PHILOSOPHY OF COMMON SENSE

 

The title phrase philosophy of common sense ought to be read literally and directly associated with its chief proponent Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Considering how virtually unknown he is today, to many of us he may seem more like a joke than a serious thinker, but this view was not shared during his lifetime, when he was more popular than his contemporary and compatriot David Hume. Nor was it shared by such a luminary of serious philosophy as Schopenhauer, who wrote this about him in his Die Welt:

Thomas Reid’s excellent book Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense affords us a very thorough conviction of the inadequacy of the senses for producing the objective perception of things, and also of the non-empirical origin of the intuition of space and time. Reid refutes Locke’s teaching that perception is a product of the senses. This he does by a thorough and acute demonstration that the collective sensations of the senses do not bear the least resemblance to the world known through perception, and in particular by showing that Locke’s five primary qualities: extension, figure, solidity, movement and number cannot possibly be supplied to us by any sensation of the senses. [Die Welt, Vol. II, Ch. 2.]

Reid took his concept of common sense from Aristotle’s/Cicero’s sensus communis, which is a rather subtle philosophical concept, best described by Kant as follows:

...We must take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by us all], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else’s way of presenting [something], in order to compare our own judgment with human reason in general. We do it as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and thus put ourselves in the position of everyone else.

Thus, Reid believed that common sense, in this special sense, is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He disagreed with Hume’s assertion that we can never know what an external world consists of, as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind, and with Berkeley’s assertion that external world is merely ideas in the mind. He claimed that the foundations upon which our sensus communis is built justify our belief that there is an external world.

As always, those readers who are interested in learning more about Reid’s theories are sent to them directly, for which they do not require me as a mediator. Meantime, I shall finally draw my reader’s attention to such part of Reid’s legacy which holds a particular attraction for me, as a linguist. Here is an important passage from Reid’s 1785 work Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man:

A philosopher is no doubt entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages; and, if he is able to show that there is no foundation for them in the nature of the things distinguished; if he can point out some prejudice common to mankind that has led them to distinguish things which are not really different; in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy. But when, in the first setting out, he takes it for granted without proof, that distinctions found in the structure of all languages have no foundation in nature; this surely is too fastidious a way of treating the common sense of mankind. (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.)

Before I depart from my subject in the current state of this entry, I might add that my definitive philosophical authority Lord Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, makes no mention of Thomas Reid, while here is the latter’s entry from my Webster’s Biographical Dictionary:

“Reid, Thomas. 1710-1796. Scottish philosopher, and founder of the so-called Scottish, or common-sense, school; professor, Aberdeen (1751); made reply to Hume in Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1763); chief of a philosophical school aiming to deliver philosophy from skepticism. He succeeded Adam Smith as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow (1764-1781). Published Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788).”

Once again, here is a founder of something, that is, a philosopher to be reckoned with, hence his necessary inclusion in this philosophical block of sections of my book.

As always for this and other sections, I shall return to this entry sometime in the future for a major revision, but at this moment I have no time for that.