Thomas reid

Question 1

How does Thomas Reid begin the first chapter of ‘an inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense’

Answer 1

By surveying the sad state of philosophy of mind. There are no principles of the mind that have been proved in the way that astronomy or optics has proven theories or laws of nature.

Question 2

What does he say about the cogito ergo sum

Answer 2

That the premise is no more certain than the conclusion but that this is not a argument for scepticism, since no one can seriously doubt the conclusion in the first place!

Question 3

Does reid think philosophy and common sense are opposed?

Answer 3

He thinks they ought not to be, and that some of the problems that permeate philosophy is its leaving behind of common sense, reid thinks philosophy would do much better if it re-joined genuine reason (common sense).

Question 4

What does Reid think is the hierarchy between philosophy and common sense?

Answer 4

He thinks that common sense does not depend on philosophical reasoning, but that it is the foundation from which philosophy springs. If one attempts, through philosophy, to demolish all of our common sense beliefs then philosophy goes down with it. (I take this to mean, trust in the demonstrations and philosophical process requires belief in many of the common sense notions that are being ‘refuted’)

Question 5

Where does Reid think sensations exist?

Answer 5

Only in sentient things.

Question 6

When I remember a sensation I had in the past, what is the object of my thought and what is the alternative possibility that Reid denies?

Answer 6

The sensation itself

A present idea of a past sensation

Question 7

List Reid’s ‘original principles of beleif’

Answer 7

memory

sensation

belief in one’s own existance

inductive principle

Question 8

What is Reid’s idea of ‘original principle of belief’.

Answer 8

Those ‘original principles of belief’ or ‘first principles’ are the things on which everything else depends, and the justification for believing them depends on nothing else. They fall, not within the principle of reason, but of common sense.

Question 9

What is simple apprehension?

Answer 9

The bare conception of a thing without any belief in it

Question 10

What relationship between imagination, sensation and memory does Reid think is absurd?

Answer 10

That they are all of the same kind but difference in degree e.g., a belief is a very lively idea, an imagination less so.

Question 11

What does it mean, according to Reid, for something to be a principle of common sense?

Answer 11

Principles of common sense are those things we cannot help but believe by our constitution and that we could not properly live without but cannot provide a reason for.

Question 12

Why does reid think the existence of a artificial language requires the original exitance of a natural language?

Answer 12

Because artificial signs must be agreed upon, but we could not agree on anything in the total absence of signs, so a natural language must have come first.

Question 12

What, according to Reid, is the first, second and third classes of natural sings, what is the significance of each

Answer 12

First: the connection between the sign and the things signified laid down by nature but is unearthed by experience.
Second: The connection between the sign and the thing signified is laid down by nature and discovered by a natural principle.
Third: When a sign signifies something of which we have no conception or experience of e.g., hardness and extension,
Significance: underpinning of philosophy; underpinning of the arts; underpinning of common sense

Question 13

What is Reid’s inductive principle?

Answer 13

The continuance of connections that arise in experience

Question 14

What does Reid think cause and effect are equivalent too?

Answer 14

Signs and the thing signified. Reid does not think that we perceive proper causation (similar to Hume)

Question 15

What are the two ways that reid thinks men come to know about, and form opinions of, the mind?

Answer 15

The way of reflection
The way of analogy

Question 16

What is the way of reflection, according to reid.

Answer 16

The way in which men come to form opinions about the mind by attending to the actual operations of the mind. Reid thinks that this is the only way to form accurate notions of the operations of the mind.

Question 17

What is the way of analogy, according to reid?

Answer 17

The way in which most men come to form opinions about the mind, by viewing it as analogous to something less complicated i.e., looking at the powers of the mind through an analogy of the senses. This is the way of figuring out the mind that leads to the most error.

Question 18

Why does the way of analogy lead to error according to Reid?

Answer 18

Because thinking, doubting actions of the mind e.t.c, are fundamentally distinct to qualities of extended objects like figure and extension.

Question 19

What book did Berkley publish in 1709?

Answer 19

Treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge

Question 20

For Reid, what are some unfortunate consequences of Berkely’s idealism?

Answer 20

That we are alone in the world (our family and friends are just ideas, there is therefore no evidence of other intelligent beings)

Question 21

What paper did Ryan Nichols write? and when?

Answer 21

Reid on Fictional Objects and The Way of Ideas, 2002

Question 22

What is the way of ideas?

Answer 22

The immediate objects of thoughts are representational states.

Question 23

Why does S.A grave think that Reids ideas on non-existant objects are contradictory?

Answer 23

Because Reid takes us to take, as the object of thought, a thing which does not exist. But how can a direct object of thought be non-existent?

Question 24

What is Meinongianism?

Answer 24

We can predicate entirely non-existent objects. According to Meinong ‘There are objects of which it is true that there are no such object’.

Question 25

What is an uneasy complication of endorsing Meinongian positions?

Answer 25

That existence is a predicate.

Question 26

What is an adverbial theory of sensation?

Answer 26

An adverbial theory of sensation says that sensations are not representational states, nor are they what they are because of relations they have to sense data, but they are pure qualitative states. For instance, if I see a red chair, this is best described by the notion that I see a chair by sensing redly.

Question 27

For Reid, what does it mean to say that we conceive of universals?

Answer 27

It means that we understand the defentions of universals.

Question 28

What is nominalism?

Answer 28

The view that universals dont exist.

Question 29

What ‘prejudices’ does reid think has given rise to the way of ideas?

Question 30

(1) For all intentional states of the mind, their immediate objects are mental representations.
(2) That which does not exist cannot be the object of intentional states of mind.

Question 31

What does Reid call ‘The ideal Theory’

Answer 31

The view that what is immediately before the mind is always and impression or idea (a view he attributes to Hume, Locke, possibly Berkley)

Question 32

What does Reid call the view that what is immediately before the mind is always and impression or idea (a view he attributes to Hume, Locke, possibly Berkley)

Answer 32

The ideal Theory

Question 33

When was Reid alive?

Answer 33

1710 to 1796

Question 34

Wa Hume contemeprous to Reid?

Answer 34

Yes

Question 35

When was his first major work published? What was it called?

Answer 35

1764

An Inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense

Question 36

What relation did Reid’s work have with Hume’s, and what did he think of Hume?

Answer 36

His work was mainly reactive to the scepticism in Hume, however, he admired Hume largely, and thought that Hume had quite rightly pinpointed the inevitable sceptical conclusions from philosophical assumptions that went back to Descarte i.e., the ideal theory. The problem, however, is therefore the ideal theory, and we are not warranted in our sceptical concluisons.

Question 37

What were Hume’s three species of scepticism?

Answer 37

Antecedent skepticism: The doubt we have prior to any inquiry that helps avoid error and making hasty judgments. Like Descartes methodological scepticism.

Consequent scepticism: When one realises there is no rational means to escape antecedent scepticism (pyronhism)

mitigated skepticism: There are many things which we do not know due to our limited capacities.

Question 38

Why might Humean naturalism obviate Reids objection to Humean scepticism?

Answer 38

Because Hume does not think that skepticism is ‘liveable’, he thinks that we cannot help but engage with the world in a nonsceptical way. It is only in the intellectual discussion that scepticism exists.

Question 39

Who would Reid class as a semi sceptic?

Answer 39

Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume

Question 40

What is the only first principle of the ideal system, according to reid, and how does this lead to scepticism?

Answer 40

The belief in the existence of our mental states. It leads to skepticism because all other beliefs have to be demonstrable only through this foundational first principle, but they are not, leading to skepticism. That is, reason is not capable of establishing the existence of the external world etc from this first principle
.

Question 41

Who thinks that Reid has made a straw man out of the theory of ideas?

Answer 41

Grave, Thomas Webb.

Question 42

What mistake do Grave and Thomas Webb think Reid has made?

Answer 42

He has made the mistake of thinking that philosophers were talking of ideas as literal entities before the mind e.g., like mental pictures or somesuch.

Question 43

How did John Yolton and Steven Nadler attempt to undermine reid?

Answer 43

By say that the ideal theory actually had a lot of perceptual realism in it, the same kind that Reid takes himself to be replacing the ideal theory with.