Christopher A. Shrock

Thomas Reid’s unpublished note, MS 2131/6/I/29 from the Birkwood Collection at the University of Aberdeen, says that rational actions require motives. Then, it names several synonyms for decorum, and, on the back, a list of ‘Scripture examples’. What could it mean? I suggest reading Reid’s Note On Motive alongside a letter Reid sent to Lord Kames, which says that motives come in two species, ‘force’ and ‘authority’. The virtue of decorum and the Scripture examples, I submit, motivate Reid’s position, contra Kames, that the human will responds to motives besides the force of desire. By recognizing two species of motives, Reid lends theoretical support to a minority view in criminal jurisprudence, Gideon Yaffe’s thesis that addictions can mitigate the blameworthiness of addiction-driven wrongdoings. According to Yaffe, to refrain from wrongdoing comes at significant cost to the addict, who can avoid the wrong only through an earlier surrender of his autonomy. Reid, I argue, can go a step further by explaining why addictions mitigate some wrongdoings even when the addict is not overwhelmed with temptation and without construing the wrong choice as a misjudgment.

Add to Wishlist Defends Reid's Common Sense philosophy against the claim that perception does not allow us to experience the physical world With a new reading of Thomas Reid on primary and secondary qualities, Christopher A. Shrock illuminates the Common Sense theory of perception. Shrock follow's Reid's lead in defending common sense philosophy against the problem of secondary qualities, which claims that our perceptions are only experiences in our brains, and don't let us know about the world around us. At the same time, Schrock maintains a healthy optimism about science and reason. Common sense philosophy states that we connect with the physical world around us through our perception of it. Philosophers call this view of perception 'direct realism'. The opposite view to this is 'the problem of secondary qualities', which relegates our perceptions--from colours, smells, sounds and tastes to how long something looks or how heavy something feels--to the mental realm, because science has no objective place for them. The logical conclusion of this argument is that we can never perceive physical objects or their properties through our senses.

Thomas Reid often seems distant from other Scottish Enlightenment figures. While Hume, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith wrestled with the nature of social progress, Reid was busy with natural philosophy and epistemology, stubbornly loyal to traditional religion and ethics, and out of touch with the heart of his own intellectual world. Or was he? I contend that Reid not only engaged the Scottish Enlightenment's concern for improvement, but, as a leading interpreter of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, he also developed a scheme to explain the progress of human knowledge. Pulling thoughts from across Reid's corpus, I identify four key features that Reid uses to distinguish mature sciences from prescientific arts and inquiries. Then, I compare and contrast this scheme with that of Thomas Kuhn in order to highlight the plausibility and originality of Reid's work.

Direct Realism is the view that human perception takes physical entities and their mind-independent properties as immediate objects. Although this thesis is supported by common sense, many argue that it can be dismissed on philosophical or quasi-scientific grounds. This essay attempts to defend Direct Realism against one such argument, which I call the “Problem of Secondary Qualities,” using the ideas of Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid. The first chapter of this work offers a detailed introduction to the Problem of Secondary Qualities. The Problem of Secondary Qualities arises from the claim that science has shown that physical objects do not possess secondary qualities. This is a problem for Direct Realism because secondary qualities are certainly possessed by at least some perceivable objects. As I present it, the Problem rests on three commitments: that an analysis of secondary quality perceptions should extend to perception in general, that we perceive secondary qualities, and that physical objects do not possess secondary qualities without our perceptions of them. I conclude that Direct Realism requires an account of secondary qualities on which secondary qualities are perceiver-independent but identifiable with other causally relevant properties. In Chapter Two, I introduce Thomas Reid’s doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, in the context of his theory of perception, as a viable response to the Problem of Secondary Qualities. On Reid’s view, secondary qualities are both perceiver-independent and identical to scientific properties, and Reid offers many useful conceptual resources for responding to objections. Most important are Reid’s claims that sensation or sense experience is casually related to, but not essential for, perception and that our perceptions of secondary qualities give us very little knowledge concerning their natures. The final chapter shows how the Reidian theory holds up against four key objections to accounts of secondary qualities on which they may be identified with perceiver-independent, scientific properties. In most cases, the Reidian approach finds solutions without compromising our intuitions or received opinions.