Scottish Common Sense School

The claim

Certain beliefs are first principles: not inferred, not needing support, and constitutive of reasoning rather than products of it. Doubting them is not rigour but a failure to notice what argument rests on.

What it held

Reid's target is what he calls the way of ideas — the assumption, shared by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, that what the mind directly perceives is an idea rather than a thing. Grant that, and the external world becomes an inference from ideas, and Hume shows the inference cannot be made.

Reid's response is not to patch the inference but to reject the premise. We perceive things, not representations of things. Sensation is a sign that prompts perception rather than an object that stands in for one, and the whole sceptical problem is generated by a theory nobody had reason to accept.

His positive account is a list of first principles: that the objects of perception exist, that other people have minds, that memory is generally reliable, that nature is uniform. None can be proved without circularity, all are presupposed by any proof, and Reid argues that trusting them is not a leap but the condition of having a position at all.

He is scrupulous about Hume, whom he corresponded with respectfully and whose argument he thought valid and whose premises he thought false.

How it argued

Argument from the absurdity of the conclusion back to the premises, plus careful description of what perception is actually like.

What it was arguing against

The theory of ideas in all its forms, and Hume's scepticism as its inevitable outcome.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether appealing to common sense is an argument or a refusal to argue. Whether Reid's first principles can be enumerated without arbitrariness.

Common misconceptions

That it is anti-intellectual. Reid was a mathematician who read Newton closely, and his critique of the theory of ideas is technical and was taken seriously by Kant.

How it began

Reid read Hume's Treatise, was convinced by the reasoning, could not accept the conclusion, and spent years locating the assumption that produced it.

What became of it

Living, in the form of Moore's defence of common sense and Plantinga's reformed epistemology, which cites Reid directly.

Lasting influence

American college philosophy for a century — it was the standard curriculum. Moore's proof of an external world. Contemporary externalist and foundationalist epistemology.

Why it still matters

Reid's account of first principles is the ancestor of contemporary views on which some beliefs are properly basic, and it is a live position.

Put another way

A man told by a valid argument that the floor is not there, who declines to fall through it.

Where to start

The Inquiry, chapter one. Reid writes plainly and the argument is not hidden.

The surprising bit

Reid sent his manuscript to Hume before publication, through a mutual acquaintance, and Hume read it and replied with detailed criticism rather than annoyance.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

British Empiricism

Opposed by

British Empiricism

Influenced

Cambridge Analysis, Classical Pragmatism

The verdict

The most sensible response to scepticism, and the one most easily mistaken for not answering it.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy