Reid on Testimony and Perception

1985 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Lehrer ◽  
John-Christian Smith
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
The Senses

Reid defended common sense against scepticism by appeal to the claim that our faculties should be considered trustworthy until some argument proves them to be untrustworthy. He believed, of course, that no such argument would be forthcoming. In this paper, we shall investigate Reid's defense of the faculty of perception and the evidence of the senses by analogy with the faculty of language and the evidence of testimony. Reid argued that the evidence of testimony should be trusted unless there is reason to think it untrustworthy and by analogy, that the evidence of the senses should be trusted unless there is reason to think it untrustworthy. He admitted the fallibility of such evidence but contended that such fallibility is characteristic of all our faculties. Moreover, and perhaps most important, Reid developed a psychological theory of the faculties of perception and language that showed the analogy between these two faculties to be very exact indeed.

Poetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Dowling
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Performance Texts ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Senses ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This review examines three books published in the field of poetics in 2020: Candice Amich’s Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas; Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics; and Anthony Reed’s Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. I show that these three books, which discuss poetry in connection with other art forms, each call for a reordering of the senses through which we perceive and analyze poetry (and other texts). While Ellis Neyra advocates multisensorial listening and Reed calls for a mode of listening attentive to what remains unnamed within current perceptual and political schema, Amich shows the importance of paying attention to the embodied rhythms and tactility of poetry and performance texts. For all three authors, these alternatives to individualized, detached, and indeed deadened linguistic contemplation proffer strategies for remaking not only common sense, but the common itself. The chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Poetics; 3. Sensoria; 4. Politics.

Linguistic Philosophy and Perception

Philosophy ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 28 (107) ◽  
pp. 311-324
Author(s):  
Margaret MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
External World ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Sense Experience ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Perceptual Variation ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy ◽  
As If

Philosophical theories of perception are generally admitted to be responses to certain problems or puzzles allied to the ancient dichotomy between Appearance and Reality. For they have been mainly provoked by the incompatibility of the common–sense assumption that an external, physical world exists and is revealed to the senses with the well–known facts of perceptual variation and error. If only what is real were perceived just as if only what is right were done it is possible that many of those questions would never have been asked which lead to moral philosophy and a metaphysics of the external world. But sense perceptions of the same object vary so that it appears to have contradictory qualities and are sometimes completely deceptive. Nor do illusory differ internally from veridical perceptions. Moreover, perceptual variation and error can be unmasked only by such procedures as looking more carefully, listening harder, trying to touch, asking others, in short by more sense experience. So the senses are, as it were, both accused and judge in these disputes and why should a venal judge be trusted more than the criminal he tries? Such “correction” of one experience by another of the same kind seems no more reliable than the original “error.” Philosophers have found all this very puzzling.

scholarly journals The Common Sense of Considering the Senses in Patient Communication

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 1659-1660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank R. Lin ◽  
Heather E. Whitson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Patient Communication ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Senses

Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bodo Winter ◽  
Marcus Perlman
Keyword(s):  
Construct Validity ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Neighborhood Density ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Actual Form ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Pragmatic Aspects

Abstract This paper reviews recent research using participant ratings to measure the iconicity (form-meaning resemblance) of words and signs. This method, by enabling wide coverage of lexical items and cross-linguistic comparison, has revealed systematic patterns in how iconicity is distributed across the vocabularies of different languages. These findings are consistent with established linguistic and psychological theory on iconicity, and they connect iconicity to factors like learning and acquisition, semantics, pragmatic aspects of language like playfulness, and to the semantic neighborhood density of words and signs. After taking stock of this research, we look critically at the construct validity of iconicity ratings, considering an alternative account of iconicity ratings recently put forward by Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Kimi Akita & Youngah Do. 2020a. Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English. Linguistics Vanguard 6. 20190088. They propose that, for most vocabulary, participants might rate the iconicity of different words based on their meaning alone – specifically the degree to which it relates to the senses – independently of actual form-meaning resemblance. We argue that their hypothesis cannot account for many of the various, theory-driven results from this line of research, which strongly support the conclusion that the ratings really do measure iconicity.

Common Sense Liposuction Tips

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Nancy Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense
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