Thomas Reid on Causation and Scientific Explanation

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Barrantes ◽  
Juan M. Durán
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Common

We argue that there is no tension between Reid's description of science and his claim that science is based on the principles of common sense. For Reid, science is rooted in common sense since it is based on the (common sense) idea that fixed laws govern nature. This, however, does not contradict his view that the scientific notions of causation and explanation are fundamentally different from their common sense counterparts. After discussing these points, we dispute with Cobb's ( Cobb 2010 ) and Benbaji's ( Benbaji 2003 ) interpretations of Reid's views on causation and explanation. Finally, we present Reid's views from the perspective of the contemporary debate on scientific explanation.

The Legacy of Reid's Common Sense in Analytic Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Mark Boespflug
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Common

The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases of knowledge. Second, dogmatists follow Reid in taking common sense propositions to provide boundaries for philosophical theorizing. Inasmuch as philosophical theorizing leads one to deny a common sense proposition, such theorizing is stepping outside of the bounds of what it can or should do. Third, dogmatists follow Reid in focusing heavily on the problem of skepticism and by responding to it by refusing to answer the demand for a meta-justification that the skeptic wants.

Stewart, Dugald (1753–1828)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward H. Madden
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Realistic Interpretation ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The Common

Dugald Stewart was, after Thomas Reid, the most influential figure in the Common Sense School; he was a major influence on Victor Cousin and Théodore Jouffroy in France and on most academic philosophers in the United States. Along with Reid and Cousin, Stewart made the Scottish tradition the dominant philosophy in America for half a century. His Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind and Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man were his most important works and went through a number of printings. The abridged edition of his Active and Moral Powers was reprinted ten times from 1849 to 1868. Stewart followed Reid in claiming that any philosophy which contravenes the principles of common sense must be false, and the problem is to discover and eliminate the premise which yields such results. He added the requirement that philosophical propositions must not change the meanings of concepts in ordinary life, and he also added a new dimension to Reid’s agency theory. More than any other writer he emphasized correctly the epistemic similarities between Reid and Immanuel Kant, but he followed Reid in avoiding Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. Stewart disagreed with Reid in avoiding the phrase ‘principles of common sense’ as misleading, rejected his mentor’s realistic interpretation of universals and provided his own nominalistic alternative. He also modified to some extent, though quite cautiously, Reid’s rigid inductivism and made some concessions to a realistic interpretation of scientific hypotheses. Stewart was equipped to discuss issues in the philosophy of science since he was well versed in mathematics and physics, having been professor of mathematics at Edinburgh for ten years before being named professor of moral philosophy. Stewart was arguably the first and finest philosopher of science in the Scottish tradition.

Buffier, Claude (1661–1737)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Manns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
External World ◽  
Inner Experience ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
External Reality ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

A French Jesuit who flourished in the early eighteenth century, Buffier developed an outlook that he referred to as common-sense philosophy. While deeply influenced by the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, he saw their reliance on the testimony of inner experience to be conducive to scepticism concerning the external world. In reaction to this, he sought to establish the irrevocable claims of various ‘first truths’, which pointed towards external reality and qualified it in various respects. His work anticipates certain themes that surfaced later in the common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid.

Scoffing at Scepticism

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
Ross Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
The Common ◽  
Philosophical Argumentation

This chapter focuses on Hume's Aberdonian adversaries: Thomas Reid and James Beattie. These common sense philosophers took a keen interest in the psychology of laughter and were anxious to undermine Hobbes's argument that laughter was ultimately an expression of contempt. But they never disavowed ridicule in philosophical argumentation and public debate. On the contrary, Beattie in particular championed it as an antidote to scepticism, a philosophy he deemed both absurd (and hence immune to rational refutation) and dangerously persuasive. Far from being a frivolous or uncivil mode of speech, therefore, Reid and Beattie made ridicule into a shield for the common sense understandings that held society together.

2. Starting from common sense

2020 ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Common Belief ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Common

Can we escape our reliance on common sense? ‘Starting from common sense’ examines what common sense is, what it isn’t, and its usefulness as a check on philosophy. Aristotle, Thomas Reid, and G.E. Moore were all advocates of common sense—specifically, the common sense of their own time and place—whereas Bertrand Russell dismissed it as pre-scientific barbarism. There is a concern that common sense may become confused with common belief or used as a disguise for popular prejudice. Our evidence for philosophical experiments depends on common-sense methods of thinking. We have no choice but to start at common sense, but we do not have to end at it.

Possible Theological Perspectives in Thomas Reid's Common Sense Philosophy

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Common ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
Theological Thinking ◽  
The Way

It is well known that Thomas Reid, premier exponent of the Common Sense school of Scottish philosophy, was an ordained and active minister. Less clear is the role played by theology in the deve opment ofthat philosophy as it matured slowly under his pen, particularly in me most prominent of his works, the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788), works which range widely over the field of human experience and the nature of reality. When philosophy and theology assumed more distinct and separate identities in the generations which succeeded Reid, it became common for critics of the Common Sense school to base their analyses solely on philosophical foundations and to neglect the theological underpinning which is essential to a fuller and clearer grasp of Keid s position. It would be a useful contribution to more than one discipline were Thomas Reid's philosophy linked more closely to the development and extent of his theological thinking. While his philosophical writings are strewn with theological references in the way typical of the eighteenth century, there is more substance in these references than is usually the case, when divines ofthat age wrote philosophy. That they are much more than casual, conventional embellishments becomes apparent from a careful reading of his works.

Hamilton, William (1788–1856)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.O. Mounce
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

Sir William Hamilton was a leading exponent of the Scottish philosophy of ‘common sense’. This philosophy had its origin in the works of Thomas Reid, but it was through Hamilton that it achieved its most subtle form and exerted its greatest influence. ‘Common-sense’ philosophy, on a superficial view, may seem to hold that philosophical problems should be settled by appealing to the commonly accepted opinions of ordinary people. But that is not what it holds. The ‘common sense’ to which it refers are certain powers and beliefs natural to the mind and therefore common alike to the learned and vulgar. Hamilton holds that these powers and beliefs can neither be doubted nor justified. They carry their own authority. This view derives its significance from a point which has often been overlooked. When we doubt or justify a belief, we stand outside that belief and compare it with the world. But the power to compare a belief with the world itself presupposes beliefs about the world. We cannot step outside all our beliefs. That is why, according to Hamilton, certain powers and beliefs must carry authority.

Common Sense and Ideal Theory in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Gellera
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Epistemological Views

In the nineteenth century James McCosh and many others identified the Common Sense school with “Scottish philosophy” tout court: the supposedly collective “Scottish” reply to Hume was the rejection of skepticism and Ideal Theory. This chapter addresses the anticipations of the Common Sense school and its broader place in the history of Scottish philosophy. The seventeenth-century Scottish philosophers reacted to Cartesian skepticism with epistemological views which anticipate Thomas Reid: direct realism and perception as a faculty of judgment. Common sense-like views seem to have been a popular strategy against skepticism already before the Common Sense school, thus providing additional evidence for McCosh’s claim of the special role of common sense in the history of Scottish philosophy.

The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought

1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. S. Jacyna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mind

In 1879 G. H. Lewes described the state of current British mental science. There were, he maintained, three main ‘schools’ of psychology. The first of these Lewes called the ‘ontological’ school; its members traced their lineage to Thomas Reid and to the common sense philosophers of the early nineteenth century, especially Dugald Stewart and William Hamilton. The second school was the ‘empirical’, which stood in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Condillac, Hartley, and James Mill. The ontologists and the empiricists differed in their theories of knowledge: the former held that certain beliefs were native to the mind; the latter that all ideas originated, mediately or immediately, from experience. However, both schools agreed on the object of psychological enquiry. They ‘quietly ignore the complex conditions of the living organism, and treat mental facts simply as the manifestations of a Psychical Principle’. Further, the ontological and empiricist schools concurred on the means by which this principle should be studied; both made introspection the ‘exclusive method of research’.

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