Reid's Perception and Idea-Talk

First off, here's what was for me a modern-day Ð'- and probably wrong-headed Ð'- way in to his Inquiry:

We want an account of how we successfully perceive and interact with the world in which any questions which would be ultimately unanswerable anyway could be acknowledged up front and integrated in some sense into the overall theoretical structure, rather than as culmination or paradoxical breaking-down of philosophising.

1 Right way, wrong turn: Here then are some regulative "controls" (or "just limits") Reid seems to want on the sort of accounts (scientific or strictly philosophical) we produce concerning human understanding of the world:

1) (important) Careful observation of, and "clear and distinct" reflection on, experimental input gathered from our experience. This allows us to more rigorously and accurately form general laws ("just deduction").

2) (all-important) Awareness that any philosophical linchpin has "no root but in" and "grows out of" (13) Common Sense. This hard-wires "original principles" in us, both fixing what basic beliefs arise and locking them in: Philosophers must "make virtue of necessity" (78), plus Common Sense proves a good guide.

3) ( especially important for philosophising): Close but discerning attention to our language use, to avoid confusing revision of common language (it generally reflects Common Sense, after all).

1.1 Reid thinks scientific knowledge/practice/achievement is grounded in (1) and (2) (articulated or otherwise). But philosophers Ð'- even when trading in scientific terms like "experimenting" Ð'- operate with an incomplete linchpin-set:

Ð'* They correctly focused on the contents of experience, but continued the age-old construal of them as impressions or ideas that in some way resemble the world causing them (like "wax seals" (269).

Ð'* When they quite admirably applied "clear and distinct" thinking on the theory of ideas, the seals melt: The account proves not only to lack evidential basis but to be radically inadequate as an explanation.

Ð'* Once philosophers get bogged down, their machinery doesn't include the common-sensical "Restart on account of absurdity!" button Ð'- which should be the basis of philosophising anyway.

2. Sensations and Suggestions: Reid's account, which aims to surgically erase obstacles encountered by idea-talk, begins with our registering a sensation: A smell, sound etc that is pure "what it is like to be it". It has "no existence but when perceived" (45).

2.1 It is a fact about the way we are that sensations give rise to, or "suggest", "notions" about that domain, external to ourselves, responsible for the sensations.

Ð'* The notion can be fundamental (eg extension, objects, a self): Bits of scaffolding needed just for us to get at the world.

Ð'* Or it might be about that "power, quality or virtue, independently existing of our mind, producing the sensation by its constitiution of nature" (45). Or primary and secondary qualities, say.

2.2 The input of different sense organs might pose specific problems in theoretical integration, but one common thread is that there is absolutely no reason to hold that sensations resemble the bits of the world indicated.

In Reid's words, "a sensation of touch suggests hardness though it has neither similitude or hardness, or any necessary connection with it (65): To take it further, there's no reason why the vibration of body might not have given the sensation of smelling or effluvia affected hearing (62).

What's important is that there be some sensation to introduce the relevant notion so it can be brought into conceptual play for us. It's a "natural kind of magic" (67).

2.3 Strike at idea-talk: The primary representative role ideas were supposed to fulfil Ð'- and which they could not do Ð'- has been pensioned off as an unnecessary epistemological bridge. We have been directly sponsored, or introduced, to the world .

3 Belief in the package deal: Just a important is how we take up sensations & the notions suggested: Reid speaks of "natural and original judgments", or "judgements of nature": That is, we necessarily believe in their existence:

"(E)very operation of the senses, in its very nature, implies judgement or belief, as well as simple apprehension... When I perceive a tree before me, my faculty of seeing gives me not only a notion or simple apprehension of the tree, but a belief of its existence, and of its figure, distance and magnitude... it is included in the very nature of the perception" (Oops).

3.1 Of coure, we start off with a small set of foundational, original perceptions; the rest are "acquired perceptions" (210) that are the fruit of experience and are "introduced" by the original perceptions.

3.2 Is this committing to an inelegant amount of machinery? Elsewhere, Reid makes a point against anyone always seeking ultimate economy of explanation, perhaps wielding an unacknowledged Occam's Razor . Newton himself hoped to claim that "all the phenomena of the material world depended upon attracting and repelling forces in the particles of matter" (262). But the world refused to fit his strictures. The question: Can we get by with less?

3.3 Maybe with that in mind, we can't allow that it is the sensation-belief that guarantees or is responsible for world-beliefs or perceptions, in some "tribunal of experience" sense. That's reduction to sense-data-talk, but sensations only "suggest" or "introduce".

3.4 Strike at idea-talk: With this account of belief, we can make redundant Humean tinkering about belief and imagination, the pondering over "vivacity" and all the rest of it. Thinking and imagining, to Reid, is a taking apart of ("resolving and analysing" (27)) what is always given as a package deal: perception/sensation and belief, then playing around with the "bare components" and "viewing its object naked" (27).

4 Building the world/ talking about it: Reid doesn't think the mind undergoes a convenient and passive sensation-bath that Ð''drips in' the necessary scaffolding or notions, which then make space and account