps we could say that Reid’s is such a book? 9 Several commentators suggest another Reidian influence on contemporary philosophy here: in quite an obvious sense, Reid’s “original principles” are the forerunners of Chomsky’s ‘hard-wired’ programmes, they say. See, for example, Daniels: 134; Redekop: 37–9.

Reid’s fallibilist/foundationalist mixture 63 10 At this point Reid makes a remark which is apparently inconsistent with his settled view of the non-inferential nature of acquired perception: “Acquired perception is not properly the testimony of those senses which God hath given us, but a conclusion drawn from what the senses testify. …” But that Reid, in his keenness to uphold the reliability of the testimony of the senses, is here using the word conclusion in a loose (non-inferential) sense is made clear when he continues “That such conclusions are formed even in infancy, no man can doubt” [336b]. 11 These being Reid’s class (1) of so-called “fallacies of the senses”, discussed in the last section. 12 Reid’s class (4) errors. 13 There are two sorts of reason for this: (a) as a dualist he thinks there is “nothing more ridiculous than to imagine that any motion or modification of matter should produce thought” [253b]. He regards perception as a “power” of the mind, not an effect upon it; and (b) Reid can find no necessary connection between types of perception and the various means of sensing: “perhaps we might have been so made as to taste with our fingers, to smell with our ears, and to hear by the nose” [187b]. See also note 1 in Chapter 10 below. 14 For example, when ‘phantom’ pain is felt in an amputated limb, or when “one who has the jaundice sees a body yellow, which is really white” [320b]. 15 Alston, for one, thinks it can’t be done: “I don’t want to suggest that Reid puts forward a reliability account of the nature of knowledge, for he proffers no such account at all” (Alston 1985: 437, emphasis added).

5

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism

1. Innateness and truth The two chief things that Reid wishes to say about his first principles are that they are innate, and that they yield true beliefs. In his published writings, Reid very often runs these two claims together, which leads commentators to conclude that he is confused about the distinction between them.1 The confusion seems to be present in the following typical passage: Opinions that appear so early in the minds of men that they cannot be the effect of education or of false reasoning, have a good claim to be considered as first principles. Thus, the belief we have, that the persons about us are living and intelligent beings, is a belief for which [i.e. for the truth of which], perhaps, we can give some reason, when we are able to reason; but we had this belief before we could reason, and before we could learn it by instruction. It seems, therefore, to be an immediate effect of our constitution [i.e. innate]. [441a] Yet Reid is well aware that to say first principles are innate is not the same as to say they are true – as we can see from this entry in an unpublished notebook: Why do I believe first principles? One philosopher says, Because I am so constituted that I must believe them. This, say some, is the only possible reason that can be given for the belief … But, say others, this is a very bad reason; it makes truth a vague thing which depends on constitution … How shall we judge of this controversy? Answer, this question admits of two meanings. 1. For what reason do you believe first principles? 2. To what cause is your belief of first principles to be ascribed? (Quoted in McCosh: 475, emphasis added) In the present chapter, where our aim is to lay bare the structure implicit in Reid’s response to scepticism, we need to insist on a sharper distinction than he usually troubles to make between these two claims for first principles:

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 65 (1) The Innateness Claim: “… there are certain principles … which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them – these are what we call the principles of common sense” [108b]. (2) The Truth Claim: First principles generate, if they are not themselves already, true beliefs: “… to suppose a general deviation from truth among mankind in things self-evident, of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable” [440b]. With this distinction made explicit, we can clearly see the extent and difficulty of Reid’s anti-sceptical task. There is no dispute with Hume about an Innateness Claim as such.2 Just as Reid says “the power of judging in self-evident propositions … may be compared to the power of swallowing our food. It is purely natural” [434b], so Hume says “nature by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel” (Treatise: 183). What Reid has to do, it is plain, is to forge some sort of link between the Innateness Claim and the Truth Claim. Without such a link, his first principles – which we have at the moment as mere psychological laws of assent to selfevident propositions – will lack any epistemological bite, and the sceptical challenge to their warrant will remain unmet. How does Reid forge such a link? This is what in Chapter 3 we called ‘the most crucial interpretative question about Reid’s response to scepticism’, and the time has come to address it. Broadly, two sorts of answer have been proposed to this question, one by Reid’s friends and one by his foes. On the one hand, commentators more or less unsympathetic to Reid, from Sir William Hamilton3 onwards, have tended to assert that Reid seeks to underwrite the truth of his first principles by a neoCartesian appeal to God’s veracity.4 We shall examine this line of commentary in the next section, and find it wanting. On the other hand, there is the influential view, propounded over many years by Reid’s most prominent current champion, Keith Lehrer, that Reid’s great anti-sceptical innovation is to combine psychology and epistemology in a “metaprinciple”: “the truth gap is closed by that principle giving rise to knowledge” (Lehrer 1998: 25). In the middle section of this chapter we shall examine this new orthodoxy only to reject it, too. Lehrer’s notion of a metaprinciple, we shall argue, is both suspect in itself and untenable as an interpretation of Reid. Our own alternative description of how Reid closes the truth gap will be offered in the final section.

2.

Reid and God

The question whether, and if so to what extent, God is detachable from Reid’s philosophy has seldom been explored by commentators.5 Perhaps this is because what we might call the ‘detachability thesis’ seems so obviously false. The many hundreds of references that Reid makes to the Almighty can make the unfortunately named Professor E.F. Boring’s cursory dismissal of Reid’s as “a good doctrine for a Presbyterian philosopher”6 look like a sufficient verdict on the matter.

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Or perhaps it is that this superficial dependence on God is reflected at a deeper level in Reid’s arguments, so that the detachability thesis is again false, though less obviously so. This is the view of more thorough critics such as Norman Daniels and Richard Popkin: Reid’s only defence against the skeptical outcome of his nativism – namely that our constitutions might lead us to systematically false beliefs – is his belief that God would not deceive us. (Daniels: 117) [Reid’s] … commonsense realism came to constitute an anti-skeptical philosophy that people could live by, whose truth ultimately rested on a conviction of God’s veracity. (Popkin: 68) Similar opinions have been put forward by F. Ueberweg,7 D.F. Norton,8 and S.A. Grave,9 “all of whom”, says Louise Marcil-Lacoste, “think that the reliance on a Deity is a basic presupposition of Reid’s epistemology and doctrine” (Marcil-Lacoste: 146). Apparently in opposition to this consensus (but only apparently, as we shall see) is a version of the detatchability thesis which finds voice in the work of Keith Lehrer, and of the Robinson/Beauchamp partnership: It is an interesting exercise for the modern reader to substitute the principle of natural selection for Reid’s principle of divine benevolence. By so doing, one will obtain a thoroughly modern doctrine …10 (Lehrer 1989: 196) Reid’s constitutionalism … is naturalistic – even Darwinian; its explanation is rooted in the adaptive success of all animal species … Organisms lacking [the] common-sense principles of perception and action will simply perish, and humans are so constituted that they cannot but believe them. That Reid attributes survival to a providential God is beside the point. (Robinson and Beauchamp: 336) A third reason can now be suggested for the neglect of this question. Perhaps it is not that the answer is too obvious to have needed a careful spelling out, but that the question contains a tangle of sub-questions to which no single answer can be given. A start will have been made at untangling them if we can understand why the opposition between the two sorts of view just aired is more apparent than real. Let us attend to the distinction, just drawn, between the Innateness Claim and the Truth Claim. When we do so it becomes obvious why these apparently opposed opinions about the detachability of God from Reid are not really in conflict. When Reid says that “it is necessary for our preservation that we should believe many things before we can reason”, and that this belief “is regulated by certain principles, which are parts of our constitution … animal principles, or instinctive principles”

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 67 [333a], he is articulating the Innateness Claim (or, alternatively, talking about causes of belief ). There is nothing here for an evolutionary naturalist to disagree with. Because the presence of these instinctive principles is as well explained by Darwinism as by theism, the Innateness Claim is fully detachable from God. When it comes to the Truth Claim (or reasons for belief), of course, the case is quite different. Although some evolutionary naturalists, such as Quine and Dennett, are prepared to argue from the innateness of selected faculties to their overall reliability,11 many are not. They share in “the horrid doubt” voiced by Darwin himself “whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy”.12 For the theist, on the other hand, there is the prospect of a Cartesian-style guarantee of man’s inborn faculties from a non-deceiving God. So one question about the detachability of God from Reid’s system becomes the question whether he, like Descartes, relies on God to guarantee his Truth Claim. If he does so, then Daniels and Popkin are right and there can be no detachability whatever. This can be thought of as the strongest statement of the ‘non-detachability thesis’. Further theses of this sort are arguable. In fact there are four possible views about the detachability or otherwise of Reid’s principles from God, which it will be useful now to label, and then to discuss, on a scale of progressively increasing detachability, like this: ‘strong non-detachability’, ‘weak non-detachability’, ‘weak detachability’, and ‘strong detachability’. (i) Descartes’s strong non-detachability; a non-deceiving God guarantees the faculties There are many passages in Reid that make this sort of interpretation tempting, for example this one, where he talks of “the universal administration”: Common Sense and Reason have both one author; that Almighty Author in all whose other works we observe a consistency, uniformity, and beauty which charm and delight the understanding: there must, therefore, be some order and consistency in the human faculties, as well as in other parts of his workmanship. [127a] But there are several ways of showing that the Daniels/Popkin reading cannot be sustained. First, there is a textual point. Reid notices and deplores the circularity involved in Descartes’s attempt to support the truth of his clear and distinct ideas: … he endeavours to prove the being of a Deity, who is no deceiver; whence he concludes, that the faculties he had given him are true and worthy to be trusted. It is strange that so acute a reasoner did not perceive that in this reasoning there is evidently a begging of the question. For, if our faculties be fallacious, why may they not deceive us in this reasoning as well as in others? [447b]

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Of course this is not conclusive, any more than is Woozley’s well-known observation on one of Locke’s objections to Malebranche: “It is scarcely credible both that Locke should be able to see and to state so clearly the fundamental objection [to the representative theory of perception] and that he should have held the theory himself ”13 (Woozley 1964: 27). But it does suggest that Reid is well aware that some non-circular grounding of his nativism is required. In any case there are more substantial points relevant here, to do with Reid’s fallibilism. Reid’s Truth Claim is not absolute in the way that Descartes’s is. As we noted in Chapter 1, Reid is always prepared (or at least should always be prepared) to entertain the possibility of global deception, even at God’s hands: How or when I got … first principles … I know not … but I am sure they are parts of my constitution, and that I cannot throw them off … That our sensations of touch indicate something external, extended, figured, hard or soft, is not a deduction of reason, but a natural principle. The belief of it, and the very conception of it, are equally parts of our constitution. If we are deceived in it, we are deceived by him that made us, and there is no remedy. [130a,b, emphasis added] Nevertheless, thinks Reid, his Truth Claim is credible enough to be foundational in his non-classical sense; it may not be beyond all conceivable doubt but it is beyond all reasonable doubt. Reid’s new way of doing epistemology means that guarantees can be done away with; and if no guarantee is presupposed, a fortiori God’s guarantee isn’t presupposed. Thus, by taking Reid’s fallibilism seriously, and by working the “no remedy” passage quite hard (that is, by taking it as more than just a piece of rhetoric), we can put at least some space between Reid and the Cartesians, whose reliance on God is total. But perhaps the chief objection to the Daniels/Popkin interpretation is that it foists an internalism on Reid which is not properly his. The best way to show this is to quote Reid himself on perceptual belief: Shall we say, then, that this belief is the inspiration of the Almighty? I think this may be said in a good sense; for I take it to be the immediate effect of our constitution, which is the work of the Almighty. But, if inspiration be understood to imply a persuasion of its coming from God, our belief of the objects of sense is not inspiration; for a man would believe his senses though he had no notion of a Deity. He who is persuaded that he is the workmanship of God, and that it is a part of his constitution to believe his senses, may think that a good reason to confirm his belief. But he had the belief before he could give this or any other reason for it. [329b] This passage is not yet a full-blown externalist justification of perceptual beliefs; but in its outright disavowal of theistic internalism, it contains at least a strong

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 69 hint that the justification, when it comes, will be of an externalistic sort. As will be suggested in the next few pages, there may be subtler ways in which Reid’s epistemology relies on his theism. (Perhaps his assumption that nature is regular amounts to an assumption that God wouldn’t tell us lies in “the language of nature”.) But the blatant attempt to link the Innateness Claim and the Truth Claim for first principles via belief in a non-deceiving God is not one that can be pinned on Reid. The chief difficulty with Reid’s position as just characterized is that it will leave the sceptic feeling that he has not been met. Reid, we know, thinks that although there are plenty of unreasonable grounds, based on “the ideal theory”, for doubting the Truth Claim, there are no reasonable ones. But, we can say, not all sceptical arguments stem from the ideal theory – in particular the argument from error does not. Now whether we agree with Reid that the argument from error is not strong enough to overturn belief in the Truth Claim may depend, at least in part, on how we feel about God. For all that has been said so far, Reid might still agree with Alvin Plantinga that “naturalistic epistemology flourishes best in the garden of supernaturalistic metaphysics” (Plantinga: 237). Which brings us to consider a second form of non-detachability. (ii) Plantinga’s weak non-detachability: God in the foundations Plantinga’s own kind of “naturalistic epistemology” is developed in his book Warrant and Proper Function (1993), the middle volume in his recently completed trilogy. Although, he tells us, he is “not entering the lists in order to provide a satisfactory interpretation of Reid’s thought”, his own account is much influenced by Reid’s.14 In a nutshell, Plantinga holds that “warrant” – a quality that comes in degrees, enough of which is what distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief – is inextricably bound up with the notion of “proper function”. Just as Reid says that “as we do not judge of the natural constitution of the body from the disorders or diseases to which it is subject … so neither ought we to judge of the natural powers of the mind from its disorders, but from its sound state” [259a], so Plantinga maintains that a belief has warrant only if it is the product of mature and properly functioning faculties. And where Reid adds that, to work properly, the natural powers of the mind require only that “the proper circumstances concur” [328b], Plantinga specifies that they must be operating in an appropriate environment – “one for which … [they] … are designed – by God, or evolution, or both” (Plantinga: 7).15 So far, so neutral, between evolutionary naturalism and theism. To see where Plantinga’s “supernaturalistic metaphysics” comes in, we can go back to Reid on Descartes. Reid’s remarks on the illegitimacy of Descartes’s manoeuvre, quoted above, continue: Every kind of reasoning for the veracity of our faculties, amounts to no more than taking their own testimony for their veracity … [447b]

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Similarly, Plantinga says: Suppose … you find yourself with the doubt that our cognitive faculties produce truth: you can’t quell that doubt by producing an argument about God and his veracity, or indeed any argument at all; for the argument, of course, will be under as much suspicion as its source. (Plantinga: 237) According to Plantinga the evolutionary naturalist is bound to find himself in this position after reflecting on Darwin’s Doubt:16 But the theist has nothing impelling him in the direction of such skepticism in the first place. (Plantinga: 237) Now perhaps here Plantinga has given a clear expression of Reid’s condition as well as his own. Reid thinks there are no good reasons for doubting his Truth Claim – but perhaps without God there would be. That is to say, it may be that Reid’s doubts about the truth of our faculties only vanish at a certain point because of his implicit assumption that they are the product of an intelligent designer. If so, then Reid, although not indeed relying on a full-blown divine guarantee of the Cartesian sort (‘parts and labour’), does seem to be helping himself to something less comprehensive from the same source (‘parts only’). His theistic assumptions, on this view, are non-detachable since they are required to stave off doubts which would otherwise persist. In passing, we should note here something that will become important for our discussion later – that there can be a doubt parallel to Darwin’s for the theist. Just as, as Patricia Churchland puts it, the most that natural selection ensures is success in “the four ‘F’s – feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing … truth … definitely taking the hindmost” – so the theist can’t rule out that a paternal God might give us the beliefs that are good for us to have, rather than always true ones. (It may, for example, materially improve a patient’s prospects of surviving a serious illness if he has unrealistically optimistic beliefs about his chances of pulling through.) So it’s not just theism, but a particular version of theism that’s needed to make the link between the existence of God and the truth of our natural beliefs.17 Now Plantinga, of course, doesn’t want to detach his theistic assumptions from his theory of knowledge, and neither does Reid. On the contrary. But since we are nevertheless investigating the extent to which Reid’s, at any rate, might be detached, we should ask whether, despite the close doctrinal parallels between them, Reid’s dependence on God is any less crucial than Plantinga’s. There is an important reason for saying that it is. Plantinga enthusiastically endorses what he calls “Reidian Foundationalism”. He agrees with Reid “that many kinds of beliefs can be properly basic, in addition to those that the classical foundationalist countenances”. But he departs from Reid to the extent of including belief in God in the foundations:

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 71 In Warranted Christian Belief, the sequel to this work, I shall argue that … it is plausible to follow John Calvin in thinking belief in God can also be properly basic. (Plantinga: 183) Now it seems fair to say that a system which includes belief in God as foundational must, by definition, exhibit greater reliance on that belief than one, like Reid’s, which does not. Perhaps, then, we should consider a third category of relation between these things – one which this time offers at least the prospect of some detachability – in which Reid might be better placed. (iii) A ‘weak detachability’: God proved from the foundations It is clear that Reid does not think that the existence of God has to be taken on faith. Rather, it can be proved by the “argument from final causes”, which “of all arguments for the being … of the Deity … in all ages has made the strongest impression upon candid and thinking minds”. He reduces it to a syllogism with two premises: First, That design and intelligence in the cause, may, with certainty, be inferred from marks or signs of it in the effect … The second … That there are in fact the clearest marks of design and wisdom in the works of nature; and the conclusion is, That the works of nature are the effects of a wise and intelligent Cause. [460b–61a, emphasis original] The thing to note here is that the first premise is, verbatim, one of Reid’s “first principles of necessary truths” [457b]. So that although he is wheeling out an old argument, he is using it in a new way – to prove the existence of God from a common sense principle that already has foundational status, rather than trying to validate common sense beliefs on the basis of God. Reid considers Hume’s objection that “the universe is a singular effect, and, [that] therefore, we can draw no conclusion from it, whether it may have been made by wisdom or not” [461b].18 About whether this objection is aimed at premise (1) or premise (2) or both, Reid is not clear, but he deals with it as with an attack on the argument as a whole. What Reid says is not easy to follow but it seems to boil down to this. Hume objects, contra premise (2), that experience cannot show us signs of design in the world because the world is a singular effect. But Hume also objects, contra the first principle, premise (1), that even if the effect were multiple there would be no proper inference from it to a designer/ cause; we don’t observe gods creating worlds. Reid’s implied defence is that he’s already agreed that the first principle, like all first principles, cannot be got from experience or from reasoning. But where Hume thinks that this lack of either kind of respectable source is sufficient to condemn the proposition, Reid thinks that the same lack is enough to establish it, by elimination, as a self-evident first

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principle. As such, it is fit to function as a premise in a deductive argument; and it stands on all fours with another first principle – that concerning other minds: It seems, then, that the man who maintains that there is no force in the argument from final causes, must, if he will be consistent, see no evidence of the existence of any intelligent being but himself. [461b] It can seem as if Reid has shot himself in the foot here by allowing that his argument from design can stand or fall with as paradigmatically weak an argument as that from one’s own case, by analogy, to the existence of other minds. But he may not have done so. To see why, we need to look at principle 8 – “That there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom we converse”. Qua first principle, this proposition should neither require nor admit of proof. But Reid provides one anyway,19 in the form of a transcendental argument: The knowledge of … [principle 8] … is absolutely necessary to our receiving any improvement by means of instruction and example; and, without these means of improvement, there is no ground to think we should ever be able to acquire the use of our reasoning powers. [449a] Perhaps, then, when Reid declares that if the argument from final causes fails, so does the argument for other minds, he is being less complacent than may appear. He intends the last-quoted passage but one as a reductio. If, in response to it, an obstinate Humean solipsist were to say ‘Quite!’, Reid would feel he still had principle 8 to fall back on as an unsupported but self-evident truth. Acknowledgement of the fact that Reid seeks to validate belief in God on the basis of common sense principles, and not conversely, makes it tempting to think of his proof of God’s existence as a detachable spin-off from, or bonus which comes with, the philosophy of common sense. This would be a mistake. True, Reid does say: He who is persuaded that he is the workmanship of God, and that it is part of his constitution to believe his senses, may think that a good reason to confirm his belief. But he had the belief before he could give this or any other reason for it. [329a] But the relevance of the last sentence, and the many like it, is only to the Innateness Claim. Where, as in the first sentence, the Truth Claim is made, it is very often hard to see how an appeal to God can be avoided. Reid may not require a copper-bottomed guarantee, with Descartes, nor yet an anti-sceptical gravitational pull, with Plantinga, but some reliance on the deity seems to be ineradicably there. To get clearer about what it might be, we do well to look again at the

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 73 work of Louise Marcil-Lacoste. In her view (which we endorsed in Chapter 3) “Reid’s appeal to common sense is an appeal to induction” – an appeal which, obviously enough, can only succeed if there is regularity in nature for induction to get a purchase on. But, as Marcil-Lacoste further points out, Reid never discusses the connection between his inductive method and his assumption that this regularity obtains beyond our direct experience of it. And there seems to be no getting away from the fact that, although his method gives him a way of proving God’s existence without blatant Cartesian circularity, his assumption of regularity in nature can’t be positively supported independently of his belief in God. Marcil-Lacoste again: On this general question, we do not find a set of methodological provisions that would parallel Reid’s alternative to the Cartesian method. For example, Reid offers no methodological means to make sure that the general cycle of his argument is not circular: we can prove that God exists on the basis of natural laws of self-evidence, which we discover in assuming that there is an order in nature and in respecting such order which is guaranteed by the existence of a Designer. (Marcil-Lacoste: 149, emphasis original) In the sense, then, in which Reid’s Truth Claim may not even be ‘weakly’ detachable from his version of theism, it can seem as if Professor Boring may have been right to say that Reid’s was “a good doctrine for a Presbyterian philosopher” after all. But rather than leave matters there, let us turn briefly to the sort of ‘methodological provision’ that Reid could have offered in a different age, before asking, in conclusion, how congenial he might have found it. (iv) Reichenbach’s strong detachability: induction without God One way of avoiding any suspicion of circularity in Reid’s undeclared connection between belief in order in nature and belief in the existence of God would be to weaken his assumptions to a sort of Reichenbachian agnosticism about both. The so-called “pragmatic” justification of induction, which Reichenbach first proposed,20 makes no assumptions about the uniformity of nature. Rather, it offers a justification for the use of the “straight rule” which posits that the same proportions hold in a whole class as in an observed sample of that class. The claim is not that the straight rule will lead to results which are probably true, but, more guardedly, that persistent use of the straight rule will sooner or later lead to the discovery of true regularities or laws of nature (expressed as limiting frequencies) if they are there to be found. Like Pascal’s Wager, it is put forward as the best available alternative, though it carries no guarantee. As one of this approach’s subsequent champions, Wesley Salmon, has said, “We have … everything to gain and nothing to lose by using induction. If induction fails, no other method could possibly succeed” (Salmon: 86).

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Waiving the important point, emphasized above, that Reid is not looking for a non-theistic justification of induction, we can ask: how would Reid react to Reichenbach’s suggestion? On the one hand we might expect him to be hostile: he’d see that he couldn’t base even a probabilistic argument for God’s existence on an inductive method thus ‘pragmatically’ justified. On the other hand, Salmon’s last sentence just quoted bears a striking resemblance to Reid’s remark: “if we are deceived in it, we are deceived by Him that made us, and there is no remedy”. It is true that Reichenbach’s and Salmon’s fallibilism far outstrips Reid’s. But it may be that by working the “no remedy” passage very hard indeed (that is, by taking it as the serious entertainment of the possibility of divine deception), it might be possible to pull Reid round to some sort of pragmatism21 – presumably of a ‘reformist’ stripe (like Peirce’s) rather than a ‘revolutionary’ one (like Dewey’s).22 The trouble with this suggestion is that, like Harry Frankfurt’s controversial “subjectivist” reading of Descartes,23 it rests on a slender textual base. Perhaps Reid’s “no remedy” passage is like the passage from the Second Replies (CSM II: 103) of which Frankfurt makes so much (to the effect, roughly, that we shouldn’t worry if what appears true to us appears false to God or an angel). That passage is isolated and at odds with almost everything else that Descartes says.24 Similarly with the “no remedy” passage. I can find only one other place in his published work where Reid overtly treats God’s veracity as an open question.25 It may be, then, that this fourth suggestion should be quietly dropped.

In summarizing the results of these four sub-sections, we should admit that some of them have lacked definiteness. Our one hard-and-fast conclusion has been that Reid does not attempt to link innateness and truth in the old and discredited Cartesian way. Apart from this, we have left it open whether, and if so to what extent, Reid’s epistemology may rely on his theism in more roundabout ways. (We shall return to these important matters in the final chapter of this book.) Still, the results overall have been useful, chiefly in steering us away from ‘internalism’ and towards ‘externalism’ in our search for a correct account of how Reid links the Innateness Claim and the Truth Claim. The promoter of the next interpretation to be considered – Keith Lehrer – would regard this as a vice, not a virtue. Among the recommendations that Lehrer finds for the idea of a Reidian ‘metaprinciple’ is its ability somehow to make these and other important items of the epistemological stock-in-trade look irrelevant: Is the legacy of Reid foundationalism or coherentism, externalism or internalism? My answer is that Reid saw these as false dichotomies – which they are. … A correct empiricism and philosophy of common sense must transcend them. (Lehrer 1998: 16)

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 75 We shall see, after a fashion, how the metaprinciple might be thought a mixture of externalism (causal production of conviction) and internalism (information vouching for truth). But as to how it ‘transcends’ these categories, let alone why it “must transcend them”, Lehrer will leave us in the dark.

3. Reid’s supposed “metaprinciple” Readers of Keith Lehrer’s many valuable writings on Reid will be familiar with the notion that there is a highly important “metaprinciple” among Reid’s principles of common sense. They might not, indeed, be able to say quite how the metaprinciple does the work that Lehrer supposes it to do, for (as I believe he would cheerfully concede) Lehrer has never succeeded in fully explaining it. But they may well have a keen sense that if it should turn out that there were no metaprinciple after all, some significant change would have to be made in the way Reid is expounded and criticized. In this section we shall first take note of the pivotal importance of the “metaprinciple” in the claims Lehrer makes on Reid’s behalf. Then we shall examine what Lehrer means by a ‘metaprinciple’, and pose a serious objection to it in the form of a dilemma. Lastly we shall arrive at a diagnosis of how Lehrer arrives at his reading of one of Reid’s principles as a metaprinciple, and propose an alternative reading of the principle on which it is stripped of its special status. The “metaprinciple” (or what he has lately taken to calling “the first first principle”26), for Lehrer, is the seventh of Reid’s twelve “first principles of contingent truths”. Lehrer introduces it thus: The most important first principle is a metaprinciple concerning all the faculties. [Emphasis added.] “Another first principle is – That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious.” (Lehrer 1989: 162) “The principle”, Lehrer tells us, “has a special position among the first principles”, and he quotes Reid’s words again: “If any truth can be said to be prior to all others in the order of nature, this seems to have the best claim (p. 448).” (Ibid.) And this priority is regarded by Lehrer as a triumph of Reidian epistemology: Is the first first principle a mere assumption, a dogmatic externalist conviction, on which the edifice of knowledge rests? Not at all. (Lehrer 1998: 24)

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The structure of Reid’s reliabilism Reid’s appreciation of the role of the first first principle as prior to all the rest, including the principles that tell us that perception, consciousness, memory, are not fallacious, was a fundamental insight. (Lehrer 1998: 23)

What, according to Lehrer, is the role of the first first principle, and how does its discharge of this role elevate it from the status of dogmatic externalist assumption? Its role is to plug what Lehrer sometimes calls “the truth gap” – or, in our terms, to link the Innateness Claim and the Truth Claim. The metaprinciple does this by tell[ing] us that first principles, in addition to [causally] producing conviction, provide us with [epistemological] information vouching for the truth of the conviction. (Lehrer 1989: 162, emphasis added) There is, admits Lehrer, some obscurity in this doctrine: That information is what we call evidence. We may not understand the nature of this information, we may not be able to say exactly what it is … (Lehrer 1989: 114) Nevertheless, in Lehrer’s view, the metaprinciple is at or near the pinnacle of Reid’s philosophical achievement: Reid thought that the basis of empiricism and common sense was the proper combination of psychology and epistemology articulated most cogently in the first first principle. The truth gap is closed by that principle giving rise to knowledge. My conclusion is that the first first principle combining psychology with epistemology to explain our knowledge of the internal and external world was and remains the best explanation of why and how faculties yield knowledge of the world of common sense and the extension of that world in science. (Lehrer 1998: 25) Let us have a closer look at the “first principles of contingent truths”, and at what Lehrer takes to be the relation within them between the metaprinciple and its fellows. It is clear from the opening quotation given above, and from the tenor of his whole discussion of this matter, that Lehrer takes the metaprinciple to range over all the faculties. What is a “faculty”, for Reid? I apprehend that the word faculty is most properly applied to those powers of the mind which are original and natural, and which make a part of the constitution of the mind. [221b, emphasis original]

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 77 “Faculties”, then, are “intellectual powers”; and at least two of them, namely memory and perception, have individual Essays devoted to them. Consciousness does not have its own Essay, but it is plainly an “intellectual power”, or “faculty”, in its own right, providing immediate knowledge of (i.e. giving rise to conceptions and beliefs regarding) our own mental operations, just as perception gives immediate knowledge of external objects, and memory, of past events. All three of these faculties – consciousness, memory, and perception – have individual “first principles of contingent truths” which apply to them, numbers 1, 3 and 5 respectively: 1. First, then, I hold, as a first principle, the existence of everything of which I am conscious … 3. Another first principle I take to be – That those things did really happen which I distinctly remember … 5. Another first principle is, That those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be. [442 ff.] Now Lehrer has it that Reid requires and supplies another and more fundamental first principle to govern all of these faculties at once: 7. Another first principle is – That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious. [447a] Lehrer anticipates what might be an objection to this construal of principle 7 as a metaprinciple: is not Reid inconsistent in holding both (a) that all first principles are on a level (among other things in being immediately assented to), and (b) that one might reason from this principle to the truth of the several faculties? No: Upon reflection, we may see that the principle is taken for granted in our assent to other first principles, but we do not reason from it to arrive at those principles. (Lehrer 1989: 163) But there is another, and this time much graver, objection to Lehrer’s reading which appears not to have been noticed by him or by anyone else. We can put it in the form of a dilemma: either the first principles without the metaprinciple are sufficient foundations for knowledge or they are not. If they are sufficient, then principle 7 as a metaprinciple is superfluous; if they are not sufficient, then the addition of the metaprinciple opens the way to a regress. Let us discuss these two horns in turn. As already underlined, the distinctive feature of Lehrer’s interpretation is that it takes principle 7 to range over all the natural faculties at once. Now the only way to square this with Reid’s wording of principle 7 is to read the phrase “by

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which we distinguish truth from error” as a sort of parenthetical gloss on what it is we do by means of our natural faculties, thus: The natural faculties, (by which we distinguish truth from error), are not fallacious. Now what is it to “distinguish truth from error” in the case of, for example, perception? Nothing other, surely, than by that “power” or “faculty” to arrive at mainly true beliefs about external objects within one’s purview. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the faculties of consciousness and memory. But we’ve already been assured by principle 5 that the power of perception is not fallacious. What extra assurance do we get of the truth of this or any other faculty by being told, in a metaprinciple, that the faculties en bloc are not fallacious? If principles 1, 3 and 5 are good enough severally as foundations for knowledge, then some joint metaprinciple to back them up is redundant. The second horn of the dilemma arises if we take it that there really is some backing-up work for a metaprinciple to do. From our previous chapters, we understand first principles as purely psychological generalizations of common sense beliefs – all healthy people form beliefs (early, irresistibly, immediately, etc.) in conformity with principles 1, 3 and 5, which are laws of their constitution. But there’s nothing so far in these psychological laws that vouches for the truth of the beliefs they describe. Enter the metaprinciple – with its purportedly epistemological “information” that the beliefs of common sense are true. “The truth gap”, as Lehrer puts it, “is closed”. But one need not be even one of Reid’s “semisceptics” to feel that this is mere bootstrapping. What if we think (as well we might from its inconspicuous position on Reid’s list of what, after all, are all called “truths”) that the metaprinciple is just another psychological generalization? It says, let us say, that all healthy people have faculties which, taken together, lead them to believe (irresistibly, immediately, etc.) that the truth gap is closed. But now we need a metametaprinciple to “inform” us that the (universal, irresistible) belief that the truth gap is closed is a true belief, and so on … . However far we go in piling on the metaprinciples, it is impossible to see how the truth gap could ever be closed along these lines, so long as we hold that the general run of first principles are insufficient foundations for knowledge as they stand. Yet it is this last contention that motivates the search for a metaprinciple in the first place. For the consistent externalist, of course, there is no question of a regress getting started. Since he only requires that the ordinary first principles in fact be true for them to suffice as foundations for knowledge, he need have no truck with metaprinciples. Lehrer, also, presumably thinks there is no continuing regress since, for him, the truth gap is satisfactorily bridged at the first level by metaprinciple 7. At the same time, however, he maintains, as we noted above, that “the first first principle [is no] mere assumption … [no] … dogmatic externalist conviction”. But these two commitments of Lehrer’s are inconsistent. The regress argument given above shows that the truth gap cannot be bridged unless we

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 79 import at some stage an externalist assumption that it is in fact bridged. Faced with having to bite the externalist bullet sooner or later, it is surely more philosophically hygienic to do it sooner – which in Reid’s case will be at the level of the “first principles of contingent truths” themselves. However, it is one thing to indicate which of two routes should be preferred, and another to show that Reid himself actually takes it. The task remains to come up with an alternative reading of principle 7, and to diagnose what goes wrong in Lehrer’s construal of it as a metaprinciple. We saw above that the terms “power” and “faculty” are virtual synonyms for Reid.27 Two other terms with closely linked meanings are “reasoning” and “judging”: “The power of reasoning is very nearly allied to that of judging” [475a]. So far, it is plain that “reasoning” and “judging”, being both “powers”, may be said to be “faculties”.28 Not only are they faculties, they are natural faculties. In the case of judging, this is obvious: The judgments grounded upon the evidence of sense, of memory and of consciousness, put all men upon a level … [and] … are purely the gift of Nature … [415b–16a] In the case of reasoning, it is less obvious but still true: although the power [strictly] of reasoning seems to be got by habit … it is nature, undoubtedly, that gives us the capacity [to acquire that power]. [476a] About the difference between the functions of these two natural faculties Reid says this: The assent we give to a proposition is called judgment … Reasoning is the process by which we pass from one judgment to another. [475a] But despite this difference, there is an ineliminable reference to truth and falsehood in both cases: It is self-evident that every judgment must be either true or false. [414a] Reasoning, as well as judgment, must be true or false. [476a] Now we have assembled the materials for saying that judgement and reasoning are distinct, if related, natural faculties (or ‘intellectual powers’), both of which have to do with the sorting of truth from falsehood. As distinct natural faculties, we can expect them each to be the subject of an individual Essay. And this is what

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we find. Just as Essay II of the Intellectual Powers is about perception, and Essay III concerns memory, so the subjects of Essays VI and VII are judgement and reasoning respectively.29 Again, as distinct natural faculties we might expect judgment and reasoning to have individual “first principles of contingent truths” to govern them. On the Lehrer reading they do not. To be sure, on the Lehrer reading judgement and reasoning are subsumable under the umbrella of the metaprinciple; but they lack what consciousness has in principle 1, memory in principle 3, and perception in principle 5, namely tailor-made principles of their own. On the alternative reading now to be proposed, judgement and reasoning don’t each have an individual first principle either. But they do have – consonant with Reid’s view noted earlier that “the power of reasoning is very nearly allied to that of judging” – a joint principle that governs them both at once. Let’s look at the seventh first principle again: 7. Another first principle is – That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious. [447a] To our early twenty-first-century eyes, Reidian texts appear to be peppered with unnecessary commas. On first acquaintance, this excessive punctuation makes the prose read rather haltingly, though it very seldom actually misleads. I think it has misled Lehrer here, for (as I shall now argue) the first comma in the seventh principle should not be there. Whether its presence is due to a typographical slip, or more likely an oversight on Hamilton’s part, it has clearly helped towards Lehrer’s construal of the principle as a metaprinciple. It licenses the implicit insertion of parentheses round “by which we distinguish truth from error” which we made explicit above, and which have to be understood if Lehrer’s reading is to be at all tempting: That the natural faculties, (by which we distinguish truth from error), are not fallacious. But if we pay proper attention to the structural features of Reid’s Essays discussed above (distinct intellectual powers typically get an Essay to themselves, plus a bespoke first principle) we shall want to remove at least that first comma and so arrive at a reading more in keeping with that structure: That the natural faculties by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious.30 Here, the phrase “by which we distinguish truth from error” has ceased to be a general gloss on all the faculties taken as a set, and has become a description which picks out just two of them. It is now judgement and reasoning which this principle is vouching for – no more and no less.

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 81 The reader may not yet be convinced that the notion of a Reidian ‘metaprinciple’ should be dispensed with. Such a major interpretative revision, he might think, needs to be supported by more than a typographical speculation (even one which agrees with the manuscript) and some remarks about the structure of Reid’s Essays. However, the additional support which might be deemed necessary can readily be found by examining the comments Reid makes about principle 7 in the relevant chapter. These thirteen paragraphs of comment [447–8] contain no fewer than four pieces of evidence, each of which puts beyond question the claim that Reid intends the principle to apply only to the faculties of judgement and reasoning. To begin with, Reid points out that any proof offered for the principle would beg the question of its truth: because, to judge of a demonstration, a man must trust his faculties, and take for granted the very thing in question … The same absurdity there is in attempting to prove, by any kind of reasoning … that our reason is not fallacious, since the very point in question is, whether reasoning may be trusted. [447a,b, emphasis added] Second, Reid says that, because the principle can’t be proved, If a sceptic should build his scepticism upon this foundation, that all our reasoning and judging powers are fallacious in their nature … it would be impossible by argument to beat him out of this stronghold … [447b, emphasis added] Third, this phrase is repeated later when he notes the irresistibility of belief in the principle and the impossibility of a sincere scepticism about it: We are born under a necessity of trusting to our reasoning and judging powers; and a real belief of their being fallacious cannot be maintained … because it is doing violence to our constitution. [448a, emphasis added] The fourth piece of evidence is found when Reid enlarges on his observation that “It is … [a] … property of this and of many first principles, that they force assent in particular instances, more powerfully than when they are turned into a general proposition.” In what can only be an illustration of this property in the case of this principle, he continues: Many sceptics have denied every principle of science … yet these men reason, and refute, and prove, they assent and dissent in particular cases. They use reasoning to overturn all reasoning, and judge that they ought to have no judgment … [448a, emphasis added]

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Here, then, are four particularly clear textual indications that principle 7 is specific to the faculties of judgement and reasoning. What of the contrary evidence? There is only one piece of it; but it appears to be substantial: If any truth can be said to be prior to all others in the order of nature, this seems to have the best claim; because, in every instance of assent, whether upon intuitive, demonstrative, or probable evidence, the truth of our faculties is taken for granted, and is, as it were, one of the premises on which our assent is grounded. [447b, emphasis added] This passage certainly seems to be grist to Lehrer’s mill. Most obviously, it appears to claim priority over other principles for principle 7. But also, the reason it gives for this priority is the assumption of the “truth of our faculties” tout court and not, as would better suit the revised reading, “the truth of our powers of judgement and reasoning”. I think we can only explain away this embarrassing passage by saying that, on any reading, it is simply ‘bad Reid’. If principle 7 is not a metaprinciple, the passage is flatly inconsistent with Reid’s implicit commitment to the parity of first principles. All first principles are equal in being, by definition, innate and unprovable; and they can all be identified only by certain “marks” – universal acceptance, practical indispensability, etc. We could, it is true, try to defend Reid against the inconsistency by saying that the passage is couched hypothetically – “If any truth can be said to be prior … this seems to have the best claim … .” But such a ‘rhetorical’ defence looks rather desperate, and is bought at the cost of admitting a misleading and unwonted unclarity in Reid’s expression. But if, on the other hand, the principle is a metaprinciple, the passage is still unhappy. The Reverend Dr Reid should surely not, by his own lights, be claiming that the truth of the set of human faculties is “prior to all others in the order of nature” – we should expect whatever truth occupies that cosmic ‘pole position’ to include a reference to God, nature’s Wise and Bountiful Author. And in any case, we can find a candidate with at least as good a claim to priority from among Reid’s purely secular list of twelve first principles, namely principle 12: “That in the phaenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like to what has been in similar circumstances” [451]. I suggest, then, that since this passage is discordant on either reading, it should be put on one side. But even if it is included in the reckoning, it does not suffice (particularly since it is the only inducement in the text to read principle 7 Lehrer’s way) to overturn the arguments advanced above for interpreting principle 7 as a run-of-the-mill “first principle of contingent truths”.31

4. Reid’s reliabilist link This leaves us with the still-pressing question: how does Reid forge the link between the Innateness Claim and the Truth Claim for first principles? Some

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 83 progress has been made with the question, if only by elimination: he doesn’t do it internalistically, like a neo-Cartesian; neither does he do it transcendentally, rising above internalism and externalism, with some mysterious metaprinciple. On the face of it, this leaves two possibilities open: either he does it along pure externalist lines; or he does it with some genuine mixture of externalism and internalism. Let us explore these two possibilities in turn. We may say that Reid’s basic procedure with respect to this link is not really to try to forge it at all, but simply, baldly, daringly, to assume it. More particularly (as emerged earlier), this assumption of his that innate beliefs are mainly true beliefs is an embryonic version of Alvin Plantinga’s kind of super-reliabilism, central to which is the notion of “proper function”. Reid’s organizing stance, like Plantinga’s, is that: as we do not judge of the natural constitution of the body from the disorders or diseases to which it is subject from accidents, so neither ought we to judge of the natural powers of the mind from its disorders, but from its sound state. [259a] So, starting from the mind in its sound state, Reid assumes of its natural (or innate) powers that: Error is not their natural issue, any more than disease is of the natural structure of the body. [468b] So far, this is unalloyed externalism; the instinctive beliefs of healthy people of all kinds tend towards truth, whether or not the believer be aware of this tendency. Reid says of perceptual beliefs, for example: The information of the senses is as perfect, and gives as full conviction to the most ignorant as to the most learned. [260b] And the reliabilist assumption is liberal enough to include animals: Not only men, but children, idiots, and brutes, acquire by habit many [veridical] perceptions which they had not originally. [185a] And what goes for the power of perception goes equally for the other powers: [Just as] a man who knows nothing of the theory of vision may have a good eye … [so] … a man who never speculated about evidence in the abstract may have a good judgment. [328a]

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There is no requirement from Reid, then, that believers be aware of the link between innateness and truth, still less that they reason out any link for themselves. First principles produce their “effect without ever being attended to” [448a]. Believers come to know things “by their constitution” provided only that the link in fact holds; and Reid assumes that it does in fact hold, in paradigmatically reliabilist fashion. Does Reid provide any argument for this assumption? That depends on which of at least three senses of the word ‘argument’ we mean. In the sense of ‘argument as proof ’, the answer is obviously ‘No’: Reid well sees that, precisely because it is an assumption, his Truth Claim for innate powers and beliefs cannot be proved. In a second sense of ‘argument as rational support’, the answer is ‘Sometimes’: in support of individual first principles, Reid does sometimes bring arguments to bear – arguments which can look like inconsistent attempts to prove what cannot be proved. These will be considered in Chapter 8. But there is a third sense of ‘argument as (merely) suasive consideration’, in which the answer is ‘Yes – Reid does offer such an argument for his adoption of this assumption rather than its contradictory.’ In a very important passage, Reid pleads in effect, as Moore was later to plead,32 that his assumption is reasonable: In a matter of common sense, every man is no less a competent judge than a mathematician is in a mathematical demonstration; and there must be a great presumption that the judgment of mankind, in such a matter, is the natural issue of those faculties which God hath given them. Such a judgment can be erroneous only when there is some cause of the error, as general as the error is. When this can be shewn to be the case, I acknowledge it ought to have its due weight. But to suppose a general deviation from truth among mankind in things self-evident, of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable. [440b] It could be objected that Reid here is at most unpacking his assumption and not arguing for it, even in the stretched sense of offering a suasive consideration in its favour. The sceptic, after all, would not find it persuasive in the least. He could meet it with the symmetrical counter-assertion: ‘to suppose a general tendency towards truth among mankind in things self-evident, of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable’. Stalemate. This may be correct. But even if the passage is only an unpacking of Reid’s assumption, it is a most illuminating unpacking – for there are other things to notice in it besides the proto-Moorean plea of ‘reasonableness’. First, it contains particularly precise formulations, in turn, of the Innateness Claim and the Truth Claim. But then Reid goes on to specify what would have to be the case if the implication of the latter by the former were not to hold: there would have to be “some cause of the error as general as the error is”. This makes room for a sophistication of the account beyond what we might call its initial assumption of ‘naive reliabilism’. It opens the way, in principle, for certain naturally formed beliefs not

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 85 to count as knowledge, namely those beliefs ‘defeated’ by a cause as general as themselves. As we have been saying, these causes of error for Reid will be (and will only be) bodily and mental malfunctions. And they can be of greater or smaller generality. In the case of vision, for example, a misperception had on a single occasion by one individual need only be caused by something slight and temporary – perhaps a man presses a finger on his eyeball and ‘sees’ two candles when there is only one there. Larger-scale visual misperceptions need to be accounted for by wider-ranging causes – white things (it is said) appear yellow to people with jaundice.33 Here the cause of error must be wide enough to encompass the class of all people with jaundice – presumably it will be whatever abnormality of the liver it is that afflicts those people. On pure externalism, these causes of error need only be operating in order for a believer not to know – they do not need to be known to be operating ( jaundiced people do not ‘know’ that snow is yellow even when they don’t know they’ve got jaundice). But now Reid adds an internalist twist. After saying that any cause of error must be as general as the error, he adds: When this can be shewn to be the case, I acknowledge it ought to have its due weight … The weight due to a recognized cause of error (of whatever generality) is surely the weight of an internalistic ‘defeater’ for the aspirant belief in question. So if, let us say, a patient waking up in a hospital bed is truly told he has jaundice, his apparent perception of yellow sheets is doubly defeated – once by the fact of his jaundice, and again, by his awareness of that fact. But Reid is very clear that, absent such an internalist defeater, the externalist truth assumption is back in play. He continues: But to suppose a general deviation from truth among mankind in things selfevident [in this case the perceptual first principle, number 5], of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable. In the passage under scrutiny, Reid speaks of “a great presumption” in favour of his Innateness Claim – that in matters of common sense the universal judgement of mankind is the natural issue of the faculties. It is, of course, a defeasible presumption, as elsewhere Reid makes clear with a court-room metaphor: We do not pretend that those things that are laid down as first principles may not be examined, and that we ought not to have our ears open to what may be pleaded against their being admitted as such. Let us deal with them as an upright judge does with a witness who has a fair character. He pays a regard to the testimony of such a witness while his character is unimpeached; but, if it can be shewn that he is suborned, or that he is influenced by malice or partial favour, his testimony loses all its credit, and is justly rejected. [234a]

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But, as we have seen, Reid effectively urges the same “great [but defeasible] presumption” in favour of his Truth Claim – naturally formed beliefs are undermined if and when due cause can be shown; otherwise, “to suppose a general deviation from truth … is highly unreasonable”. This adds up to an account on which common sense beliefs are prima facie justified, or ‘innocent until proved guilty’. It is, if we like, reliabilism with one epicycle: the true beliefs of common sense are justified, and so amount to knowledge, provided only that the believer have no good reason to doubt them. So far we have only considered small-scale defeaters (like pressed eyeballs) and medium-scale defeaters (like abnormalities of the liver). These bring no real threat of scepticism in their wake, since all they do is merely to override, on certain occasions or kinds of occasion, the default attitude of belief. But there is also, at the top end of the scale, a potentially devastating defeater for all common sense beliefs, namely the doctrine of mental representationalism within the ideal theory. Once it is accepted that the mind’s only immediate objects are its own ‘ideas’, then scepticism about perception, memory, personal identity (both synchronic and diachronic), and about the existence of other minds, becomes unavoidable. In fact the only sort of scepticism not generated by the ideal theory is scepticism about the contents of presently existing mental states. Just such a ‘global’ defeat of common sense beliefs, in Reid’s view, was the aim, and has been the result, of Hume’s arguments in the Treatise. But who is susceptible to these arguments? Certainly not “the vulgar”, who would not be able to take them seriously, even if they were made aware of them; still less, children, idiots, and brutes, who could not understand the arguments in any case. These classes of believer, then, can unproblematically be said to know most of the things they think they know, since they have (and could have, it seems) no good reason to doubt them. The consistent “learned”, however, are in different case.34 Having accepted the initial premise of the ideal theory, they are forced by the logic of Hume’s arguments to recognize a battery of sceptical defeaters for their natural beliefs. Without these defeaters to oppose, the Philosopher of Common Sense would be out of a job; or better, had the ideal theory not become the received opinion, the Philosopher of Common Sense would never have found work in the first place. He exists to argue that these purported defeaters are spurious; and he does so by showing that they have been deduced – so newly and with such rigour by Hume – from an ancient but false premise. This explains why so much of Reid’s time is spent attacking mental representationalism. Hume’s arguments being valid, it is only by demolishing his premise that Reid can show that natural beliefs meet the extra necessary condition, or epicycle, on his account of knowledge – only then can he say: “You, Hume, have not given us good reasons to doubt …” In the next chapter, we examine Reid’s attack on Hume’s premise; and in the chapter after that, we consider whether the attack is well aimed.

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 87

Notes 1 For example: “Reid … appears to have argued fallaciously that what psychologically commands belief must … be true … . [But] it is one thing to hold that some … [beliefs] … are innate; another that some truths are innately known” (Somerville 1987: 425). 2 I intend this remark only in the mild sense captured by Lehrer as follows: “Neither Hume nor Reid holds that our most basic conceptions and beliefs are learned, and, therefore, they must be taken to agree that there is some principle of the mind which is original that gives rise to the conception and belief. They may disagree about which innate principles give rise to conception and belief in [for example] perception, but that there are some such principles is the fundamental contention of Reid and appears to be unavoidable, even for Hume” (Lehrer 1998: 20). 3 About Hamilton’s editorship of Reid’s Works, R.E. Beanblossom (in a preface to his own edition, produced jointly with Keith Lehrer) says this: “It is our judgment that while Hamilton’s critical and expository footnotes may be of historical interest, they are generally based upon a misinterpretation of Reid and are primarily a vehicle for presenting Hamilton’s own views” (Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and Essays, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1983: lxi). 4 See for example Hamilton’s footnote on page 130b. 5 Against this trend, two recent treatments of the topic may be found in Somerville 1995: 342–62, and in Gallie 1989: 240–43. 6 Cited in The Monist vol. 61: 339, n.17. 7 Uberweg, vol. 2: 135. 8 Norton: 58. 9 Grave: 159, 255. 10 It should be said that Lehrer does not here use the word ‘principle’ in Reid’s technical sense. Reid has no ‘principle of divine benevolence’ as such. 11 See Quine, “Natural Kinds”, in Ontological Relativity and other Essays (Columbia University Press, NY, 1969): 126; and Dennett, The Intentional Stance, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1989: 19, 50–51, 96, 97. For a spirited attack on arguments such as Quine’s, see S. Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason, Chapter 1. 12 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, Murray, London (1887) vol. 1: 315–16. 13 Locke’s account of perception will be discussed in Chapter 7, where we shall find reason for saying that both conjuncts of this “scarcely credible” proposition are actually true. 14 The sort of super-reliablism Plantinga propounds “marks” he says, “a real advance – or better, it represents a fortunate retreat, a happy return to the externalist perspective occupied much earlier by Thomas Reid”. Plantinga makes this remark in the introduction to his Warrant: The Current Debate (1993, New York, Oxford University Press: viii). However, in the text above, all references to Plantinga are not to this work but to its justmentioned sister volume Warrant and Proper Function (same year and publisher). 15 We shall examine Plantinga’s account in more detail (and compare it more thoroughly with Reid’s) in our concluding chapter. 16 “Darwin’s Doubt” is Plantinga’s label for the worry expressed by Darwin in the letter quoted above, about the trustworthiness of “the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals”. 17 See Chapter 10, below, for a fuller discussion of this issue. 18 Reid must have in mind Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Pt. II (page 185 in the N. Kemp Smith edition). 19 The seeming inconsistency between Reid’s occasional provision of ‘proofs’ for first principles and his ‘official’ doctrine (that they neither require nor admit of them) is examined below in Chapter 8.

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20 H. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, University of Chicago Press, 1938, and The Theory of Probability, University of California Press, 1949. 21 This suggestion is made from a quite different angle by Peter Baumann in “The Scottish Pragmatist? The Dilemma of Common Sense and the Pragmatist Way Out”, Reid Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 (1999): 47–57. Baumann urges that we view Reid as “one of the grand-uncles of pragmatism”: confronted by the dilemma between, on the one hand, the dogmatic assertion of the truth of common sense principles, and, on the other, a too-Humean refusal to make any truth claims about them, Reid may be seen as taking a third way – that of adopting principles which simply help us attain our goals. 22 These labels are Susan Haack’s, taken from her article “Pragmatism” in Dancy and Sosa: 351–7. 23 H. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen: The Defence of Reason in Descartes’ Meditations, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1970: 180 ff. Compare E. Curley, Descartes against the Sceptics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1978: passim. 24 Although objectionable as an interpretation of Descartes, the Frankfurt/Curley analysis may well turn out to have proper application to Reid. John Cottingham paraphrases: “According to Curley, Descartes is ‘implicitly redefining the concept of proof’ in such a way that a proposition is held to be proved merely if (i) it compells [sic] our assent so that we are incapable of doubting it; and (ii) we have no valid grounds for doubting it (Curley: 118–19)” (Cottingham 1986: 77, n.23). See the final page of the present study, where we imagine Descartes’s words coming out of Reid’s mouth. 25 “The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe the existence of the external object which you perceive? This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine” [183b]. 26 In still another guise it appears as “the looping principle”: “It loops around and supports itself. We might … [call] … it the looping principle” (Lehrer 1990: 43). 27 They are not complete synonyms; but the nice distinctions he makes between them at, for example, 221a,b, are not relevant here. 28 For an example of Reid using the phrase “the faculty of judgment” see 414a. 29 Consciousness is in this respect anomalous – presumably because its deliverances provide the data for all the Essays. 30 An examination of Reid’s manuscript, held in the Special Collections Department at Aberdeen University Library, reveals that it lacks the second comma too. The manuscript [shelfmark 2131/1/II/7] reads: VII Another First Principle is, That the natural Faculties by which we distinguish Truth from Error are not fallacious. See Appendix 2 for a facsimile of Reid’s manuscript. 31 Andrew Pyle has put it to me that there is a third way of interpreting what I have called this “discordant” passage, as follows. Perhaps Reid’s meaning is merely that since all beliefs (i.e. perceptual beliefs, beliefs based on memory and induction, beliefs about other minds, etc.) are judgements, the non-fallaciousness of the faculty of judgement is presupposed in all these beliefs. This involves working the phrase “as it were, one of the premises on which our assent is grounded” quite hard (it is conceded), because plainly Reid doesn’t hold these beliefs to be literally inferred. But if we take the phrase metaphorically, the passage becomes not so much “bad Reid” as simply ‘innocuous Reid’. I think this suggestion improves on the reading of the discordant passage given above; I would only insist that it is perfectly compatible with the proposed ‘commonor-garden’ status of the vexed principle 7. 32 We recall, here, Moore’s plea quoted in an earlier footnote: “There is no reason why we should not … make our philosophical opinions agree with what we necessarily

The structure of Reid’s reliabilism 89 believe at other times. There is no reason why I should not confidently assert that I do really know some external facts, although I cannot prove the assertion except by simply assuming that I do. I am, in fact, as certain of this as of anything; and as reasonably certain of it” (Moore 1955: 163, emphasis original). 33 Reid certainly believes this [see 320b, 338b]; but whether it is an old wives’ tale or a pathological fact about jaundice, is not important for his general point. 34 Compare our hospital patient in altered circumstances: this time he’s been falsely told he has jaundice when the sheets are in fact yellow (perhaps it’s now a private BUPA hospital, where the doctors are greedier and the décor more lavish). Now, his visual mechanism is externally reliable, but he has an internal defeater for his true belief – so again, he doesn’t know the sheets are yellow (even though this time they are). His situation is like that of the learned in the grip of the ideal theory.

6

The slippery slope

Reid writes in a letter to James Gregory: The merit of what you are pleased to call my philosophy, lies, I think, chiefly, in having called in question the common theory of ideas, or images of things in the mind, being the only objects of thought. [88b] There is more than modesty in this remark – there is understatement too, amounting almost to misdescription. For Reid’s ‘calling in question’ of the theory of ideas in fact consists in a sustained and detailed battery of objections to what he saw as the philosophical orthodoxy. This orthodoxy had gone unchallenged since Descartes’s time, and had commanded even Reid’s assent1 until, Kant-like, he had been woken from his slumbers by the loud sceptical conclusions coming from Hume’s Treatise. Reid was convinced that Hume’s arguments for these conclusions were sound; he could now see that scepticism had been implicit in the theory of ideas all along: Like the Trojan horse … [it] … had a specious appearance both of innocence and beauty; but if those philosophers had known that it carried in its belly death and destruction to all science and common sense, they would not have broken down their walls to give it admittance. [132b] Reid was thus the first person to formulate the ‘slippery slope’ reading of the history of British Empiricism. At the top of the slope is Locke’s Essay, there because it imports the relevant parts of the Cartesian doctrine of ideas; half-way down and struggling for a purchase is Berkeley’s Principles; and at the bottom, in the “coal-pit” of scepticism, is Hume’s Treatise. Reid describes the descent thus: Mr Locke had taught us, that all the immediate objects of human knowledge are ideas in the mind. Bishop Berkeley, proceeding upon this foundation, demonstrated, very easily, that there is no material world. … But the Bishop,

The slippery slope 91 as became his order, was unwilling to give up the world of spirits. He saw very well, that ideas are as unfit to represent spirits as they are to represent bodies … and, therefore, while he gives up the material world in favour of the system of ideas, he gives up one-half of that system in favour of the world of spirits; and maintains that we can, without ideas, think, and speak, and reason, intelligibly about spirits, and what belongs to them. Mr Hume shews no such partiality in favour of the world of spirits. He adopts the theory of ideas in its full extent; and, in consequence, shews that there is neither matter not mind in the universe; nothing but impressions and ideas. What we call a body, is only a bundle of sensations; and what we call the mind is only a bundle of thoughts, passions, and emotions, without any subject. [293a] But Reid’s ‘slippery slope’ version in this period in the history of philosophy, despite (or perhaps even, perversely, because of ) its continuing popularity in introductory textbooks, is widely thought to be unsatisfactory. There simply was no “common theory of ideas”, so it is said, to which Reid’s strictures might apply. This sort of criticism, which is now newly fashionable, in fact appeared early in reaction to Reid. Sir Thomas Brown, for example, said that, excepting Malebranche and Berkeley, “all the philosophers whom Dr Reid considered himself as opposing, would, if they had been questioned by him, have admitted, before they heard a single argument on his part, that their opinions, with respect to ideas, were precisely the same as his own” (Brown: 174). Brown’s view has had recent and vigorous support, notably from John Yolton and Steven Nadler.2 If Brown and Co. are right, then Reid’s importance in the history of philosophy is certainly reduced (as he himself would have agreed: “The merit of what you are pleased to call my philosophy lies, I think, chiefly in having called in question the common theory of ideas”; the less ‘common’ the theory of ideas really was, the smaller the ‘merit’ of that part of his philosophy which questions it). But Reid’s importance is not in that case reduced to nothing. On the Brown view, Reid is still left with Berkeley and Malebranche as proper targets (even if Nadler would deny him the latter). And even his attacks on allegedly ‘improper’ targets such as Descartes, Locke, and Hume would retain interest, if not merit, since Reid’s interpretation of those philosophers was widely shared, however mistakenly, in the eighteenth century. In the next chapter we will revisit the texts of the “ideal theorists” to assess the weight of this criticism. Our conclusion will be that although the “way of ideas” was indeed more multifarious and sophisticated than he allowed, Reid’s diagnosis of its faults was not based on a simplistic misreading of his predecessors. In important and unignorable places (we shall find) the tradition did present a potential global defeater for common sense beliefs. In the present chapter our aim is to see how Reid argues it down.

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Reid’s attack on ‘ideas’ Reid formulates what he calls “the ideal theory” (sometimes “the ideal hypothesis” or “system”) many times over, in slightly different ways. The following two passages are typical: all philosophers, from Plato to Mr Hume, agree in this, That we do not perceive external objects immediately, and that the immediate object of perception must be some image present to the mind. [263a] things which do not now exist in the mind itself, can only be perceived, remembered, or imagined, by means of ideas or images of them in the mind, which are the immediate objects of perception, remembrance, and imagination. [210a] The first passage says of perception what the second says of mental acts more generally; but both passages contain the crucial ‘ideal’ claim, as Reid has it – that the mind’s only immediate (i.e. uninferred) objects are ideas, which must in some way be ‘in’ it or ‘present to’ it, and which may resemble its mediate objects. We can catch Locke in the act of assuming the ideal hypothesis, as Reid understands it, in a passage which, curiously, Reid himself does not cite. In his second reply to Bishop Edward Stillingfleet of Worcester, Locke takes it that the bishop is not persuaded that as often as you think of your cathedral church, or of Des Cartes’s vortices, that the very cathedral church at Worcester, or the motion of those vortices, itself exists in your understanding; when one of them never existed but in that one place at Worcester, and the other never existed anywhere in ‘rerum natura’; I conclude, your lordship has immediate objects of your mind, which are not the very things themselves existing in your understanding. (Works, vol. IV: 390) Reid might well have quoted this passage from Locke because it nicely exhibits the combined result of the “two prejudices” which, he thinks, give rise to the theory of ideas in all its forms: The first is – That, in all the operations of the understanding, there must be some immediate intercourse between the mind and its object, so that the one may act upon the other. The second, That, in all the operations of the understanding, there must be an object of thought, which really exists while we think of it. [368b] These two prejudices clearly correspond to Locke’s assumption of ‘ideas’ of Worcester cathedral and of Descartes’s vortices, respectively. We will return to Reid’s treatment of these prejudices at several points below.

The slippery slope 93 Reid’s criticisms of the theory of ideas are scattered throughout his work. In each of the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, as he develops his own accounts, successively, of perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgement, reasoning, and taste, he points to the shortcomings of ‘ideas’ in those domains. And similarly in the Inquiry, where the five senses are discussed chapter by chapter, he snipes at the system as he goes. The closest Reid comes to offering a summary of this attack is in chapter xiv of Essay II, Reflections on the Common Theory of Ideas. This chapter is sketchy, and doesn’t provide much more than headings. But we can use these headings as a template with which to impose some structure on Reid’s rather sprawling onslaught. The “reflections” given in the chapter are five in number, and three of them are correctly described as mere reflections. The remaining two, however, amount to proper arguments and contain between them the substance of Reid’s attack on the representationalist element in “the ideal theory”. Let us look at the less substantial points first.

First reflection The first reflection I would make on this philosophical opinion is, that it is directly contrary to the universal sense of men who have not been instructed in philosophy. [298b] This is just the kind of remark that gets ‘the philosophy of common sense’ a bad name. Were it the only reflection that Reid had to offer, Kant might have had some warrant for saying, in his famous gibe, that “seen clearly, it is but an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan glories and boasts in it” (Kant: 7).3 Prereflective opinion is not a reliable guide to truth, as the history of natural science and the continuing abundance of superstition amply shows. But Reid knows this very well. He is simply, in this first reflection, making the plain observation that the ideal theory is counter-intuitive – it might, for all that, be true. He also wants to stress that the burden of proof is with the propounders of the theory, and this, too, is surely supportable. Anyone who wants to persuade us that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa, or that the immediate objects of perception are ideas and not external objects, had better have arguments powerful enough to overturn our counter-intuitions. And Reid will go on to argue in his further reflections that such arguments are lacking in the case of the ideal hypothesis. It could be said, however, that in this first reflection Reid is unfair to Berkeley. Reid’s criticism of idealism is subtler than Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking, but, arguably, in its rush to make idealism offensive to common sense, it pays insufficient attention to Berkeley’s claim that the abolition of matter has no implications whatever for experience. The evidence here is mixed. On the one hand, in his more polemical moments, Reid is overly dismissive of Berkeley:

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The slippery slope Bishop Berkeley did not duly consider that … by depriving us of the material world, he deprived us, at the same time, of family, friends, country, and every human creature; of every object of affection, esteem, or concern, except ourselves. [445b]

On the other hand he allows: Berkeley has employed much pains and ingenuity to shew that his system, if received and believed, would not be attended with those bad consequences in the conduct of life, which superficial thinkers may be apt to impute to it. His system does not take away or make any alteration upon our pleasures or our pains: our sensations, whether agreeable or disagreeable, are the same upon his system as upon any other. These are real things, and the only things that interest us. They are produced in us according to certain laws of nature, by which our conduct will be directed in attaining the one and avoiding the other; and it is of no moment to us, whether they are produced immediately by the operation of some powerful intelligent being upon our minds; or by the mediation of some inanimate being which we call matter. [285a] At all events, John Yolton’s verdict – “Reid’s equating of ‘matter’ with the ordinary objects of our experience misses entirely Berkeley’s careful and labored distinction between them” (Yolton: 206) – seems too harsh.4 Fifth reflection Reid’s fifth reflection is closely related to the first, but there is a sharpening of focus. Where before the complaint was the general one that ‘ideas’ sit ill with the plain man’s view of the world, now it is more precisely that ideas, once admitted, lead to “wild and shocking paradoxes” and ultimately to scepticism [306a,b]. Again, this doesn’t amount to an argument. Reid is not saying that because the ideal theory has these consequences therefore it is false (though in some moods he’s prepared to say as much) – he realizes that one must follow where the argument leads. Rather he is saying, as before, that these “necessary consequences of it furnish a just [ prima facie] prejudice against it” which should make us re-examine the premise from which they follow. But, again, Reid spoils his modest reflection by playing ducks and drakes with one of his predecessors, this time Locke. Among the “paradoxes” into which Locke was led by the theory of ideas is, he says, the view “that the secondary qualities of body are no qualities of body at all, but sensations of the mind” – a flat mistake on Reid’s part.5 However, there are enough other bizarreries accurately taken from the work of ideal theorists (Locke on personal identity over time, Hume on the self) to generate the prima facie doubt about ideas that Reid is reflecting on here. And his chief observation – “that all the laboured arguments

The slippery slope 95 they have advanced to prove the existence of those things we see and feel, are mere sophisms” – remains intact. Third reflection A third reflection I would make upon this subject is, that philosophers, notwithstanding their unanimity as to the existence of ideas, hardly agree in any one thing else concerning them. If ideas be not a mere fiction, they must be, of all objects of human knowledge, the things we have best access to know, and to be acquainted with; yet there is nothing about which men differ so much. [305a] Reid goes on to enumerate a host of competing accounts of the nature and origin of ideas. There is something very suspect about this reflection but it is not at all easy to pinpoint what it is. First, Reid sets up a false dichotomy: surely ideas could be both non-fictional and not the best-known things there are? Indeed, if ideas are to do the job assigned them in the theory, must they not be perfectly ‘transparent’? As Locke might say: only a dirty window pane gets noticed. Reid might well reply by reiterating his constant warning against analogical reasoning – for him “one of the chiefest causes of error in the philosophy of the mind”. But an ideal theorist could make the same point, without metaphor, in Cartesian terms: what we have “best access to know” is the “objective reality” of ideas, not necessarily their “formal reality” as modifications of mind. Then, Reid overstates the case when he says that the nature of ideas is more controversial among those who think they exist than any other subject matter. (No doubt there is deliberate hyperbole here, but let’s take it seriously.) Religious believers are at least as quarrelsome. There are surely more varieties of Christian than of ideal theorist, to mention only Christians. Pursuing this thought, and drawing a direct analogy with Reid’s reflection, we can see Reid (improbably perhaps) as an atheist using the fact of lack of consensus among believers to cast doubt on the credibility of both (a) theism in general, and (b) any particular variety of it. This is a familiar atheistic ploy and one which we may well think has some force, at least against (a). Its success against (a) is due to the space it clears for non-theistic explanations of religious beliefs in general (perhaps in terms of deep-seated psychological needs for ‘father figures’ which we might expect to be variously satisfied in different times and places). Reid, speaking with the vulgar, has nothing analogous to this to explain why philosophers as a breed should come to such multifactional adherence to the ideal system, unless it is, as he says elsewhere, that “reason is the faculty wherein they assume a superiority to the unlearned” [339a] (and so are inclined to trust reason where they trust nothing else). But this latter point does not tell against the philosopher as persuasively as the atheist’s version tells against the believer. After all, philosophers can say, we in this case are the experts if anyone is, and so when we say that there are ‘ideas’

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we deserve a hearing over those who never gave the workings of the human mind a moment’s thought. Differences of detail, even major ones, do not put the common core of our claims in question. Moreover (they could continue), we are not all at the same game anyway – some of us focus on ideas in reflection, others on ‘ideas of sense’ – so there are bound to be disparities in our accounts. However, the atheist’s ploy, whatever its success against (a), theism in general, has no power against (b), any one of its individual variants – and the same goes for its Reidian analogue. The claims of Islam, for example, are either true or they are not. Whether they are so is a question independent of the claims of other faiths, whatever our Reidian atheist on the one hand, or indeed Muslim apologists on the other, might say (‘gropings towards the One True Path’, etc.). Just so, Berkeley might be right, or the truth lie in some as yet unhatched version of the ideal theory, however many versions are currently on offer. Second reflection We come, then, to reflections 2 and 4, where the substance of Reid’s attack on this element of the ideal theory is to be found outlined. As we established in Chapter 3, Reid is a keen supporter of Newtonian method; he refers to its inventor with approval in many places: When men pretend to account for any of the operations of Nature, the causes assigned by them ought, as Sir Isaac Newton has taught us, to have two conditions, otherwise they are good for nothing. First, They ought to be true, to have a real existence, and not to be barely conjectured to exist, without proof. Secondly, They ought to be sufficient to produce the effect.6 [250a] Although Reid does not mention Newton’s name in any of these ‘reflections’ we are considering, reflections 2 and 4 in effect say that the ideal hypothesis does not satisfy either of these Newtonian conditions.7 Not only are there no good arguments for the existence of ideas (reflection two); but ideas, even if they did exist, would be quite inadequate to explain human mental operations (reflection four). Therefore, they are “good for nothing”. Reid thinks that of all the arguments that have ever been offered for the existence of ideas as the immediate objects of perception, only two kinds deserve serious consideration. The first of these depends on an analogue of the principle that nothing can act where it is not. Ideal theorists ask: how can the mind have as its ultimate objects things which are more or less remote from it, in space or in time, if not by having some sort of idea, representative of them, as its immediate familiar? Reid does not claim to be the first to challenge the principle underlying this question – a principle which Nadler dubs “no cognition at a distance” (Nadler 1992: 67). He pays tribute to Arnauld for having pointed out “very judiciously” the prejudices that appear to support it; and some of Reid’s criticisms of the principle look like restatements in his own words of Arnauld’s objections to Malebranche. Like

The slippery slope 97 Arnauld, Reid thinks that belief in ‘no cognition at a distance’ is the product of a misbegotten assimilation of mental to physical processes. All dualists should realise, as both men insist, that nothing but confusion can come from trying to make meaningful comparisons between what is mental and what is material.8 The objects of sense must be present to the sense, or within its sphere, in order to their being perceived. Hence, by analogy, we are led to say of everything when we think of it, that it is present to the mind, or in the mind. But this presence is metaphorical or analogical only; and Arnauld calls it objective presence, to distinguish it from that local presence which is required in objects that are perceived by sense. [296b] Local presence, understood as contiguity, is only necessary for touching and tasting things. Arnauld is, in fact, more thorough than Reid here; he points out that contiguity actually prevents the operation of the ‘distance’ senses: “the object must be absent from [the eye] … if it were in the eye or too close to the eye, it could not be seen” (Arnauld: 16). But even though contiguity is sometimes necessary for perception, it is never sufficient. Reid writes: Two things may be in contact without any feeling of perception; there must therefore be in the percipient a power to feel or perceive. How this power is produced, and how it operates, is quite beyond the reach of our knowledge. [305b] This unanalysability of the intellectual powers is another point of agreement between Reid and Arnauld, and, coupled with their shared diagnosis of the prejudices that beckon towards êtres représentatifs, brings Reid closer to Arnauld than to any other ideal theorist. It might be objected against Reid at this point that in his attack on the ideal system he simply parrots what was said earlier, and more incisively, by Arnauld. Three things need saying about this. First, on the question of incisiveness: given that Reid was attempting to take on the ideal system ‘wholesale’ rather than, like Arnauld, to oppose one of its retail outlets, it is perhaps not surprising that his critique should appear in places more diffuse than Arnauld’s. Second, on the question of their similarity: Reid insists (whether correctly or not) that his position is not equivalent to Arnauld’s.9 The good done by Arnauld’s denunciation of êtres représentatifs as “a mere fiction of the philosophers” was undone, says Reid, by his continued use of such expressions as “that we perceive not things immediately; that it is … ideas that are the immediate objects of our thoughts” [297b]. Third, on the question of parroting: where Reid does use Arnauldian arguments he does so with acknowledgement. And he has a number of non-Arnauldian points to make against ‘no cognition at a distance’, of his own devising. The most important of them is this: ‘No action at a distance’ implies ‘no cognition at a distance’ only if action is involved in cognition. But, Reid avers, it is not: “there

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appears no reason for asserting that, in perception, either the object acts upon the mind, or the mind upon the object” [301a]. He enlists the logicians to support him. Regarding the first: “to be perceived, is what logicians call an external denomination10 which implies neither action nor quality in the object perceived”. And regarding the second – the supposed ‘acts’ of mind – he distinguishes between transitive acts which produce some effect on external objects (such as, presumably, any volition which has a physical upshot) and immanent acts, like perceptions, which do not [301b]. These distinctions are part of Reid’s attempt to go beyond what Arnauld said – that is, to show what is wrong with taking motion in bodies as the model for perception and other cognitions. Less technically, in a later Essay, Reid seeks further to undermine ‘no cognition at a distance’ by observing that nobody complains that ‘love’ or ‘resentment at a distance’ is impossible: It is, I think, acknowledged, that persons and not ideas, are the immediate objects of those affections; persons, who are as far from being immediately present to the mind as other external objects, and, sometimes, persons who have now no existence, in this world at least, and who can neither act upon the mind, nor be acted upon by it.11 [369a] Besides ‘no cognition at a distance’, “There remains”, says Reid, “only one other argument that I have been able to find urged against our perceiving external objects immediately” [302a]. Here, Reid means ‘one other type of argument’ (and not of course ‘one other instance of an argument’), namely the argument from the relativity of perception, which in Hume’s version runs like this: The table, which we see, seems to diminish, as we remove farther from it; but the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration; it was, therefore, nothing but its image, which was present to the mind. These are the obvious dictates of reason; and no man, who reflects, ever doubted that the existences, which we consider, when we say this house and that tree, are nothing but perceptions in the mind, and fleeting copies or representations of other existences, which remain uniform and independent. (Enquiries: 152) Reid has a knockdown argument to expose the fallacy embedded in Hume’s argument, which draws on a distinction borrowed from Berkeley between “real” and “apparent” magnitude. These two are things of different natures, though the same name ‘magnitude’ is given to both. An object’s “real” magnitude has three dimensions and is measured on a linear scale; it is an original object of touch, not of sight, and for that reason was called “tangible” magnitude by Berkeley. It remains constant while the object continues unchanged. The same object’s “apparent” or “visible” magnitude, however, has only two dimensions, and is measured by the angle which it subtends at the eye. While the object continues

The slippery slope 99 unchanged and in the same place, its apparent magnitude “must necessarily vary … according as the point from which it is seen is more or less distant … nearly in a reciprocal proportion to the distance of the spectator” [303b–4a]. With this distinction made, Reid can easily show that Hume equivocates between these two kinds of magnitude. When Hume argues: (1) “the table seems to diminish as we remove farther from it” he says, truly, that its apparent magnitude diminishes. When he continues: (2) “but the real table suffers no alteration”, he says, again truly, that its real magnitude is unaltered. But his conclusion (3) “therefore it is not the real table we see” does not follow because “the syllogism has what the logicians call two middle terms” [304a,b]. Simple and effective as this refutation is, it does not meet with everyone’s approval. Cummins, for instance, says that “Reid tried to utilize Berkeley’s theory of the heterogeneity of visual and tangible objects to account for perspective with only indifferent results. Reid came perilously close to reintroducing ideas of sense” (Cummins: 332, n. 56). We have dealt in Chapter 4 with the general complaint that Reid’s realism is not so direct as he imagines,12 but Cummins raises a more specific point. His worry is presumably that what Reid chooses to call “apparent magnitude” is the same as what Hume is calling an “image” or “representation”. If so, the worry can be allayed. For, as Duggan underlines, while Reid allows that the “appearance of colour” is a mere sensation, or mental entity, he insists that the other appearances (those of size, shape, motion) presented to the mind along with the sensation are extra-mental: “just as the real or tangible figure of an object can be defined as the position of its several parts with regard to one another, so its visible figure can be understood as the position of its several parts with regard to the eye” (Duggan: 26). So an object’s visible figure – its shape as seen – is a public object external to the eye, with ‘real’ extension, albeit in two dimensions, such as a Lockean idea or a Humean impression could never have. So far we have only seen Reid dealing negatively with Hume’s argument. But Reid is doing more than merely pouncing on a logical howler of Hume’s as he might do legitimately, but ad hoc, if his concern were simply to refute an argument in one place. His wider, more positive concern becomes apparent when he continues: Mr Hume’s argument not only has no strength to support his conclusion, but … it leads to the contrary conclusion – to wit, that it is the real table that we see; for this plain reason, that the table we see has precisely that apparent

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The slippery slope magnitude which it is demonstrable the real table must have when placed at that distance. [304b]

This demonstrability comes, of course, from the necessary connection that exists between apparent and real magnitude as an inverse function of distance, which we saw Reid insisting upon in the earlier quotation. It is a thesis that Reid frequently reiterates. At the risk of over-quotation, a particularly succinct statement of it from the Inquiry is worth reproducing: There is … resemblance and a necessary connection between the visible figure and magnitude of a body, and its real figure and magnitude; … we can assign a reason why a circle placed obliquely to the eye, should appear in the form of an ellipse. … it may be demonstrated, that every eye that sees distinctly and perfectly, must, in the same situation, see it under this form, and no other. [142b] This necessary connection has a psychological aspect – it sets up expectations. But the psychological aspect is not much stressed by Reid.13 He is more interested in arguing, at this point, that when in “acquired perception” we instinctively take visible figure as a “sign” of real figure, the sign/signified relation is underwritten by a principle that “is as certain as the principles of geometry”. He is also, incidentally, concerned to show how pervasive this kind of acquired perception is: “it is repeated every hour and almost every minute”.14 But mainly Reid wants to insist that we know the table is real because its apparent magnitude diminishes as we withdraw from it. Turned against itself, with ‘magnitude’ disambiguated, Hume’s ‘incredible shrinking table’ argument shows that the ‘ideas’ to which it would argue are “deficient in both of the essential characteristics of a true and philosophical account” laid down by the much-admired Newton – “for we neither have any evidence [from this argument] of their existence, nor, if they did exist, can it be shown how they would produce perception” [326b]. The facts of perceptual relativity, in other words, speak against the existence of ideas, and even if they didn’t, we’d have a huge and mysterious fluke to explain in an infinity of instances, namely, why visible objects have the apparent figures and magnitudes they do have, rather than other ones. Turning from sense perception to simple apprehension, or “conception”, Reid finds another pervasive argument that has been urged for the existence of ideas. Since all thought requires an existing object, how can we think (as we can) of nonexistent objects, such as centaurs, if not by means of existing ideas of these objects in the mind? But again, says Reid, the assumption from which the argument starts is mistaken: all thought does not require an existing object – indeed “conception” is precisely the power to think directly of objects which may not exist: The philosopher says, I cannot conceive a centaur without having an idea of it in my mind. I am at a loss to understand what he means. He surely does

The slippery slope 101 not mean that I cannot conceive it without conceiving it. This would make me no wiser. What then is this idea? Is it an animal, half horse and half man? No. Then I am certain it is not the thing I conceive. Perhaps he will say, that the idea is an image of the animal … [but] … I know what it is to conceive an image of an animal, and what it is to conceive an animal; and I can distinguish the one of these from the other without any danger of mistake.15 [373a,b] Fourth reflection So far we have considered one of the two prongs which make up Reid’s main attack on the representationalist part of the ideal system – his claim that there are no good arguments for the existence of ideas. But now the second prong suggests that even if we had proof of their existence, ideas would be explanatorily inadequate: A fourth reflection is, that ideas do not make any of the operations of the mind to be better understood, although it was probably with that view that they have been first invented. [305b] Reid assumes that the purpose of the ideal hypothesis is to explain how the mind can perceive what is external to it, how it can remember what no longer exists, and how it can imagine what need never have existed. Broadly, he has two different ways of showing how it fails to explain these things, according to the different stages in the development of the hypothesis. In the hands of Descartes and Locke (“who was no sceptic”) there is supposed to be mediate perception of external objects (mediate memory of past events, etc.) explained by immediate perception of internal ideas. Reid raises the stock objection to representationism – the one which Gilbert Ryle says “nearly every youthful student of philosophy can and does [raise] in about his second essay” (Ryle 1971: 147): When it is maintained that all that we immediately perceive is only ideas or phantasms, how can we, from the existence of those phantasms, conclude the existence of an external world? [358a] But he develops the stock objection in a non-obvious way. Not only is the required inference unjustifiable, but “it seems very hard, or rather impossible, to understand what is meant by an object of thought that is not an immediate object of thought”. Reid casts about for such a meaning and finds the only supportable one to be something signified to the mind by a sign: But here the thing signified, when it is introduced to the thought, is an object of thought no less immediate than the sign was before. And there are here

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The slippery slope two objects of thought, one succeeding another, which we have shewn is not the case with respect to an idea, and the object it represents. [278b]

This is a key Reidian point – one which he will go on to develop in his own positive accounts of sense perception, memory and judgement.16 Here Reid uses it to show how indirect realism collapses into idealism, and how it thereby fails to explain what it sets out to explain. “I apprehend, therefore, that, if philosophers will maintain that ideas in the mind are the only immediate objects of thought, they will be forced to grant that they are the sole objects of thought, and that it is impossible for men to think of anything else” [279a]. The explanatory purposes, then, of this form of the ideal hypothesis are frustrated by its own consequence.17 Berkeley and Hume, of course, embrace this consequence, and Reid congratulates them at least on their consistency in doing so. But now, with these reductions made, Reid has a new charge of explanatory failure to level, namely that the things to be explained have become unrecognizable.18 Often, he makes this point satirically: Suppose a man strikes his head smartly against the wall, this is an impression [‘perception’]; now, he has a faculty by which he can repeat this impression with less force, so as not to hurt him: this, by Mr Hume’s account, must be memory. He has a faculty by which he can just touch the wall with his head, so that the impression entirely loses its vivacity. This surely must be imagination; at least, it comes as near to the definition given of it by Mr Hume as anything I can conceive. [357b] We noted above, exemplified in Locke’s reply to Stillingfleet, the two prejudices which, in Reid’s opinion, underlie the ideal system: (a) the “immediate intercourse” prejudice (b) the “really existing object” prejudice. Now we should try to see how they interpenetrate. About the connection between (a) and (b), Reid says that the former depends on the latter: “for, although the last may be true, even if the first was false, yet, if the last be not true, neither can the first” [369a]. To spell this out: if there is to be “immediate intercourse” between the mind and its object, then there must be a “really existing object” for the mind, so to speak, to have intercourse with. In other words, where there is no object there is no intercourse, and so a fortiori no immediate intercourse. We might put this by saying that the mind’s intercourse with non-existent objects (perfectly possible for Reid – his “conception” pure and simple) is the limiting case of what the ideal theory denies is possible, namely ‘cognition at a distance’. All of which is to say that ‘(a) implies (b)’, and so, equivalently, ‘not (b) implies not (a)’; and

The slippery slope 103 this implication gives Reid his strategy. If he can establish not (b) – that we can conceive of non-existent objects – then not (a) will follow and the ideal system be deprived of its main support. How, finally, does this strategy slot into Reid’s wider onslaught on the ideal system as outlined in his five reflections? He contends that we shouldn’t accept on the authority of philosophers, however unanimous, a doctrine as repugnant to common sense and as sceptical in its tendency as the ideal theory (reflections 1 and 5), especially when it comes in so many incompatible versions (reflection 3). Instead we should examine the arguments which are supposed to support it. When we do so we find that these arguments rest on two mistaken assumptions, of which the most basic is that all thought requires something existing as its immediate object. But, Reid avers, we can directly conceive of non-existents, such as centaurs (we can also conceive of images of centaurs, but that’s not the same kind of thought). How we can do this is inexplicable, but that we can do it is sufficient to knock the keystone out of the ideal arch and bring the structure crumbling down (reflection 2). If some sizeable lumps of rubble remain, these can be pulverized by showing that the explanatory success of the system was only apparent, not real (reflection 4). The same problems – if they were problems – about how the mind overcomes cognitive ‘distance’ between itself and its objects recur when those objects are internalized.19 And in any case, the usual problem cases which ideas are intended to explain – false memory, misperception, etc. – can (to the extent that they can be explained at all) be explained without recourse to ideas. In the next chapter, we shall make an excursus into the ideal theory, in order to judge whether Reid’s attack on its doctrine of mental representationalism, just summarized, is deserved.

Notes 1 “If I may presume to speak my own sentiments, I once believed this doctrine of ideas so firmly as to embrace the whole of Berkeley’s system in consequence of it” [283a]. 2 Yolton has provided ‘direct realist’ readings of Descartes and Locke (Yolton 1984), while Nadler has performed the same service for Malebranche (Nadler 1992). Berkeley seems so far to have resisted this kind of treatment, but at this rate we shall one day be offered a book-length study of his ‘materialism’ too. 3 A.D. Woozley remarks: “The plain fact is that Kant had not read any Reid: when the Prolegomena was published in 1783 Reid’s only work then available, even in English, was the Inquiry (1764); and in that work, so far from misinterpreting Hume’s theory of cause [as Kant affirms here that he does], he does not discuss it at all. … From the fact that Kant mentions Reid in the company of Oswald, Beattie and Priestley it may be inferred that he had seen Priestley’s book in which the three others are lumped together for the purposes of destruction, and that he accepted the interpretation there given, an acceptance which he could hardly have made if he had had access to Reid’s Inquiry itself” (Woozley 1941: xiv). 4 See note 20 in Chapter 3 above. 5 Reid usually manages to avoid this pot-hole: e.g. “Mr Locke, in making secondary qualities to be powers in bodies to excite certain sensations in us, has given a just and distinct analysis of what our senses discover concerning them” [318a].

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6 See also 57a,b, 236a,b, and 271b. 7 I have been alerted to this fact by Marcil-Lacoste’s discussion of Reid’s Newtonian treatment of “assent to self-evident propositions” (Marcil-Lacoste: 124–31) which I shall mention and develop in Chapter 8 below (see pp. 147–9). Marcil-Lacoste herself does not (as I do above) relate Reid’s Newtonian method specifically to his attack on ‘ideas’. Nicholas Wolterstorff, on the other hand, does exactly this (Wolterstorff 2001: 50, n.3). 8 Reid and Arnauld thus both reject what Richard Watson calls the Cartesian “Epistemological Likeness Principle” (Watson: passim). 9 The question whether Reid is correct in this insistence will be more fully examined in the next chapter. 10 Compare Caterus’s objection to Descartes, discussed in Chapter 7, below. 11 This observation seems not to be the clincher that Reid would like it to be. Is he even right that this is acknowledged by ideal theorists? (Hamilton, usually so quick in his footnotes to pounce on any inaccuracy of Reid’s, is silent about this.) Even if Reid is right, he has shown, at most, that there is a pragmatic inconsistency in the ideal theory, the repair of which might not go his way – that is, the repaired ideal theory might say that, after all, there is ‘no affection at a distance’. Having driven the ideal theory into that corner, Reid could, of course, reapply his first reflection (counter-intuitiveness). 12 See above, page 52. 13 However, it is much stressed by J.L. Austin: “we should be badly put out if we ever found a round coin not to look elliptical from some points of view” (Austin: 26). 14 Shouldn’t that be “every minute and almost every second ”? – for once Reid understates. 15 Some commentators have made surprisingly heavy weather of Reid’s account of “conception”. For example: “Conception obviously troubled Reid; the most obscure passages in his writings are devoted to the topic … a careful analysis of Reid’s account of conception would reveal rather heavy apparent commitments to species, fictional objects, incomplete objects, etc. …” (Sleigh: 82); “What does Reid mean when he says that a centaur is the direct object of the conception of a centaur and that there are no centaurs…? One would like to be quite sure that Reid himself knew even vaguely” (Grave, 36). Surely Reid means only that thought is intentional. If Grave thinks this amounts merely to hand-waving, we may say in Reid’s defence that we are still waiting two hundred years later (and may have to wait forever) for a precise account of the intentionality of thought. For a particularly good discussion of Reid’s differences with the ideal theorists over ‘conception’ see Wolterstorff 2001: Chapters 1 and 2. 16 Sometimes he poses it as a dilemma: “whatever the object be, the man either thinks of it, or he does not. There is no medium between these. If he thinks of it, it is an immediate object of thought while he thinks of it. If he does not think of it, it is no object of thought at all. Every object of thought, therefore, is an immediate object of thought, and the word immediate, joined to objects of thought, seems to be a mere expletive” [427b, emphasis original]. 17 Compare Keith Lehrer’s comment: “I cannot interpret or learn to interpret any presently existing impression or idea as representing some other impression or idea, one that no longer exists but which I now remember for example, unless I have some conception of that other impression or idea that no longer exists. The conclusion is ineluctable. Representation presupposes conception of the object represented and cannot explain conception of the object. On the contrary, conception of the object is required to explain representation” (Lehrer 1989: 14). 18 Again we can note a debt to Arnauld, who makes this objection to Malebranche. 19 “If we should admit an image in the mind, or contiguous to it, we know as little how perception may be produced by this image as by the most distant object” [302a].

7

Was Reid tilting at a straw man?

We need to distinguish at the outset two sorts of ways in which Reid is said to get the ideal theory wrong. The first, and less damaging (because quite obviously false), is expressed by Sir William Hamilton in a footnote to the Inquiry: by the Ideal Theory, Reid always understands the ruder form of the doctrine, which holds that ideas are entities, different both from the external object and from the percipient mind, and … he had no conception of the finer form of that doctrine, which holds that all we are conscious of in perception, (of course also in imagination) is only a modification of the mind itself. [130b, emphasis added] Hamilton is certainly wrong about this. So far is Reid from the one-eyed view imputed to him that he makes it a particular criticism of, for example, Locke that Locke uses the word ‘idea’ at random, now rudely, now finely: if the word idea, in a work where it occurs in every paragraph, is used without any intimation of the ambiguity of the word, sometimes to signify thought, or the operation of the mind in thinking, sometimes to signify those internal objects of thought which philosophers suppose, this must occasion confusion in the thoughts both of the author and of the readers. I take this to be the greatest blemish in the “Essay on Human Understanding”. [277b] However, it is true that Reid directs most of his fire towards the ‘rude’ form of the ideal theory. This is presumably because he thinks that the theory has to reify ideas if it is to amount to a theory at all. Reid maintains a proper distinction between a “popular” sense of ‘ideas’ as mental acts, and the “philosophical” sense as objects of those acts;1 and he repeatedly makes it clear that he has no quarrel with the existence of ideas taken in the popular sense.2 If ideas are simply mental operations, then the claim that cognition is always by means of ideas becomes trivial. Reid, then, directs his attack as he does, not because he lacks any conception of the theory’s finer form, but because he considers the rude form the only form worthy of attack.

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The second charge against Reid is more radical, because it questions the very existence of the rude form of the theory as a matter of historical fact. In the last chapter we cited Sir Thomas Brown as an early exponent of this view. Here we can add that this kind of criticism was voiced even in Reid’s own lifetime by Joseph Priestley; in Grave’s paraphrase: Priestley ha[d] Reid standing in foolish triumph over the theory of ideas, simplified, for simple refutation, to the view that perception is by means of literal images, mirror-pictures, replicas of things in the outside world. (Grave: 13, emphasis original) But the charge was never more venomously put than by Thomas Webb in 1885. “The sage of common sense was an unimaginative man”, Webb declared – so unimaginative that he could not see that his predecessors’ talk of ideas as entities was merely “poetical” (Webb: 140). In another sense, however, Reid was over-imaginative: [Reid’s] whole philosophy in this respect was nothing but a blunder, and the philosopher was in the predicament of the astronomer who, with the dead fly in the glass of his telescope, imagined he had discovered a monster in the moon. (Webb: 135) In recent years, a new twist has been given to this long-standing tradition of debunking Reid as a historian of philosophy. Critics led by John Yolton and Steven Nadler have gone back to the texts of eminent ‘ideal theorists’ and found in them powerful strains of the very perceptual direct realism which Reid thought was his own much-needed contribution. So now, not only does Reid stand charged with a sin of commission (he saw something in the ideal theory that wasn’t there, namely a uniform tendency to reify ideas); he is also charged with the sin of omitting to see in it something that was there and which renders his own efforts philosophically superfluous. To be sure, these two charges are not really distinct – the intimate connection which exists between the negative and the positive parts of Reid’s programme mean that they are, rather, two aspects of the one accusation, that he crassly misread his predecessors. But that same intimate connection gives us a double motive for seeing whether Reid can be rehabilitated as a historian of philosophy. If we want to be able to reassert the originality of his positive doctrine, it seems that we have to show that Reid’s attack on the ideal theory was not just a waste of paper and ink. Let us turn first to Descartes, whom Reid regards as the progenitor of the ideal system in its modern form, and ask: what are Cartesian ‘ideas’,3 and do Reid’s strictures upon them properly apply?4

Descartes John Cottingham aptly says: “The term ‘idea’ is one of the most slippery and ambiguous of all philosophical concepts” (Cottingham 1992: 77). In the writings

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of Descartes the term has at least a triple ambiguity between (i) physical image, (ii) mental image, and (iii) mental act. The search, then, for what might have been Descartes’s settled doctrine of the nature of ideas will involve finding a predominant sense from among these three, and seeing if the other two can be reconciled to it. This may well turn out to be impossible, and we should beware any commentator who tells us it will be easy. First, to the texts. The sense of idea as physical image in the brain is characteristic of Descartes’s early work. In the Treatise on Man (c. 1630) he describes with the aid of a diagram “how ideas are formed of the objects which strike the senses”. In the case of vision, rays emanating from outside objects cause “figures” corresponding to the shapes of these objects to be conveyed, via the optic nerve, to the internal surface of the brain and thence to the surface of the pineal gland where they are “traced in the spirits”. I wish to apply the term ‘idea’ generally to all the impressions which the spirits can receive [and inscribe] as they leave the gland … the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses. (CSM I: 106) Now in subsequent writings Descartes seems to depart from this use of ‘idea’ to denote these material images on the pineal gland. By Meditation II, for example, ideas seem to have become, if objects at all, then mental objects, which can survive the doubt that the meditator has a body, and a fortiori a pineal gland, at all. We shall consider this second sense of idea shortly; but before doing so, it is worth pointing out that Descartes never in fact abandons the first sense. Interviewed by Frans Burman less than two years before his death, Descartes reportedly says: When external objects act on my senses, they print on them an idea, or rather a figure, of themselves; and when the mind attends to these images imprinted on the gland in this way, it is said to have sensory perception. When, on the other hand, the images on the gland are not imprinted by external objects but by the mind itself, which fashions and shapes them in the brain in the absence of external objects, then we have imagination. The difference between sense-perception and imagination is thus really just this, that in sense-perception the images are imprinted by external objects which are actually present, whilst in imagination the images are imprinted by the mind without any external objects, and with the windows shut, as it were. (CSMK: 344–5) We should underline in passing that, for Descartes, these ideas as brain images are more than simply physiological aspects of perceptual acts – they are representative physical objects, distinct from the act of perception, which, and only ever which, the mind “directly considers” or “attends to” when it thinks.

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Descartes’s move towards sense (ii) – ideas as representative mental objects – may be illustrated by this passage from Meditation III: Some of my thoughts are as it were the images of things, and it is only in these cases that the term ‘idea’ is strictly appropriate – for example, when I think of a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel, or God. Other thoughts have various additional forms: thus when I will, or am afraid, or affirm, or deny, there is always a particular thing which I take as the object of my thought, but my thought includes something more than the likeness of that thing. (CSM II: 25–6) Here, with Descartes certain only of his own “modes of thinking”, his ideas seem to have ceased to be literal images and to have become quasi- or “as it were” images, such as can exist in a disembodied mind. But Hobbes’s objection that we can have no idea of God, provokes from Descartes a fuller definition of ideas in this second sense: Here my critic wants the term ‘idea’ to be taken to refer simply to the images of material things which are depicted in the corporeal imagination; and if this is granted, it is easy for him to prove that there can be no proper idea of an angel or of God. But I make it quite clear in several places throughout the book, and in this passage in particular, that I am taking the word ‘idea’ to refer to whatever is immediately perceived by the mind. (CSM II: 127) This passage shows that Descartes wants to keep the earlier corporeal “pictures on the gland” to explain sense perception, but to accommodate them within a more general account of thought as the immediate perception of ideas: ‘I am [now] taking the word ‘idea’ [widely] to refer to whatever [i.e. whatever else] is immediately perceived by the mind’. Again, we should stress that these sense (ii) ideas are more than just aspects of the perceptual act – Descartes’s very strong suggestion is that they are mental entities (res cogitatae) distinct from the act of perception, which are the sole objects of immediate perception or thought. Descartes’s third sense of idea as mental act or operation is thought by some to emerge in the Definitions appended to the second set of Replies: II. Idea. I understand this term to mean the form of any given thought, immediate perception of which makes me aware of the thought. Hence, whenever I express something in words, and understand what I am saying, this very fact makes it certain that there is within me an idea of what is signified by the words in question. Thus it is not only the images depicted in the imagination which I call ‘ideas’. Indeed, in so far as these images are in the corporeal imagination, that is, are depicted in some part of the brain, I do not call them ‘ideas’ at all; I call them ‘ideas’ only in so far as they give form to the mind itself, when it is directed towards that part of the brain. (CSM II: 113)

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This definition of ‘idea’ – the fullest we’ve seen so far – marks a more explicit departure from the purely physical definition in the Treatise on Man. And those who take it as offering an ‘act’ theory of ideas light on the word ‘form’ to support their reading. Nadler writes: “Descartes here identifies ‘idea’ with the form of a thought (forma cogitationis). Since perception falls under the category of thought for Descartes, an idea can be said to be the form of an act of perception” (Nadler 1989: 127). Similarly Yolton: “The being of objects is captured by the form in the understanding. Ideas as the forms of objects are hardly intermediaries” (Yolton: 33). This reading is controversial, and we shall be saying more about it in due course. Here, we can simply note that the word ‘form’ appears in both of the other definitions (of ideas as physical objects and as mental objects) we cited above, and so is not, on its own, compelling evidence for the interpretation of ideas as mental acts. Where Descartes does unquestionably say that idea can mean ‘mental act’ is in the Preface to the Meditations: there is an ambiguity here in the word ‘idea’. ‘Idea’ can be taken materially, as an operation of the intellect. … Alternatively, it can be taken objectively, as the thing represented by that operation … (CSM II: 7) This passage, too, is one to which we shall return, for its second sentence bears heavily on the way in which Arnauld (as well as Yolton and Nadler) reads Descartes. Its quotation at this point completes our survey of the main places where Descartes mentions the meaning of ‘idea’. And it is already clear that in owning up to only a double ambiguity5 in the term, Descartes is not owning up to enough – the last-quoted passage entirely ignores the important ‘brain-trace’ sense of idea which, as we saw from the late conversation with Burman, is never entirely repudiated. It is remarkable that in ignoring this further ambiguity Descartes is joined by certain commentators. Hamilton, for example, declares: There is no valid ground for supposing that Des Cartes meant by ideas aught but modifications of the mind itself” 6 [207 n.]. A more careful and more recent critic, R. McRae, at least notices the extra ambiguity, but he is curiously blind to its implications: there is little difference between the later and the earlier versions of ideas in Descartes other than their location in the mind rather than the brain … one might say that the immediate objects of the understanding have merely been moved from the brain to the mind. (McRae: 179) But surely this movement is not mere? Indeed, on Cartesian principles there could be no bigger difference than that between a modification of material substance and a modification of mental substance. Descartes could not have booted his ideas across categories without altering fundamentally the theory in which they feature.

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Nadler and Yolton properly concede that there are some textual obstacles in the way of their revisionary interpretation of Descartes. Nadler allows: “certainly, ambiguities remain in Descartes’ use of the term ‘idea’ … which … cause confusion not only for the reader of Descartes, but also in Descartes’s thought” (Nadler 1989: 130). And Yolton admits: “Descartes’s text is not unsupportive of” the standard representationalist reading (Yolton: 38). Nevertheless, argues Yolton, his new interpretation (which goes further yet than Nadler’s) is supported by three considerations: Descartes’s stress upon signification, his insistence in a number of passages that by ideas he means acts of the mind, and Arnauld’s confidence that his interpretation of Descartes is correct – all of these support the reading of ideas as acts of the mind, acts of understanding, reactions to the meaning of the world. (Yolton: 37–8) Because our concern in this section is with Reid’s interpretation of Descartes, we shall confine our attention to the first and second of Yolton’s points.7 “Descartes’s stress up on signification” is – so Yolton alleges – something that Reid missed, and is therefore an instance (if not the paradigm case) of what we earlier suggested is the ‘new debunking’ of Reid in this area.8 On the other hand, Reid’s alleged misreading of Cartesian “passages” is what led him to invent an ‘object’ theory of ideas for the ideal system’s modern father, and so is part of the ‘old’ debunking which goes back to Hamilton and beyond. With the most prominent of these Cartesian passages now in front of us, we are in a position to hold up against them Reid’s interpretative comments and assess those comments for cogency. To begin with, Reid is aware of, and makes allowance for, the fact that Descartes, like Arnauld, has an unobjectionable “popular” sense of idea as mental act: [Arnauld] supports this popular sense of the word by the authority of Des Cartes, who, in his demonstration of the existence of God, from the idea of him in our minds, defines an idea thus: – “By the word idea, I understand that form of any thought, by the immediate perception of which I am conscious of that thought; so that I can express nothing by words, with understanding, without being certain that there is in my mind the idea of that which is expressed by the words”. This definition seems, indeed, to be of the same import with that which is given by Arnauld. But Des Cartes adds a qualification to it, which Arnauld, in quoting it, omits; and which shews that Des Cartes meant to limit his definition to the idea then treated of – that is, to the idea of the Deity; and that there are other ideas to which this definition does not apply. For he adds: – “And thus I give the name of idea, not solely to the images painted in the phantasy; nay, in this place, I do not at all give the name of ideas to those images, in so far as they are painted in the corporeal

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phantasy that is in some part of the brain, but only in so far as they inform the mind, turning its attention to that part of the brain”.9 [297b] Reid’s main point here is that the ‘act’ sense of idea is not Descartes’s only sense. And Reid’s useful suggestion is that, so far from being the predominant sense, the ‘act’ sense only comes in at all, ad hoc, to cope with the special case of the idea of God. If we pick up Reid’s hint and turn to Nadler’s discussion, “Descartes’ theory of ideas” (Nadler 1989: 126–30), we find it borne out. Nadler cites eight passages10 to support his (and Arnauld’s) claim that ideas, for Descartes, are acts, not objects, of perception. It turns out that, of these eight passages, all except one of them11 show Descartes grappling with two sorts of objection to the pivotal but troublesome idea of God in the Meditations: the objections (a) that he can have no idea of God, and (b) that anyway the idea couldn’t be such as to require an existing God as its cause. We can see that both of these objections put Descartes under pressure to move away from the notion of ideas as literal pictures in the brain; but whether, under this pressure, Descartes moves all the way to a ‘mental act’ theory of ideas is certainly debatable. The passages cited by Nadler to support such a radical shift are all open to an alternative construal, according to which the change is ‘only’ to ideas as, in some sense, mental objects. This shift is, of course, radical enough (as we earlier faulted McRae for failing to recognize), but it still keeps Descartes within the bounds of a representative account of cognition. We do not need to scrutinize all seven of Nadler’s cited passages (three of which, in any case, we have already considered) because they exhibit overlap and repetition; two examples will suffice: Your friends have noted … that not everyone is aware of the idea of God within himself. … But if we take the word ‘idea’ in the way in which I quite explicitly stated I was taking it, and do not take refuge in ambiguity, like those who restrict this term to the images of material things formed in the imagination, then we will be unable to deny that we have some idea of God. The only way of denying this would be to say that we do not understand the meaning of the phrase ‘the most perfect thing which we can conceive of’; for this is what everyone calls God. ... if one has no idea, i.e. no perception which corresponds to the meaning of the word ‘God’… (CSM II: 273) Nadler comments: “In this context, Descartes identifies having an idea of God with having a perception of him” (Nadler 1989: 128, emphasis original). But this is surely not persuasive evidence of Descartes’s further identifying a perception with and act of perception, even in this context. It is at least as plausible to take Descartes here as saying that ‘possession of the idea of God’ equals ‘comprehension of the meaning of the word God’ equals ‘perception of a mental representation of God’.

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What Nadler regards as “the most telling piece of evidence” for his case (and one stressed also by Yolton) is the passage from the preface to the Meditations, part of which we quoted above, in which Descartes says that an idea can be taken materially, as an operation of the intellect … [or] … objectively, as the thing represented by that operation; and this thing, even if it is not regarded as existing outside the intellect, can still, in virtue of its essence, be more perfect than myself. (CSM II: 7) We are here landed in difficult territory, forced to confront what Descartes means by the “objective reality” of ideas – his term, roughly, for their representational content. Descartes needs to pick out the representational content of ideas in general as a preliminary move, so that he can go on to apply what Cottingham calls his “causal adequacy principle”12 to his innate idea of God, and thus conclude God’s existence in Meditation III. The crucial question for our purposes is whether, as Arnauld and his followers have it, ideas “taken objectively” are simply representative aspects of mental acts,13 or whether they “exist inside the intellect” in some strong sense, as representative proxies. Evidence for the latter interpretation can be garnered from what Descartes says in the First Replies. The Dutch priest Caterus has objected that “ ‘objective being in the intellect’ … is simply the determination of an act of the intellect by means of an object.14 And this is merely an extraneous label which adds nothing to the thing itself ” (CSM II: 66–7). Descartes replies that this is fair comment if the object in question is taken to be an object external to the mind, for example the sun. He continues: But if the question is about what the idea of the sun is … ‘objective being in the intellect’ will not here mean ‘the determination of an act of the intellect by means of an object’, but will signify the object’s being in the intellect in the way in which its objects are normally there. … Now this mode of being is of course much less perfect than that possessed by things which exist outside the intellect; but, as I did explain, it is not therefore simply nothing. (CSM II: 75, emphasis added) Descartes seems here clearly to be insisting on a ‘philosophical’ sense of ideas as entities15 distinct from the act of perception; their “mode of being” may not be full-blooded, but neither does it evaporate into the intentional aspect of ideas in their ‘popular’ sense as merely acts of mind. To take stock: we find that Reid’s contentions about Descartes’s ideas, so far, are correct. Reid says that the “popular” sense of idea is not Descartes’s only sense – and it isn’t. Reid says further, that this popular sense is confined to Descartes’s treatment of the idea of God – this, too, is largely true. Indeed Reid’s second contention may be capable of working harder for him than he realises, in that the “objective reality” of Descartes’s idea of God turns out, on inspection,

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arguably to make it a reified or “philosophical” idea after all. What else does Reid say about Descartes’s ideas? Reid really only has two other complaints to make in this area, and these are to do with Descartes’s attachment to purely ‘philosophical’ ideas. The first is the general complaint that Descartes affirms the existence of these ideas at all, as the only immediate objects of perception – whether those objects be conceived as physical objects or as mental objects: he took it for granted … that what we immediately perceive must be either in the mind itself or in the brain, to which the mind is immediately present. [272a] Above, we have amply seen the very strong encouragement which Descartes’s own words give to this construal of his theory of perception. Whether the ideas are material images depicted on the pineal gland when ‘the windows are open’ (to Burman), or non-material images in the mind, enjoying in some non-empty sense a “mode of being” (to Hobbes), they are – Descartes states – the things which the mind immediately attends to in the process of perception. These ideas (both physical and mental) are more than dead flies on the glass of Reid’s telescope.16 Reid’s final complaint is that Descartes is inconsistent with respect to the location of these immediate objects of perception: he sometimes places the ideas of material objects in the brain, not only when they are perceived, but when they are remembered or imagined; and this has always been held to be the Cartesian doctrine; yet he sometimes says, that we are not to conceive the images or traces in the brain to be perceived, as if there were eyes in the brain; these traces are only occasions on which, by the laws of the union of soul and body, ideas are excited in the mind.17 [272b] Once again, this is a complaint which our survey of Descartes’s writings on the subject fully bears out. About the nature of the inconsistency, Reid says this: These two opinions, I think, cannot be reconciled. For, if the images or traces in the brain are perceived,18 they must be the objects of perception, and not the occasions of it only. On the other hand, if they are only the occasions of our perceiving, they are not perceived at all. Des Cartes seems to have hesitated between the two opinions, or to have passed from the one to the other.19 [272b–3a] In the end, Reid’s verdict on Descartes’s account of perception is more charitably put than a Hamilton or a Webb could have managed: in what he has said, in different parts of his writings, of our perceptions of external objects, there seems to be some obscurity, and even inconsistency;

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Was Reid tilting at a straw man? whether owing to his having had different opinions on the subject at different times, or to the difficulty he found in it, I will not pretend to say. [272b]

Yet it is accurate. However, we may well feel that the person who puts his finger on the reason for its accuracy is not Reid himself but Malebranche, when he says of Descartes: “this great philosopher has not at all probed to the bottom of the nature of ideas” (OC 6: 214).

Malebranche and Arnauld The figures of Malebranche and Arnauld are of particular interest in this chapter. Not only do they represent the twin poles of the ideal theory – the extremes, in Hamilton’s terms, of its ‘crudeness’ and ‘refinement’ respectively; they also, in their famous battle over the nature of ideas, come to grips with many of the same issues as we have seen troubling Reid. For these reasons, it is useful, as well as convenient, to treat these two Cartesians together. Malebranche regards it as incontestable that ideas are involved in sense perception; but he nevertheless provides two arguments for their indispensability. One argument is a classic statement of the argument from illusion, based on an assumption about the intentionality of perception. Perception must always be perception of some thing – “voir rien, c’est ne point voir”. Malebranche takes it as self-evident that perception – just as much as, say, eating – involves a relation that can only hold between entities which actually exist (compare manger rien, c’est ne point manger). But now, says Malebranche, reflection on the facts of illusion and delusion shows that “the sensible view of objects necessarily involves a judgement which may be false”. So to accommodate these possibilities of error we must recognize that ideas (“êtres représentatifs”) are present to the mind which represent objects external to it, whatever the state of those objects, and whether or not they exist at all (OC 6: 202).20 This relational account of the intentionality of perception, and of thought in general, is of course a major point of disagreement between Malebranche on the one hand and Arnauld and Reid on the other. ‘Presence to mind’ is also at the centre of Malebranche’s other main argument for ideas, known in the literature as the “walking mind” argument: I think everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by themselves. We see the sun, the stars, and an infinity of objects external to us; and it is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll about the heavens, as it were, in order to behold all these objects. Thus, it does not see them by themselves and our mind’s immediate object when it sees the sun, for example, is not the sun, but something that is intimately joined to our soul, and this is what I call an idea. (OC 1: 413–14)

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It should be emphasized that although both these arguments for the necessity of êtres représentatifs are built round examples drawn from sense perception, Malebranche intends them to apply universally to cognition in all its forms. Just as much are ideas necessary for thinking about or imagining objects as for seeing them through ones eyes.21 So far, Malebranche takes himself merely to have shored up a conclusion around which there is a consensus: “everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by themselves”.22 But this agreement does not extend to the metaphysical status of the mediating entities involved – their origin and their location. Malebranche’s really radical departure from Descartes is to export ideas from the human mind or brain and to place them in God, where we become aware of them when he so wills. Ideas of objects are metaphysically identical with the archetypes of extension in God’s mind according to which he has made, and continues to make, his creatures. Hence their epistemological accuracy (with an important qualification to be made in a moment). There could be no more perfect representation than a divine blueprint, and this is why it is enough simply to consult the idea of a body to know what extensional modifications it is capable of. On the occasion of the physical presence of an object, God does two things. He reveals a general idea of extension, and he causes some sensations which particularize the idea and make it specific to its object. This is explained in Eclaircissement X, where it becomes clear that ideas of particular extended objects are not held individually in God’s mind, ready for revelation, but rather exist there as a single infinite idea of extension which it is the function of sensations to cut up into finite parts. It is crucial to note that, for Malebranche, the ‘epistemological accuracy’ of ideas is hypothetical only. The ‘vision in God’ gives us certain knowledge of the nature of the external world if God, of his own free will, has created it – but the only evidence we have that God has exercised his free will in this way comes from the scriptures: “only faith can persuade us that there really are bodies” (OC 3: 64). Reid is surprisingly well disposed towards Malebranche, considering their polar opposition as epistemologists. The mockery he uses against some ideal theorists (notably Berkeley and Hume) is entirely absent from his review: However visionary this system may appear on a superficial view, yet, when we consider that he agreed with the whole tribe of philosophers in conceiving ideas to be the immediate objects of perception, and that he found insuperable difficulties, and even absurdities, in every other hypothesis concerning them, it will not appear so wonderful that a man of very great genius should fall into this; and, probably, it pleased so devout a man the more that it sets, in the most striking light, our dependence on God, and his continual presence with us … [and that it rests] … the complete evidence we have of the existence of matter upon the authority of revelation. [265b–6a]

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Reid’s evident respect, then, stems partly from sympathy with Malebranche’s theological motives. But it is also due to similarities of detail between these two theories which, overall, are so different. As C. McCracken points out, both use the term “natural judgement” for much the same thing, and both stress the importance and the difficulty of disentangling these judgements from the sensations that always (or in Reid’s case, almost always) accompany them. In both accounts natural judgements are non-inferential and involuntary; they are caused, immediately or ultimately, by God in order to promote the survival of mankind (McCracken: 303–4). But there the similarities stop. Malebranche’s agreement with “the whole tribe” of ideal theorists means that for him these natural judgements are false judgements, while for Reid they are, in the main, true, as products of the principles of common sense. No two more different dishes, it seems, could be cooked up from so many shared ingredients. But despite this, there is obvious in Reid’s reaction to Malebranche a greater friendliness than he shows towards his apparently closer doctrinal ally, Arnauld, to whom (and to whose dispute with Malebranche) we now turn. Arnauld’s controversy with Malebranche over the nature of ideas was one of the most protracted and acrimonious punch-ups in the history of philosophy. The initiating event had been the publication in 1674 of Malebranche’s main work, De la Recherche de la Vérité, in which he presented the account just summarized. Eclaircissements (or Elucidations) followed, of which number XVI (1678) was particularly provocative to Arnauld. In 1683 Arnauld fired his first shot in the written debate with a book-length critique of the Recherche, entitled Des Vrayes et des Fausses Idées. Lengthy printed replies and counter-replies ensued, after which the dispute ground on in the exchange of many bad-tempered letters. In Arnauld’s book,23 the eponymous fausses idées are, of course, Malebranche’s ‘representative beings distinct from perceptions’. Ideas in this sense, insists Arnauld, are “chimeras”; if we take them for true we shall be led into “paradoxes” and “very absurd opinions” (Arnauld: 11). Vrayes idées, on the other hand, are identical with perceptions: I take the perception and the idea to be the same thing. … this thing, although only one, has two relations: one to the soul which it modifies, the other to the thing perceived … and … the word perception indicates … the first relation and the word idea the second. (Arnauld: 20, emphasis original) Seeing the terms of the debate set up in this way, we cannot but be struck by the close parallel between what Arnauld means by ‘true’ and ‘false’ ideas on the one hand, and what Reid calls the ‘popular’ and ‘philosophical’ senses of ‘idea’ on the other. There is, it is true, a difference24 in their respective attitudes to ‘true’ and ‘popular’ ideas (Arnauld is keen to affirm the existence of ideas in his sense, while Reid will merely tolerate the usage). But in what each of them says against ‘false ideas’ and ideas in the ‘philosophical’ sense, there are many similarities. To begin with, they diagnose the cause of their opponents’ mistakes in the same way:

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What confuses this entire matter of ideas is that people want to use comparisons with corporeal things to explain the way in which objects are represented by our ideas. (Arnauld: 20) analogical reasoning from a supposed similitude of mind to body … I conceive to be the most fruitful source of error with regard to the operations of our mind. [Reid: 237b] Then, there are correspondences of detail between Arnauld’s particular objections to Malebranche on the one hand, and Reid’s wider attack on ‘the ideal theory’ on the other, as we shall see if we now sketch some of the main exchanges in the internecine Cartesian squabble. The wrongful assimilation of the mental to the material, thinks Arnauld, is what is behind Malebranche’s “walking mind” argument. Arnauld finds two main faults with the assimilation here, one specific and one general. Specifically, the requirement that in bodily vision the object be present to the eyes is not even true: “The object must be absent from them . . . if it were in the eye or too close to the eye, it could not be seen” (Arnauld: 16). Generally, Malebranche should know “better than anyone else” (as a Cartesian) the folly of trying to make meaningful comparisons between what is mental and what is material (Arnauld, sixth Rule: 4). What Malebranche says in reply to this helps us to get clear about the principle which underlies the ‘walking mind’ argument: Is it not evident that what I say is a sort of jest rather than a principle on which I establish opinions which overturn that same principle? … But what did I mean when I said that the soul does not go for a walk in the heavens, there to contemplate the stars? … I only meant that something different from the sun was needed to represent it to the soul. (OC 4: 95–6) Malebranche thinks that “something different from the sun” is needed as a representative intermediary because he adheres to what Richard Watson calls the Cartesian “epistemological likeness principle” – there must be (as there cannot be between spiritual soul and physical sun) an essential likeness between knower and thing known. ‘Something (metaphysically) different from the sun, yet like the soul’, then, is the expansion we need for full clarity.25 At all events, the only sort of presence to mind that Arnauld will countenance is cognitive or “objective” presence, so called to distinguish it from the “local” presence that applies only to bodies. Arnauld uses this same notion of Descartes’s – “being objectively in the mind” – as a fig-leaf to hide behind when it comes to explaining how idea/perceptions represent their objects. This relation can only be characterized negatively (not like pictures, not like words), and is peculiar to mind. It is simply in the nature of ideas to represent their objects without resembling them or being like them in any other way. God has arranged it so.26

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Arnauld feels he has reached the proper stopping-place; his third Rule “is not to seek for reasons ad infinitum; but to stop when we know what belongs to the nature of a thing …” (Arnauld: 3).27 When Malebranche says we do not see things “immediately” or “through themselves”, he means ‘without the mediation of ideas distinct from perceptions’. Arnauld objects that this denial of ‘immediate’ perception encloses the mind in a “palace of ideas”. This, he points out, is counter to the intentions both of Malebranche and of God: “He [Malebranche] assumed at the outset that our mind perceives material things. He was troubled only about how” (Arnauld: 51). But the upshot of Malebranche’s long investigation is not an explanation of how perception happens, but a denial that it ever takes place at all. So despite himself, he has frustrated his own purposes. More importantly, he has frustrated God’s purposes, and there is “impiety” in this. God, having joined my soul to a body, cannot intend that I put “intelligible meat” and “intelligible drink” into my “material mouth” (a dress rehearsal, this, for the sort of exasperation that Berkeley would later provoke). Malebranche replies that it is Arnauld and not he who deprives us of the objects of perception. From ideas as modifications of mind we can tell only that we are perceiving and that the perception belongs to us. If we want objects for our acts of perception, and these objects are to be metaphysically independent of our minds, then the representative idea must be properly distinguished from the mental substance of which these acts are modifications. Without êtres représentatifs distingués des perceptions we are left only with our perceptions. Arnauld’s response to this counter-charge that his position implies scepticism is the orthodox Cartesian resort to the premise of God’s non-deceptiveness. He gives no fewer than eight Arguments in which, he claims, the falsity of such scepticism is “fully demonstrated” (Arnauld: 176–80). At several points Arnauld accuses Malebranche of begging the question in favour of his êtres représentatifs. For his part, Malebranche finds many of Arnauld’s arguments less than adequate. In his first reply, for example, he says that Arnauld’s Definition No. 3 contains no demonstration, but only assertion, of the identity of ideas with perceptions. (This is true but hardly a fair complaint; the Definitions are preliminary to the Demonstrations.) In following these exchanges it is hard to avoid the feeling that each protagonist is frequently talking past the other, without really engaging him. Perhaps this is a function of their failure ever to get clear on the precise nature of the dispute between them. There seem to have been four main ways in which others have viewed their controversy.28 (1) Locke and others (including sometimes Arnauld) see idealism in Malebranche. These would have regarded the dispute with Arnauld as taking place between an idealist and an indirect realist. (2) On what Monte Cook calls the “Old View”, the debate was seen as one between two indirect realists who agreed about the structure of perception but disagreed about a detail (Cook 1991: 183ff.). Both Malebranche and Arnauld (it was thought) held that we mediately see external objects only by

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immediately seeing ideas. At issue was whether these ideas were only modifications of mind or were independent of mind and in God. On this view, which is very much Malebranche’s (though he did sometimes call Arnauld an idealist), the dispute is ontological: What is the issue at hand? Mr. Arnauld insists that the modalities of the soul are essentially representative of objects distinct from the soul; and I maintain that these modalities are nothing but sensations, which do not represent to the soul anything different from itself. (OC 6: 50) (3) On Cook’s “New View”, however, the debate becomes an epistemological one between (as before) Malebranche’s indirect realism and Arnauld’s (now) direct realism. This is how Arnauld saw the dispute, and is how Nadler chose to characterize it in his earlier book on Arnauld. He argued persuasively in that book that “the act-of-perception/object-of-perception issue is equivalent to the modification-of-mind/non-modification-of-mind issue. ... Malebranche’s description is not inaccurate but merely one (correct) way of characterizing what is at issue” (Nadler 1989: 86). The epistemological and the metaphysical aspects of the dispute, in other words, come to much the same thing. (4) But in his later book, Malebranche and Ideas, Nadler interprets his subject as a direct realist too (let us call this the ‘Very New View’).29 Since we now have two direct realists in contention, one dimension (that of epistemological disagreement) will clearly drop out – but in view of the equivalence between it and the ontological dimension argued for in the earlier book, we might expect the focus of the debate to remain unchanged, in Nadler’s eyes. It doesn’t. As before, “Malebranche’s characterisation is accurate and the debate … really is solely over the ontological status of ideas … [and] … not over whether we perceive bodies or ideas” (Nadler 1992: 185, emphasis original). This is puzzling. A chart might help to clarify this movement of interpretative opinion through time.

Direct realist Locke’s View ‘Old View’ ‘New View’ ‘Very New View’

Indirect realist

Idealist

Arnauld

Malebranche

Arnauld and Malebranche Arnauld

Malebranche

Arnauld and Malebranche

Four views of the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche

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Reid deliberately abstains from giving “an account of the continuation of this controversy between th[ese] two acute philosophers” because, he says, “I have not access to see … the subsequent defences and replies” [296b]. But it is obvious from his other remarks that Reid is an Old View man. He sees both Malebranche and Arnauld as at best indirect realists, the former beyond any question but the latter committed too, since “what he had given up with one hand, he takes back with the other” [297a]. We should now ask to what extent is he, and the Old View, correct? With respect to Malebranche we may well feel that the Old View (and indeed the New View) gets things right. Nadler’s direct realist reinterpretation of Malebranche has been examined in detail, and found wanting, by David Scott. In summary, Scott’s findings are these. First, Nadler rules out the standard representationalist reading on the basis of too narrow a construal of ‘representationalism’, according to which the mind’s direct awareness of its intermediary entities must be sensory awareness. Malebranche’s ideas, it is true, will not fit this model since they are logical or conceptual in nature and so cannot be sensed. But this is only to dispose of one kind of representationalism, and not the one usually attributed to Malebranche at that: “It is precisely because bodies themselves are invisible (intellectually), not possessed of sensible qualities and impossibly present to the mind, that he has been viewed as a representationalist in his doctrine of ideas” (Scott: 58–65). And second, Scott shows that each of the five Malebranchean texts cited by Nadler to support his revisionary interpretation is either neutral on the question or positively hostile to Nadler’s case (Scott: 65–70).30 Here we shall simply help ourselves to these results and conclude that the Very New View is wrong with respect to Malebranche. How about the Very New View with respect to Arnauld? Is its (and the New View’s) reading of Arnauld as a direct realist supportable? Since (we assume) Reid is a direct realist if anybody is, this question is equivalent to the question whether Reid is correct in his opinion that issues of substance divide him and Arnauld over ideas. Reid, as we should expect, approves Arnauld’s denial of êtres représentatifs distingués des perceptions, but he laments Arnauld’s lack of courage in still accepting as true, when rightly understood, such expressions as: “(a) we do not see things immediately; (b) their ideas are the immediate objects of thought; and (c) it is in the idea of each thing that we see its properties” (Arnauld: 25). It would have been better, says Reid, “to have rejected boldly the doctrine of Descartes, as well as the other philosophers, concerning those fictitious beings, and all the ways of speaking that imply their existence” than to have spent his sixth chapter in “a weak attempt to reconcile two inconsistent doctrines by one who wishes to hold both” [297b].31 Yet in many respects the grounds for saying that Arnauld is an indirect realist are no better than those for saying the same of Reid. There have indeed been commentators who have called Reid’s realism indirect;32 but the label cannot be made to stick to Reid except, quite unenlighteningly, to indicate his necessary recognition that cognitive contact with the world is mediated by mental activity.33 The same is true of Arnauld:

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I state here that if by conceiving the sun, a square or a cubic number immediately, is meant the opposite of conceiving them through ideas … not distinct from perceptions, I agree that we do not see them immediately, for it is clearer than the day that we can see, perceive or know them only through the perceptions that we have of them. (Arnauld: 31) But, Arnauld goes on to say, in any interesting sense: we can know material things … not only mediately but also immediately, i.e. … we can know them without there being any intermediary between our perceptions and the object. (Ibid.) The kinship between Arnauld and Reid is based in their common rejection of Waston’s “epistemological likeness principle”. It issues in their shared acceptance of (or insistence upon) the primitive unanalysability of intentional mental states. And it carries with it a joint denunciation of ‘ideas distinct from perceptions’ as fictions of the philosophers – in the course of which several of the same arguments are used by each. To some extent Reid acknowledges the similarity. If only Arnauld had abandoned the use of those objectionable façons de parler, he says, “I should have thought him more consistent with himself, and his doctrine concerning ideas more rational and more intelligible than that of any other author of my acquaintance who has treated of the subject” [298a]. But Reid has sunk too much capital into his attack on ideas to welcome as a brother one who persists in saying such things as “that it is in the idea of everything that we perceive its properties”. He is convinced that there is real theoretical space between himself and Arnauld in this area. Is he right? Two things that make a firm answer hard to give are the act/object ambiguity of ‘idea’, and the widely extended meaning given to ‘perception’ at this time. As Grave says, these features make it unclear sometimes how to understand Arnauldianisms such as “I take … the idea of an object and the perception of an object to be the same thing.” They could mean that ‘having an idea of an object’ means only thinking of it, or imagining it, or remembering it – all these being ways of ‘perceiving’ it. But equally they might be “multiplying entities” while appearing to reject their multiplication – rejecting ideas as objects distinct from perception in order to reassert them as objective components of perception. “The opposite meanings of which such statements are capable partly explains why Reid was unsure as to whether or not he was encountering the ideal theory when he encountered them in Arnauld” (Grave: 22). Nevertheless, I think we should give Arnauld the benefit of any doubt here. Arnauld devotes his entire sixth chapter to explaining why his direct realism is not compromised by these façons de parler, and his explanation is clear and thorough enough to deserve to be taken at its word. We still need a reason why

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Arnauld should have wished to persist with these ways of speaking when, as he admits, they apparently conflict with the position he is professing. Cook suggests, plausibly, that this embarrassing talk of ‘ideas’ was required for one who would be seen as “genuinely Cartesian” (Cook 1974: 58) – rather (we might add) as some ‘New Labour’ politicians in Britain today continue to lard their speeches with talk of ‘socialism’. In the end, then, Arnauld and Reid differ less over the nature of ‘ideas’ than over the role of God in their responses to scepticism – a difference which will become clearer in our final chapter.

Locke In his introduction to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke apologizes for his frequent use of the word ‘idea’: It being that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking. (Essay: 1.1.8) In this, his most general statement of what he means by ‘idea’, Locke makes explicit mention of Scholastic terminology. But in the page-by-page uses to which he puts the word, other, more recent influences are present, if less overtly. He may not consciously exploit the material/objective ambiguity of ‘idea’ as Descartes signals he will do in the Preface to the Meditations; but Locke does, in his Epistle to his readers, talk similarly of ideas being “objectively in the mind.” When on the final page of the Essay he says: for since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it; and these are ideas (Essay: 4.21.4) the Malebranchean echo is unmistakable. And the Arnauldean view comes through strongly at 1.2.5: “for if these words (to be in the understanding) have any propriety, they signify to be understood.” Everyone who has written about Locke’s use of the term ‘idea’ in the Essay has noticed its ambiguity. Commentators often make lists of its different senses there, and typically they find it to be quintuply ambiguous.34 The Malebranchean sense (i) (idea as entity) and the Arnauldean sense (ii) (idea as act) find their way on to all lists, as does another aberrant sense (iii) (idea as quality) for which Locke seems to apologize at the end of the famous ‘snowball’ passage.35 The fourth and fifth senses of ‘idea’ that feature on most lists, variously described, are to do with concepts. These are either complex ideas of particular substances built up out of

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simple ideas, as a chair is composed of seat, back and legs (the word ‘chair’ then standing for the complex idea) – sense (iv); or they are general characteristics, either of objects of sense such as whiteness or hardness, or of objects of reflection like triangularity or theft, arrived at by abstraction – sense (v). Because the headings in these various lists cut across each other, we cannot compare them directly. But in order to weigh the charge of ambiguity against Locke (is it “ruinous” (Ryle 1933: 19) or “harmless” (Ayers 1986: 16)?) it may be helpful to take one list as standard and see what ambiguities it contains. Nathanson’s list, then, with glosses where appropriate, is as follows: A. Percepts. [This category corresponds to Ryle’s “sense-data”, “images”, and “supposed mental entities” – cf. the Malebranchean sense (i) above.] B. Mental dispositions to form ordinary concepts, or the concepts so formed. [That is, the capacity to form complex ideas – cf. sense (iv) above.] C. Mental dispositions to form abstract concepts, or the concepts so formed. [Cf. sense (v) above.] D. Individual beliefs or particular “bits of knowledge”. [The closest item to Arnauld’s sense (ii).] E. Qualities. [The aberrant sense for which Locke apologizes.] (Nathanson: 30–32) D.J. O’Connor makes much of Locke’s failure to draw attention to, or even apparently to notice, the now popular type/token distinction (O’Connor: 37). An ambiguity of this sort might be said to be present, in Nathanson’s list, between senses C and A, or between C and D (or even between B and any of A, C or D). But Ayers thinks this kind of systematic ambiguity, like that of ‘thought’ or ‘sensation’, is quite unproblematic. He says the same about another ambiguity – in the expression ‘to have an idea’, between a ‘dispositional’ sense, in which it connotes a capacity, and an ‘occurent’ sense, in which it connotes an actual occurrence in consciousness (Nathanson’s senses B and A/D; compare the word ‘understand’). Ayers notes that these two ambiguities can be closely related – as at 2.10.2 where Locke, discussing memory, says we “revive again” ideas which “have been as it were laid aside out of sight” (Ayers 1986: 4). Here the ideas are laid aside as tokens or ‘images’ which have been had occurrently, but they are revived dispositionally, often as idea-types. “Neither ambiguity seems in any way pernicious”, says Ayers, and we might well agree. Ryle would not agree; he would diagnose a ‘category mistake’ in Locke’s use of one term to refer both to capacities for observable action and to “inner episodes of ghostly status”. But since Locke would have rejected logical behaviourism even if he had heard of it, Ayers is surely right when he declares: however ambiguous the term ‘idea’ may be in other respects, in this respect at least Locke employed it deliberately and unequivocally to express a view

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The main and most troublesome of the “other respects” in which the term is ambiguous doesn’t emerge properly from Nathanson’s list. Locke often speaks quite definitely of ideas as entities present in the mind, its only immediate objects (sense A, if we like); but sometimes he appears to equate ideas with acts of perception (sense D, but only strainedly). If these two usages are not flatly inconsistent (as they well may be), it is just as hard in Locke’s case as it is in Descartes’s to make sense of a theory in which both are held to be true at once. At all events they tend in different directions: the former is representationalism, or indirect realism, par excellence, while the latter provides the ingredients for direct realism. The traditional view of Locke the representationalist was taken by Berkeley and, of course, Reid – a fact which H.E. Mathews thinks should be allowed some weight: “they did, after all, live in the same intellectual atmosphere as Locke, and took the same things for granted. It is more likely, therefore, that they would interpret him correctly than that his perhaps over-subtle modern defenders should do so” (Mathews: 61). The key Lockean statement which supports the traditional interpretation comes at 4.4.3: ’Tis evident, the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the Ideas it has of them. The passage is not isolated; there are many others that seem also to require a representationalist reading, such as 1.1.8 and 4.1.1, where Locke talks of ideas as “objects”, and 4.17.8 where he calls them “particular existences”. But proponents of the New View (which is not a view only about paid-up Cartesians) give direct realist readings even of 4.4.3. All we need take Locke to be saying there, they urge, is that we can only perceive things by means of our perceptions of them; and they provide long lists of places in the text where the identification of ideas with ‘perceptions’ is explicitly made. About this, Vere Chappell, who is above the fray, warns that for Locke (as for Descartes) the word ‘perception’ has act/object ambiguity and that Locke always has the ‘object’ sense in mind when he says that ideas are perceptions; “when he wants to speak of perceptions in the act-sense, he uses, not ‘idea,’ but ‘having an idea’ [as at 2.1.9]” (Chappell: 28).37 Another seemingly powerful reason for denying that Locke was a representationalist also turns out under scrutiny to lack force. This is Woozley’s contention, based on Section 52 of Locke’s Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion, that: It is scarcely credible both that Locke should be able to see and state so clearly the fundamental objection to the picture-original theory of senseperception, and that he should have held that theory himself. (Woozley 1964: 27)

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In that place, Locke had asked of Malebranche: “How then does he know that there is a sun which he never saw?”; and on the face of it it does seem odd that Locke, if he were a representationalist, should have made to Malebranche the same objection that Berkeley and Reid were later to make to him. But, as Mathews has convincingly shown, this is to misread the nature of Locke’s objection, which is not to any picture-original theory of sense-perception but to Malebranche’s ‘Vision in God’. What Locke criticizes is the failure of occasionalism to give as good an account of sense perception as the corpuscularians, never mind a better one, as promised (Mathews: 55–61). So the proper sense of the objection comes out if we prefix it thus: ‘Malebranche holds that our idea of the sun is not caused by the sun – how then does he know that there is a sun which he never saw?’38 The interpretative issue between traditionalists and revisionists is a complicated one and some of its aspects have gone unremarked here. It has not been mentioned, for instance, how much better ‘ideas as entities’ sit with Locke’s account of knowledge as the perception of a relation between ideas, than do ‘ideas as perceptual acts’. But perhaps enough has been said to show the desirability of challenging the Woozley/Yolton reinterpretation of Locke, both as it affects the body of Locke’s work itself, and as it reflects on the judgement made on it by his immediate successors, Berkeley and Reid. This older judgement may not be the only supportable one, since textual obstacles remain. But we can say, unless Woozley and Yolton are uniquely right, that Berkeley’s and Reid’s criticisms of Locke are not based in myth-promoting misreadings of the Essay, but are proper responses to part of what is there in the text.

Summary We have reviewed what some of the major ideal theorists had to say about ideas39 and found one of them – Malebranche – to have been unambiguously a reifier, and another – Arnauld – not. Two others – Descartes and Locke – have proved more difficult to classify because the textual evidence points both ways. Sometimes they use the term ‘idea’ for acts of perceiving, sometimes for the objects of those acts. This textual inconclusiveness is acknowledged by proponents of the New View, when they are being conciliatory. Thus Woozley modestly intends some of his remarks only to “shake … our confidence” in the traditional interpretation (Tipton: 55); and Yolton concedes “there is ample textual support for applying to Locke, and to other writers in the way-of-ideas tradition, this standard interpretation” (Yolton: 5). But when, as usually, they are being more robust, they treat the evidence as all one-way, and berate Thomas Reid for having missed the now-obvious truth, and having fathered the simplistic Old View on the history of philosophy. The immediate aim of this chapter has been to try to show that Reid deserves better than to be treated as a mere whipping-boy for the admitted unclarity in these difficult texts. The ideal theory may have been more diverse than he realized, with less monolithic a tendency to reify ideas than he allowed. But, as

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has emerged above, the tendency was there in important and unignorable places, and to this extent Reid was not tilting at a straw man. His summaries of his predecessors were, in the main, fair and astute. Only in the case of Arnauld have we found him to have made an outright interpretative mistake. The wider aim of our historical digression has been to show that Reid was right to identify in the ideal theory a potential global defeater for the beliefs of common sense, and therefore right to see a need to argue it down. But it is one thing for Reid successfully to have shown that the epicycle on his reliabilism has not been triggered by a real threat, and quite another to have persuaded us that reliabilism with an untriggered epicycle constitutes an adequate answer to scepticism. In the following chapters we return to Reid’s reliabilism to examine how Reid undertakes this latter and most important task.

Notes 1 “When … in common language, we speak of having an idea of anything, we mean no more by that expression, but thinking of it. The vulgar allow that this expression implies a mind that thinks, an act of that mind which we call thinking, and an object about which we think. But, besides these three, the philosopher conceives that there is a fourth – to wit, the idea, which is the immediate object. The idea is in the mind itself, and can have no existence but in a mind that thinks; but the remote or mediate object may be something external, as the sun or moon; it may be something past or future; it may be something which never existed. This is the philosophical meaning of the word idea” [226b]. 2 “To prevent mistakes, the reader must again be reminded, that if by ideas are meant only the acts or operations of our minds in perceiving, remembering, or imagining objects, I am far from calling in question the existence of those acts; we are conscious of them every day and every hour of life.… The ideas, of whose existence I require the proof, are not the operations of any mind, but supposed objects of those operations. They are not perception, remembrance, of conception, but things that are said to be perceived, or remembered, or imagined” [298a,b, emphasis added]. 3 To avoid a veritable plague of single quotation marks round the word idea, these will mostly be omitted henceforth in this chapter. I hope that the distinction between the use and the mention of this term will nevertheless be clear from the context. 4 Subsequent sections (on the ideas of Malebranche and Arnauld, and of Locke) will be briefer, since some of our conclusions about Descartes’s ideas will carry across. 5 In the Haldane and Ross translation, it is an ‘equivocation’ (vol. 1: 138). 6 In a subsequent footnote, Hamilton unwittingly (and then only partially) corrects his mistake, in the very act of drawing attention to a supposed mistake of Reid’s: “Des Cartes here refers to the other meaning which he gives to the term idea – that is, to denote the material motion, the organic affection of the brain, of which the mind is not conscious. On Reid’s misapprehension of the Cartesian doctrine touching this matter, see Note N” [297b n., emphasis added]. 7 Arnauld’s views will be discussed in the next section. 8 Against Yolton, James Manns has convincingly argued “that there is to be found in Descartes no more than the barest hint of the theory of sensations-as-signs that was to become such a pivotal element in Reid’s theory of perception … [so that] … it is hardly appropriate to say that Reid’s theory of perception “echoes” that of Descartes, unless we allow that echoes can ring with far greater strength than the original sound that produced them” (Manns: 513, 523).

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9 We might well pause to question whether Reid is not in fact making too much allowance here for Descartes’s sense of ideas as acts of mind, in the sentence quoted by Arnauld. We noted above that the word ‘form’, being common to all Descartes’s explanations of what he means by ‘idea’, is not a reliable indicator that here he intends the ‘act’ sense. And in addition, as Anthony Kenny points out: “when [Descartes] denies that ideas are images, we cannot be quite sure that he is denying that ideas are mental images in the sense of pictures in the mind’s eye. For mental images are not material images in the brain” (Kenny: 235). 10 CSM II: 113 (2nd Replies); 132 (3rd Replies); 273 (5th Replies); 25–6 (Med. III); 7 (Preface); 27–8 (Med. III); 163 (4th Replies); III: 172 (Letter to Mersenne). 11 The anomalous passage concerns acts of will: “I claim that we have ideas not only of all that is in our intellect, but also of all that is in the will. For we cannot will anything without knowing that we will it, nor could we know this except by means of an idea; but I do not claim that the idea is different from the act itself ” (Letter to Mersenne, 28/1/1641, CSM III: 172]. However, we may well feel that the special case of volition is too small a base to support Nadler’s generalized claim that all Descartes’s ideas are mental acts. 12 See Cottingham 1986: 49 ff. See also Descartes’s own words: “It is manifest by the natural light that [an idea’s cause must] … contain at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality in the idea” (CSM II: 28–9). 13 “To be in the understanding for physical objects [by means of ideas] just is to be understood ” (Yolton: 37, emphasis original); “‘Idea’ does refer to the thing outside the mind, but only as that thing exists in the mind as an object of thought, that is, as it is represented by the perceptual act” (Nadler 1989: 129, emphasis added). 14 This, of course, is the Arnauld/Yolton/Nadler construal of ‘objective being in the intellect’, which Reid would find innocuous. 15 Compare Anthony Kenny on this passage: “An extra entity has been spirited into existence” (Kenny: 242). 16 If not, then the same dead flies decorate the lens of no less a telescope than Bernard Williams’s in our own day: “We are given a picture of the mind in direct contact only with its own experiences or ideas, ‘outside’ which there are objects, causing these experiences and imperfectly represented by them” (Williams: 240). See also Williams: 59, and 285, n.7. 17 Reid leaves tacit (presumably because of its obviousness, as he sees it) the further complaint that wherever they are located, there is reification of ideas going on. 18 “Which, in Des Cartes’ doctrine, they are not”, barks Hamilton in a footnote at this point. 19 Again, lest this be thought a maverick description of Descartes’s position or a wrongheaded diagnosis of what is wrong with it, we can enlist a respectable present-day Cartesian scholar to endorse it: “[The] occasionalist solution is hinted at in several Cartesian texts, and it evidently does not require the brain happenings to be ‘images’ even in the most attenuated sense; all that seems necessary is that there be certain regular (divinely decreed) correlations between brain happenings … and mental states. … Notwithstanding these passages, however, the way in which Descartes seems to have conceived of the mind as a kind of homunculus, located in the pineal gland and ‘contemplating’ the images presented there, made him reluctant to abandon the notion that the end-product of the stimulation of the sense organs was, in some sense of the word, an actual, physically delineated, picture or image” (Cottingham 1992: 83). 20 References to Malebranche are to Oeuvres Complètes de Malebranche (ed. Robinet), 20 vols, Paris, 1972–84. English translations are either Nadler’s or my own. 21 Another thing to note about these two arguments is that they illustrate at work both of what Reid regards as the two “vulgar prejudices” that underlie the ideal theory in all its forms: “voir rien, c’est ne point voir” springs from what we have dubbed the ‘really

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existing object’ prejudice, while the “walking mind” argument trades on the ‘immediate intercourse’ prejudice (see pp. 92 and 102, above). Compare the opening sentences of both Berkeley’s Principles and Hume’s Treatise. All quotations from Arnauld have been taken from On True and False Ideas, (trans. E.J. Kremer), Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York, 1990. Reid thinks it is a big difference – we shall consider below whether he is right. Alternatively, we can turn to Lennon’s gloss: “The thrust … is something like the following. ‘The mind does not physically approach the material objects, as if that would explain its knowledge of them anyway!’” (cited in Nadler 1992: 73, n.9). Compare Reid: “We perceive, because God has given us the power of perceiving …” [257b]; “ all attempts to account for it will be vain” [260b]. There is an echo here of Aristotle’s well-known remark in Book One of the Nicomachean Ethics: “It is a mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits …” (Penguin edition: 65). A fifth view of the controversy (from a more historical perspective) is given by Richard Watson, who sees the cruces of the dispute as being (i) the Cartesian ‘epistemological likeness principle’, which Arnauld abandons and Malebranche retains; and (ii) the all-inclusive type distinction between substance and modification, which Arnauld retains and Malebranche abandons. Trouble comes, either way. Malebranche can explain, in some sense, how ideas as divine archetypes external to us can represent material objects, but not how we (of whose minds these ideas are not modifications) can be directly acquainted with them. He can only talk of “illumination”. Conversely, Arnauld can account for the direct acquaintance of mind (substance) with idea (modification), but not, except theistically, for how these mental modifications can represent material objects. Watson thus locates the dispute in the wider, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to stave off The Downfall of Cartesianism (Watson: 101–4). According to the Very New View, Malebranchean ideas are not to be thought of as sense-data but as logical concepts – all that Malebranche means when he says that bodies are not perceived “par eux-mêmes” is, harmlessly, that sense perception is mediated by concepts. Another Malebranche specialist, Andrew Pyle, has expressed similar reservations: “Nadler’s Malebranche is undoubtedly an impressive construct, a powerful and sophisticated thinker. But is the picture historically accurate as well as philosophically impressive? Here, it has to be admitted, doubts begin to arise. Could almost all the commentators (from Arnauld and Locke down to Nadler himself only a few years ago) have been so wrong for so long? Does Nadler succeed in explaining away all the passages that seem to support some version of representative realism? … I for one am not completely convinced” (Pyle: 178). Predictably, Hamilton cannot keep quiet about this, charging Reid with unclarity and confusion in a footnote. Reid is not unclear or confused here – the point he raises is plainly one which troubled Arnauld himself. Arnauld attempts a reconciliation by distinguishing between two kinds of ‘reflection’ which a thought or a perception may have. All thought is “virtually” reflective, or reflexive upon itself – which is to say that we cannot think without knowing (of) that (of which) we think. In this sense it is the idea (in its representative aspect – its objective reality) that is the immediate object of all perception, and the external object (which contains formally what is objectively in the idea) that is the mediate object. This satisfies expressions (a) and (b) above. “Explicit” reflection, by contrast, accompanies only some perceptions, as when “we examine our perception by another perception” (Arnauld: 26). A geometer, for instance, having conceived a figure bounded by three straight lines (one perception), examines it and sees that it must have three angles adding up to 180 degrees (another perception). In the same way, we can abstract the idea/perception of ‘twenty’ in general from the

Was Reid tilting at a straw man?

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primary perceptions of twenty individual objects. “Explicit” reflection, then, does two dialectical jobs for Arnauld; it renders êtres représentatifs superfluous to the formation of general ideas, and it allows Arnauld to assent to the third of the seemingly objectionable façons de parler above – (c) “it is in the idea of each thing that we see its properties”. See above, page 52. “If the idea of a thing means only the thought of it, or the operation of the mind in thinking about it … to think without ideas is to think without thought, which is undoubtedly a contradiction” [373a]. Though Ryle finds six senses and Woolhouse only four (Woolhouse: 46–7), Nathanson and O’Connor both list five; Reid, it is true, only spots three, but this is at a point where he is only concerned with sense perception [279a,b]. “Thus a snowball having the power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round, the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understandings, I call them ideas; which ideas if I speak of sometimes as in things themselves, I would be understood to mean those qualities in the objects which produce them in us” (2.8.8). In another place, Locke says that “such ways of speaking … are accommodated to the vulgar notions, without which one cannot be well understood” (2.21.2). Compare Jonathan Bennett: “[Locke’s] view is that the difference between seeing a tree, say, and being in a visual state as of seeing a tree though there is no tree to be seen, is the difference between having a sensory “idea” while in the presence of a real thing which is like the idea, and having such an idea while in the presence of no such thing. … This aspect of Locke’s thought may be summed up in the remark that Locke puts the real world on the other side of the veil of perception …” (Bennett 1965: 90–91). Roland Hall, from a similarly Olympian standpoint, notes that the earliest examples given in the O.E.D. for an eighth usage of ‘perception’ – “the result or product of perceiving” – are from the Essay 1.4.20 and 4.11.4 (Hall: 16). Gunnar Aspelin, who is parti pris for the Old View, seems to be right in saying that, for Locke, “‘idea’ and ‘perception’ in this sense are never synonymous, but correlative terms” (Aspelin: 50). In any case, as J.L. Mackie points out, Locke’s awareness of ‘the fundamental objection to the picture-original theory’ is quite consistent with his espousal of a theory exposed to the same objection, all the more since he openly admits that his own view is so exposed. Indeed, his way of meeting it is to “appeal to the very causal relationship whose denial was the distinctive feature of Malebranche’s view” (Mackie 1976: 39). We have not examined Berkeleian or Humean ‘ideas’ in this chapter because no argument seems to be required that they are proper targets for Reid (at least by Reid’s own lights). Hume prefixes his ‘shrinking table’ argument (which we analysed in Chapter 6) with the words: “nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and … the senses are only the inlets, through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object” (Enquiries: 152). Regarding Berkeley, even if Reid’s own lights drastically misled him (so Ferrier, note 20 in Chapter 3 above) Berkeley was no straw man of Reid’s invention. As Roger Gallie says: “it is plainly possible to characterize the Humean position in such a way as to be able to place it among those that Reid wishes to attack, and I think that the same point can be made about Berkeley …” (Gallie 1989: 25).

8

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism

There appears to be an important inconsistency (which, so far as I know, goes unexamined in the literature) between what Reid says about the first principles of common sense and what he actually does about them. On the one hand, his ‘official’ position is that the first principles, as axiomatic assumptions, are quite incapable of (what in any case they do not need) positive argumentative support. On the other hand we frequently find him providing just such support in at least the following ways: transcendentally, by elimination and reductio, by means of ‘track record’ arguments and considerations of coherence, and by appeal to God. Theory and practice, it would seem, could scarcely be further apart. Matters here are not straightforward; for even within the ‘theoretical’ half of this relation, Reid says things which appear to conflict with each other. The first job in this chapter, therefore, will be to see whether there is even a consistent theoretical position available to Reid on this question of whether, and if so, how, first principles can be rationally supported. Then we can look at the practice – that is, at the types and instances of the rational support he actually offers – to see whether this ‘unofficial’ provision betrays any fear on Reid’s part that his reliabilism (even with an untriggered epicycle) might, after all, be an unsatisfactory resting-place for an anti-sceptical philosopher.

Theory and practice It will be helpful to have before us Reid’s most significant theoretical pronouncements on this topic: (1) Such common principles seldom admit of direct proof, nor do they need it. [230b] (2) … although it is contrary to the nature of first principles to admit of direct or apodictical proof; yet there are certain ways of reasoning even about them, by which those that are just and solid may be confirmed, and those that are false may be detected. [439a]

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 131 (3) … although first principles are not capable of direct proof, yet … there are ways of reasoning, with regard to … [them] … by which those that are truly such may be distinguished from vulgar errors or prejudices. [441a] (4) … they require to be handled in a way peculiar to themselves. Their evidence is not demonstrative, but intuitive. They require not proof, but to be placed in a proper point of view. [231b] (5) To reason against any of these kinds of evidence, is absurd; nay, to reason for them is absurd. They are first principles; and such fall not within the province of reason, but of common sense. [108a] (6) … to place … [first principles] … upon any other foundation than that of their intrinsic evidence, is in effect to overturn them. [713b] (7) … it is unreasonable to require demonstration for things which do not admit of it. It is no less unreasonable to require reasoning of any kind for things which are known without reasoning. [482a] These passages contain multiple conflicts, the first of which to notice is relatively minor, and can easily be dealt with. Passage (1) has it that first principles “seldom admit of direct proof ”, of which it is an implication (or at least a clear Gricean conversational implicature) that one or more first principles might indeed admit of direct proof. But plainly this cannot be Reid’s considered position.1 For him, it is one of the defining characteristics of first principles that they do not admit of direct proof. To provide such a proof of a putative first principle would, therefore, be a cogent way of showing that it did not qualify for foundational status. The very success of the proof would show the principle to be a conclusion derived, not a premise assumed – which is what all genuine first principles must be. The word “seldom”, then, in passage (1) is a piece of carelessness on Reid’s part and can safely be disregarded. This correction brings the passage into line with Reid’s official position, which finds clearest expression in passages (4), (5) and (6): reasoning for first principles is not necessary (passage 4), and anyway couldn’t achieve the desired result (passage 5), and might even be counter-productive (passage 6) – all this because first principles fall outside the province of reason. At this point we might think we had spotted a contradiction between this official position and Reid’s statement in passages (2) and (3) that there are “certain ways of reasoning” about first principles after all. But what we should be missing is Reid’s clear distinction between “direct proof” or demonstration, on the one hand, and other kinds of reasoning, on the other. It is only the former sort of proof which, so Reid is saying, is inapplicable to first principles. The bar does not extend to indirect proofs, such as arguments ad hominem and reductions to

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absurdity [439a,b]. So any appearance of inconsistency here vanishes when this distinction between sorts of reasoning is observed. However, there is a further threat of inconsistency between the official position and something that is said in passage (7), which is more complicated to resolve. Reid allows in passages (2) and (3) that non-demonstrative ways of reasoning can quite legitimately be used in support of first principles. But now in passage (7) he says it is “unreasonable to require reasoning of any kind ” for them. What he has given with one hand he seems to have taken away with the other: indirect proofs for first principles – formerly permitted – are now being said to be no less unreasonable than demonstration, and the careful distinction between kinds of reasoning seems to have been lost. To see why no real inconsistency arises here we have to be clear about precisely what each passage is saying. The official view as enshrined in passages (2) and (3) apparently has it that the truth of first principles, though not strictly demonstrable, can be reasoned for in other ways: there are certain ways of reasoning even about them, by which those that are just and solid may be confirmed, and those that are false may be detected. [439a] But we have, surely, to take Reid here as saying that the “justness” and solidity”, or the “falsity” in question relates only to the status of principles as genuine first principles, not to the objective truth or falsity of what they lay down. Thus, when disputes arise about whether a given principle is “original” or not, then certain ways of reasoning – for example indirect proofs – may be brought to bear by which those that are truly such may be distinguished from vulgar errors or prejudices. [441a] In other words, Reid’s view is that the Innateness Claim for first principles may be argumentatively supported in these indirect ways. But this is perfectly consistent with his official doctrine that attempts at direct proof of the Truth Claim are unnecessary, unworkable, and counter-productive. We have, as it were, two levels of claim, on one of which argument can operate, on the other, not. There is room for argument in particular cases about the Innateness Claim – we can reason for or against the admission of a principle as “original”. But when agreement on that point has been reached and we move up a level to Reid’s overarching reliabilist account of knowledge itself, argument has to cease. We either ‘buy’ the Truth Claim or we don’t. The Truth Claim is, and can only be, an externalist assumption, unamenable to proof of any sort. All Reid can do on its behalf is to urge that the assumption is more “reasonable” than any alternative assumption about either (i) the tendency of natural faculties in respect of truth or (ii) the structure of knowledge itself. In Chapter 5 we examined Reid’s procedure with respect to (i), and found it best summed up in these words:

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 133 to suppose a general deviation from truth among mankind in things self-evident, of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable. [440b] And we decided that this nativism, when married with an externalist assumption about (ii), the structure of knowledge, can aptly be characterized as reliabilism with one epicycle: properly functioning faculties produce mainly true beliefs which amount to knowledge, provided only that the believer not have good reason for doubt. Passage (7), we can now suggest, is a corresponding statement by Reid of his attitude towards (ii) – an assertion of the greater reasonableness of externalism as a structural assumption in the theory of knowledge over its main competitor, internalism: (7) … it is unreasonable to require demonstration for things which do not admit of it. It is no less unreasonable to require reasoning of any kind for things which are known without reasoning. [482a] There is more going on in and around this compressed passage than its two short sentences advertise. To paraphrase and amplify: there is nothing more unreasonable than to ask the impossible; and the internalists, in requiring demonstration of first principles, are involved in a special case of asking the impossible.2 But not only do they demand the impossible; they (or at any rate those of them in the ‘way of ideas’ up to and including Berkeley) also engage in a futile attempt to deliver it, and their inevitable failure to do so leads them to the sceptical coal-pit. In this situation, says Reid, the reasonable thing to do is to drop the impossible internalist requirement and to assume instead that common sense beliefs are defeasibly justified as they stand. From this new externalist standpoint, first principles are seen to be known without reasoning, so not only is demonstration for them impossible, but reasoning for them “of any kind” is evidently unnecessary. And Reid insists that the demand for the latter is “no less unreasonable” than the demand for the former. There may be some overstatement by Reid here (it’s surely not quite so unreasonable to ask for the merely superfluous as to ask for the logically impossible), but there need be no inconsistency. It could be (let us grant) equally unreasonable to require (a) demonstration and (b) ‘reasoning of any kind’ for first principles without it being equally unreasonable to offer these two kinds of support, in all circumstances. In the case of demonstration, the logic of the situation dictates that it will always be unreasonable either to require it or to offer it for first principles. But in the case of other kinds of reasoning there is not this symmetry. In general, yes, it will always be unreasonable to require reasoning of any kind for first principles – because according to Reid’s reliabilist account of knowledge they are known without reasoning, in the absence of any epicyclical defeater. But once the epicycle has been triggered – as it is on a grand scale by the sceptical arguments in Hume’s Treatise – then reasoning of some kind is permissible, and will indeed be needed if common sense beliefs are to reassert themselves as knowledge.

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To summarize: we have seen that, despite appearances, there is a consistent theoretical position available to Reid on the question of when and how first principles may be supported by argument. What he opposes is (i) the requirement of (ii) direct proof of (iii) the Truth Claim; consistently with that he can himself (i) offer (ii) indirect proof of (iii) the Innateness Claim (and even, perhaps, the Truth Claim as well). Less schematically, Reid has a principled ‘twin-track’ approach to this matter, which is fully consonant with what we have been calling his ‘reliabilism with one epicycle’. In the normal case it is unreasonable to require reasoning of any kind for first principles, because, first, they don’t admit of proof, and second, because first principles produce their effects in a sane man “without ever being attended to … unless when he considers the grounds of scepticism” [448a]. However, when considering the grounds of scepticism, it is not unreasonable to offer reasoning of various kinds, either to argue down the sceptic on his own ground or to bolster the principles of common sense. So much for the theory; we turn now to consider Reid’s practice. Considering their fundamental importance as the basis of his alternative brand of foundationalism, it is remarkable how little space Reid devotes to the first principles of common sense. His discussion of the “First Principles of Contingent Truths” is particularly abbreviated, taking up a mere eleven pages; and if we add to that chapter ii of Essay I – “Principles Taken for Granted” – and chapter iv of Essay VI – “Of First Principles in General” – we still only get a total of twentytwo pages, or a little under three per cent, of the Hamilton edition. What is Reid up to in these pages? On the one hand he is doing more than simply stating his first principles (though he is certainly doing this in quite an ample fashion). On the other hand he is doing less than attempting to prove them, for he never forgets that all such attempts are futile. But it is not enough to say what Reid is not doing in these pages; we have to find a positive way of characterizing his argumentation – somewhere between enumeration and demonstration as it is – and it is not obvious what that characterization should be. Perhaps we can usefully start by noticing a comment Reid makes in passing at the outset of the chapter, “Principles Taken for Granted”: There is the more occasion for … [a list of first principles] … because very ingenious men, such as Des Cartes, Malebranche, Arnauld, and Locke, and many others, have lost much labour, by not distinguishing things which require proof, from things which, though they may admit of illustration … do not admit of proof. [231a, emphasis added] The hint in this passage is that we consider Reid’s procedure with respect to first principles not as argumentation but as illustration. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the verb ‘to illustrate’ has no fewer than seven senses, of which three may be helpful to us here (we may discount any pictorial connotation). First, what headway can we make with the commonest (non-pictorial) modern-day sense of ‘illustrate’ as “to make clear by means of examples” – to what extent does Reid illustrate his first principles in this sense?

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 135 In the chapter in which he enumerates his twelve “first principles of contingent truths” there are really only four places where, even arguably, he provides such illustration. The first comes in support of the memory principle. As an example of the way in which this principle operates as a basic unquestioned assumption, Reid asks us to consider the law courts. No defence barrister, he says, however wily, has ever had the effrontery to plead as follows: “Admitting … the integrity of the witnesses, and that they distinctly remember what they have given in evidence – it does not follow that the prisoner is guilty … Shew me any necessary connection between that act of the mind which we call memory, and the past existence of the event remembered … until it can be proved … no judge or jury can justly take away the life of a citizen upon so doubtful a point …” And for what reason [has such a plea never been entered]? For no other reason, surely, but because it is absurd. Now what is absurd at the bar, is so in the philosopher’s chair. [444b] But it may be that we do better to think of this not as an illustrative example, but as an instance of one of the two kinds of indirect proof that Reid allows may be used for first principles (the other being argument ad hominem): Secondly, a first principle may admit of a proof ad absurdum. In this kind of proof, which is very common in mathematics, we suppose the contradictory proposition to be true. We trace the consequences of that supposition in a train of reasoning; and, if we find any of its necessary consequences to be manifestly absurd, we conclude the supposition from which it followed to be false; and, therefore its contradictory to be true. [439b] A second instance of a principle being supported by illustrative example might appear to come in the case of principle 7, which vouches for the faculties of reasoning and judgement. About these Reid says: a real belief of their being fallacious cannot be maintained for any considerable time by the greatest sceptic, because it is doing violence to our constitution. It is like a man’s walking upon his hands, a feat which some men upon occasion can exhibit; but no man ever made a long journey in this manner. Cease to admire his dexterity, and he will, like other men, betake himself to his legs. [448a] But, on reflection, this is not an example, in any sense, of the principle in action, but a simple, if happy, analogy which draws attention, again, to the absurdity of its denial. Better candidates for ‘illustrations’, in the sense we are considering, are found in Reid’s remarks about principles 8 and 9. Principle 8 – the ‘other minds’ principle – is exemplified in this way:

136

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism Every one knows that there is a social intercourse between the nurse and the child before it is a year old. … It can by signs ask and refuse, threaten and supplicate. It clings to its nurse in danger, enters into her grief and joy, is happy in her soothing and caresses, and unhappy in her displeasure. That these things cannot be without a conviction in the child that the nurse is an intelligent being, I think must be granted. [448b]

Here, it is the necessity only of the “conviction” to the operation of the principle that is being illustrated. When it comes to principle 9 – the ‘body language’ principle – Reid is more ambitious. He gives multiple examples of the principle at work: The power of natural signs, to signify the sentiments and passions of the mind, is seen in the signs of dumb persons, who can make themselves to be understood in a considerable degree, even by those who are wholly inexperienced in that language. It is seen in the traffic which has been frequently carried on between people that have no common acquired language. They can buy and sell, and ask and refuse, and shew a friendly or hostile disposition by natural signs. [450a] Reid is going further, here, than he did in the case of principle 8: these examples are intended to illustrate the necessity not just of belief in the principle but also of the principle’s truth: For these reasons, I conceive, it must be granted, not only that there is a connection established by Nature between certain signs in the countenance, voice, and gesture, and the thoughts and passions of the mind; but also, that, by our constitution, we understand the meaning of those signs, and from the sign conclude the existence of the thing signified. [450b] If Reid is right, the examples show that there must be an objectively existing link between these signs and the thoughts they signify. To take stock: we have found that of the twelve first principles of contingent truths, only four of them are ‘illustrated’ by Reid in the sense of being ‘made clear by means of examples’. And of these four cases, one is really only a graphic simile, and another is more properly seen as a reductio. What hangs on this piece of classification? Only this – that if we want to keep on saying that most of Reid’s proffered ‘argument’ for first principles is in fact illustration (and so not in any way at odds with his official position), then we had better find a different sense of ‘to illustrate’ in which this stands a chance of being true. The sense we are looking for must be something like senses (1) and (2) in the Shorter O.E.D., namely “to light up, illumine”, “to set in a good light”. Reid cannot help (as which philosopher can?) using ocular metaphor at many points in his

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 137 explanations of the workings of the mind. This is apparent in the case at hand, right at the start of the chapter “Of First Principles in General”: “One of the most important distinctions of our judgments is, that some of them are intuitive, others grounded on argument” [434a, emphasis added], ‘intuition’ being, as the dictionary puts it, “the action of mentally looking at”. Any sort of successful inspection in the physical world, of course, needs light; and Reid (again standardly) often uses ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ as images for knowledge and ignorance – as here, at the end of his remarks on principle 1: We can know nothing of the immediate objects of sight, but by the testimony of our eyes; and I apprehend that, if mankind had found as great difficulty in giving attention to the objects of sight, as they find in attentive reflection upon the operations of their own minds, our knowledge of the first might have been in as backward a state as our knowledge of the last. But this darkness will not last for ever. Light will arise upon this benighted part of the intellectual globe … [443b] So far, the suggestion that Reid, in general, is busy illustrating first principles in this sense of ‘shedding light on’ them seems inviting. But it seems definitely correct when we look again at passage (4) above, where Reid says: [first principles] require to be handled in a way peculiar to themselves. Their evidence is not demonstrative, but intuitive. They require not proof, but to be placed in a proper point of view. [231b] Not only is there mention here, again, of ‘intuition’; there is talk also of placing first principles “in a proper point of view”. Although this latter phrase chiefly connotes, perhaps, matters of ‘angle’ (lack of obstruction, etc.) from the perspective of the viewer, it is surely not being over-Austinian to suggest that “a proper point of view” involves favourable lighting conditions for the object itself. Thus Reid can well be construed as ‘illustrating’ his first principles, meaning by this: placing them in a proper point from which to be viewed. Still more appropriate to Reid’s procedure in these chapters is the O.E.D.’s sense (5): “to elucidate, clear up, explain”. Elucidate retains the connection with ‘light’, as (though more obliquely) does clear up. But with explain, we reach an entirely general sense of ‘illustrate’, which no longer has any connection with its luminous root. Here at last, we might think, is a satisfactorily non-metaphorical sense in which Reid may be said to be illustrating his first principles – by explaining them. But this isn’t to say very much. ‘Explanation’ is a vague term; it might indeed, in the present context, exclude enumeration on the one hand, and demonstration on the other, but between these two extremes it is fuzzy enough to include more or less any sort of comment whatever. So if our tour round the various senses of ‘illustrate’ is to end in more than vacuity, we must examine in much

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more detail the aims and tendencies of these arguments given by Reid for first principles. The most general point to make about Reid’s reasoning for first principles is that, overwhelmingly, it is concerned with the Innateness Claim. This is not to say that Reid doesn’t have important things to say in connection with the Truth Claim, for, as we shall see in our next chapter, he does. But these, on the whole, are things which follow from accepting the Truth Claim – consequences of the assumption, rather than direct urgings in favour of accepting the assumption in the first place. Reid’s practical strategy seems to be roughly as follows (as our earlier analysis of his theoretical position suggested it should be): against the sceptic he makes the reliabilist assumption that innate beliefs are mainly true beliefs – or, in other words, he asserts the Truth Claim for beliefs coming under first principles. Then, in the case of any particular principle whose status as a first principle is in question, if Reid can show it to be innate, he has thereby (by his lights) shown it to be true. This explains the large imbalance we find in the space Reid devotes to the Innateness Claim (relatively generous) and the Truth Claim (by comparison, niggardly). In practice (as in theory) the two claims occupy different levels in Reid’s dialectic, which it is difficult to characterize otherwise than in spatial terms. We have a choice: we could say either that the Truth Claim overarches Reid’s entire discussion of first principles and so is above the Innateness Claim;3 or we could say instead that the Truth Claim is below the Innateness Claim in the sense that it is the more fundamental of the two. Reid himself won’t give us any help here (these are our terms, after all, not his). But, either way, it is unsurprising that the Truth Claim should be relatively under-discussed by Reid. As an unprovable externalist assumption, there is little that Reid can do to promote it. However, the fact of innateness in particular cases is a different matter. There is plenty of room for debate about whether individual first principles are innate or adventitious – whether, as Reid puts it, they are “original” or instead owe their presence to inference, authority or “party zeal”. So, with these broad structural considerations in mind, we can turn to consider the detail of Reid’s promotion of these distinct but related Claims, taking the one that looms largest first.

The Innateness Claim Reid’s most concise expression of what he means by ‘first principles’ is the following: propositions which are no sooner understood than they are believed. The judgment follows the apprehension of them necessarily, and both are equally the work of nature, and the result of our original powers. There is no searching for evidence, no weighing of arguments; the proposition is not deduced or inferred from another; it has the light of truth in itself, and has no occasion to borrow it from another. [434a]

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 139 At first pass, it can look as if we are being offered here a set of four defining characteristics of first principles: they are (i) self-evident, (ii) irresistible, (iii) innate, and (iv) uninferred. But although Reid does seem to mean that all and only first principles have these features, the features themselves are closely interlinked, and indeed overlapping, in a way in which the severally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions that make up a standard definition are not. For first, they are not severally necessary: if, for example, a proposition is innately assented to as selfevident, it goes without saying that the assent is both non-inferential and irresistible (we simply have no choice but immediately to believe it). And second, neither are they jointly sufficient: Lockean “trifling propositions” (so Reid would say) possess all four features, yet assent to tautologies falls outside any foundational ‘first principle of contingent truths’.4 We need a reason, then, why Reid should have listed these four characteristics as apparently definitive of first principles when two of them, at least, are not. And perhaps it is this: Reid’s real interest is in self-evidence and innateness – possession of these two features, for him, is what the essence of first principles consists in. Jointly, the two features mark out the extension of the common sense beliefs he will go on to enumerate and defend as first principles. The only reason Reid has for saying that first principles are also characterized by irresistibility and uninferredness is that (as he sees it) most if not all of the principles on his chosen list of twelve have been attacked at precisely these points. Descartes, for example, has sought to infer all bar one of them from the cogito; and Hume has apparently been able to resist most of the others, if only in his study. Against these and other sceptically tending predecessors, Reid will want to insist that inference to the beliefs of common sense is neither possible nor necessary, and that resistance to them of any kind is only feigned. So, at the outset, he puts irresistibility and uninferredness into his ‘definition’ of first principles along with self-evidence and innateness, even though, as we noted above, the former pair of features is supererogatory, being implied by the latter pair.5 What of the ‘senior’ pair, self-evidence and innateness – what ordering can we find between these? Well, the claim of self-evidence for first principles is not going to need much in the way of defence, particularly in front of an audience of ‘semi-sceptics’. This, at least, is how Reid sees it: I take it for granted that there are self-evident principles. Nobody, I think, denies it. And if any man were so sceptical as to deny that there is any proposition that is self-evident, I see not how it would be possible to convince him by reasoning. [434b] In fact, to say that first principles are self-evident is merely to describe them – to mark out a territory for discussion; but to say that assent to them is innate is to go on to assert a controversial thesis about them – to bring argument to bear within the territory.

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Thus it is that the four features attributed to first principles by Reid (in the last-quoted passage but one) reduce to two, and those two to one – innateness. This helps us to see that, and why, the Innateness Claim is so important for Reid: there is more that he can say about it than he can say about self-evidence; and there is more that he needs to say about it if he is to use it, in conjunction with the Truth Claim, to counter the sceptic in his characteristic way: (1) Innateness implies (or strongly suggests) Truth (‘The Truth Claim’) (2) This (or any) principle is Innate (‘The Innateness Claim’) Therefore (3) This (or any) principle is, very likely, True. Before we proceed to examine how Reid argues for the innateness of particular principles, we should pause to consider a difficulty that presses for anyone who holds that there is innate assent to self-evident principles, namely, how is it that there are disputes about whether there are such principles and which they are? Surely, if there are genuine cases of such assent, we should expect to find universal or near-universal agreement about their existence and extent? This is a question of which Reid is aware, and to which he has a variety of answers. Yes, he acknowledges, the domain of first principles is much disputed: there seems to be a great difference of opinions among philosophers about first principles. What one takes to be self-evident, another labours to prove by arguments, and a third denies altogether. [434b] But among whom do the disputes rage? Only among philosophers. Here we can make some interesting connections between Reid’s specific comments on mistaken philosophical attitudes to self-evidence, and his more general remarks in Essay VI, chapter viii, Of Prejudices, the Causes of Error, which is a sort of annotated catalogue of Bacon’s idola. Plainly, from Reid’s perspective, the main reason why some philosophers labour to prove what should be taken as self-evident, and others are led to deny it altogether, is their thraldom to the classical foundationalist element in the theory of ‘ideas’. This error is an instance of Bacon’s idola theatri – “prejudices arising from the systems or sects in which we have been trained, or which we have adopted” [474b], which Reid glosses thus: A false system once fixed in the mind, becomes, as it were, the medium through which we see objects: they receive a tincture from it, and appear of another colour than when seen in a pure light. [474b] Hence, ideal theorists, with the best will in the world, are actually prevented from seeing the self-evidence of the first principles of common sense. Their distorting

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 141 prejudice – the classical foundational principle of warrant – makes what is self-evident appear not to be, but instead to stand in need of proof. Hence, too, the need for the philosopher of common sense to correct the distortion by ‘illustrating’ first principles in the sense of “placing them in a proper point of view”. As well as conscientious workers in ‘the way of ideas’, who try hard to see the truth but can’t, there are less reputable camp-followers who make no effort at all: Through laziness and indifference about truth, they leave to others the drudgery of digging for this commodity; they can have enough at second hand to serve their occasions. Their concern is not to know what is true, but what is said and thought on such subjects; and their understanding, like their clothes, is cut according to the fashion. [469b] It is Reid’s frequent complaint that the ideal theory is a ubiquitous and uncritically received opinion; and he would no doubt agree that it largely owes its hegemony to the first of Bacon’s ‘idols of the tribe’ (on which the last-quoted passage is Reid’s gloss) – “men are prone to be led too much by authority in their opinions”. There are two other idola tribus which can be said to contribute to the inadequately small number of first principles admitted by philosophers in the way of ideas. In his historical remarks in Essay VI, chapter vi, Reid notes a swing from one extreme to the other: The Peripatetic philosophy was redundant rather than deficient in first principles. Perhaps the abuse of them in that ancient system may have brought them into discredit in modern times; for, as the best things may be abused, so that abuse is apt to give a disgust to the thing itself; and as one extreme often leads into the opposite, this seems to have been the case in the respect paid to first principles in ancient and modern times. [435a] This is the same tendency as appears in Reid’s Baconian chapter as the fifth of the idols of the tribe: “5. In avoiding one extreme, men are very apt to rush into the opposite” [472b]. Elsewhere Reid says in the same vein: “this spirit, in the ancient philosophy, to multiply first principles beyond reason, was a strong presage that, when the authority of the Peripatetic system was at an end, the next reigning system would diminish their number beyond reason” [462b–3a]. But it is not simply aversive reaction to what has gone before that accounts for the present dearth of first principles. There is also the third of the idola tribus, namely that “Men are often led into error by the love of simplicity, which disposes us to reduce things to few principles, and to conceive a greater simplicity in nature than there really is” [470b]. And Reid suggests that, in the case of Descartes, the founder of the currently reigning system, this love of simplicity acquires an aesthetic aspect:

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Reid’s further arguments against scepticism There is, no doubt, a beauty in raising a large fabric of knowledge upon a few first principles. … Des Cartes, who was well acquainted with this beauty in the mathematical sciences, seems to have been ambitious to give the same beautiful simplicity to his system of philosophy; and therefore sought only one first principle as the foundation of all our knowledge, at least of contingent truths. [463b–4a]

We have, then, four sorts of prejudice which feed the philosophical perversity of denying the self-evidence of first principles: undue deference to authority, reactionism, a tendency to oversimplify, and, above all, party zeal within the ideal system. Each is an instance of one of Bacon’s idola, and together they explain why we find disputes among the learned over first principles when (if they are innate) we should expect to find consensus. Among the vulgar, things are different. The vulgar might indeed be prey to the first three of these dangers, but they are mercifully free of the fourth – they don’t have the distorting cataract of the ideal theory to block their view of what is self-evident. This means that, among the properly functioning vulgar and the unprejudiced learned, the expected consensus as to first principles can be looked for: To judge of first principles, requires no more than a sound mind free from prejudice, and a distinct conception of the question. The learned and the unlearned, the philosopher and the day-labourer, are upon a level, and will pass the same judgment, when they are not misled by some bias, or taught to renounce their understanding from some mistaken religious principle. [438a] And, Reid insists, this consensus is found: And this is actually found to be the case with regard to many truths, against which we find no dissent, unless perhaps that of a few sceptical philosophers, who may justly be suspected, in such cases, to differ from the rest of mankind, through pride, obstinacy, or some favourite passion. [233a] Yet, despite the accessibility of self-evident principles to unblocked intuition, there is a perennial risk that they might not be properly identified: it is not impossible, that what is only a vulgar prejudice may be mistaken for a first principle. Nor is it impossible that what is really a first principle may, by the enchantment of words, have such a mist thrown about it, as to hide its evidence, and to make a man of candour doubt of it. [231a,b]

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 143 This being so, there is need for a catalogue. The task of drawing up a catalogue of first principles is made difficult by their inherent unprovability, but there are various compensating advantages, thinks Reid, which make it tractable. First, as already noted, every man is a competent judge when it comes to first principles – philosophers enjoy no special privilege here. Next, there are some indirect or non-apodictical ways of reasoning which may be brought to bear.6 Finally, there are several “marks” or “criteria” attached to genuine first principles which can help in their recognition: universal acceptance; absurdity of denial; early appearance in childhood; and practical indispensability. In sum, Nature hath not left us destitute of means whereby the candid and honest part of mankind may be brought to unanimity when they happen to differ about first principles. [437b, emphasis added] Here we can see Reid implicitly conceding that the ‘uncandid’ or ‘dishonest’ part of mankind will never agree with the rest of us about first principles, either because they deny that there are any such, or because they stubbornly refuse to assent to self-evidence in particular cases. It is to the candid and honest, then, that his arguments are addressed – but who, exactly, are “the candid and honest”? Let us attend to a further key remark of Reid’s about the proper attitude that should prevail when honest disputes arise: When this happens, every man who believes that there is a real distinction between truth and error, and that the faculties which God has given us are not in their nature fallacious, must be convinced that there is a defect or a perversion of judgment on the one side or the other. [438a, emphasis added] This passage is crucial for our understanding of Reid’s strategy. It shows that he takes himself to be addressing, not “total sceptics” (we’ve already established that), nor yet agnostics – waverers on the borderline between scepticism and non-scepticism – but those who have come down off the fence on the side of positive non-scepticism. To believe “that the faculties which God has given us are not in their nature fallacious” is nothing other than already to have accepted the Truth Claim for first principles. Such people believe that there are innately implanted principles yielding mainly true beliefs; but their candour and honesty consists in their clear-eyed recognition that they may not know precisely which these principles are – they are “open to conviction” on that score. So Reid’s best way of convincing them that any principle is a genuine “first principle of contingent truths” is (since they’ve already swallowed the Truth Claim) to convince them that it is innate and not acquired. Thus, the “marks” or “criteria” that attach to genuine first principles are marks and criteria not (or not directly) of truth but of innateness – as we can confirm

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if we run through the marks one by one. First, and most obviously, universal acceptance-as-true: Where there is such universal consent in things not deep nor intricate, but which lie, as it were, on the surface, there is the greatest presumption that can be, that it is the natural result of the human faculties … [233a] Here, the claim is straightforwardly that universal consent strongly suggests innateness, and no more than that. Next, absurdity of denial: opinions which contradict first principles are distinguished, from other errors, by this – That they are not only false but absurd; and, to discountenance absurdity, Nature hath given us a particular emotion – to wit, that of ridicule – which seems intended for this very purpose of putting out of countenance what is absurd, either in opinion or practice. … Thus I conceive, that first principles which are really the dictates of common sense, and directly opposed to absurdities in opinion, will always, from the constitution of human nature, support themselves, and gain rather than lose ground among mankind. [438b–9a] Here, the claim is rather more complicated. It can look as if Reid is saying that we simply find ‘absurdity’ and read off ‘falsehood’ from it. But this would be to jump from the ‘mark’ – ‘absurdity’ – to something within the domain of the Truth Claim (namely ‘falsehood’) in one hop. And although Reid would no doubt agree that in practice we do just this, on the theoretical level the connection between the ‘mark’ and Truth must go via Innateness, if our interpretation is correct. Theoretically, what must be happening is something like this: we can’t say of a candidate first principle straight off that it’s true or that it’s false – because principles don’t wear their truth-values on their sleeves. But, happily, nature comes to our aid. First, she implants propensities to form beliefs which are mainly true (so we happen to believe). Then second, she hath not left us destitute of “rational means” (Reid’s phrase) for sorting the genuine and the spurious, among putative first principles. Among these rational means is the seeking and finding of certain marks of innateness attaching to beliefs – which marks, by virtue of our earlier assumption, we take to be indicative, in turn, of truth. In the case at hand, the mark is a negative one, that is, one which eventually indicates lack of truth – but that indication is mediated by the natural feeling of ridicule. Absurdity is, if we like, a mark of adventitiousness – and although adventitiousness isn’t a sufficient condition for falsehood (on the contrary, true adventitious beliefs abound), nonadventitiousness (i.e. innateness) is a necessary condition for a principle’s being a genuine first principle. So if we find an opinion ridiculous, although we cannot say straight off that it is false, we can (as epistemologists, anyway) insist on the innateness of the laughter it provokes and use that innateness, as before, as an indication that it is not to be taken as self-evident.

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 145 A third mark of genuine first principles is early appearance in childhood: Opinions that appear so early in the minds of men that they cannot be the effect of education or of false reasoning, have a good claim to be considered as first principles. Thus, the belief we have, that the persons about us are living and intelligent beings, is a belief for which, perhaps, we can give some reason, when we are able to reason;7 but we had this belief before we could reason, and before we could learn it by instruction. It seems, therefore, to be an immediate effect of our constitution. [441a] This passage is remarkable for two things. First, it contains a good example of Reid’s tentativeness about these marks. Early appearance, he says, doesn’t imply innateness (still less does he say it implies truth); it merely means that a principle has ‘a good claim to be considered as a [genuine] first principle’. Similarly for the other marks – they are accompanying characteristics of first principles, not defining ones;8 and so they are suggestive, only, of a principle’s bona fides. Second, the passage spells out what it is to be a genuine first principle (for the purposes of these arguments, to this audience): “It seems, therefore, to be [not a true principle but merely] an immediate effect of our constitution”. Finally, says Reid, genuine first principles are marked by practical indispensability: The last topic I shall mention is, when an opinion is so necessary in the conduct of life, that, without the belief of it, a man must be led into a thousand absurdities in practice, such an opinion, when we can give no other reason for it, may safely be taken for a first principle. [441a] Here again (though less clearly than in the cases of the preceding marks), it is innateness that is being signalled, rather than truth. It is “the belief of it” that Reid says is necessary to the conduct of life – he says nothing about the practical indispensability of the truth of the belief. Reid is aware of the difference between talk about the usefully innate and talk about the innately true, even if he doesn’t always keep them tidily separate. And he must recognize the possibility, in principle, that beliefs might be usefully innately false.9 (Even if “we are deceived by Him that made us, and there is no remedy” on the meta-level, common sense beliefs still keep us out of harm’s way in the here and now.) It is a possibility that of course he rejects in making the Truth Claim.10 But, as we have been insisting throughout this chapter, that rejection is prior to the great bulk of the argument he puts forward for the principles of common sense, and so it remains in the background. In the foreground is Reid’s concern to argue, against philosophers who have said they are in some way acquired, that the beliefs of common sense are innate. Let us turn now to chapter v of Essay VI, “The First Principles of Contingent Truths”; where most of this argument is to be found.

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Reid begins this chapter by echoing Berkeley’s words. An inquiry concerning first principles, he says, should start by distinguishing them “from other truths” (we note the implicit Truth Claim) “and present[ing them] to view, that they may be sifted and examined on all sides”. He continues: “In order to this end, I shall attempt a detail of those I take to be such, and of the reasons why I think them entitled to that character” [441b]. Reid’s “reasons” are rather a hotch-potch. He does not go about defending his detail in any systematic way; and the overall effect is less like that of a marksman using clean rifle-shots than of a yeoman firing nuts and bolts out of a blunderbuss. Still, some sort of pattern is discernible in the miscellany – it seems to fall into two broad clusters. The first sort of reason Reid gives for including a principle in his list is that it possesses one or more of the four “marks” – those characteristics that accompany genuine first principles and so aid their recognition.11 It would be unprofitable, as well as tedious, to go through his enumeration of the twelve “first principles of contingent truths” charting which marks Reid says attach to which individual principle. What such a rehearsal would show is that, rather than schematically mapping each mark onto every principle (which no doubt he could have done), Reid works his way down the list using whichever mark or marks most effectively ‘illustrate’ the genuineness of the principle at hand. One example of each of the marks being used like this will suffice to show his procedure. First, universality. Reid says of principle number 1, which vouches for the existence of the objects of consciousness: This, I think, is the only principle of common sense that has never directly been called in question. … As, therefore, the real existence of our thoughts, and of all the operations and feelings of our own minds, is believed by all men … it may justly be considered as a first principle, or dictate of common sense. [442b–3a] Next, absurdity of denial and the memory principle, number 3. Reid invents the risible courtroom scenario, noted earlier, in which counsel gravely asks for his client’s acquittal on the sole ground that the distinct memories of admittedly honest witnesses cannot be demonstrated to be reliable. Why has such a plea never been entered, asks Reid? “For no other reason, surely, but because it is absurd. Now, what is absurd at the bar, is so in the philosopher’s chair” [444b]. Third, early appearance is put forward as marking the perceptual principle, number 5: It is too evident to need proof, that all men are by nature led to give implicit faith to the distinct testimony of their senses long before they are capable of any bias from prejudices of education or of philosophy. How came we at first to know that there are certain beings about us whom we call father, and mother, and sisters, and brothers, and nurse? Was it not by the testimony of our senses? [445b]

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 147 Lastly, belief in the testimonial principle, number 10, is said to be practically indispensable: Before we are capable of reasoning about testimony or authority, there are many things which it concerns us to know, for which we can have no other evidence. The wise Author of nature hath planted in the human mind a propensity to rely upon this evidence before we can give a reason for doing so. … If children were so framed as to pay no regard to testimony or to authority, they must, in the literal sense, perish for lack of knowledge. [450b] Reid often does not stop at producing just one mark per first principle. He uses many permutations: for example, principle 4, which vouches for personal identity over time, is said to be both universal and absurd to deny;12 and the inductive principle, number 12, is said both to appear early and to be necessary for survival. There is even one principle – “6.… That we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will” – that has all four marks: To call to account a being who never was intrusted with any degree of power, is an absurdity no less than it would be to call to account an inanimate being. … [Belief in the principle is] a conviction so early, so general, and so interwoven with the whole of human conduct, that it must be the natural effect of our constitution … [446b–7a] But whether a principle is marked once, twice, thrice, or even by the ‘full house’, the fact that it is marked at all, in Reid’s view, gives “men of candour” one powerful sort of reason for admitting it to the list.13 We come now to the second sort of reason – the second cluster of arguments – used by Reid for the same conclusion (that conclusion, we remind ourselves, being that principles deserve a place on the list if they are innate, because innate beliefs have a very good chance of being true). These arguments are really arguments by elimination. What they eliminate are alternative (which is to say empiricist, and therefore sceptically tending) accounts of the provenance of the first principles of common sense. In a nutshell, these empiricist accounts say either that we reason our way to the beliefs which Reid calls first principles, or that we acquire them in some way from experience. So the arguments in this second group set out to eliminate both of these rival explanations, leaving Reid’s nativism the winner by default: we neither learn nor infer these beliefs, therefore they must be instinctive. It should be stressed that in styling them ‘arguments by elimination’, we are imposing more of a structure on Reid’s dialectic than is there in the original – a procedure called for by the original’s somewhat haphazard or ‘scatter-gun’ quality, noted above. Louise Marcil-Lacoste goes further still in this direction, linking Reid’s argumentation at this point with his commitment to Newtonian

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methodology in a way in which he never does explicitly himself. She takes the first of Newton’s rules (which Reid repeatedly quotes with approval14) and calls its two parts “the reality condition” and “the adequacy condition”. Then she relates the rule to Reid’s arguments for first principles by saying that the arguments seek to show that reasoning and experience “do not (reality condition) and cannot (adequacy condition) produce self-evident assent” (Marcil-Lacoste: 124, 130). This is a sound suggestion; but it is one which (though she has much else of interest to say about Reid’s debt to Newton) Marcil-Lacoste does not go on to develop or to tie to the text. Perhaps, as with the “marks”, there is little point in going through all the principles to try to bring this hidden methodology to the surface. But, again as with the marks, it does seem worthwhile to look briefly at a few examples in order to show that this reconstructive interpretation has good textual support. Let us take reasoning first. If Reid is using Newton’s first rule to eliminate reasoning in this context, he is using, as it were, a weapon with two prongs, one empirical and one conceptual. Reasoning fails to meet the reality condition if, for any principle, Reid can say ‘we do not, as a matter of fact, reason our way to this principle’. He plainly does just this in support of the innateness of the ‘other minds’ principle, number 8: As soon as children are capable of asking a question, or of answering a question, as soon as they shew the signs of love, of resentment, or of any other affection, they must be convinced that those with whom they have this intercourse are intelligent beings. … Now, I would ask how a child of a year old comes by this conviction? Not by reasoning surely, for children do not reason at that age. [448b] The adequacy condition, by contrast, is a condition to do with conceptual possibilities. Reasoning comes unstuck here if Reid can say, of any principle, that we could not, even in theory, reason our way to this principle. The clearest instance of Reid making this move comes in the case of principle 7: If a man’s honesty were called in question, it would be ridiculous to refer it to the man’s own word, whether he be honest or not. The same absurdity there is in attempting to prove, by any kind of reasoning, probable or demonstrative, that our reason is not fallacious, since the very point in question is, whether reasoning may be trusted. [447b] Switching now to find examples of Reid using Newton’s two conditions to eliminate experience as a begetter of first principles, we can kill two birds with one stone, for principle 9 is said by Reid to fail both conditions at once. Reid addresses the empirical question first: It seems to me incredible, that the notions men have of the expression of features, voice, and gesture, are entirely the fruit of experience. … Who has not

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 149 observed that children, very early, are able to distinguish what is said to them in jest from what is said in earnest, by the tone of the voice, and the features of the face? They judge by these natural signs, even when they seem to contradict the artificial. [449a,b] And then he turns to the conceptual question: Nay, I apprehend that it is impossible that this should be learned from experience. When we see the sign, and see the thing signified always conjoined with it, experience may be the instructor, and teach us how that sign is to be interpreted. But how shall experience instruct us when we see the sign only, when the thing signified is invisible? Now, this is the case here: the thoughts and passions of the mind, as well as the mind itself, are invisible, and therefore their connection with any sensible sign cannot be first discovered by experience; there must be some earlier source of this knowledge. [449b–50a] In sum, we neither do, nor could, arrive at this principle from experience, so experience falls foul of both the reality and the adequacy conditions together. We have now completed our survey of the nature and extent of Reid’s arguments for the Innateness Claim. By nature, they are inventive and multifarious; they are also somewhat disorganized, though certain submerged patterns can be discerned beneath their surface. As arguments for Reid’s advancement of this list of first principles rather than any other, they are consistent with the ‘official’ doctrine that first principles in general cannot be argued for. In extent they bulk large, taking up most of the space allotted by Reid to the defence of his first principles. To their intended audience – “men of candour” – they are probably effective. But therein lies their greatest shortcoming as arguments against scepticism. “Men of candour” are a congregation of the converted, listening only because they already accept the Truth Claim which is at all points presupposed by the arguments we have surveyed. The sceptics are not listening; and even if they were, they could grant all the arguments for the Innateness Claim without embarrassment: “Very well, Dr Reid,” they could properly say, “You’ve convinced us these principles are innate – now convince us they are true!” In the next chapter we examine whether and how Reid thinks he can do that.

Notes 1 Whether or not it should be Reid’s position is, of course, a separate question (cf. the inadequacy of Reid’s criticism of Descartes’s cogito). 2 We pass over, here, the obvious and cogent internalist rejoinder to this (roughly, that when X is claimed, the impossibility of providing Y has nothing whatever to do with the reasonableness of asking for Y if Y is indeed a necessary condition for X). 3 Described in this way, the Truth Claim begins to look like Lehrer’s “metaprinciple”. But the Truth Claim is not (what a metaprinciple must be) one single claim on behalf of, or

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principle governing, all the faculties at once. It is, rather, a series of claims – the same claim expressed or implied every time a first principle is laid down. In what sense, then, does it ‘overarch the entire discussion’? Only in the sense that it is left largely unstated and unexamined – the product of Reid’s externalist organizing stance. Reid says of ‘trifling propositions’ that they “deserve not the name of axioms, as that name is commonly understood to imply not only self-evidence, but some degree of dignity or utility” [466a]. On the other hand, Reid does lay down, in addition, “First Principles of Necessary Truths”, among which are “logical axioms” [452a] which might stretch to cover assent to tautologies – so perhaps Reid’s is not, after all, an under-definition in this respect. See note 8 for Lehrer’s different interpretation. As we noted above, Reid mentions arguments ad hominem and ad absurdum as useful for exposing inconsistency in a proposed body of principles [439a,b]. The embedded Truth Claim here is beside the present point, and will be considered in the next chapter. Keith Lehrer cuts the cake differently: he says “it is also clear that irresistibility and self-evidence are marks of first principles” (Lehrer 1989: 156), which would mean that, in our terms, they too are accompanying characteristics rather than defining characteristics. But, pace Lehrer, it isn’t very clear in Reid; and I think the argument given above (pp. 138–40) for treating self-evidence and irresistibility as, respectively, explicit and implicit defining characteristics (and so not ‘marks’) shows that my way of cutting the cake is preferable to Lehrer’s. See Chapter 10, note 1 below; see also pages 179–80. There is a closely related possibility that Reid does not explicitly discuss (and so a fortiori does not reject), namely that certain belief-forming mechanisms (as distinct from beliefs themselves) may be innate, and useful, and have a tendency to produce some false beliefs – for example the products of ‘wishful thinking’. Plantinga discusses two cases of this sort: (a) when a seriously ill person forms an unrealistically optmistic belief about the probability of his recovery, and (b), when an Alpine climber believes over-optimistically that he can leap across a crevasse wider than any he has had to jump before (Plantinga: 11). The utility of such false beliefs consists, of course, in their tendency to help the illness to be survived, the crevasse jumped; yet we want to say that they lack warrant, even when they turn out to be true. In Chapter 10 below, we shall see how Plantinga excludes such beliefs from his neo-Reidian account of warrant with his condition (3) (see p. 167). In note 8 I referred to Reid’s unclarity about precisely which characteristics define first principles and which merely accompany or “mark” them. Keith Lehrer, I noted, classifies irresistibility and self-evidence as “marks”, while I had given reasons for preferring to see them as part of the ‘definition’. Now Reid does, in chapter V, spend quite a bit of time saying of each first principle that it is irresistible and self-evident (or not inferred or inferable, which comes to the same thing as self-evident). If I’m correct, then this is just so much talk about what first principles are, and hence not part of his ‘reasoning’ for including principles in the list. So, to forestall confusion – a reiteration: when I refer to ‘marks’ I mean universality, absurdity of denial, early appearance, and practical indispensability. “If these things [i.e. judgements, feelings] can be ascribed to a succession of ideas and impressions … I should be very glad to know what is nonsense” [444a]. If we were to put it to Reid that he might be sheltering falsehoods (superstitions, gamblers’ fallacies, vulgar secondary quality judgements, etc.) within the first principles in virtue of their possession of these marks, a twofold response is open to him. While conceding that these tendencies to err are species-wide, he could first insist that they are not practically indispensable (e.g. the ‘Ramsey sentence’ construction of secondary quality beliefs – suggested on page 44 above – will do just as well in practice). Second,

Reid’s further arguments against scepticism 151 like Bacon and Descartes, he can say that we have the wherewithal to correct these errors, for example by becoming better inductivists (see 113a). Our tendency to worship the idola tribus, then, need not involve us in systematic error. 14 For example at 236a: “The first rule of philosophising laid down by the great Newton, is this – ‘No more causes, nor any other causes of natural effects, ought to be admitted, but such as are both true, and are sufficient for explaining their appearances’. This is a golden rule; it is the true and proper test, by which what is sound and solid in philosophy may be distinguished from what is hollow and vain.” See also 57b, 250a, and 271b.

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Track record arguments Reasoning and experience may be powerless to get us to first principles, but they can, in Reid’s view, help us to confirm their truth: When Reason is properly employed, she will confirm the documents of Nature, which are always true and wholesome. [201a] The chief way in which Reid thinks that reason can confirm the Truth Claim is by using inductive, or ‘track record’ arguments. Of the inductive first principle itself, he says: This is one of those principles which, when we grow up and observe the course of nature, we can confirm by reasoning. We perceive that Nature is governed by fixed laws, and that, if it were not so, there could be no such thing as prudence in human conduct. [451b] In saying “this is one of those principles”, Reid clearly signals that not all first principles are to be thought of as confirmable by reasoning from experience. So which others, in his view, can be so confirmed? The perceptual first principle is one: I gave implicit belief to the informations of Nature by my senses, for a considerable part of my life, before I had learned so much logic as to be able to start a doubt concerning them. And now, when I reflect upon what is past, I do not find that I have been imposed upon by this belief. I find that without it I must have perished by a thousand accidents. [184a] The memory principle is another: Perhaps it may be said, that the experience we have had of the fidelity of memory is a good reason for relying upon its testimony. I deny not that this

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may be a reason to those who have had this experience, and who reflect upon it. [341a] And the testimonial principle, too, is susceptible of this reflective confirmation; of his “parents and tutors” Reid says: I believed by instinct whatever they told me, long before I had the idea of a lie, or thought of the possibility of their deceiving me. Afterwards, upon reflection, I found they had acted like fair and honest people … [and] … I continue to give that credit, from reflection, to those of whose integrity and veracity I have had experience, which before I gave from instinct. [184b] Here, then, are track record arguments for four of the first principles. What should we make of them? The first thing to say is that, as arguments in support of the Truth Claim, they seem entirely to miss the sceptical point. In each case, the track record can only function as evidence for the truth of the principle if the principle is already accepted as true. This circularity is particularly blatant in the case of the memory principle, where the evidence offered – “the experience we have had of the fidelity of memory” – is, precisely, remembered evidence. But circularity (or at least, point-missing) plagues the other arguments too. Successful past inductions can only ‘confirm’ the inductive principle (which vouches for future inductions) if the principle is assumed to be correct. Then, we can only corroborate a certain ‘run’ of perceptions by relying, at some point, on other perceptions (our own, or other people’s – and if the latter, we have to hear them tell us about them, or use our eyes to read their written reports). Finally, the case of testimony, where the prospects for a track record argument appear brightest – here, it might seem, there is a chance of an individual’s getting independent confirmation of the principle that testimony is on the whole reliable. But this is, at least, highly problematic, because one’s personal stock of observations is far too small a base to ground an inductive inference to the general proposition. (It won’t do to include other people’s observations in the data for the obvious reason that one’s only access to those is via testimony.) More radically, according to present-day philosophical orthodoxy, there is no such thing as observation which is independent of theory, and all theory is to some extent testimonially acquired.1 It seems, then, as if not even the best candidate among the four first principles for which Reid provides a track record argument can be supported in this way without circularity. Each such argument will depend for its cogency, sooner or later, on the prior acceptance of the principle it is designed to confirm. And this is to say nothing of the wider circularity which is involved in the various mutual presuppositions between the track record arguments.2 So that even if, per impossibile, Reid were able to establish the reliability of, say, perception without at any point depending on perceptual data for his track record argument, in doing so he would perforce have to take for granted the deliverances of other faculties; and

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any eventual non-circular track record argument for these latter would require the taking of perceptual data for granted, and so on … . In short, even if track record arguments for particular faculties or principles were not internally circular, the fact that they must rely on other faculties or principles in order to get going disqualifies them from effective use against a sceptic who doubts all the faculties or principles en bloc. Now if Reid were any sort of modern ‘coherentist’, he would have an obvious and disarming reply available to these alleged shortcomings. If he held a coherence theory of truth, or of justification, then so far from being embarrassed by these circularities, he would welcome them. The relations of mutual support, both within and between first principles, he would then say, are virtuous, not vicious. The ways in which, for example, particular inductions lean on and are leaned on by the inductive first principle; or in which the first principles of induction, perception, memory, and testimony variously support one another in a maximally coherent system – these, he would insist, are just what make the principles true, or at least confer justification on our belief in them. But coherentism, whether with respect to truth or to justification, would seem to be inimical to Reid’s whole conception of knowledge. There are, it is true, certain isolated passages in which coherence among the beliefs of common sense is mentioned. But they are neither numerous nor important enough to make a reinterpretation of Reid as a coherentist at all plausible.3 For first, Reid is definitely (if only implicitly) a correspondence theorist with respect to truth. We look in vain for any direct discussion of truth in his work, presumably because, as a philosopher of common sense, he considers it too obvious to be worth stating that an empirical judgement is true when it corresponds to objective fact. Perhaps he reveals this assumption obliquely when he speaks of his intended audience as made up of “every man who believes that there is a real distinction between truth and error” [438a]. And again, the assumption is presumably present in the very wording of the first principles of perception and memory:4 Those things did really happen which I distinctly remember … Those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive … [444b–5b, emphasis added] There is no temptation – here or anywhere – to understand Reid as holding that truth is to be thought of as a function of coherence among beliefs. The different kinds of common sense beliefs (i.e. those based on perception, on memory, etc.) might indeed cohere with one another – but this is only what we should expect if they are different kinds of ‘take’ on the same states-of-affairs in the world. When he talks of coherence among beliefs at all, Reid surely thinks of it as merely a product of the fit between beliefs and the world – a fit which alone determines their truth. Neither can we properly see Reid as a coherentist about justification. Justificatory coherentists have it that justification attaches to a belief to the extent that it figures in a system of beliefs that is coherent – the degree of coherence in

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a system being a matter of the strength of the mutual support that its parts give one another. There is no role, in this account, for self-sufficient foundational beliefs – beliefs that lend justification to other beliefs without ever needing to borrow it for themselves. For Reid, of course, the first principles of common sense are just such self-sufficient propositions. Each one “has the light of truth in itself, and has no occasion to borrow it from another”, even from another first principle of common sense. Working, then, with these rather ‘broad-brush’ dichotomies in the theories of truth (coherence/correspondence) and of justification (coherentist/foundationalist), it is safe to say that Reid is no coherentist in either domain. Coherence theory with respect to truth, he would say, obliterates any “real distinction between truth and error”. And coherentism with respect to justification does away with what he insists we must have, namely first principles. But while this verdict rids Reid of the obligation to meet the standard ‘plurality’ objection to coherence theory (i.e. that there may be several belief systems of equal coherence and scope), it also robs him of the readiest counter to the objection that his track record arguments for the truth of his first principles are circular. Now Reid, as it happens, has an especially sharp eye for circularity in the arguments of other philosophers. (His detractors say he is pedestrian and unimaginative, but they seldom fault his actual reasoning.) Yet, as we have seen, the circularity of his own arguments in this area could scarcely be more glaring. So perhaps, with a principle of charity in mind, we should look more closely at Reid’s track record arguments to see whether, after all, he can achieve something by their means without falling foul of his own high standards. One current writer who has made a special study of track record arguments is William Alston.5 About the kind of circularity involved in a track record argument for the reliability of sense perception (SP), Alston has this to say: It is not the most direct kind of logical circularity. We are not using the proposition that sense perception is reliable as one of our premises. Nevertheless, we are assuming the reliability of sense perception in using it, or some source(s) dependent in it, to generate our premises … . Since this kind of circularity involves a commitment to the conclusion as a presupposition of our supposing ourselves to be justified in holding the premises, we can properly term it ‘epistemic circularity’. Epistemically circular arguments would seem to be of no force. If we have to assume the reliability of SP in order to suppose ourselves entitled to the premises, how can an argument from those premises, however impeccable its logical credentials, provide support for that proposition? (Alston 1993: 15–16, emphasis original) To relate this now to Reid: if his first principles needed confirmation, and if these bootstrapping track record arguments were the best that Reid could offer for their confirmation, then the sceptic could rightly plead that the principles remain unconfirmed because of epistemic circularity. But in fact the official Reidian

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position is that first principles don’t stand in need of confirmation. According to Reid’s overarching externalism, natural judgements are presumed true until shown to be otherwise.6 So the first principles count as known – as items of knowledge – provided only that no ‘cause of error’ is forthcoming to defeat them. In this scheme, track record arguments are not needed to defeat proposed defeaters – those we just argue down as they arise, and then let the overarching reliabilism do the rest. Why, then, are the track record arguments there, if they are superfluous to the status-as-knowledge of first principles and to the justification of our belief in them? Does their presence betoken any second thoughts on Reid’s part that his ‘official’ response to scepticism might need strengthening after all? Does he, perhaps, recognize their weakness as single arguments, but think that cumulatively they are strong?7 Even if no definite answers to these questions emerge, we should bear them in mind as we continue. One would like to be sure that Reid sees that epistemic circularity threatens to disbar his track record arguments from ‘closing the truth gap’ between instinctive beliefs and the world of objects. But unfortunately, however hard we look, this acknowledgement doesn’t seem to come.8 Typically, he proceeds as if it is not the reliabilist assumption about the non-fallaciousness of the faculties that is doing the anti-sceptical work, but the track record arguments themselves. As we saw him saying of the inductive principle: This is one of those principles which, when we grow up and observe the course of nature, we can confirm by reasoning. [451b, emphasis added] It may be that this unclarity on Reid’s part about what track record arguments can and can’t do stems from an ambiguity in the word ‘confirm’. We can distinguish at least three senses of ‘confirm’. The first is ‘put beyond all doubt’, as by a valid deductive argument – a sense which is plainly not in play here. This leaves two other senses between which Reid may well be unwittingly sliding. Of these, one is concerned with veracity of belief, and could be expressed as ‘give added reason for supposing true’; the other is psychological, and means something like ‘entrench’. Consider this passage from the Inquiry: There is a much greater similitude than is commonly imagined, between the testimony of nature given by our senses, and the testimony of men given by language. The credit we give to both is at first the effect of instinct only. When we grow up and begin to reason about them, the credit given to human testimony is restrained and weakened, by the experience we have of deceit. But the credit given to the testimony of our senses is established and confirmed by the uniformity and constancy of the laws of nature. [184b, emphasis added] Here, we can come at the sense Reid means to give “is established and confirmed ” by comparing it with the contrasted phrase “is restrained and

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weakened”. When Reid says that instinctive belief in testimony “is restrained and weakened” by the experience of deceit, he is describing a causal process that occurs in human psychology. To be sure, if pushed, he would say that the resulting attitude contains more truths than the early uncritical belief-set; but his statement, as it stands, is a piece of purely descriptive psychology – childish credulity is, as a matter of fact, eroded by the experience of being lied to. And we should surely interpret the corresponding statement about the testimony of the senses in the same way: “restrained” contrasts with “established” as “weakened” contrasts with “confirmed”. Paraphrased, it means that experience of uniformities in nature encourages and strengthens instinctive perceptual beliefs. Again, the statement is about the effect of experience on the relative felt strengths of sorts of belief, and not about whether those beliefs are true or false. So Reid is using ‘confirm’, in this passage, in a psychological, not a logical, sense. Next, we should look again at Reid’s track record argument for the inductive first principle: This is one of those principles which, when we grow up and observe the course of nature, we can confirm by reasoning. We perceive that Nature is governed by fixed laws, and that, if it were not so, there could be no such thing as prudence in human conduct … . But the principle is necessary for us before we are able to discover it by reasoning, and therefore is made a part of our constitution … [451b] Here, it certainly seems as though Reid is using the word ‘confirm’ in a morethan-psychological sense. He evidently takes the argument to be doing some real gap-closing work – to be ‘confirming’ the principle in the strong sense of ‘giving added reason for supposing it true’. But this, to put it mildly, is controversial. It is precisely Hume’s point that reasoning on experience of regularities can only show us how inconvenient it would have been if in the past these regularities had not held. Any inference from a track record of regularity to future regularities is an application of the inductive principle, not a ‘confirmation’ of it in the strong sense, unless an epistemically circular one. Prescinding for a moment from the question of the truth of the inductive principle: what reasoning on experience can do, of course, is to make us realize the necessity to practical conduct of belief in the principle – we have to take the principle as self-evident in order to go about the world. In this sense, as Reid says, we can “discover it by reasoning”. But ‘discover’ has a similar ambiguity to ‘confirm’, between one sense in which we can discover a pre-existing truth, and another in which we can merely strengthen a pre-existing belief. And, again as with ‘confirm’, Reid seems unsure about which sense he intends. Let us try to state exactly the complaint we are making about Reid’s use of the track record argument. In Reid’s favour, we can say that he oftentimes shows himself to be well aware of Hume’s point about induction:

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The Truth Claim Mr Hume, I think, was the first who put this question; and he has shewn clearly and invincibly, that it is … [not] … grounded upon reasoning … [451b]

And he fully understands that the tempting pre-reflective answer is circular: True; experience informs us that … [events] … have been conjoined in time past; but no man ever had any experience of what is future: and this is the very question to be resolved. [198a, emphasis original] The issue between Reid and Hume is twofold. First, where does this principle come from, if not from reason? Is it learned (Hume) or is it innate (Reid)? And second, whatever its provenance, is the principle in conflict with reason (Hume) or in confluence with it (Reid)? One way (an instance of Reid’s favourite way, so we are saying) of urging his ‘confluence thesis’ is to put forward a track record argument from past inductive success. Now there need be nothing reprehensible in this. Indeed what was arguably one of the twentieth century’s most powerful treatments of the problem of induction was R.B. Braithwaite’s “predictionist” or “inductive” justification, which is a refined species of track record argument (Braithwaite: 102–26). The merit of Braithwaite’s version of the argument consists (a) in the way in which it keeps Hume’s logical point in the foreground at all times, and (b) in its recognition that argument is needed for the proposition that epistemic circularity (or “effective circularity” as Braithwaite calls it) does not, of itself, prevent us from showing that past experience is not irrelevant to future likelihoods. In Reid’s case, as regards (b) there is no such argument – an omission for which, perhaps, as an eighteenth-century man, he should not be blamed. But as regards (a), Reid’s position is less satisfactory. The complaint against him is that, in his use of track record arguments, he lets Hume’s point slip entirely from view. He writes as though there were no difficulty at all in bolstering first principles by reason – as if a moment’s reflection on experience suffices to confirm them in the strong sense – when in fact he knows quite well that things are not that straightforward. Our diagnosis of this unclarity has had to do with the ambiguity, ignored by Reid, of words like ‘confirm’ and ‘discover’. His loose use of these terms does three things. It gives the sceptic too easy a come-back – “Poor old Reid’s missed the point!” It also gives the detractor too ready a criticism – “Reid fudges these distinctions, hoping we won’t notice.” And it leads even the sympathizer to wonder whether these ambiguities passed Reid by, causing him to become genuinely, if unconsciously, confused. With all this said, we can perhaps make one more attempt to vindicate Reid’s use of track record arguments, borrowing again from twentieth-century work in epistemology. Alston, whom we quoted above, after having said that epistemically circular arguments for the reliability of sense perception “would seem to be of no force”, continues:

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But … that does not prevent our using such arguments to show that sense perception is reliable or to justify that thesis … . At least this will be the case if there are no “higher level” requirements for being justified in believing that p, such as being justified in supposing the practice that yields the belief to be a reliable one … I do not think of justification as subject to any such requirements. On my view, a belief is justified if and only if it is based on an adequate ground; that is, it is necessary only that the ground be adequate, not that the subject know or justifiably believe this … (Alston 1993: 16, emphasis original) The externalist standpoint that Alston adumbrates here is similar to, if not the same as, Reid’s. Alston’s sufficient condition for a meta-justification – “only that the ground be adequate” – is translatable into Reid’s – “only that the proper circumstances concur”. For Reid, as for Plantinga, the concurrence of the proper circumstances consists in the functioning of healthy faculties in friendly environments. But the interesting thing is that when the concurrence obtains, a track record argument can get started. Alston again: if SP is reliable, I can use various ( justified) perceptual beliefs to show that SP is reliable, for I need not already be justified in holding the conclusion in order to be justified in holding the premises. The argument would still be epistemically circular, for I am still assuming in practice the reliability of SP in forming normal perceptual beliefs. Nevertheless, I don’t have to be justified in making that assumption, in order to be justified in the perceptual beliefs that give me my premises. Hence the epistemic circularity does not prevent justification from being transmitted from the premises to a conclusion that would have been unjustified except for this argument. That applies even to a simple track record argument. (Alston 1993: 16–17, emphasis original) It is not for a moment being suggested that Reid thought of his track record arguments in these terms, or even that he should have done (Alstonian intricacies and Plantingan “bells and whistles” being unknown in eighteenth-century debate). We are simply indicating a subsequent line of development, interesting in itself, which he would have found congenial.9 This piece of anachronism is not gratuitous – in fact it has a double point. First (and to Reid’s credit, if we like), it shows that Reid’s favourite way of supporting the Truth Claim is in principle more powerful than first appears, even if he does not realise its full potential. But second, and more importantly, it helps to bring out a basic limitation on any attempt to reason for the first principles of common sense, which we should have had to confront sooner or later in any case. Here is Alston, for the last time: But even if … it is possible to establish the reliability of sense perception and other basic sources of belief by simple track record arguments, these arguments still do not satisfy the usual aspirations of those seeking to determine

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The Truth Claim whether a basic doxastic practice like SP is reliable. The reason is this. What I pointed out … is that if sense perception is reliable, a track record argument will suffice to show that it is … . But … the argument will not do its job unless we are justified in accepting its premises; and that is the case only if sense perception is in fact reliable. This is to offer a stone instead of bread. (Alston 1993: 17, emphasis original)

What has become clear is that Reid’s track record arguments are only conditionally successful. They don’t fall at the first hurdle of logical circularity – they do have the power to ‘show’ or display the reliability of perception, memory and the rest. But they have this power only on the externalist assumption that “the natural faculties … are not in their nature fallacious”. Thus, in the end, the whole weight of Reid’s anti-sceptical case rests on the cogency of the Truth Claim itself, not on the track record arguments he adduces to support it (nor on any supposed superiority of direct over indirect realism). The sceptic has asked for a categorical response, and Reid has supplied a hypothetical one – a process which Alston describes as offering “a stone instead of bread”. What can Reid do now? How, if at all, can he bolster the Truth Claim itself? Only, it seems, by having recourse to the one personage in his firmament who is capable of turning stones into bread, namely God.

God and the Truth Claim The influence of his Christian faith pervades Reid’s works, from their title pages onwards.10 A central (if neglected) question for Reid scholarship is whether his philosophy is detachable from this religious faith, and if so, to what extent.11 In an earlier chapter we concluded that, if detachable at all, it was only “weakly detachable”.12 And we drew a parallel between this position and Plantinga’s view that “naturalistic epistemology flourishes best in a garden of supernaturalistic metaphysics”. We can now strengthen that parallel. For each of the first principles that he seeks to support with a track record argument (as well as for some others), Reid provides some sort of theistic underpinning. Sometimes this amounts to no more than the betrayal of a religious orientation vis-à-vis the principle: I believe most firmly, what I can distinctly remember; but I can give no reason of this belief. It is the inspiration of the Almighty that gives me this understanding. [340b–41a] Even here, where no argument from God to the truth of the memory principle is attempted, there is revealed the extra motive (that is, extra to the track record argument) that a religious person has for supposing it true. In the case of testimony, in addition to exhibiting simple piety, Reid makes an argument of sorts:

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The wise and beneficent Author of Nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes, implanted in our natures two principles that tally with each other. The first of these principles is, a propensity to speak truth … [and the second is] … a disposition to confide in the veracity of others, and to believe what they tell us.13 [196a,b] In the case of perception we find the frankest admission of all by Reid that his belief in the truth of the principle is underpinned by faith: I consider this instinctive belief as one of the best gifts of Nature. I thank the Author of my being, who bestowed it upon me before the eyes of my reason were opened, and still bestows it upon me, to be my guide where reason leaves me in the dark. And now I yield to the direction of my senses, not from instinct only, but from confidence and trust in a faithful and beneficent Monitor, grounded upon experience of his paternal care and goodness. [184b] This passage is particularly interesting. Like the others, it supplements the ordinary track record argument (“when I reflect upon what is past, I do not find I have been imposed upon by this belief”) with an appeal to God. But it does so precisely by supplying a track record argument from the experience of God’s paternal care and goodness. By way of brief summary: we have examined Reid’s four track record arguments for the truth of first principles, and found him to be over-optimistic about what they can achieve. If he thinks (as certain verbal ambiguities may have led him to think) that these arguments can directly or unconditionally support the Truth Claim, then he is wrong. In any case, to underpin the Truth Claim he appears to turn to God. This summary implies an unfavourable disjunctive verdict on Reid as an anti-sceptical epistemologist: either he is a muddled naturalist who takes it that rational reflection can unproblematically confirm instinctive common sense beliefs; or he is ultimately just another theist whose only answer to scepticism is something like the old and discredited Cartesian one. As it stands, this judgement is unacceptably harsh, and in what remains of this study we shall make radical qualifications to both of its disjuncts. In the next section we shall find that Reid’s account of what rational reflection can do to prereflective belief has a sophistication of which we have not yet taken notice; and in the final chapter we shall return in detail to Reid’s reliance on God.

‘Reflective equilibrium’ Reid and Hume disagree profoundly about the relation between reason and natural belief. On the one hand, Hume thinks that reason and natural belief are

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irreconcilably opposed, and that their opposition results in “the whimsical condition of mankind”. On the other hand, Reid denies this opposition – and its whimsical upshot. His view, both of the relation between reason and natural belief, and of mankind’s resulting condition, can be appropriately captured in the modern phrase ‘reflective equilibrium’. If Reid were committed to the position that reason always backs up, endorses, or confirms instinctive beliefs, we could label him a ‘naive confirmationist’ in this respect. But although he thinks that this sort of confirmation is the usual result of rational reflection, he is very far from saying that it is the invariable result. He points to important cases in which reflection produces disconfirmation14 of natural beliefs. For example, when discussing the ‘other minds’ principle, Reid says: It cannot be said that the judgments we form concerning life and intelligence in other beings are at first free from error. But the errors of children in this matter lie on the safe side; they are prone to attribute intelligence to things inanimate. These errors are of small consequence, and are gradually corrected by experience and ripe judgment.15 [449a] He makes much the same point in connection with the principle of testimony: when our faculties ripen, we find reason to check that propensity to yield to testimony and to authority, which was so necessary and so natural in the first period of life. We learn to reason about the regard due to them, and see it to be a childish weakness to lay more stress upon them than reason justifies.16 [450b] A third example of the disconfirmation (or at least the qualification) of a first principle by reason comes in the case of the inductive first principle: This principle remains in all its force when we come to the use of reason; but we learn to be more cautious in the application of it. We observe more carefully the circumstances on which the past event depended, and learn to distinguish them from those which were accidentally conjoined with it. [451b] Here, although the principle itself is said to “remain in all its force” as people grow up, it is still proper to speak of an alteration to a set of instinctive beliefs, brought about by rational reflection on experience. Nor is it ‘ripening’ or maturation that does the altering – intelligent adults abound who make faulty inductions. It takes hard thinking, not just the passage of time, to disabuse oneself of gamblers’ fallacies and other superstitions that, formerly, seemed to have good inductive support. We have found, then, what amount to three negative track record arguments concerning first principles. And we can now point out that, for Reid, the effect of

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reason (or reflection) on the first principles concerning other minds, testimony, and induction is not just to curb their over-credulous application, but to modify the principles themselves. The principles we have (the principles as worded) are the result of philosophical reflection – they have been modified by reason and experience from (let us say) immature, pre-reflective dispositions to believe in animism, universal veracity, and exceptionless regularity.17 This modification is contrary to reason’s effect on our belief in some of the other principles, which is one of reinforcement or strengthening. Put together, these opposite forces that reason exerts on different parts of the body of common sense beliefs produce a state of balance which can well be called ‘reflective equilibrium’. To the extent that Reid builds this equilibrium into his naturalism, we can say that the faults identified earlier in his positive track record arguments for the Truth Claim are partly cancelled out. And to the same extent, we can conclude that his naturalism is neither muddled nor naive.

Notes 1 For example, I might take myself straightforwardly to be ‘seeing’ the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace; but in fact this ‘observation’ of mine is dependent at several points on bits of theory I owe to other people. 2 All four arguments clearly presuppose the reliability of induction, reasoning, and memory; and all (though less obviously in the case of the argument for memory) presuppose the reliability of perception as well. 3 Three such passages occur at 127a, 184b, and 439b. In an unpublished paper, Keith Lehrer and John-Christian Smith have used these passages to emphasize a hitherto unnoticed coherentist strand in Reid’s thought. In reply, Daniel Schulthess has argued persuasively that coherence plays “only a fringe role in Reid’s philosophy” (Schulthess: 198 and passim). 4 I owe this latter point to Schulthess (see Schulthess: 195). 5 William P. Alston: The Reliability of Sense Perception, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1993. 6 “Such a judgment can be erroneous only when there is some cause of the error, as general as the error is. When this can be shewn to be the case, I acknowledge it ought to have its due weight. But to suppose a general deviation from truth among mankind in things self-evident, of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable” [440b]. 7 “The strength of probable reasoning … depends not upon any one argument, but upon many, which unite their force … Such evidence may be compared to a rope made up of many slender filaments twisted together. The rope has strength more than sufficient to bear the stress laid upon it, though no one of the filaments of which it is composed would be sufficient for that purpose” [482a]. 8 Contrast Alston: “[Reid] explicitly recognizes the epistemic circularity we have pointed out. In fact, Reid stresses this point perhaps more than any other philosopher prior to the twentieth century” (Alston 1985: 443–4). 9 For a fuller discussion of this matter see James Van Cleve’s masterly paper, Van Cleve 1999 (especially section IX). 10 The epigraphs to the Inquiry and the Intellectual Powers are both taken from the Book of Job: “The inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding” [93]; “Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts?” [213]. For the Active Powers, Reid goes to Micah: “He hath shewed thee, O Man, what is good” [509].

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11 I give some argument for the importance of this question in the opening paragraph of Chapter 10, below. 12 “Reid thinks there are no good reasons for doubting his Truth Claim – but perhaps without God there would be” (p. 70 above). 13 This argument from divine intention to the truth of the principle is found again in the case of the inductive first principle: “The wise Author of our nature intended, that a great and necessary part of our knowledge should be derived from experience, before we are capable of reasoning, and he hath provided means perfectly adequate to this intention. … He hath implanted in human minds an original principle by which we believe and expect the continuance of the course of nature … . Indeed, if we believe that there is a wise and good Author of nature, we may see a good reason why he should continue the same laws of nature, and the same connections of things, for a long time: because, if he did otherwise, we could learn nothing from what is past, and all our experience would be of no use to us” [198a]. 14 We can leave behind the worries expressed earlier about Reid’s loose use of ‘confirm’. As Popper has taught us, falsification and disconfirmation are terms or concepts much less problematical than their opposites. 15 It may be objected that this passage is not a proper illustration of the point at issue, because it is “experience” or maturation that is being said to do the correcting, not reasoning or reflection. But the objection is not sound. For one thing, the corrective “ripe judgments” (on the ‘ripeness’ of which the objection lays stress) are precisely judgements, or reasonings – and of course one can’t expect these things to operate in the very young. And for another thing, Reid elsewhere says that primitive or uneducated adults, too, tend to overdo ascriptions of mentality (see, for example, 605a). So maturation is beside the present point – a necessary condition of reflection, perhaps, but not a sufficient one. 16 If a similar objection to the one just noted were made against this example, a similar reply would be available. There is a rational correction made, so Reid is saying, to pre-rational belief – and only to immature belief insofar as it is pre-rational. 17 See page 61, above, where (in reply to Cummins) we noted that many of the first principles of contingent truths are offered by Reid as holding only for the most part.

10 Reid’s theism reconsidered

Nowadays most philosophers and their students are atheists, and a good many, especially of the students, are women. These facts, perhaps, account for two tendencies in current philosophical writing: one, to feminize the pronouns so as somehow to make amends for centuries of anti-female bias; and the other, to be on the alert for, and to deplore when found, any systematic reliance on religious faith in the work of philosophers of the past. But whereas the first of these tendencies may rightly be considered a risible and distracting piece of philosophical correctness, the second is surely respectable. This is by no means to say that a philosopher need only mention the Wise Author of Nature in order to consign himself to some philosophical scrap-heap. Rather it means that, for any given piece of philosophy, if in theory it can be shown to stand free of any theistic presuppositions which might in fact have informed its composition, then its appeal as a piece of philosophy is very significantly widened. It becomes an object not only of historical or special interest, but of live philosophical consideration by everyone in a secular age (such as its author, however devout, would wish it to be). This is a point that would not have been lost on Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, or any other of the great modern philosophers whose theism, like Reid’s, is deeply embedded in their writings. We have touched on this general question as it applies to the particular case of Reid’s epistemology at two points in this book. In Chapter 5, where we first distinguished the Innateness Claim from the Truth Claim for first principles and asked how Reid closes “the truth gap” between them, we declared rather tentatively that it was not (or at least not straightforwardly) by God. And in Chapter 9, while noting that Reid does seem to provide theistic underpinnings for the Truth Claim, we left it unclear whether such underpinnings are necessary for the success of his enterprise. In view of the importance of the general question just urged, and the lack of any consensus about its answer in Reid’s particular case, it seems appropriate to use this concluding chapter to arrive at some more definite view of the role of God in Reid’s theory of knowledge. This can best be done by stalking our prey from a distance. On any reliabilist account, in order for natural beliefs to count as knowledge, it is necessary only that the human faculties in fact be reliable (whether they have been ‘designed’ by God, or naturalistic evolution, or both, or have arisen in some

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other way). Emphatically it is not required that the believer know or justifiably believe that the human faculties are reliable. A fortiori, it is not required that the believer be able to give reasons (whether theistic or Darwinian) for their reliability. So far, this is just a bare externalistic schema – it doesn’t yet amount to an interesting epistemological doctrine. Perhaps the human faculties are reliable (in which case we know lots of things), but then again, perhaps they are not. So to get closer to a position like Reid’s, we need to supplement the bare schema with something equivalent to his Truth Claim: ‘and the human faculties are in fact reliable’. The conjunction of the schema and this truth claim gives a substantive reliabilism which locates the burden of proof on the sceptic as well as on the agnostic. There is an initial assumption of reliability (by the truth claim) which (by the schema) requires no defence. Naturally formed beliefs are justified as they stand. But so far this reliabilism is altogether too crude ever to have been sensibly promulgated, for it is too hospitable to the many naturally formed beliefs (such as those stemming from some individual disorder, or from some specieswide tendency to err) that plainly lack justification. Minimally, some refinement of basic reliabilism is needed in order to exclude such cases, if the account is to be acceptable. How does Reid refine his reliabilism? Essentially, his refinement consists in his preparedness to listen to reasons that might be proposed for thinking that his basic assumption, that “the human faculties are not in their nature fallacious”, may on occasion be undermined or ‘defeated’: [common sense judgements] can be erroneous only when there is some cause of the error, as general as the error is. When this can be shewn to be the case, I acknowledge it ought to have its due weight … [440b] This is what in Chapter 5 we began to call the ‘epicycle’ on Reid’s reliabilism; and in that chapter we gave some attention to the various levels of generality at which these epicyclical defeaters could be said to operate. But we also made clear that, absent a triggering of the epicycle, the basic reliabilist assumption (or the Truth Claim) is back in play: But to suppose a general deviation from truth among mankind in things selfevident, of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable. [Ibid.] However (as again we said before), this statement is open to a symmetrical counter-assertion by the sceptic or anti-reliabilist: ‘to suppose a general tendency towards truth among mankind … of which no cause can be assigned, is highly unreasonable’. Let us now call these opposed stances ‘metapositions’ about the justification of natural beliefs. Reid’s metaposition is: ‘disbelieve only if negative reasons defeat, otherwise believe’, while the contrary, sceptical, metaposition is: ‘believe only if positive reasons support, otherwise disbelieve’. And clearly there

Reid’s theism reconsidered 167 is room for an agnostic or ‘neutralist’ metaposition in the middle: ‘in default of positive reasons pro or negative reasons con, suspend judgement’. In labelling these default stances ‘metapositions’, we are of course drawing attention to their second-order status. And our inquiry in this final chapter is into the extent to which, if at all, Reid’s second-order reliabilist default stance depends on God. At this point it will be useful again to compare Reid’s account with Alvin Plantinga’s, to which it is apparently very similar. Plantinga has recently developed a sort of super-reliabilism (though he disavows the label) according to which there are four key conditions severally necessary and jointly sufficient for a belief’s having “warrant”: (1) the cognitive faculties involved in the production [of the belief] are functioning properly … (2) your cognitive environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which your cognitive faculties are designed, (3) … the design plan governing the production of the belief in question involves, as purpose or function, the production of true beliefs … and (4) the design plan is a good one: that is, there is a high statistical or objective probability that … [the] … belief is true. (Plantinga: 194) There are close affinities between each of these four conditions and things said more or less explicitly by Reid. Condition (1), for example, is reflected in the typical Reidian prescription that “as we do not judge of the natural constitution of the body from the disorders or diseases to which it is subject from accidents, so neither ought we to judge of the natural powers of the mind from its disorders, but from its sound state” [259a]. Reid’s version of condition (2) is found, for example, in his talk of atmospheres “uncommonly foggy” wherein a nearby seagull is mistaken for a man on horseback half a mile away [191b], or the more radically uncongenial situation of the touch-blind “Idomenians” who believe that two or more bodies may exist in the same place simultaneously [151a,b]. Condition (3), too, is prefigured in Reid’s exclusion of useful but (strictly) false beliefs – notably popular beliefs about physical ‘causes’ in nature.1 But the condition of most interest here is the last one. For the assertion that condition (4) holds for mankind – that our design plan is a good one (i.e. that the modules referred to in condition (3) are successfully aimed at truth) – is, in effect, nothing other than what we have been calling Reid’s ‘Truth Claim’ for first principles. Now Plantinga maintains that atheists and religious agnostics are not in a position to assert that condition (4) does hold in the case of mankind. Reflection on “Darwin’s Doubt”,2 so he argues, presents non-believers with an “ultimately undefeatable defeater” for the belief that the human design plan is a “good” one. For theists, by contrast, this calamitous defeater is prevented from arising by the assurance that the designing has been done by a non-deceiving God. In sum, says Plantinga, “naturalistic epistemology flourishes best in a garden of supernaturalistic metaphysics”.

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Two related questions now seem to press. The first is whether the accounts of Reid and Plantinga really are as similar, structurally speaking, as they appear to be (the latter looking like a refinement of the former). The second is whether Plantinga is correct in saying that his kind of epistemology requires God in the background. Affirmative answers to both questions would, of course, imply that Reidian reliabilism, too, carries an ineliminable commitment to God. Negative or equivocal answers, while they would not decide the issue the other way, might still provide help in arriving at a final verdict. Let us begin with the structural comparison. Reid’s Truth Claim, so we have said, is at least analogous to Plantinga’s condition (4). The first thing to say is that in Plantinga’s case the claim that the human faculties are reliable is down there among the “bells and whistles” (as he calls them) on his account. A belief’s having warrant is a matter of its not being defeated by being the product (1) of malfunction, or (2) of proper function but in an uncongenial environment, or (3) of proper function in a congenial environment, but by modules not aimed at truth, or now (4) of truth-aimed modules functioning as and where they should but according to an unreliable design plan. We shall come later to examine Plantinga’s arguments for saying that this last condition trips up the believer in naturalistic evolution but not the theist. It is enough for the moment to note that condition (4) is a potential defeater on the same level as the other potential defeaters, in Plantinga’s account. By contrast with this, Reid’s equivalent of condition (4) – his assumption that our design plan is a ‘good’ one – is what motivates his metaposition. In other words, his presupposition of the Truth Claim for first principles is what is behind his default stance, belief. It is because he presumes the reliability of the faculties that he can prescribe belief, in the absence of “shewn” causes of error (this latter qualification or ‘epicycle’ being there in commonsensical recognition that sometimes we go wrong in our naturally formed judgements). Given this second-order metaposition, we can attend to proposed first-order defeaters. Some of these will be accepted as occasionally genuine defeaters (malfunction, abnormal environment, useful but false prejudice and the like); others, notably the doctrine of ‘ideas’, will be rejected. Either way, the assessment of these proposed first-order defeaters occupies the same level in Reid’s account as do conditions (1), (2) and (3) in Plantinga’s. For Reid to say, comprehensively, that “the proper circumstances concur” is the same as for Plantinga to say that these first three conditions of his have been met. What about Reid’s version of Plantinga’s condition (4), the Truth Claim? Is it ‘up for defeat’ in the same way? Well, a direct attack on the Truth Claim would not be a ‘defeater’ according to our usage of the term so far (though it would be, according to Plantinga’s) because ‘defeaters’, as such, arise only within ‘reliabilism with an epicycle’. At least, it would not be a first-order defeater. Instead, it would be an attack on the motivation for the Reidian metaposition. Perhaps, then, we should call it a second-order defeater. For Reid would acknowledge that he’d have to relinquish his metaposition (reliabilism with an epicycle; default stance,

Reid’s theism reconsidered 169 belief ) – just as he relinquishes first-order beliefs – if it were shewn to be false. To press such an attack successfully would be to beat Reid on his own ground. But this is going to be very difficult to do, given where the burden of proof lies on Reid’s chosen ground. Let us continue for the moment to stand above the fray between theism and naturalism (taking naturalism to include the denial of theism), and point out that doubts can be raised about reliabilism from both of these perspectives. One may question from within theism whether a benevolent god might not deceive us for our own good. And, correspondingly, one may wonder from within naturalism whether Darwin’s Doubt is well founded. Now neither of these questionings, even in conjunction, is going to help the sceptic defeat Reid’s reliabilism at second order. Reid takes himself to be entitled to believe the Truth Claim (in the same way as any lower-order belief ) unless it can be shown to be false (or in the absence of good reasons not to believe it). In order to trigger Reid’s epicycle, the sceptic is going to have to show that both theism and naturalism generate good defeating reasons for doubting reliabilism. Then, he can say, since the reliabilist has nowhere else to go, he must abandon his reliabilism. But the mere possibility that reliabilism might be false (i.e. the possibility of divine deception or of Darwin’s Doubt) doesn’t present a defeater for reliabilism. These possibilities would only matter to those with different metapositions. The possibilities might well be what would prevent the sceptic or anti-reliabilist from believing; and they would presumably steer the neutralist towards suspension of judgement. But for those who share the generous Reidian metaposition, these possibilities leave the default stance of belief untouched. Thus does reliabilism insulate itself from easy refutation by its very structure. We can now come directly at the doctrinal question whether Reid’s reliabilism carries with it any ineliminable commitment to God. In the current literature there is a very wide range of answers to this question. At one extreme are those like Daniels and Popkin, whose views we cited in Chapter 5. Let’s have them in front of us again, together with a passage from David Fate Norton in the same vein: Reid’s only defense against the skeptical outcome of his nativism – namely that our constitutions might lead us to systematically false beliefs – is his belief that God would not deceive us. (Daniels: 117) [Reid’s] … commonsense realism came to constitute an anti-skeptical philosophy that people could live by, whose truth ultimately rested on a conviction of God’s veracity. (Popkin: 68) [Reid holds that our faculties] are part of the overall design of a providential nature, and can be trusted implicitly. What we naturally believe is in fact supernaturally guaranteed. (Norton: 318)

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The contrary view is put particularly clearly by James Somerville. Reid’s many references to divine providence, he says, are “unremarkable pleasantries” which are “quite irrelevant to the specific epistemological issues”, rather like “the nugatory adding of D.V. to a statement of intention” instanced by J.L. Austin (Somerville 1995: 348, 361). Somewhere in the middle is Plantinga’s view that naturalistic epistemology, such as his and Reid’s, requires to be set in a supernaturalistic garden “for its best flourishing”. It is not hard to find fault with the first of these two sorts of readings – the neoCartesian interpretation of Reid as reliant on the guarantee of a non-deceiving God. For one thing, it ignores Reid’s own criticism of Descartes for this very reliance: “it is strange that so acute a reasoner did not perceive that in this reasoning there is evidently a begging of the question” [447b]. For another, in making basic his “belief that God would not deceive us” (Daniels) or his “conviction of God’s veracity” (Popkin) it foists an internalism on Reid that is not properly his. And for a third thing, its talk of supernatural ‘guarantees’ (Norton) quite misses the presumptive nature of Reid’s Truth Claim. Yet there are possible replies to each of these points. First, Reid sometimes stumbles in his particular criticisms of Descartes (notably in his commentary on the cogito); and even if in the case at hand he is sure-footed, it remains generally true that one philosopher’s awareness of another’s mistake doesn’t, of itself, prevent him from falling into the same sort of error himself.3 No doubt Reid avoids Descartes’s particular sort of circularity – he thinks God’s existence can be inferred from the truth of natural beliefs, not conversely. But there may be wider circles than the one which bears Arnauld’s name, in which Reid is involved nevertheless. In the second place, there may be a way of reading the remarks of Daniels, Popkin and Norton so as to make them consistent with an externalist Reid after all. Thus, when Daniels says that Reid’s belief that God would not deceive us is his “only defense” against scepticism, he may not mean that this defence is actually wheeled out by Reid; he could mean, rather, that it is the only defence available to him in principle – a ‘dispositional’ defence rather than an ‘occurrent’ one, as we might put it. Similarly, Popkin’s assertion is not that Reid’s system “rests on a conviction of God’s veracity” simpliciter, but rather that it “ultimately” so rests. The suggestion may be, in our terms, that the conviction motivates Reid’s metaposition, not that it is required at first order. And third, Norton’s gloss need not commit Reid to internalism: “what we naturally believe is in fact supernaturally guaranteed [though this fact is beyond our ken]”. Here, perhaps, the word ‘guarantee’ is misleading. In everyday parlance, as in Cartesian philosophy, there are two parties to a guarantee – the manufacturer and the customer. But in Norton’s gloss taken the externalist way, the guarantee is not something vouchsafed the customer; it is more like a brute description of how the manufacturer behaves. We see, then, that the question whether Reid’s reliabilism depends on God is not adequately answered by pointing out that Reid is no Cartesian. Descartes’s, although the market-leader, is only one brand of God-dependent philosophy. There are other positions actual and possible, externalist in character and abjuring

Reid’s theism reconsidered 171 two-party guarantees, which depend on God in subtler ways. Let’s see whether Reid’s is one of them. Plantinga’s is the most fully worked out of these alternative externalisms, so it seems important to examine more thoroughly than previously his claim that it “flourishes best in the garden of supernaturalistic metaphysics”. As it stands, the import of this slogan is relatively weak. It is not claiming that naturalistic epistemology can’t flourish, still less that it can’t subsist at all, in a garden of naturalistic metaphysics – the claim is only that it flourishes best in the theistic setting. Now this weaker claim will plainly be the easier to defend – and indeed when specified to the particular case of Reidian epistemology, it may turn out to represent the truth of the matter. But the curious thing is that Plantinga presents the slogan in summary of two arguments, one of which is for the stronger claim. What he calls his “Main Argument against Naturalism”, as we have seen, has two implicit premises: (a) naturalism generates doubts which, once present, cannot be argued down; and (b) these doubts don’t arise for the theist. The unavoidable conclusion, welcomed by Plantinga, is that naturalistic epistemology can’t get by at all without God – it is defeated by an “ultimately undefeatable defeater”. As a clergyman, Reid would very likely have welcomed this conclusion too. But present-day friends of Reid (and not just the atheists among them) will balk at it. They will see the situation like this. Nobody, it is agreed, can positively establish Reid’s Truth Claim by argument – it has to be assumed. But if Plantinga is right in saying that the assumption of the Truth Claim is only tenable for the theist, then (so long as the Reid/Plantinga parallel is close enough) it will not be the case that Reid’s references to God are without epistemological significance (as Somerville has it). On the contrary, they will evidently be part of the shrubbery in the supernaturalistic garden in which, and only in which, the Truth Claim can survive. The result of this will be to diminish Reid’s reputation among many contemporary philosophers, for the reasons outlined at the start of this chapter. It is not just that naturalistic gardens are all the rage nowadays. It is also that, even for philosophers who happen to be theists, a reliabilism that is hardy enough to survive anywhere is preferable to one that needs special metaphysical conditions. It behoves us, therefore, to try to show that Reid is not committed to Plantinga’s stronger claim – or, in other words, to show that Reid could in principle resist the Main Argument against Naturalism. Plantinga’s first premise, we recall, states that naturalism (or more exactly, the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism, N, and contemporary evolutionary theory, E, and a description of what cognitive faculties we have, C) provides for itself an ultimately undefeatable defeater. He arrives at this premise by asking us to consider a hypothetical population of creatures much like ourselves, which we believe to be the product of N&E&C. What should our estimate of the probability of the truth of reliabilism (P/R) for this population be? Darwin’s Doubt would counsel something less than 0.5, but Plantinga magnanimously lets us opt for “simple agnosticism” here. Even so, he says, we can’t reasonably believe R for this population because “the proposition in question is the sort for which one needs evidence if one is to believe it reasonably”, evidence which in this case we

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lack (Plantinga: 229). And if we must withhold belief in R in their case, so must we, by parity of reasoning, in our own. But now, if we are naturalists, we have an “undercutting defeater”, which itself can’t be defeated, for any belief B that we hold. “The next thing to note” (now here’s a how-d’ye-do) “is that B might be N&E itself ” (Plantinga: 231, emphasis original). Now it’s surely clear that Reid not only could but assuredly would resist Plantinga’s key move in this argument. When he considers the appropriate attitude towards R for the hypothetical population, Plantinga says “the proposition in question is the sort for which one needs evidence if one is to believe it reasonably”. Fair enough, we might think – the population is only hypothetical. But he takes this result – agnosticism with respect to R – and then runs a parallel argument for “ourselves and our condition”, which is a quite un-Reidian, or even antiReidian, thing to do. According to Reid’s metaposition, R (or, if we prefer, the Truth Claim) is precisely not the sort of proposition “for which one needs evidence if one is to believe it reasonably”. We can safely conclude, then, that Reid would not regard Darwin’s Doubt as capable of presenting a calamitous defeater for the Truth Claim – Plantinga’s first premise, he would say, is unsound. What of the second premise, which holds that the theist has no doubts corresponding to those by which the Darwinian naturalist is assailed – “nothing impelling him in the direction of such skepticism in the first place” (Plantinga: 237)? The reason for asserting this, of course, is the commonplace that The traditional theist … believes that God is the premier knower and has created us human beings in his image, an important part of which involves his endowing them with a reflection of his powers as a knower. (Plantinga: 236) However, Plantinga is careful to note that not all theists need be “traditional” in this sense: Things may stand differently with a bare theist – one who holds only that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good creator, but does not add that God has created humankind in his own image. (Plantinga: 236, n. 26, emphasis original) So the question whether Reid would endorse this second premise of Plantinga’s reduces to the question whether he, like most theists then and now, is an ‘image of God’ man, or whether his theism is of the scarcer “bare” variety. Does Reid himself say anything which might help us decide? I can find only one passage which looks even vaguely relevant to the specific issue: in all ages men have been prone to attribute the human figure and human passions and frailties to superior intelligences, and even to the Supreme Being. [470a]

Reid’s theism reconsidered 173 But the passage doesn’t settle the question. On the one hand there is an attribution of similarity being made. But (i) it is an attribution in the wrong direction for the doctrine (God is being made in man’s image, rather than conversely), and (ii) the attribution is of deficiency not of excellence, and (iii) is in any case, as the context makes clear, a mistaken attribution. Now if Reid were saying that the attribution is mistaken because it goes the wrong way, and is of frailty rather than perfection, then we would have some evidence that he holds the Image of God doctrine. But he doesn’t say this. He says, rather, that it is an instance of one of the idola tribus – the tendency “to judge from too slight analogies”. If anything, the passage in its context prompts the thought that it is open to Reid to regard the Image of God doctrine as itself an instance of one of the idola tribus. But at any rate the passage is indecisive for the present question. To make progress, we need to enlist some specialist help.

The “Image of God” doctrine Edward Craig, in his book The Mind of God and the Works of Man, has presented a detailed study of the Image of God doctrine, charting its sources, development and ramifications. He distinguishes within it two sub-theses, both of which are relevant here: that man resembles God (a) in point of reason (“the Insight Ideal”), and (b) in point of moral values. Let us hold them up in turn and ask whether Reid subscribes to them. The difficulty facing sub-thesis (a), so Craig suggests, is a special case of the difficulty of explaining how any one thing can ‘resemble’ any other thing to which it is infinitely inferior. The cleverest men know vanishingly little by comparison with their omniscient creator, so how can we say that the human mind and the divine mind are alike? The seventeenth-century solution to this problem, which Craig finds in Galileo, is to distinguish between the intensive, or qualitative, and the extensive, or quantitative, aspects of human knowledge. With this done, we can say with Galileo that although the extent of God’s knowledge is immeasurably greater than ours, with regard to those few [things] which the human intellect does understand … its knowledge equals the divine in objective certainty, for here it succeeds in understanding necessity, beyond which there can be no greater sureness. (Quoted in Craig 1987: 19) We can now ask whether Reid can be comfortable with this distinction and the conclusion Galileo draws from it. Again, the texts don’t offer any direct help. On the one hand Reid frequently says such things as this: until the wisdom of men bear some proportion to the wisdom of God, their attempts to find out the structure of his works, by the force of their wit and genius, will be vain. [235b, emphasis added]

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Here, the notion of “proportion” is a quantitative one, and so in ruling out any proportion between the infinite extension of God’s wisdom and the limited extension of man’s, Reid is only stating what the Image of God men freely admit – namely that there is a difference of degree between the two. Does he go further and rule out a difference of kind? Passages such as the following suggest that he might: The works of men and the works of Nature are not of the same order … the works of Nature are contrived and executed by a wisdom and power infinitely superior to that of man … [472a, emphasis added] But again the evidence is not conclusive. “Not of the same order” is ambiguous between ‘not of the same quality’ and ‘not of the same order of magnitude’, so it is still not clear whether Reid means that the infinite superiority of God’s wisdom over man’s is a superiority of kind or merely of degree. Faced with this textual inconclusiveness, we can go back to Craig to see if his study contains any clues which might help us to determine a definite position for Reid here. In Craig’s opinion, several highly important preoccupations in seventeenthcentury philosophy, whose predominance is commonly assumed to be just a brute fact about the intellectual taste of the period, should be seen as having their origin, or at least as taking nourishment, from this branch of the Image of God doctrine, the Insight Ideal. The high status of mathematical method (especially the power of deduction to preserve truth), infallibilism about states of consciousness, the thorough intelligibility in principle of the universe, and of the causal connections in it4 – all these, says Craig, support, and are supported by, the notion that man has available to him a quasi-divine certainty for his best intellectual efforts (Craig 1987: ch. 1 and passim). If we now ask how many items on this list Reid ‘buys’, the answer is obvious – precious few, if not none at all. Let us run down the list. First, although Reid is fascinated by mathematics – indeed he is a mathematician of the front rank5 – he does not associate any extraordinary properties with the discipline. It is a skill, learned like any other, and the capacity to progress in it varies from person to person. Its rules enjoy no special status: the rules of demonstrative sciences are discovered by our fallible and uncertain faculties, and have no authority but that of human judgment. [486a] And even experts can go wrong in applying them: When a demonstration is short and plain; when the point to be proved does not touch our interest or our passions; when the faculty of judging, in such cases, has acquired strength by much exercise – there is less danger of erring; when the contrary circumstances take place, there is more … [487a]

Reid’s theism reconsidered 175 But there is never no danger of error at all, in Reid’s view. So far, these remarks may seem uncontroversial. But they feed into a central thesis of Reid’s with which many would profoundly disagree: demonstration is neither necessary nor sufficient for “certainty”, that “highest degree of evidence, when all doubt vanishes, and the belief is firm and immovable” [482b]. Not sufficient, because “in all our judgments, we ought to be sensible of our fallibility” [485b, emphasis added]. Not necessary, because “probable” (i.e. non-demonstrative) inference can also yield “this degree of evidence, the highest the human faculties can attain [which] we call certainty” [482b]: When [for example] there is an agreement of many witnesses, in a great variety of circumstances, without the possibility of a previous concert, the evidence may be equal to that of demonstration.6 [483a] It is clear, then, that Reid puts no halo around mathematical or demonstrative reasoning, as ‘Image of God’ men are inclined to do. Neither (to take the second item on our list from Craig) does Reid think that any special certainty attaches to our knowledge of our own mental states. He puts the challenge to Descartes: How do you know that your consciousness cannot deceive you? You have supposed that all you see, and hear, and handle, may be an illusion. Why, therefore, should the power of consciousness have this prerogative, to be believed implicitly, when all our other powers are supposed fallacious? To this objection I know no other answer that can be made but that we find it impossible to doubt of things of which we are conscious. The constitution of our nature forces this belief upon us irresistibly. [463a] We have observed in an earlier chapter that in this passage, as elsewhere, Reid quite fails to appreciate the self-verifying nature of the cogito. But whatever its ineptitude as a piece of commentary on Descartes, the passage illustrates that Reid’s fallibilism is thorough-going enough to extend even to “the only principle of common sense that has never directly been called into question” [442b]. This is not to say that Reid himself has actual doubts about first principle number one, which vouches for “the existence of everything of which I am conscious”. On the contrary, he affirms its truth. But the point is that, for him, the grounds for affirming it, while quite as good as those for affirming any other first principle, are no better.7 So he is not in a position to draw any sort of parallel between people’s awareness of their own states of consciousness and God’s infallible awareness of all things. The third belief which, according to Craig, typically accompanies the Image of God doctrine, is the view that the world is a thoroughly intelligible place. Again, this is not a view that Reid shares. While he is broadly optimistic that future science, if properly conducted (i.e. conducted along good inductivist lines), will

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uncover natural laws of greater and greater generality, there is much that Reid insists we shall never know. How perception works, for example: “this, I am afraid, is hid in impenetrable darkness” [326b]. The same goes for mind/body interaction more generally: “there is a deep and dark gulf between them, which our understanding cannot pass; and the manner of their correspondence and intercourse is absolutely unknown” [187a]. Also, “the real essence of created things … is a knowledge which seems to be quite beyond the reach of the human faculties” [392b]. And about the intelligibility of causal connections Reid says this: “supposing natural philosophy brought to its utmost perfection – it does not discover the efficient cause of any one phaenomenon in nature” [527a]. We find, then, that each of these three tributaries to the Image of God doctrine flows in a counter-Reidian direction. The third one he stands against in principle. And the first and second provide the motivation for classical foundationalism, which it has been the single most distinctive feature of Reid’s epistemology to reject. It now becomes evident that he is opposed, also, to the current in the main channel. “We are thinking”, writes Craig, “about an epoch which deified reason, figuratively and almost literally”8 (Craig 1987: 37). Reid can have none of this. In many places he insists that reason has no privilege over the other faculties. They all “came … out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist” [183b]. And they are equally fallible: “Our senses, our memory, and our reason are all limited and imperfect – this is the lot of humanity” [335a]. Our general fallibility must rule out any identity (even a qualitative one) of our intellectual powers with God’s: that a fallible being cannot have that perfect comprehension and assurance of truth which an infallible being has – I think ought to be granted. [485a,b] But Reid goes further: our particular power of reason, so far from being a power we share with God, is “only a kind of crutch to a limited understanding”. God’s is an understanding to which that truth appears intuitively, which we can only discover by reasoning. For this cause, though we must ascribe judgment to the Almighty, we do not ascribe reasoning to him, because it implies some defect or limitation of understanding. [476a] Not having had the benefit of reading Craig, Reid is unaware of the extent to which theology is driving this undue elevation of reason by his opponents. So he ventures a plausible psychological explanation for it instead: “Perhaps the pride of philosophers may have given occasion to this error. Reason is the faculty wherein they assume a superiority to the unlearned” [339a]. But we, at all events, can be grateful to Craig for digging deeper and providing, in his analysis of the Insight Ideal, the means for showing exactly why Reid is not party to it.

Reid’s theism reconsidered 177 To take stock. In our attempt to find out whether Reid’s philosophy can stand free of his religious faith, we first established that he is no Cartesian. This, however, left it possible that there might be subtler ways in which his system depends on God. To try to tease out the complicated issues involved, we turned to the work of Reid’s inheritor, Plantinga. There, we found that Plantinga’s advertised slogan – to the effect that reliabilism “flourishes best” in a garden of theism – masked a much stronger conclusion, namely that unless so situated, reliabilism can’t exist at all. It emerged that this stronger conclusion (to which we want to know if Reid, too, is committed) rests on two premises: (i) naturalism is ultimately self-defeating; and (ii) theism is free of any corresponding doubts. Now clearly, we need only show that Reid is not committed to one of these premises in order to show that he can evade the stronger conclusion. And we have already declared that, for structural (or ‘metapositional’) reasons, he does not have to accept premise (i). Nevertheless, in a spirit of thoroughness (and because the results will later be useful) we are presently trying to show that he doesn’t have to accept premise (ii) either (even though, by temperament, he probably would). By Plantinga’s admission, not all theists have to accept premise (ii), only “traditional” ones. For the “bare” theist – i.e. the theist who does not hold that man is made in the image of God – there is the possibility of doubts parallel to those that the naturalist may have. Now the Image of God doctrine, so we learn from Craig, has two aspects, of which we have so far dealt with only one, the Insight Ideal – Reid, we have just seen, definitely doesn’t subscribe to this. Our next task, therefore, is to see whether he accepts the doctrine in its other aspect. If it should turn out that he rejects this too, what will follow? It will follow that Reid’s theism, being “bare”, is such that he can in principle deny Plantinga’s premise (ii). Of course the denial, by Reid or anyone else, of premise (ii) does nothing whatever to raise the probability of reliabilism’s being true. But it does mean that theists (theists of this kind) are in the same epistemological boat as naturalists, with respect to this probability. So the combined effect, if we can achieve it, of our showing that Reid is not committed in principle either to premise (i) or to premise (ii) will be to have shown that his reliabilism with its Truth Claim (unlike Plantinga’s with its) can be coherently formulated without recourse to theism.

To resume the task: we are concerned to know Reid’s attitude to the other part of the Image of God doctrine, its moral aspect. More precisely, we want to see whether a notorious remnant of Cartesianism, which still does crucial work for Plantinga and other “traditional” theists, does any work for Reid too. About this remnant, Craig is pithy: The premise that ‘God is no deceiver’, without which … [Descartes’s] … salvage of knowledge fails in limine, is plucked out of the air, a product of the unthinking assumption that God’s ways are our ways, that we resemble him in point of moral values. (Craig 1987: 23)

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To begin with, it is perfectly certain that Reid does believe that we resemble God in point of moral values: the moral excellence, which we see and admire in some of our fellowcreatures is a faint but true copy of that moral excellence which is essential to … [God’s] … nature. [679b] He even, on occasion, uses the word ‘image’ to describe this resemblance: Disinterested goodness and rectitude is the glory of the Divine Nature, without which he might be an object of fear or hope, but not of true devotion. And it is the image of this divine attribute in the human character that is the glory of man. [585b, emphasis added] On the face of it, these unambiguous expressions of what Craig calls “the unthinking assumption that God’s ways are our ways” might seem to prepare Reid to draw from it the “product”, so important to Descartes, that “God is no deceiver”. Such a result would not only be a considerable embarrassment for our interpretation of Reid throughout this study. It would also be impossible, on any interpretation, to reconcile with those passages (admittedly few in number) which strongly suggest that Reid regards God’s veracity as a genuinely open question.9 But in fact it is not hard to find a consistent position for Reid here. He can hold both that our moral ways are God’s moral ways, and that God might sometimes deceive us, simply by pointing to the fact that our (estimable) moral ways include paternalistic deception. We fill our children’s heads with pleasure-producing falsehoods about the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas; we exaggerate the ‘poisonousness’ of certain plants to save them from minor stomach upsets; we tell them comforting lies about the family pet living happily ‘on a farm’ when we know it was killed by a lorry. In short, we deceive them ‘for their own good’ in ways that are quite consistent with our “moral excellence” as parents. Analogously, so Reid could say, our being “deceived by him that made us” does not at all compromise (and might even sometimes be dictated by) the “disinterested goodness and rectitude” of our maker. Now it has to be conceded that Reid does not, at least in his published writings, directly discuss the possibility that God might deceive us for our own good. He even, in the Active Powers, says things which appear to rule it out: The character of perfect wisdom and perfect rectitude in the Deity, gives us certain knowledge that he will always be true in all his declarations, faithful in all his promises … [631a] The genuine dictate of our natural faculties is the voice of God, no less than what he reveals from heaven; and to say that it is fallacious, is to impute a lie to the God of truth. [617a]

Reid’s theism reconsidered 179 About this last passage Roger Gallie well says: But it cannot be said that he argues for this position which … is very much at odds with the main lines of his thought on the dictates of our natural faculties, especially the dictate that these faculties are not fallacious. (Gallie 1989: 264) I think we can explain these two features – Reid’s failure directly to discuss the possibility of God’s paternalistic deception, and his apparent indirect denial of the possibility – by making a distinction between Reid the clergyman and Reid the philosopher. No doubt in his religious practice (and the Active Powers does have more of the flavour of the pulpit than his other works) Reid does feel the pull of his faith towards the “traditional” notion that God is always “the God of truth”. But in his philosophical principle he makes room for a qualification of the traditional notion in two ways: first, by distinguishing, if only implicitly, between the utility of natural beliefs and their truth; and second, by saying quite openly that God’s purposes are, in important respects, inscrutable. Let us look at these in turn. Reid’s implicit distinction between the utility and the truth of instinctive beliefs has to be teased out of passages like the following: The Supreme Being intended that we should have such knowledge of the material objects that surround us, as is necessary in order to our supplying the wants of nature, and avoiding the dangers to which we are constantly exposed; and he has admirably fitted our powers of perception to this purpose. [260b, emphasis added] Here, it is not absolute objective truth that is being claimed for God-given perceptual beliefs, but simply utility (or, more exactly, enough truth in the set of perceptual beliefs to ensure utility). Elsewhere, Reid says explicitly that utility is compatible with falsehood. The inductive principle, for example leads us often into mistakes; but is of infinite advantage upon the whole. By it, the child once burnt shuns the fire; by it, he likewise runs away from the surgeon by whom he was inoculated. It is better that he should do the last, than that he should not do the first. [199b] Now, although the “infinite advantage” claimed here is plainly infinite practical advantage, Reid would doubtless also want to claim an advantage in terms of truth – that is, he would claim that application of the inductive principle “upon the whole” yields a huge preponderance of true beliefs over false ones.10 But he does not here, nor anywhere else with respect to first principles, “make the mistake of arguing they are true because they are useful”, as Lehrer rightly points out (Lehrer 1989: 293).

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Roger Gallie has a different way of bringing out this distinction. He compares the wording of the inductive first principle in the Intellectual Powers, which “contains the crucial qualification ‘probably’, presumably because Reid is well aware that the version of the principle without ‘probably’ is false”, with a similar formulation of the proposition in the later Active Powers where the qualification is omitted. Gallie points out that Reid’s earlier fallibilist awareness “suggests that at this point in the Active Powers [where the emphasis is on instinctiveness] Reid feels the force of the point that an instinctive belief may well serve its purpose and yet be in fact false” (Gallie 1989: 241). It is beyond question, then, that Reid is well aware that utility and truth, as properties of beliefs, do not always go together. And if he does not insist on the distinction, this, we have suggested, may be because his religious temperament inclines him not to. What of the second Reidian commitment that, so we are arguing, gives him a principled way to countenance divine paternalistic deception, namely a commitment to the inscrutability of God’s purposes – what evidence can we marshal for this? First, we can adduce the general tenor of Reid’s reiterated complaints against the scientific method of “conjecture” (or “hypothesis” in its perjorative sense). Because “the works of Nature are contrived and executed by a wisdom and power infinitely superior to that of a man”, Reid says that when men attempt, by the force of genius, to discover the causes of the phaenomena of Nature, they have only the chance of going wrong more ingeniously. Their conjectures … have no chance to hit the truth. They are like the conjectures of a child how a ship of war is built, and how it is managed at sea. [472a] It may be objected that this complaint is against the Insight Ideal and not against the moral branch of the Image of God doctrine which presently concerns us. If so, we can offer a passage from the same page, in which Reid recommends the alternative “slow and patient method of induction” in more relevantly moral terms: It humbles the pride of man, and puts him constantly in mind that his most ingenious conjectures with regard to the works of God are pitiful and childish. There is no room here for the favourite talent of invention. In the humble method of information, from the great volume of Nature we must receive all our knowledge of Nature. Whatever is beyond a just interpretation of that volume is the work of man; and the work of God ought not to be contaminated by any mixture with it. [472b] This may, of course, be simply a more rhetorical reworking of the message of the previous passage. But I think that his talk of humbling, pity and contamination shows that Reid means that there is more wrong with “conjecture” than just

Reid’s theism reconsidered 181 lese-majesty towards a heavenly king who is our infinite intellectual superior. There is impiety in it too,11 and impiety is a specifically moral offence. If it is objected that we still haven’t extracted the thesis of God’s moral inscrutability from Reid’s texts, this quotation should put the matter beyond doubt: It would be great folly and presumption in us to pretend to know all the ways in which the government of the Supreme Being is carried on, and his purposes accomplished … for … his ways are above our ways. [616a] Here, as it happens, the letter of Reid’s statement actually denies the relevant part of the Image of God doctrine as paraphrased by Craig (“God’s ways are our ways”), but this is just coincidence. Reid’s meaning, surely, is – as indeed he says – that we can’t “pretend to know all” his ways, moral and other, such as we should have to know in order to be assured that ‘God is no (benevolent) deceiver’. Consistently with this (or even, perhaps, implicated by it) we can know some of his ways, moral and other. Morally speaking, we can know, for example, “that the Judge of all the earth will do what is right” [616a]. (This much is certain from Reid’s conviction, quoted earlier, that man’s “moral excellence . . . is a faint but true copy of … [God’s] … moral excellence”.) But as to how God will go about doing what is right – that, in principle, is anybody’s guess. Because “he who made man may have ways of governing his determinations … of which we have no conception”, and because these unknown ways may include paternalistic deception, we might, for all we know, be more or less deceived for our own good by the God who loves us. Such, at least, is a position open to Reid in principle. That it is also a correct interpretation of his epistemological practice (pulpit-pronouncements notwithstanding) is, I think, supported by its consonance with this statement and the many like it: Our intellectual powers are wisely fitted by the Author of our nature for the discovery of truth, as far as suits our present state. [468b, emphasis added] Reid’s settled view is that our ability to discover truth is relativized to “our present state”. In our present state we lack the God’s-eye perspective from which alone we could tell the extent to which this ability of ours gives us a lien on absolute or unrelativized truth. The epistemological upshot is that our belief that a benevolent God has designed our faculties gives us no assurance that those faculties, even when functioning properly, are, in an absolute sense, veridical. To summarize once more: we said earlier that if we could show that Reid’s theism was, in Plantinga’s terms, “bare” (a bare theist being one who believes in a benevolent god, but does not add that man is made in his image), we could thereby show that Reid could avoid Plantinga’s ‘strong’ conclusion that

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reliabilism in a strict sense requires theism as its necessary condition. He could do this comprehensively, we said, by denying not only the first premise on which Plantinga’s strong conclusion rests (that naturalistic reliabilism is selfdefeating) but also the second premise, namely that theism is free of corresponding doubts. The picture that has emerged is slightly more complicated. Reid rejects some parts of the Image of God doctrine but accepts others, so his theism turns out to be a hybrid of “traditional” and “bare”. This complication, however, has not spoiled the case we are making, because it has become clear that the really important part of the Image of God doctrine – that part on which any theist’s assertion of premise (ii) depends – is the belief that ‘God is no deceiver’. And this latter, we have seen, is a belief which, though it might be attractive to Dr Reid in the pulpit, is not one on which Professor Reid in his study can rely. His acknowledgement of the distinction between utility and truth among beliefs, and his commitment to the inscrutability of God’s moral ways, mean that in principle he may have doubts about the reliability of the faculties parallel to those of a non-theist. So we can reiterate our conclusion thus far: it is not the case that Reid’s theism is bolstering his philosophy in any epistemologically vital sense – his reliabilism does not require a supernatural garden for its very survival. In the light of this interim conclusion, what are we to say of the many hundreds of references to God in Reid’s works? Are they, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, wheels not connected to the machinery? James Somerville, of whose opinion we have already taken a distant sighting, in effect says ‘yes’. Plantinga (whose ‘official’ position – that reliabilism needs theism only for its “best flourishing” – our discussion above has done nothing to shake) in effect says ‘no’. Our final conclusion (to anticipate for a moment) will be an ambivalent ‘yes and no’ – but our reasons for saying ‘yes’ will be different from Somerville’s; and, likewise, our reasons for saying ‘no’ will not be the same as Plantinga’s. Somerville’s contention that Reid’s mentionings of God are epistemologically irrelevant is backed by an account, developed at length and persuasively, of the large extent to which, in the course of the debates of Reid’s period, the belief that men were the creatures of a benevolent god “might be taken to be common ground among an author’s readers”. Failure to appreciate this, says Somerville, is what underlies the criticisms of Daniels, Popkin and others, that “Reid, like Descartes, has recourse to God at philosophically embarrassing moments”: Such criticism only betrays the gulf of understanding there is between eighteenth-century authors, on the one hand, and … twentieth-century secularism, on the other. (Somerville 1995: 346) Somerville points out that Reid sometimes says that our faculties are “the gift of Heaven”, sometimes “the gift of Nature”, and sometimes “the gift of nature”. The interchangeability of these terms in Reid’s hands should make us realize, says Somerville, that Reid’s talk of God having designed our faculties is not intended

Reid’s theism reconsidered 183 as any kind of argument for their reliability, but rather amounts “to no more than pious reminders for the faithful” (Somerville 1995: 347, 356). Somerville makes a powerful case for the complete detachability in principle of Reid’s theism from his epistemology. But we may well feel that his case is somewhat overstated. Of the important “no remedy” passage, for example, he says this: If we are deceived in our belief, Reid retorts with a shrug of the shoulders, then ‘we are deceived by Him that made us, and there is no remedy’. That is, deception which is totally and in principle invincible is not just of no practical consequence, it is also barely intelligible. … Reid has not ruled out … the very possibility of divine deception … [but he] … is arguing only that any God-caused deception which might be supposed to occur would be quite undetectable by us, and hinting that in that case it would have no practical effect, and consequently have no theoretical meaning. The virtual unintelligibility of the notion of invincible deception, whether divinely or diabolically produced, absolves Reid of suspicion of actually harbouring any heretical thoughts of despairing of God’s goodness. (Somerville 1995: 357) We may well think that something is being added to Reid’s meaning here, and something left out. What is being added is the “virtual unintelligibility” of invincible deception – this, surely, is more than Reid even hints at, here or anywhere else. And what is being left out, in describing his statement as a mere “shrug of the shoulders,” is the specifically religious aspect of Reid’s recoil from the (well-understood) possibility that this invincible deception might be divinely produced. For his opposition to scepticism, and to the ideal theory, is religious as well as philosophical: “absolute scepticism is” as much “destructive of the faith of a Christian” as “of the science of a philosopher” [95b]. As he tells the Inquiry’s dedicatee: I thought it unreasonable, my Lord, upon the authority of Philosophers, to admit a hypothesis which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy, all religion, and virtue, and all common sense. [96a] Somerville could properly reply that this is simply a point about Reid’s motivation: the fact that the truth of scepticism would have adverse consequences for religion doesn’t mean that an anti-sceptical philosophy has to depend on religion in any essential way. This would be correct. Yet we may not be convinced, after noting the extent of interpenetration between Reid’s philosophical and his religious concerns, that all the references to God in the positive part of his project are doing nothing, and can be translated out without loss. May they not, while being unessential to the survival of common sense philosophy, at least be contributing to its “best flourishing”? Plantinga, to whose ‘official’ position at last we turn, says ‘yes’ to this.

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Plantinga’s argument for this position (which in fact appears as the “Preliminary Argument against Naturalism”) is structurally different from his “Main Argument” which we discussed earlier. There, reliabilism (R) was said to present a defeater for itself on naturalism (N&E&C) but not on theism (T). Here, reliabilism is held fixed: given R, it is argued, the probability of T is “considerably greater” than the probability of N. The two arguments in effect work conversely to each other. Where before, one’s belief in N&E&C was supposed to overturn one’s belief in R (so that if one were a reliabilist one apparently had to be a theist), now, one’s belief in R is supposed to give one a reason to think N&E&C less likely than T (so that theism now merely provides a better garden than naturalism, for reliabilism’s flourishing). Plantinga’s argument begins, as did the previous one, with a low estimate of P(R/N&E&C). We might initially be inclined to join Quine and others in assessing this probability as relatively high. But Plantinga points out that this optimism was not wholeheartedly shared by the inventor of E, and insists that it is in any case not supported by the details of evolutionary theory. The most that natural selection guarantees (as we saw him saying before) is a certain kind of adaptive behaviour – success in Patricia Churchland’s “four Fs”. And since no necessary connection can be made out between successful F’ing and the truth of most beliefs that may accompany it, Plantinga concludes that Darwin’s Doubt is well founded. The posture Plantinga recommends is to think it very unlikely that the statistical probability of [our] belief-producing mechanisms’ being reliable, given that they have been produced in the suggested way, is very high; and rather likely that (on N&E&C) R is less probable than its denial. (Plantinga: 228) We might well pause to query Plantinga’s pessimistic estimate of P(R/N& E&C),12 but instead let’s examine the use to which he puts it. Plantinga feeds Darwin’s Doubt into Bayes’s Theorem to generate a probability for N&E&C which compares unfavourably with the probability of T/R, where T is traditional theism, considered as the only “significant alternative” to N and one with a “comparable” prior probability (Plantinga: 228–9). In his presentation of this argument Plantinga assumes familiarity with Bayes’s Theorem; and he puts no figures on this instantiation of it. To get an intuitive feel for Bayes’s Theorem, it will be helpful to see it at work in a simpler case. Then, to make sure we are grasping Plantinga’s argument properly, we can apply some figures to his version too. Where H is a hypothesis up for test, E is the evidence, and K is the background knowledge, Bayes’s Theorem13 states that P(H/E&K) =

P(E/H&K) × P(H/K) [P(E/K)]

Reid’s theism reconsidered 185 Suppose a Ming vase goes missing at a country house. Evidence in this case is that Mary, a rather slovenly housekeeper, cannot find the vase (E). The hypothesis is that a burglary has occurred (H); and background knowledge includes awareness of the rarity of burglaries, but also the knowledge that Mary is always losing things (K). What degrees of probability should we assign here, to the righthand side of the ‘equals’ sign? Clearly, if a burglar has made off with the vase, Mary will be unable to find it, so P(E/H&K) must be 1.0. And, since burglaries are mercifully rare, P(H/K) will be low, say 0.1. But since we know that Mary often fails to see things even when they are under her nose, P(E/K) will be considerably higher, say 0.4. Feeding these values into Bayes’s Theorem, we get a relatively low probability on the left: 0.25 =

1.0 × 0.1 0.4

and this seems intuitively correct; Mary’s report – ‘vase missing’ – raises the probability of H only slightly because there are many other ways of explaining it (perhaps Mary herself moved the vase to another room only yesterday). Contrast this with a similar case in which there is ‘harder’ evidence for H – perhaps footprints are found in the flowerbed. As before, P(H/K) is low, though this time K can include the knowledge that burglars usually leave traces behind them. For this reason, P(E/H&K) is still very high, though it has dropped a bit (perhaps we are dealing with a particularly tidy burglar; or, conceivably, a ‘Father Christmas’ specialist). P(E/K), on the other hand, has gone down a lot, almost to the level of P(H/K) though not quite (the footprints could have been left by the gardener). We could estimate the probabilities like this: 0.63 =

0.95 × 0.1 0.15

to generate a much higher probability than before on the left. Again this result seems intuitively right, both in itself and as compared with the first case. It ought indeed to be that the less explicable the evidence otherwise is, the more it probabilifies the hypothesis; and Bayes’s Theorem yields just this result. Now, how does Plantinga suppose it to operate in his “preliminary argument against naturalism”? He sets the argument out in a way equivalent to this:14 P(N&E&C/R) =

P(R/N&E&C) × P(N&E&C) P/(R)

and invites us to agree for the moment both (i) (“as most of us do”) that in fact our cognitive faculties are mainly reliable, and (ii) that Darwin’s Doubt is well founded. (As mentioned above, he also assumes we’ll take P(N&E&C) and P(T) to be “comparable”.) Plantinga doesn’t suggest definite values for these probabilities, but let’s put some in:

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Reid’s theism reconsidered Plant. (1) 0.22 = 0.4 × 0.5 0.9

This gives a low degree of probability for N&E&C on R, which is what Plantinga wants: “your belief [in R] gives you a reason for rejecting naturalism and accepting its denial” (Plantinga: 228). Next, Plantinga says that the same argument will not hold for traditional theism because P(R/T) will be much higher than 0.5 since, on that view (again as before), man has been made in God’s image. If we estimate P(R/T) at 0.9 and plug that into the schema Plant. (2) 0.5 = 0.9 × 0.5 0.9 we get a value for P(T/R) which, at 0.5, is “considerably greater than P(N/R)”, in accordance with Plantinga’s aim (Plantinga: 229). Now for some objections. First: Plantinga treats R as ‘evidence’ – “you do think R is true; you therefore have evidence against N” (Plantinga: 228). But surely we can’t treat R as evidence at all. Knowledge or belief with respect to R is not something we come to possess (there’s a disanalogy with ‘footprints’ here). R (at least with respect to reason), rather, is a presupposition in any argument, Bayesian or otherwise, for N and for T alike. Second, even if we waive the first objection, can we sensibly go about assigning prior probabilities to N&E&C and to T, even rough ones? And, third, even if we can do this, is it not highly unreasonable to agree with Plantinga that those two prior probabilities are “comparable” (by which he must mean ‘more or less the same’)? It does not take much tinkering with the prior probabilities we entered in Plant. (1) and Plant. (2) above to reverse Plantinga’s result. Suppose we now estimate P(N&E&C) and P(T) at 0.7 and 0.3 respectively (still, perhaps, just ‘comparable’). We then get Plant. (1′) 0.31 = 0.4 × 0.7 0.9 and Plant. (2′) 0.3 =

0.9 × 0.3 0.9

giving P(N&E&C) a slight edge. And, it might fairly be said, these estimates of prior probability are still much too generous in favour of the theist. If background knowledge counts for anything (and it was background knowledge, after all, that made Bayes’s Theorem work in the burglary case), we can borrow a remark made by J.L. Mackie in response to a similar argument for the existence of God due to Richard Swinburne:

Reid’s theism reconsidered 187 the very notion of a non-embodied spirit, let alone an infinite one, is intrinsically improbable in relation to our background knowledge, in that our experience reveals nothing of the sort. (Mackie 1982: 100) If we could show Plantinga’s argument, and these objections to it, to Reid, what might he say? Like many theists, he would probably counter Mackie’s remark by asserting that his experience does reveal evidence of God’s activity in the world. But, fortunately, the argument from religious experience is a hare we don’t have to chase. For Reid would surely be unsympathetic to the use of his reliabilism – his ‘R’ – in this Bayesian apparatus in the first place. His R, at least with respect to the faculties of reasoning and judging, is “something we must take for granted in all our inquiries”, and so is not the sort of proposition that can serve as an input into Bayes’s Theorem. Nor is it the specifically Bayesian character of the argument that Reid would be unhappy about. If Plantinga were to present a more straightforward argument to show both that P(R/N&E&C) is less than P(R), and that P(R) is less than P(R/T),15 then Reid would complain about that argument too, for a similar reason. He would see the force (though he’d balk at the tone) of the following imagined naturalist’s objection to it: OK – but we just don’t know what P(R/N&E&C) is. It may be lower than P(R/some tellable fairy-story), but that fact needn’t unsettle us. We knew already that N&E can’t make R more likely because N&E, as scientific theories, require R to be true for their successful formulation. As Reid puts it: “Every kind of reasoning for the veracity of our faculties, amounts to no more than taking their own testimony for their veracity” [447b]. It is precisely because R with respect to the faculties of reasoning and judging cannot be justified without circularity that Reid includes their bespoke first principle – “that the natural faculties by which we distinguish truth from error are not fallacious” – in his list of foundational beliefs which we are entitled to hold on no evidence whatever. Let us review: Reid’s reliabilism can survive in a naturalistic garden, and perhaps even flourish in it – to this extent we agree with Somerville. But we don’t agree that Reid’s references to God are entirely idle. We think they are ‘helping’ the reliabilism in some as yet unspecified way – which is tantamount to saying with Plantinga that the reliabilism “flourishes best in a garden of supernaturalistic metaphysics”. But Plantinga backs up this claim with an argument (which in any case fails16) that is quite un-Reidian. So the hunt is still on for a way of cashing out Plantinga’s garden metaphor which makes adequate sense of the role played by God in Reid’s philosophy. We shall have one last shot. It is clear that in practice Reid’s reliabilism is set in a theistic garden. It is also clear that it doesn’t have to be. The principles of common sense don’t require theistic justification, or indeed justification of any kind. If they did, then the

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reliabilism of which they form the centrepiece would not be reliabilism, but some other thing. Moreover, God couldn’t provide the justification in any case, as the history of philosophy has amply shown. In what way, then, are Reid’s religious wheels connected to his reliabilist machinery? Christopher Hookway, it seems to me, gets things exactly right here: The reliability of our faculties is self-evident, and stands in no need of justification. However it is natural to seek a systematic understanding of ourselves and our capacities; the benevolence of God explains our possession of reliable faculties although it has no role in justifying our belief that they are reliable. This may add to the justification which these beliefs already possess but it has no role in warranting our initial acceptance of them. (Hookway: 116, emphasis original) Reid’s theism gives him an explanation for the reliability of the faculties, in terms of God’s benevolence, which in a naturalistic garden he would lack. Although not necessary in principle, in practice this explanation makes his Truth Claim for first principles more comfortably assertible. But how can it do so, given Reid’s belief in God’s inscrutability which we were at such pains to emphasize earlier? This is not an easy question. We can only try to imagine how Reid would answer it, were he to walk into a present-day seminar room (which, as we remarked on page 1 of this book, as a philosopher he might usefully do): The first principles [so he might begin] are implanted in us by God or nature – call it what you like – as children, to guide us before we are old enough to reason. If you put it to me that the innateness of beliefs doesn’t entail their truth, of course I’d have to agree. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to think that innate beliefs, on the whole, are true, because my Christian faith, in telling me that God’s ways are our ways, gives me an analogical explanation for that truth which I find satisfying. (Yes, I know I often warn against the use of analogies, but I also say they can be useful.17) As human parents look after their children, so God the Father looks after us. Just here is where we should interrupt Reid to press the ‘inscrutability of God’ objection: how do you know God isn’t deceiving us (perhaps on a global scale) for our own good? That would be a triggering of your epicycle – a “cause of the error as general as the error is” – if ever there was one! I don’t know, and I can’t know [Reid might resume]: If we are deceived in it, we are deceived by him that made us, and there is no remedy. But weigh this: human paternalistic deception is most exceptional. (Compare my remarks on the rarity of lying in general.18) The overwhelming majority of the statements we make to our children are true – even on those rare occasions when we are deceiving them for their own good (Father Christmas may not really be coming down the chimney tonight; but we have got a chimney – and there will be

Reid’s theism reconsidered 189 presents on the hearth in the morning). So I don’t accept the defeater. Even though, by Newton’s Rule, the defeater would be adequate (which in this case is to say ‘general enough’) to account for the error, the likelihood of its being real, on the analogy, is too remote to disturb me. In any event, “we are sure that the Judge of the earth will do what is right”. If, as you correctly point out, we cannot also be sure that what he will do is true, I don’t really mind. As the learned and ingenious Des Cartes put it in his Second Replies (in an uncharacteristic passage which I’ve often wished I’d written myself ): “What is it to us that someone may make out that the perception whose truth we are so firmly convinced of may appear false to God or an angel, so that it is absolutely speaking false. Why should this ‘absolute falsity’ bother us, since we neither believe in it, nor have even the smallest suspicion of it? For the supposition which we are making here is of a conviction so firm that it is quite incapable of being destroyed; and such a conviction is clearly the same as the most perfect certainty.” (CSM II: 103)

Notes 1 For Reid, the only real cause is “active power”: “nothing can be an efficient cause, in the proper sense, but an intelligent being. … Matter cannot be the cause of anything; it can only be an instrument in the hands of a real cause” [65b–6a]. Yet Reid does not (as we earlier saw him doing in the case of popular secondary quality judgements) ascribe the implausible ‘Ramsey sentence’ construction to popular causal beliefs: “The vulgar, in their notion even of the physical cause of a phaenomenon, include some conception of efficiency” [76a]. For example: “If a magnet be brought near to a mariner’s compass, the needle, which was before at rest, immediately begins to move. … If an unlearned sailor is asked the cause of this motion of the needle, he is at no loss for an answer. He tells you it is the magnet” [526b]. Nevertheless the sailor’s mistake is useful to him: “What he takes for the cause answers his purpose” [607a]. 2 See pages 67 and 70 above. 3 Compare Locke’s objection to Malebranche and the representative theory of perception, discussed above in Chapter 7. 4 To this list we might add Richard Watson’s two “likeness principles”, the causal and the epistemological (Watson: 33–4 and passim). 5 See Wood (1998) for details of Reid’s mathematical interests and accomplishments. 6 See Ferreira (1986): ch. 4 for an interesting discussion of Reid’s related claims that demonstrative conclusions may sometimes be reasonably doubted, and conversely, that “probable” conclusions may be beyond reasonable doubt. 7 “It is difficult to give any reason for distrusting our other faculties, that will not reach consciousness itself ” [713b]. 8 For a good illustration of Craig’s point, we can go to Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! … in apprehension how like a god!” (Act II, Scene ii). 9 The two most prominent such passages (mentioned at several points in previous chapters) concern belief in the external world: “If we are deceived in it, we are deceived by him that made us, and there is no remedy” [130b]; “This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it comes from the mint of Nature … and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine” [183b].

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10 Otherwise, what we have been calling his ‘Truth Claim’ for first principles would be an unremarkable ‘Utility Claim’. 11 Compare: “every discovery we make … becomes a hymn of praise to the great Creator and Governor of the world. And a man who is possessed of the genuine spirit of philosophy will think it impiety to contaminate the divine workmanship, by mixing it with those fictions of human fancy called theories and hypotheses” [460b]. 12 This we might do by going back to Stich, one of Plantinga’s quoted authorities on the matter. Stich, arguing that the fittest system need not be the most reliable system, says “If the costs [of reliability] are very high and if there is an alternative available that does a less good, but still acceptable, job … then natural selection may favour it” (Stich: 61, emphasis added). Stich’s point is well taken – but it does not support Darwin’s Doubt. Since the job done by the less expensive, less-than-maximally-reliable system would be still acceptable, then natural selection, in favouring it, would have favoured a still reliable system. Because P(R/N&E&C) would in that case be greater than 0.5, a Reidian Truth Claim (which is not a claim for maximal reliability) could still be made out on naturalistic grounds. 13 In its simplest form Bayes’s Theorem makes mention only of hypothesis and evidence: P(h/e) = P(e/h) × P(h)/P(e). The form of the theorem given above, in which background knowledge is explicitly included, is of course equivalent to this simplest form. 14 Again, Plantinga’s form of Bayes’s Theorem is equivalent to the simplest form of the theorem given in the previous note. 15 Surprisingly, although the ingredients for such an argument are to be found in Plantinga’s text, the argument isn’t explicitly presented. 16 I should stress that this remark (and the criticism of which it is a summary) isn’t meant to apply to any new forms of his anti-naturalist argument that the redoubtable Professor Plantinga may have presented in his most recent book, Warranted Christian Belief, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, which appeared too late for consideration here. 17 “I know no author who has made a more just and a more happy use of this mode of reasoning than Bishop Butler, in his ‘Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature’. In that excellent work the author does not ground any of the truths of religion upon analogy, as their proper evidence. He only makes use of analogy to answer objections against them. When objections are made against the truths of religion, which may be made with equal strength against what we know to be true in the course of nature, such objections can have no weight” [237a]. 18 “[The principle of veracity] has a powerful operation, even in the greatest liars; for where they lie once, they speak truth a hundred times. Truth is always uppermost, and is the natural issue of the mind. … Lying, on the contrary, is doing violence to our nature; and is never practised, even by the worst men, without some temptation” [196a,b]; “There never was a society, even of savages – nay, even of robbers or pirates – in which there was not a great degree of veracity and of fidelity among themselves” [666a].

Appendix 1 Reid’s First Principles of Contingent Truths

1. First, then, I hold, as a first principle, the existence of everything of which I am conscious. 2. Another first principle, I think, is, that the thoughts of which I am conscious, are the thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person. 3. Another first principle I take to be – that those things did really happen which I distinctly remember. 4. Another first principle is, our own personal identity and continued existence, as far back as we remember anything distinctly. 5. Another first principle is, that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be. 6. Another first principle, I think, is, that we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will. 7. Another first principle is – that the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious. 8. Another first principle relating to existence, is, that there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom we converse. 9. Another first principle I take to be, that certain features of the countenance, sounds of the voice, and gestures of the body, indicate certain thoughts and dispositions of mind. 10. Another first principle appears to me to be – that there is a certain regard due to human testimony in matters of fact, and even to human authority in matters of opinion. 11. There are many events depending upon the will of man, in which there is a self-evident probability, greater or less, according to circumstances. 12. The last principle of contingent truths I mention, is, that, in the phaenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like to what has been in similar circumstances. [442b–51a]

Appendix 2 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, VI, chapter v

© University of Aberdeen Shelfmark MS 2131/1/II/7: Aberdeen University, Special Libraries and Archives; reproduced by kind permission of the Senior Curator.

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Notes The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid, (1995–), series ed. Knud Haakonssen, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, contains the following works: (1995) Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation: Papers Relating to the Life Sciences, ed. P. Wood. (1997) Thomas Reid: An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. D. Brookes. (forthcoming) The Collected Correspondence of Thomas Reid, ed. P. Wood. (forthcoming) Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. D. Brookes. The definitive Reid bibliography is now the splendidly comprehensive Thomas Reid: An Updated Bibliography, by Dr Martino Squillante of the Università degli Studi di Milano, published in two parts in Reid Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (1998), and vol. 2, no. 1 (1998).

Index

(see also the Analysis on pp. ix–xi) Alston, W. 23–4, 26, 31 n.6, 46 n.5, 63 n.15, 155, 158–60, 163 n.8 analogical reasoning 95, 97, 173, 188, 190 n.17 Aristotle 128 n.27 Arnauld, A. 21, 96–8, 104 n.18; on ‘ideas’ 114, 116–22, 126, 128 n.31 Aspelin, G. 129 n.37 Austin, J.L. 54–6, 104 n.13, 170 Ayers, M. 2, 123–4 Bacon, F. 39, 46 n.11; idola 140–2 Baumann, P. 88 n.21 Bayes’s Theorem 184–7 Beattie, J. 4, 47 n.17 Bennett, J. 1–2, 62 n.8, 129 n.36 Berkeley, G. 17, 42, 47 n.20, 90–1, 93–4, 98, 102, 125 Braithwaite, R. 158 Brown, T. 19 n.3, 52, 91 Cartesian/classical foundationalism 4, 17–18, 20–31, 38, 176 causation, Reid’s view of 59, 62 n.4, 63 n.13, 176, 189 n.1 Chappell, V. 124 Chisholm, R. 3, 37–41, 47 n.16 Chomsky, N. 62 n.9 coherentism 154–5, 163 n.3 ‘common sense’, ambiguity of 34, 46 n.7 conception, Reid’s account of 51, 62 n.2, 100–1, 104 n.15 Cook, M. 118–19, 122 Cottingham, J. 88 n.24, 106, 112, 127 n.19

Craig, E. 6 n.5, 173–7, 189 n.8 Cummins, P.D. 49–50, 56–61, 99 Dancy, J. 25 Daniels, N. 4, 66, 169–70 Darwin, C. 67, 70, 87 n.12, n.16, 167, 169, 171–2, 184, 190 n.12 Davenport, A.W. 46 n.11 defeasibility 18, 85–6, 89 n.34, 166–9, 171–2 Dennett, D. 67, 87 n.11 Descartes, R. 8, 17, 18, 20, 26–30, 57, 101, 189; the cogito 21, 26–8, 149 n.1, 175; on ‘ideas’ 106–14, 127 n.9, n.19 Ducasse, C.J. 50–1 Duggan, T. 58, 99 epistemic circularity 153–4, 155, 158–60, 163 n.8 externalism/internalism 40, 68–9, 74–5, 78–9, 83–6, 133, 149 n.2, 159, 170ff. fallibilism 16, 19 n.7, 25, 49–50, 56–61, 68, 175, 176 Ferreira, M. 11–12, 189 n.6 first principles of common sense 14, 30–1, 32–7, 45 n.2, 60–1, 71, 76–8, 150 n.4, 191; supportable by argument 130–4; illustration of 134–7; innateness of 138–40; disputes about 140–3; identification of, see marks of first principles; and Newton’s Rule 148–9; confirmation of, see track record arguments

202

Index

foundationalism, Reid’s alternative 18, 29–31, 49–50, 56–61, 70 Frankfurt, H. 74, 88 n.24 Galileo 173 Gallie, R. 4, 46 n.14, 87 n.5, 129 n.39, 180 God, his guarantee 65, 67, 68, 70, 118, 169–70, 177–8, 181; his inscrutability 179, 181, 188–9; (see also theism) Grave, S. 4, 66, 104 n.15, 106, 121 Grice, H.P. 62 n.6 Haakonssen, K. 4, 6 n.6 Hall, R. 129 n.37 Hamilton, Sir W. 6 n.6, 65, 87 n.3, n.4, 104 n.11, 105, 109, 126 n.6, 128 n.31 Hookway, C. 188 Hume, D. 3, 4, 6 n.3, 8–14, 17, 38, 47 n.21, 59, 65, 71, 86, 90–1, 102, 157–8; and methodism 38, 43; his ‘shrinking table’ argument 98–100 hypotheses, Reid’s view of 39, 42–3, 180 “ideal theory”, the 4, 5, 9, 18, 20, Chs 6 and 7 passim ‘ideas’ 4, 17–18, 20, 86, 92–103, 106–29 Image of God doctrine 173–82 inductive method, Reid’s use of 35–7, 39–41, 46 n.14, 175–6 Innateness Claim 4, 37, 46 n.14, 64–5, 66–7, 72, 76, 82–5, 132, 134, 138–49 Johnson, S. 93 Kant, I. 4, 6 n.8, n.9, 34, 93, 103 n.3 Kenny, A. 127 n.9, n.15 Laudan, L. 46 n.11 Lehrer, K. xiii, 3, 4, 5, 22, 35, 45 n.1, 46 n.3, 47 n.16, n.22, 49, 65, 66, 74–82, 87 n.2, n.10, 104 n.17, 150 n.8, 163 n.3, 179 Locke, J. 3, 17, 31 n.1, 68, 87 n.13, 90, 92, 94, 95, 101, 102, 118; on ‘ideas’ 122–5 McCracken, C. 116 Mackie, J.L. 2, 129 n.38, 186–7 McRae, R. 109 Madden, E. 47 n.20, 52, 62 n.5 Malebranche, N. 21, 31 n.1, 91, on ‘ideas’ 114–20, 125 Manns, J. 126 n.8

Marcil-Lacoste, L. 4, 35–6, 40, 46 n.11, n.12, 66, 73, 104 n.7, 147–8 marks of first principles 29, 37, 40–1, 143–7, 150 n.11 Mathews, H. 124 metaprinciple 5, 65, 74–82, 88 n.26, n.30, 149 n.3, 192 methodism 37–43, 47 n.16, n.23, 48 n.24 Moore, G.E. 22, 42, 47 n.19, 88 n.32 Nadler, S. 18, 91, 96, 103 n.2, 106, 109–12, 119, 120 Nathanson, S. 123 natural signs 46 n.9, 52–3, 62 n.5 Newton, I. 35–6, 39, 46 n.11, 96, 147–8 “no remedy” passage 16, 74, 183, 188 Norton, D.F. 66, 87 n.8, 169–70 O’Connor, D. 123 particularism 4, 37–45, 47 n.16 paternalistic deception 178–9, 181, 188–9 perception, Reid’s theory of 50–6; allegedly inconsistent 56–61 Plantinga, A. 69–71, 83, 87 n.14, n.15, 150 n.10, 159, 160, 167–8, 170, 171–2, 177, 181–2, 183–4, 185–7, 190 n.16 Popkin, R. 66, 169–70 pragmatism 73–4, 88 n.21 Priestley, J. 106 Putnam, H. 3 Pyle, A. xiii, 48 n.24, 88 n.31, 128 n.30 Pyrrho 7–8, 9–10 Quine, W. 67, 87 n.11 Ramsey sentences 44, 150 n.13 Rawls, J. 43 Redekop, B. 6 n.4 reflective equilibrium 14, 45, 48 n.24, 161–3 Reichenbach, H. 73–4 Reid, Thomas, his life 2–3, 5 n.1 reliabilism 5, 18, 35, 61, 63 n.15, 82–6, 133–4, 156, 165–9, 182, 187–8 Russell, B. 1, 22, 32 Ryle, G. 101, 123 Salmon, W. 73–4 sceptical hypocrisy 7–12 scepticism, antecedent 8; consequent 9; mitigated 13; semi- 17; total 14–17, 19 n.7, 46 n.8

Index Schulthess, D. 163 n.3, n.4 Scott, D. 120 Scottish School of Common Sense 2, 3, 4 secondary qualities 43–5, 47 n.21, n.22, 94, 103 n.5 Sextus Empiricus 10 Sleigh, R. 104 n.15 Somerville, J. 36, 46 n.2, 87 n.1, n.5, 170, 182–3, 187 Squillante, M. xiv, 6 n.6, 199 Steup, M. 41–2, 43, 45 Stich, S. 87 n.11, 190 n.12 Stillingfleet, E. 92, 102 superstition 93, 150 n.13, 162 Sutton, T. 34, 46 n.6, n.7 Tapper, A. xiii testimony 53, 156–7, 190 n.18 theism, Reid’s 5, 65–74, 160–1, Ch. 10 passim; (see also God) track record arguments, positive 5, 152–61; negative 162–3

203

Truth Claim 4, 5, 37, 46 n.14, 64–5, 67, 68, 72–3, 76, 82–6, 132, 134, 138, 140, 143, 149, Ch. 9 passim, 166, 167, 168–9, 170, 171, 172, 188, 190 n.10 Ueberweg, F. 66, 87 n.7 Van Cleve, J. xiii, 35, 46 n.4, n.10, 163 n.9 Vernier, P. 31 n.3 Watson, R. 104 n.8, 117, 121, 128 n.28 Webb, T. 106 Williams, B. 2, 25–6, 127 n.16 Wittgenstein, L. 31 n.6 Wolterstorff, N. 4, 6 n.7, 31 n.2, 62 n.2, 104 n.7, n.15 Wood, P. 6 n.1, 47 n.21, 189 n.5 Woolhouse, R. 129 n.34 Woozley, A. 103 n.3, 124–5 Yolton, J. 5, 91, 94, 103 n.2, 106, 109–10, 125, 126 n.8