Reid's First Principle #7

Abstract

By Reid's own account, ‘That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious’ (FP#7), has a special place among the First Principles of Contingent Truths. Some have found that claim puzzling, but it is not. Contrary to what's usually assumed, certain FPs preceding FP#7 do not already assert the better part of what FP#7 explicitly states. FP#7 is needed because there is nothing epistemological in the FPs that precede it; and its special place among the FPs is a straightforward consequence of its being both perfectly general and distinctively epistemological.

Keywords::

• first principles
• reliability
• Thomas Reid
• Philip De Bary
• Keith Lehrer

Notes

^1. Discussions of these matters include Alston (1985), Lehrer (1989), Rysiew (2005), Sosa and Van Cleve (2001), Van Cleve (1999), and Wolterstorff (2001).

^2. References to Reid will be followed by indication of the relevant work – An Inquiry into the Human Mind (IHM), or Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (EIP) – followed by as well page numbers in both the Hamilton and the Brookes editions. (For the former, ‘a’ refers to the left-hand column, ‘b’ to the right-hand side.)

^3. Following Van Cleve, we can distinguish between epistemic principles and epistemological ones: the former ‘specify[…] the conditions under which beliefs of various types are justified, rational, evident, or the like’ (1999, 5); the latter have more broadly to do with matters epistemic. Cf. Alston, 437.

^4. Note that these are first principles of contingent truths – i.e., they function as axioms upon which our thinking is based when inquire about contingent matters. While I myself think, and think Reid thinks, that the principles themselves are contingent (see especially, perhaps, EIP 442a, 469), as Van Cleve observes (1999, 21), that is a distinct issue.

^5. ‘…consciousness, memory, and perception…[already] have individual “first principles of continent truths” which apply to them, numbers 1, 3, and 5 respectively’ (de Bary 2002, 375). In the same vein, Alston refers to several of the FPs as ‘epistemological principles hav[ing] to do exclusively with reliability’ (1985, 437), and says that FP #5, e.g., is ‘the thesis that sense-perception is reliable’ (443). So too, Lehrer refers to FPs 1, 3, and 5 as ‘tell[ing] us that perception, consciousness, memory are not fallacious’ (Lehrer 1998, 23).

^6. A propensity to rely on testimony is certainly natural (‘the principle of credulity’; IHM 196b, 194), though it's not clear that it makes good sense to say that testimony is a natural faculty.

^7. At least, insofar as such use involves assent to the faculty's deliverances, as it does in normal cases. (One can imagine, for instance, cases in which a faculty is known to be unreliable, but in a systematic enough way that one can nonetheless make good use of its deliverances without taking them at face value or forming the relevant beliefs.) Thanks to Todd Buras for this point.

^8. De Bary's 2000 article appears, with very slight changes, as Section 5.3 in his 2002 book. Here, I cite de Bary's work using the pagination of the original paper.

^9. De Bary is not the only recent commentator who has found this particular passage difficult to reconcile with his/her own preferred reading of Reid's epistemology – both van Cleve (2008, 301–302) and Lemos (2004, Chapter 4) think that this passage marks a significant, and unexplained, mistake on Reid's part. It's clear that, in van Cleve's case anyway, the interpretative problem stems from his wanting, like de Bary (and Greco 2002, 2010), to read Reid as an externalist – something that, I think, we have independent reason not to do (see Rysiew 2005, 2011, and footnote 23, below).

^10. ‘In persons come to years of understanding, judgment necessarily accompanies all sensation, perception by the senses, consciousness, and memory’ (EIP 414a–b, 409). ‘The man who perceives an object, believes that it exists, and is what he distinctly perceives it to be; nor is it in his power to avoid such judgment. And the like may be said of memory, and of consciousness. Whether judgment ought to be called a necessary concomitant of these operations, or rather a part or ingredient of them, I do not dispute; but it is certain that all of them are accompanied with a determination that something is true or false’ (EIP 414b, 409).

^11. This passage is hardly idiosyncratic. At (EIP 329a–b, 231–232), e.g., Reid speaks of ‘seeing’ as itself doing the judging, producing various convictions, and so on; and he says similar things about consciousness and memory as well – they produce immediate belief, etc.

^12. Given, then, that he wants to see FPs 1, 3, and 5 as already asserting the reliability of consciousness, memory and perception, de Bary cannot claim that, while judgment typically follows instances of these acts of mind, it should not be considered a part of them. For it is only insofar as consciousness, memory and perception incorporate judgment that they can be fallacious/non-fallacious, reliable or not.

^13. Cf. Lehrer and Warner (2000, 367–372). And: ‘Every kind of reasoning for the veracity of our faculties, amounts to no more than taking their own testimony for their veracity’ (EIP 447b, 481; emphasis added).

^14. Apart, perhaps, from giving some place to reasoning among the FPs – see above. But, as discussed, it's implausible that that's all FP#7 is mean to do.

^15. There is controversy over how best to characterize such commitments – whether it is appropriate to describe them (as Reid sometimes does) as beliefs, as opposed to saying (as Reid also does) that they are things all normal humans commonly take for granted. (For discussion of this issue, see Wolterstorff 2001, 215–227, and Sosa and Van Cleve 2001, 190–193.) Here, I move between these two ways of putting the relevant point; the present discussion is meant to be neutral on the question of which, if either, is to be preferred.

^16. Here, I'm indebted to Todd Buras.

^17. As does ‘The man drinking the martini’ in its referential use. In terms of that well-known example, if it turns out that the person to whom the speaker is referring has some other colorless liquid in their glass, the use of the phrase need not be defective, since the referential use doesn't presuppose the existence of a unique object satisfying the description – it's just serving to pick out the person about whom the speaker has something to say. (Donnellan's paper has of course spawned much debate as to whether the distinction in question is semantic or pragmatic, and so on, but there is broad agreement that the general phenomenon is real. Needless to say, nothing in the present paper hangs on such questions; the reference to Donnellan is meant merely to help clarify what's being claimed about the relevant FPs. Thanks to Mike Raven for discussion on these matters.)

^18. FPs 1, 4, and 5 do so explicitly; the pastness of the events in FP#3 mandates ‘did really happen’ (vs. do really exist); and, as Reid's discussion of Hume's views in connection with FP #2 (EIP 444a–b, 473–474) makes clear, it is as much concerned with the reality (hence, the existence) of the self (mind, person) as with its being the subject of one's thoughts.

^19. Todd Buras has suggested to me that there may be a relevant and important difference between FP#12, say, and FPs 1, 3, and 5: while the former might have epistemological implications, those can be derived only by addition of some further premise (that the assumption nature's uniformity is essential to inductive reasoning, say); whereas, it seems that the connection is much tighter in the case of the latter. E.g., if the things we distinctly remember did really happen, then the beliefs formed as a result of distinct memories are reliable. Essentially, it's just a rewording of the principle that's required to generate the epistemological moral. To reply: I am not sure that the example just given is merely a case of rewording what's already been stated. (See below. See too what was suggested above about the function of such phrases as ‘the things we distinctly remember’, etc., in 1, 3, and 5.) But even it if were, rewordings can of course make for significant semantic differences.

^20. Of course, when I assent to the former proposition, I thereby presume the latter. But this doesn't show that the two are not really distinct. What it illustrates, as Reid sees it, is the special role of FP#7 among the FPs. – See below.

^21. FP#10 – That there is a certain regard due to human testimony in matters of fact, and even to human authority in matters of opinion – is like this as well; it is the inter-personal, social-epistemological counterpart of FP#7.

^22. Reid says: the ‘fundamental truth on which all others rest’ (EIP 448a, 481). This is an unfortunate way of putting the point: it not that all truths rest upon the non-fallaciousness of our faculties. Nor is it that Reid thinks that FP#7 serves as a premise for other beliefs, except in some figurative sense – ‘[it] is, as it were, one of the premises on which our assent is grounded’ (EIP 447b, 481; emphasis added; see Lehrer 1989, esp. 163). The better, non-figurative way of putting the point, again, is to say that FP#7 is, inevitably, taken for granted whenever one assents to anything at all.

^23. Here, as elsewhere, ‘ground’ might be intended as either a descriptive-psychological or a normative-epistemic term. Reid tends to mean both of these, when speaking of evidence as ‘the ground of belief’ (EIP 328a, 228), and I think it's both of these questions that he's meaning to address in the passage at (EIP 448a, 481). In my 2005 and 2011, I explore this and other ideas central to Reid's thinking about evidence. As the present discussion suggests, among the consequences of that thinking is that Reid's epistemological views are not purely externalist.

^24. Nothing in the present interpretation is ‘inconsistent with Reid's implicit commitment to the parity of first principles. All first principles are equal in being, by definition, innate and unprovable; and they can all be identified only by certain “marks” – self-evidence, irresistibility, etc.’ (de Bary 2000, 382).

^25. Some commentators have found it hard to take seriously the idea that the first principles are really self-evident. Elsewhere (see footnote 23), I address such concerns. The more general question as to the nature and normative status of the FPs is a large and difficult one; I set out my own views on this in (Rysiew 2002).

^26. For helpful comments and discussion, I'm indebted to Todd Buras, Alastair Crosby, Laurent Jaffro, Mike Raven, and the other attendants at the Vermont Reid conference.

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Notes on contributors

Patrick Rysiew

Patrick Rysiew is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria. His primary research interest is in epistemology, including its points of intersection with certain issues in philosophy of language and psychology. He has published a number of articles on Reid (in The Philosophical Quarterly, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Evidentialism and its Discontents, and elsewhere), most of which focus on his epistemological views and their relevance to contemporary issues and theories.