Problems from Reid

Problems from Reid bears an apt title for James Van Cleve's comprehensive examination of philosophical questions that arise in the work of Thomas Reid and that continue to engage us today. Drawing from fifteen years of publications on Reid, Van Cleve presents a unified understanding of Reid by our own lights, that is, by the lights of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone analytic philosophy. Problems is not a contribution to what may be called contextualist history of philosophy: an interpretation that places the text alongside cultural, social, political, economic, and other historical evidence in order to arrive at a picture of a thinker and his ideas in his time. Rather, Van Cleve situates Reid in the argumentative space of current philosophical thinking. This approach allows Van Cleve to regiment Reid's texts by rendering his prose into arguments in premise form, and to use current conceptual tools, distinctions, and positions in order to lay out a space of interpretive options constrained by a presentist principle of charity: maximize affinity with and plausibility by our current understanding of what the central philosophical problems are and what positions exhaust the possible ways of addressing these central philosophical problems. The result is an understanding of Reid that illuminates and informs current controversies in the philosophy of perception, epistemology, theories of action and agency, moral theory, and metaethics.Van Cleve's approach is in touch with much of recent Reid scholarship in the Anglophone analytic tradition, which allows him to engage this scholarship while locating Reid's views in current philosophical space. Those familiar with both resources—Reid scholarship and current work in perception, epistemology, action theory, and moral theory—will profit from Van Cleve's careful presentation of the interpretive and philosophical options. Those unfamiliar with Reid, but familiar with current debates, will find in Problems a singular opportunity to introduce themselves to a figure whose views stimulate new ways of thinking about these debates. Problems is also an occasion to work toward the day when the “big seven” of modern philosophy courses is expanded to the big eight: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Reid” (1). The sixteen chapters (and twenty-six appendixes) in Problems are concise and focused and can be used independently to introduce advanced students to Reid, Reid scholarship, and current approaches to central philosophical problems.The first ten chapters of Problems concern questions that arise from Reid's theory of sensory perception (excepting chapter 8, which examines memory and personal identity). At the heart of Reid's theory is his distinction between sensation and perception. According to Reid, sensations are unique among mental operations in being objectless: they are not of or about anything, they are nonintentional, and they are informationally inert. Van Cleve concludes that Reidean sensations are nonrelational, monadic states. Even though we rarely attend to our sensations, we are nonetheless conscious of them, and they contribute to the phenomenal character of our overall perceptual experience. Van Cleve finds that an adverbial theory of sensation best accommodates Reid's view: a sensation is a modification of a sensing subject's mind; it is a way of sensing, of sensing F-ly. Perception, by contrast, is presentational. Van Cleve identifies three elements in Reidean perception: conception, belief, and immediacy. But “the real core of perception,” according to Van Cleve, “is conception . . . a nonconceptual and therefore non-doxastic act” that he calls an A-relation (where the “A” stands for acquaintance): “an irreducible cognitive relation with nonpropositional objects” (18, 83). Sensations, claims Reid, suggest or trigger the conceptions at the core of perception, leading to Reid's nativism: while sensations are required to trigger conceptions, the conceptions themselves are neither derived nor derivable from sensation, as Reid's experimentum crucis aims to show (Reid 1997, 5.6, 5.7). On this view, perception is a primitive, autonomous source of information in response to sensory modifications of the perceiving subject.The core of Reidean perception is a conception that presents us with objects. Accordingly, Van Cleve argues that Reid is a direct realist in the fullest sense. Recall the three elements in Reidean perception: conception, belief, and immediacy. Reid is an epistemological direct realist because the beliefs we form about the objects presented in perception are warranted independently of other propositions we believe (81; see also chap. 11). He is a perceptual direct realist because the objects presented in perception are presented immediately—that is, without any perceived intermediaries (82). And he is a presentational direct realist because the conception at the core of perception is an A-relation: perception acquaints us with objects (83). The main worry for Reid's direct realism is the role of sensations in mediating perception of objects: because sensations suggest perceptions, Reid calls them signs that signify the objects presented in perception. Van Cleve responds to this worry by asking on Reid's behalf whether there could be such a thing as indirect perception – does the kind of representational realism attributed to Locke, for example, count as perception? Van Cleve's answer is no: regardless of the presence of intermediaries, if an operation does not secure an A-relation to an object, it cannot be perception; if an operation does secure an A-relation to an object, it is perception, regardless of the presence of intermediaries or whether we have an A-relation to them. Direct realism, if true, is thus true a priori and no form of indirect realism counts as perception, properly speaking.Deciding that Reid is a direct realist, however, does not settle how to characterize the contents of perceptual experience. Van Cleve identifies four possible options: disjunctivism, adverbialism, propositionalism, and Meinongianism (81). Van Cleve uses the term “propositionalism” to denote representationalism, or intentionalism (though note that not all those who hold these views agree that the contents of perception are propositional). He assays each option, ruling out all but an adverbial theory on which perceptual experience is a nonrelational monadic state of a subject that has “an object-presenting phenomenological character,” which “can be embedded in a veridical perception that does have an object” (299). Nevertheless, Van Cleve recognizes that an adverbial theory of perceptual experience is difficult to characterize and that it is inconsistent with his commitment to an A-relation as the core of perception. This kind of honesty is required by Van Cleve's method: when we recruit historical figures into current disagreements, we will confront cases where the gulf between what a historical figure wrote and where analytic philosophy finds itself today is too wide to ease our approach to either. Van Cleve exhibits this careful honesty throughout Problems from Reid.Van Cleve examines much more in his chapters on sensory perception than can be canvassed here, including Reid's distinction between primary and secondary qualities, his account of acquired perception, his famous Geometry of Visibles, the puzzle of the inverted retinal image, and Molyneux's question. For each of these, Van Cleve gives us a rich exploration of philosophical possibilities that illuminate Reid as they inspire novel ways of approaching our own philosophical landscape.Chapters 11 through 13 are devoted to Reid's epistemology, in which Van Cleve argues that we should understand Reid as a particularist, evidentialist, externalist. In the Essays on the Intellectual Powers Reid presents us with what he calls “first principles” (Reid 2002, 6.5) that declare consciousness, memory, perception, and other operations of the mind to be trustworthy. According to Van Cleve, Reid's first principles are principles of evidence that establish that each of the deliverances of an operation is itself a first principle, thereby yielding “many particular first principles” (305). For example, the first principle concerning perception grants that “any deliverance of sense perception may function as a first principle, implying that if we perceive or seem to perceive that p, it is thereby immediately evident for us that p” (315–16). Van Cleve uses this reading of Reid to present a track-record—or bootstrapping—argument for the reliability of our faculties that uses those very faculties without requiring that we know or establish in advance the reliability of the faculties. He then argues that it is Reid's externalism—not his direct realism or his naturalism—that motivates and justifies his antiskepticism, and he places Reid among those today who advocate for dogmatism or liberalism: the view that “certain things you can know without any proof” (342).The final three chapters cover Reid's theory of action and his moral philosophy. Reid distinguishes between agent causation (efficient causation) and event causation (physical causation). In event causation, the relation is constant conjunction by law and the two relata are events. In agent causation, agents (beings with intelligence and will) exert an active power to produce a volition, which is the first item in chain of event-causes leading up to an agent's action (398–9). The only true causes, according to Reid, are agents (including ourselves). Reid's account of agent causation allows him to maintain libertarian indeterminism in the face of the dilemma whereby either (a) determinism is true because every action has a cause determined by events that precede one's own existence, so that no action is free; or (b) determinism is not true because some actions are uncaused, and thus attributable to no one and nothing, in which case no action is free. If some actions are caused not by events but by agents, then some actions are attributable and free. Finally, Van Cleve contrasts Reid with Hume on morals, arguing that Reid is a cognitivist, objective, nonnaturalist: according to Reid, we have a moral faculty that delivers both judgments and feelings about the rightness and wrongness of actions.It makes sense to try to understand Reid by our own lights both because we inherited the lights we now shine on the past from the traditions in which Reid worked, and because his philosophical contributions help us envision philosophical options that are currently obscured. Reid reminds us that the progressivist story of modern philosophy implicit in contemporary Anglophone analytic philosophy, where Hume and Kant are the heroes from which our own story proceeds, is a distortion. It ignores the richness and complexity of philosophy in the modern period, while obscuring the ways we constrain our own philosophizing by adhering to methods and models we use in part because they conform to the standards set by that distorting story. The project of understanding Reid is not only a task for the history of philosophy; it holds the promise of reconfiguring how we understand philosophical problems and the methods we use to address them. When it comes to Reid, that project may yet be more revolutionary than we anticipate. Problems from Reid is an excellent contribution to this project

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy

• Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

  Open Access•James Walker, Thomas Reid et al.•Essays on the Intellectual Powers…•2011

  Añadir item

• An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense

  Thomas Reid, Derek R Brookes et al.•An Inquiry into the Human Mind on…•1997

  Añadir item

• An inquiry into the human mind, on the principles of common sense.

  Thomas Reid•1764

  Añadir item

• Thomas Reid - Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

  Thomas Reid, Derek R Brookes et al.•Thomas Reid - Essays on the…•2002

  Añadir item