Ep. 352: Thomas Reid on Smelling and Knowledge (Part One)

0:08 Mark: Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 352 is something like, how can we best analyze the human mind? And we read the first half and the conclusion of Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of common sense from 1764. More information about the text and the podcast, please See partially examined life.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with a soul, accounting for my unique scent in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin concluding immediately without reasoning from my senses in Austin, Texas.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan rearranging the furniture of my understanding in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:51 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, entranced with the scent of a rose in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Mark: All right, Thomas Reid, one of the better of the second stringers of the People. Maybe you didn't study even if you took a modern philosophy course, but he is a really, really solid writer. He was a direct respondent to Hume, also in Scotland, but known as a common sense philosopher. You know, it's right there in the title. I know he was in the ministry. He has some churchy background, but that doesn't show up that much in here. Like, ultimately he wants to say that there are just certain basic things, the way the world is and the only, you know, we could conclude from that that God set it up that way.

But that's not supposed to be necessarily informative or add to the theory. But the question is just sort of epistemologically, what is basic? Is it as his predecessors were saying, that we have only certain knowledge of our own sensations, that the only thing we're ever in touch with is our own sensations? Because he follows the line from Descartes through Berkeley and Malebranche to Hume to say that whole idea just leads to skepticism, and skepticism is thoroughly repugnant. Surely there must be some better way. Let's actually pay attention to what is happening in our experience, to our faculties.

And so he writes this thing that lays out the five senses, starting with smell, which was most of what we read.

2:20 Wes: So I recommended reading Reid because I came across some lectures about him on YouTube. I forget who the lecturer is, and I was surprised by what I heard, which was that in a way, Reid is doing what something very reminiscent, reminiscent of contemporary analytic philosophers, which is challenging the myth of the given. I don't think the lecturer put it like that, but that's the way that's what occurred to me. And the other part of it, really, Reid was interested in a detailed phenomenology of perception and in particular, the way in which our immediate.

The immediate awareness that we have of sense data is something like a language. It's really. We kind of see through it in the same. The same way that we see through words. And if we pay attention to the raw data of our experience, it's a lot different than the intentional objects that we. That it signifies and the thing towards which we see right through the window of raw experience through. Through to those intentional objects. So I thought, wow, this is very advanced for his time. And he's taking on Hume, right? The big guy. And of course, I think from what we read for today, we can see that Hume did not take this challenge all that seriously.

And I'm not sure that it was taken all that seriously in the history of philosophy, even though it is, you know, one of the earliest challenges I've seen to this very popular early modern conception of experience and epistemology, this kind of veil of illusion that stands between us and things in themselves. This idea that we can know only our immediate ideas in our mind and not the external world. I think from what I understand, Reid was not aware of Kant, but Kant was well aware of Reid and even argued against Reid's realist conclusions in favor of his boy, Hume.

As we know, Kant was very fond of Hume. And I think it's interesting because there is some overlap in Reid's reaction to Hume and Kant's reaction to Hume. It's just that Kant sort of doubles down on the phenomenalism and Reid draws these very realist conclusions from it. So I think it's really fascinating and I think, wow, it seems to me like he's an underrated philosopher. I don't know, maybe there's. Maybe there's a ton of scholarship and he's been resurrected.

4:59 Dylan: I've felt the same way, Wes. I had never even heard of him, but it felt like the history of philosophy was sort of hijacked by the current that runs through Hume and skepticism. And then Kant's response. I don't know if you'd agree with this, but it feels like Kant tries to find the sliver of daylight in skepticism and effectively says, well, yes, all the skepticism is right, but there's a way out of this dilemma and I'm going to find it. And so that's the way he does it. Whereas Reid is not just with the early modern skeptics, but really, I feel like going all the way back to any kind of skeptical or paradoxical thinking.

He brings up Zeno and for example, it made me. I would phrase his point of view this way. Skepticism is an absurd conclusion. That's absurd in the same way as Zeno's paradox is absurd. That Zeno's paradox is, oh, you can't get from here to there because you always have to go halfway and halfway and halfway and you'll never get there. And he basically said, well, that's just dumb. It means you're just thinking about it wrong. Obviously we get from here to there. So your paradox isn't really all that interesting, except insofar you're thinking about mathematics, you're not thinking about the world.

And I feel like that's the way he would treat all those skeptics. He's treating all those sort of radical skepticism as you're coming to an absurd conclusion for which you should indict the way you're thinking about the world before you try to say, well, I must be thinking about it correctly.

6:35 Seth: Yeah, I think he says with respect to that, to accept that conclusion, you have to be either a philosopher or a lunatic. And that really is where he starts from. Let's just say the conclusion is patently absurd, so there must be something wrong with the argument or the premises. And he respects it enough to not just simply say, because the conclusion is absurd. I'm just going to ignore. He really thinks, like, he's profoundly moved by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He thinks there's a lineage of thought. He actually says numerous times in what we read that he likens philosophy, really philosophy of mind, if you will, to science and says, you know, we need to build and refine.

We're not going to develop the entirety of a complete science of mind overnight. But, you know, what these guys were doing was building on things. And they're sharp thinkers and they're brilliant human beings, so let's take them seriously. But he identifies the paradigm of the.

7:44 Mark: The parapatetics, peripatetics, the Aristotelians, the ancients, basically the ancients.

7:49 Seth: So he says, you know, there were hundreds or maybe even thousands of years of development along that line. And Descartes comes along and blows it all out of the water and we start all over again. Descartes was right to blow them out of the water doesn't mean that the research paradigm that we've gotten through, Cartesianism, is the right one. Or at least he doesn't think so. And so you're right. It's shockingly modern, shockingly modern in the way that he thinks not just about scientific development of knowledge, but also of sensation. Wes I think in the lead up to this, you were talking about drawing an analogy to, you know, GE Moore. It's really impressive and he's, you know, as clear a writer. Unless this text has been amended somehow to make it into modern English, you won't find anything from the 1800s or the early 1900s that's, that's written this.

8:42 Wes: Well, yeah, he's a literary dude and you can see allusions all over the place to Shakespeare and Milton. He uses this phrase, darkness visible at one point, which is right out of Milton's Paradise Lost. And his writing, yeah, is way more accessible and enjoyable, I think, than the average philosophical treatise of the time. It feels less dated and it feels in a way more honest and down to earth in line with his whole embrace of common sense. I do want to say, in the spirit of comparing him to G.E. moore, for those listeners who might be thinking, oh no, not another one of these people who kicks a rock and therefore says it must be there.

I think it's more sophisticated than that. I think the more sophisticated version of this argument is that, look, when we philosophize, we bring with us this enormous number of assumptions about the world. And we do that even if we are moving into skeptical territory. And so our skeptical conclusions are way in, are grounded in all these premises. And if the conclusions contradict the premises, then you, you have to say, well, that there must be something wrong with the conclusions. In other words, as I've said many times on the show, there's something self limiting about skepticism, if you think about it.

And I want to say one more thing about this phrase common sense. It's not just, oh, you know, you see it so it's there. You kick it so it's there. Look, everyone knows it. You're stupid and a lunatic if you don't believe it. It sounds like that sometimes, but the point is larger. What he means by common sense is that we have been endowed naturally and now we know by evolution. Of course, he talks about nature all the time and what he calls the furniture of the understanding, which is one of the reasons why Hume accuses him of going back to innate ideas.

But we have these natural dispositions, right? We have brains, we have minds, brains are evolved to function in certain ways. And a lot goes on before we ever even talk about what we're conscious of, before we ever make our philosophical judgments. The way we are constituted as human beings includes all this prior stuff, right? Well, so what Kant would call the a priori synthetic or the categories of the mind or what Cognitive scientists would call certain brain modules. Right. It's all there underneath it. And that, in a larger sense, is what he means by common sense.

Right. We are not just minds floating free. We are natural creatures embodied in a natural world whose minds. Minds and brains are real things and influenced by reality.

11:21 Dylan: I like the way he talked about powers effectively. And I think you're right that in the end, Hume, I sort of was surprised Hume even responded to him. When after I read Hume's responses, it was like he wasn't seeing what Reid was talking about. And that he glosses Reid's talking of Powers as being part of what as innate ideas seems to be, just not even engaging with understanding what that distinction would be.

11:51 Mark: So just to clarify, we read this critical edition by Derek Brookes, 1997, and part of it is this Hume Reid exchange, which is only about 10 pages long, and Hume's are mostly quite short. That it is. Somebody presented. Reid's friend presented this to Hume. Hume sort of pointed out. One of the things that he pointed out, which I think is what makes Reid most modern, is that he said, well, I'm not sure what your method is. And Reid's response was like, well, I think you should have a method, but I don't think you need to be ostentatious about it.

And Reid is not a system builder that he specifically says, anybody thinks that they can reduce all of any science to a few principles and deduce everything from that has got to be just grossly oversimplifying things. And then he gives us in the introduction and in the conclusion, a sort of historical diagnosis of what went wrong, of where this theory of ideas, this ideal theory as he came. In other words, the only thing that we ever perceive is our own ideas. The only thing we can ever think is ideas that correspond, at least according to Hume, to impressions.

Yeah. Where did this whole thing come from? And for the most part, it's a matter of people choosing too narrow a foundation to build things on. So Descartes, for instance, thought that the only thing I can be certain of is that I exist. Or really, I can be certain that there are perceptions and thoughts, there are mental contents, and that I can also be certain that, well, these things have to have a bearer. They have to have an agent that has them. And Hume, of course, didn't even think that the latter one was something that is certain. And Reid finds it scandalous that he would bring that up as something that you might doubt and rather also that the self is consistent and over time, well, you know, Locke brought that up as something to doubt and he had a response to it, that it's memory that makes the self contiguous over time.

But Reid's point is it's just as obvious to us, it's just as undeniable that there are physical objects in the world that we walk around among and that I exist, that I exist over time, that I have mental contents. Some of these contents are memories, that memories are different than perceptions. Perception. When I perceive something, I don't just have an idea, but I actually have a judgment that this thing that I'm perceiving exists and that it is separate from me. I mean, I don't know if he goes that far, but. Yeah. So that there are just a list of things that end up being common sense.

And like, why would you just pick one of them and say we have to build everything on this foundation?

14:29 Seth: Yeah. I think what he says specifically there is that it has existence. There's judgment built into the simple perception that when you are experiencing something, you're experiencing something that exists.

14:42 Mark: And then when you remember something, you're remembering that it did exist and that it had such and such properties. That there are. That there are judgments involved in perception. You don't just perceive that I am having a perception. You perceive that the chair is there, that it has this shape, that it's this distance from me. A whole bunch of things.

15:01 Wes: Yeah. The point isn't that we're always right. So I think, yes. What he wants to say, and this is in line with the critique of the myth of the given, is that we don't just have raw experiences of the world that are non propositional by the time they rise to the level of experience, they are propositional, at least to the extent that they involve this existential claim. And the existential claim is twofold. We'll find out towards the end of the book. On the one hand, it's that it's this sensation exists right now for me, and then also that there is something causing that in me.

Right. If I'm attributing it to an external object. So there's some mind independent entity to which this experience is related. So he's contrasting that with what in the ideal system, and this is principally like Locke's version of it, he's putting together Descartes and Malebranche and Locke and Berkeley and Hume all into, you know, lumping them all together in a way. But I think for Locke in particular, we start out with these simples, these simple ideas, either impressions or more general ideas. And Then we concatenate them, we relate them.

And that relating is. If we want to give an account of belief or propositions, we talk about these relations between these simple elements, these ideas. It's very. It's analogous to modern science with atoms and building up things out of atoms. But Reid wants to say no. In fact, it is relational, you could say, or propositional from the ground up. You could also say formal if you wanted. We don't. Right. We don't just have these simples and then relate them to form our beliefs. Something is weaving them together in the background before we ever come to it, with consciousness judgments.

16:55 Mark: Although saying something is propositional, we shouldn't go so far as when Rorty said things are propositional that seem to deny that there is any sort of knowledge that is pre. Propositional. I think he's perfectly comfortable with qualia, that we have these sensations. And in fact, in the hearing section. Wes, you sort of recommended at the end that we just go ahead and read. The hearing section is short. It's only two sections, and the second one is on natural language. And he says everybody, in addition to language per se, which is an artificial language, is conventions that we've agreed to.

We couldn't even build that. We couldn't point to something and say, cheese, and then, oh, okay, let's call that cheese. We couldn't do that unless we had natural language, which is, I think, this pointing and smiling and grunting and a bunch of other things like that. So we can clearly have meanings. We can have thoughts in our heads that do not involve, you know, a language, per se.

17:53 Wes: Yeah. This is another thing that really excited me, made me want to read them. It's something I've mentioned before. I got really excited. Right. With Schlegel. Schlegel had a very similar idea. It's something I've often thought, and, you know, we kind of got at it in the Tomasello episode a little bit in the sense that we want to talk about some foundation for artificial language, let's call it spoken language. In Tomasello, it's all about joint attention, these very general capacities for consciousness. I think Reid is right that we need something more specific, that we have a system of natural signs that's actually quite robust, including smiling Mark, as you mentioned, and facial expressions.

And this natural language continues alongside artificial language, spoken language, and cannot even be dispensed with. We would become robots. We would lose all expressiveness. Right. If we were speaking without facial expressions and intonation and all the things and body language, all of the things that. That communicates. Language would be very denuded of its power if it were purely devoid. Devoid of that system of natural signs.

19:03 Mark: But that was kind of a distraction from one of Hume's criticisms.

19:08 Seth: Was.

19:08 Mark: Seems like you don't stay on the point. And this of smelling chapter that was most of what we read is mostly not about smelling. He kind of brings us.

19:17 Wes: Which Hume notes that's one of the only things Hume says. Yeah, I don't think the smelling chapter is really about smelling. This is confusing because.

19:25 Mark: Yeah, I like this better that he gives this historical background, here's where things went wrong. And then he just starts by let's analyze specific things. And I'll have to get into my philosophical theory, my epistemological theory in the course of that, as opposed to, first of all, there are common sense beliefs. Let me lay them all out and describe them in order because then you wouldn't have a context for why this matters. But he starts with smelling. He says he's starting with the simplest sense, but it's also the one that is as smelling and tasting are the best in terms of illustrating what was wrong with the imagistic philosophy.

The idea that your idea must resemble what is out in the world. And Berkeley might say, well, how can an idea that's a mental thing, how could that resemble a thing out in the world? Well, if you still think of ideas as images, then the idea of a dog, okay, it's not like a dog in that the idea does not bark, the idea does not have weight, it is not alive, et cetera, et cetera. It has a lot of. But, but it's like. Like a picture of a dog is like a dog, okay, but the smell of a rose is not like the picture in any sense of a rose. It's just something that when we're near roses, we get this sense, we take the rose away and we figure out that that scent goes with the rose and that's all there is.

So it's. He sounds very human here. That it is constant conjunction is what tells us that this is the scent of a rose. And that's all there is to it, that the a rose is. It must have some power to give us this sensation. And when we feel that sensation, we will then subsequently say there is a rose. Or, you know, someone has taken the extract of rose. Maybe it's not a rose itself, but the effluvia of a rose, something that ultimately was designed, came from a rose or was designed to smell like a rose.

21:17 Dylan: And this is where he basically calls Hume effectively to task, was saying, well, of course it's constant conjunction. That's how we think about things. That's part of our natural powers. And again, he points effectively to a kind of Aristotelian point of view that one of our powers is we want to figure things out. We look to find causes and things. So the, you know, the look of the association of the scent of a rose with the rose and testing it out to see I'm getting closer and further away. That inherent activity permeates the ways in which we interact the world.

And then trying to. There's another version of effectively Occam's razor. Let's just try to make it as sort of simple and straightforward as possible as a characteristic of the way in which we try to make sense of things. And he has a nice digression about this where the way in which we might come up with superstitions. He basically says superstitions make sense that people think that way because they end up associating rare events with each other that happen in conjunction with one another. The fact that we have superstitions is a consequence of the ways in which our mind works about figuring out things in the world.

They happen to be ones that end up being wrong, but they are perfectly understandable by the way in which our minds work. Which I really like that fact that he did that. That he was taking both pathological versions and non pathological versions and saying that my description of the why this is happening, the powers of the mind account for both of those. Yeah.

22:51 Wes: I want to reemphasize Mark's point, which is that what he wants us to do is to take smelling is to understand other modalities like seeing by way of smelling.

23:04 Dylan: Yes.

23:05 Wes: Because we are ultimately going to conclude that the copy theory, I think, as Rorty would put it. Right. I think Rorty would like a lot of this does not work. The relationship between our ideas in the world is not a copy relation. And that's clearest in smelling. But it will also become clear. And next time we'll. We'll look at his very long seeing chapter. It'll also become clear for seeing that our experiences are not copies. And we can know that because within experience in a way we have access to both the raw experience. He thinks if we pay close enough attention to it, sort of the language of experience, but also what it signifies, what it's constructing. And we can compare the two and see that they're very much not alike.

23:50 Dylan: In a way.

23:51 Wes: He's following Berkeley's conclusion here about what Berkeley calls spirits, Right, which is just to say metaphysical minds, which is that we don't have any experience of them, any imagistic idea of them. We can still think about them, we can still talk about them, we can still reason about them. Kant picks up on that idea big time, right, and says, yep, the noumena, the things in themselves, we can't experience them. They're not within experience. But we can still talk and think about them. And Reid's going to say, hey, you know what? I'm going to extend Barclay's idea to everything. We're able to think about objects and have objects and have this external reality without our access to it being mediated by copies. You can still call it representation, I think, if you want, but you have to make your theory of representation much more sophisticated.

24:43 Mark: So it's not mediated by copies. I think it is still mediated. So we talked to John Searle, a contemporary philosopher who wants to just be a direct realist, to say, we are not aware of our own ideas. We are not. We are not aware of our own impressions. We are aware of the things in the world. And I don't think that Reid actually goes that far. I think he is saying, look, it's really hard for us, you know, when we have an impression of a chair, to actually focus on what is my impression of the chair. Our thoughts go right to the chair. But that doesn't mean that the chair.

I mean, maybe this is playing with words like, what is it we're actually perceiving? Well, we are perceiving the chair. That's how you use the word. But technically, yes, the thing that I am aware of that I can examine is the idea I have of the chair. Because I don't see, for instance, the back of the chair. I don't. It could be the facade of a chair. So that proves that I don't actually see the chair itself. It's just that I see this representation, this impression that I have, or which impressions don't resemble. He says it seemed, again, you could make an argument that, at least visually, and we're going to do this next time, so maybe I shouldn't be using this as an example.

But even when, you know, the image of the chair seems to look like the physical chair, he still says, I think, following Berkeley, that an idea in your head is a very, very different thing than a physical thing out in the world. So we have to see this thing that we're aware of as a representation of a mediation to the chair, it just doesn't do it by resemblance.

26:24 Seth: So he's speaking against Locke, Berkeley and Hume, specifically Locke and Berkeley, on the idea that all we have access to is ideas that the sensations produce in us, or we have ideas like, you have an idea of the rose. And he's saying, no, I don't have just an idea of the rose. Now, that doesn't mean that he wants to give metaphysical status to something like a percept or something like that. And he says, you know, Hume thinks there are ideas and judgments, and what he wants to say is, whatever's happening when I have a sensation, experience is something other than an idea, because an idea is something that I would only come to have with reflection, with judgment, and yet the sensation itself is delivering something to me.

Not saying that. And this got me to questioning about the idea of, like, for example, the visual example of a chair, because we all know you have to have a lot of conceptual apparatus to actually see a chair as opposed to something else. But like smelling a rose, particularly if your eyes are closed. Right. Seems to be pretty basic. Something in the experience of sensation delivers you all this stuff. Whether or not that's being a realist about that stuff being in the world and being delivered in the perceptual field versus somehow being manufactured or delivered by the senses themselves is actually a question he brings up.

He says it's kind of ambiguous the way we use language to say that the smell is in the rose or something that admits versus the smell is in our head. And he's like, you know, that's confusing. But he wants to be able to account, I think, for some measure of realism there.

28:14 Wes: So the question of whether our experience is mediated, as Mark is saying, he's still suggesting that our experience is mediated. I think yes and no. I think it becomes more complicated. And I think, here's the example I would use. If I'm reading a book and I'm looking at all the letters on the page on one way of looking at it, the thing to which I have unmediated access are just the shapes of the letters, whether or not I know the language. Right. On the other hand, that's not generally what's going on. Right. I'm usually more seeing again through the language to what's being talked about, to the signifieds.

In a way, my relationship to the signifieds becomes more immediate, and so much so that it's hard to even look at the page and the shapes of the letters without seeing the meanings through them. Right. It's hard to do just pure phenomenology by looking at that page. That's the way he says experience works. We have this manifold, this sense manifold. I'm going to put it in Kantian terms. And if we didn't speak the language, it would just look like chaos. It would be sound and fury, signifying nothing. But nature has instilled the language of that in us such that we see through that manifold to what it signifies.

And what it might signify in one case is a chair or a tree. But the language that allows us to go from the sensory manifold to the tree or the. The chair is instilled in us. Now, does that mean that we don't have direct access to the tree that is mediated by this veil of illusion? I think he wouldn't want to say that because this is very different than saying that we just have this immediate access to these image copies in our own mind of the thing that's out there. This sort of like reading the book analogy, I think in a way gives us more direct access to the signifieds, let's say.

30:02 Seth: Well, it obviates the question because if you're not trying to compare your idea to something in the world, but instead you're out of that paradigm altogether by virtue of having that the apparatus necessary to see through to the world, then it's not a. There's no question of correspondence.

30:22 Mark: So I like Seth, that you were talking earlier about sensations, because that's what he talks about. So we do the thing that we have immediate access is our own sensations. It's not the only thing. He says we can think of the objects out in the world just fine. I mean, our way of apprehending them is through sensory input. So it is through sensations, which of course, if the lights are off, if your sensory organs are broken. Right. That shows that we don't have. Even when we have a physical part of it in your nose. Right. So. So it's not the corpuscular, it's not mere light that is, that is giving you the outline of something and bouncing to your eye, but like a piece of the rose has floated into your nose.

Even then, if your nose doesn't work, that sensation doesn't get in your brain. So you wouldn't know that the rose is there. From there, maybe you would sneeze, you would have some other reaction, or you could feel around or something like that, but you wouldn't through smell, find that. But the word idea, he explicitly says is a term of art among these philosophers that he's Trying to argue against. So yes, there are sensations, yes, there are thoughts about objects, there are judgments, there are memories. There are all these things, but not ideas.

Because ideas are specifically like for Hume. They're impressions that have faded or impressions complex idea that have been built.

31:43 Wes: Or they're copies of the original impression.

31:45 Seth: Right.

31:45 Wes: And how Reid characterizes you.

31:47 Mark: Yes, copies of the original impression are made by combining them. Like he just doesn't like this whole way of talking about how we construct mental contents.

31:57 Seth: He thinks that they're sneaking in the peripatetic Aristotelian idea of how ideas come to pass, which is they bombard us until they imprint in the wax. You know that, that metaphor.

32:09 Wes: Right. The form can come whole cloth and press itself on our wax. Basically, as gross as that sounds when I say it out loud.

32:17 Dylan: But I mean the three that he seems emphasizes is sensation, memory and imagination. And to me he's substituting imagination for this notion of ideas that are the ones that fade that from the impressions that were made on our minds. It's all more active. Our minds are actively engaging in all these things. We have these, you know, the sensations that come to us. We have memories that even if we don't have the sensations that can be memories of sensations, but also memories of ideas that are a result of our imagination.

32:51 Mark: Yeah, I think he calls them simple apprehensions. So he doesn't even want to use the word idea. Is that. And we never just have a simple apprehension. Which is what an impression is for Hume is that we just have. I see.

33:03 Dylan: Chair.

33:04 Mark: Do we want to call it chair? Because isn't that connecting it to other chairs? Right. This is the Hegelian like there's no such thing as. As direct sense impression. There's always universals involved.

33:16 Wes: This is why we want to talk about smells first.

33:18 Mark: Yep, yep.

33:20 Seth: They're even.

33:21 Wes: Not even that easy to categorize. Which makes them great. Yeah, yeah. I mean we, we have. Right. So he wants to challenge this idea that we have these simple ideas as simple apprehensions in the sense that they are non propositional, not accompanied by beliefs and unrelated to other apprehensions. And say from the ground up, they are accompanied by at least existential beliefs. This experience is the sensation exists and something out there is causing it. That exists. And I think if he were to elaborate his account, there are hints of this, but they would be relational. From the ground up too, I think Mark, as you're pointing out. Right. So we can't just say we start with simple apprehensions and then relate them together a la Locke. They don't become apprehensions for us except through prior a priori relation.

34:13 Mark: Yeah, I wondered how much of this is just. He actually is Kant, but he's not using any of the fancy terminology and he's just giving a different ontological interpretation of the results. You know, likewise Hume, all this talk about custom and how, yeah, we just have a notion of cause and effect. We can't avoid but think that the object exists when we perceive it. All these things he says are evolutionarily advantageous, right? I mean, of course he puts it in terms of we are well designed creatures, a God would make us such that these things work out.

But for Hume, that's not real knowledge. That's just like some, okay, in place of real knowledge we have this God has set up to make these crude approximations. And so we are forced as a practical matter to live on, you know, with the notion of causality. But we don't actually know causality, right? All we know is just one, you know, regular sequences of things insofar as we've actually experienced them. And so Reid has the same idea that, you know, if our reason were to get involved in all this, Hume says almost exactly the same thing. We would be too slow, right?

The tiger would be coming from us and we would have to sit and do some sort of relating ideas to ideas and this sensation to last. No, it all, it just lets us, it gives us that survival advantage. And that's all knowledge is. Right? And as Dylan was pointing out, it's actually, yes, you could be wrong sometimes. Maybe it isn't a tiger, but these are the capabilities that we come with. And it's not that there's oh, the true knowledge giving capabilities which are always inerrant. And then there's the, the bullshit that just custom has glommed onto that.

That is, you know, just that that was the big jump from Hume to Kant is that Kant is saying, yes, we have this expectation of causality, but it's not just an accident, it's not just an evolutionary advantage, it is an a priori knowledge. I mean, isn't that basically what Reid is saying, right? That we, as soon as we are at the point of being able to understand that something would cause something else, then we see things through the lens of everything is causal and this is just one of the things that we come with. It is one of our instincts, God given, isn't that great?

It is a foundation for knowledge. But he doesn't see the, you know, is it just that he doesn't use the words a priori or is there some great.

36:36 Wes: Yeah, well, I think he, Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I wrote down a priori synthetic over and over again at various places when he's talking about what we've been endowed with by nature and common sense and all that. But I think that his realism is very significantly different from Kant. And this is, and I think it's related, Mark, to your question about mediation, which is that it depends on whether or not you think that the thinkability of objects is enough. Right. So Berkeley said, well, we're kind of cut off from these metaphysical objects, minds and God.

We're cut off when it comes to the empirical, you know, the sort of knowledge that we have of the empirical world. And Kant ultimately went with that kind of idea. Right. There's this whole set of metaphysical objects, gods and minds and all the rest of it, things in themselves that we are tragically cut off from. And what we know are the phenomena as we have constructed them. I don't think what Reid is saying is that all we know are the phenomena as we have constructed them. We really do know the external world. And that saying that it's thinkable, saying that our knowledge is right, we have access through it as signifies rather than as raw sensory data, is not a bug, it's a feature.

It's just the way knowledge works. And you could, you know, maybe you could say, well, this kind of. Maybe it sounds a little bit like Platonic intellectual intuition that conversations didn't like. Right. You know, saying we have direct access through objects, through thinking them now as opposed to sensing them. Yes. You know, sense mediates it in the sense we need the language to get to the thinkables, but we still get some sort of direct access to a mind independent reality through that. And I, I'm very, very sympathetic to that now that I've woken up from my Kantian dogmatic slumber for the last few years.

I'm always sympathetic to these challenges to phenomenalism, especially one which, like this, which is, it's not just dumbly rejecting all the insights of the ideal system. Right. He accepts those insights, but he said he thinks they reveal something else.

38:52 Seth: Yeah, And I think to tie that, that idea back to what we were talking about earlier about regularity and how we're wired, we're built in such a way to experience the world in a particular way. We have the five senses, they have certain jobs, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also the case that we are built to look for regularity. It's not just that the world, yes, the world has a lot of regularity in it. But he basically says something to the effect of for most rational people, regularity is what they notice. And then that's how you build your conceptual framework.

So you experience something and you experience it regularly under the same circumstances and then you come up with a concept of cause or source or whatever the case may be and you're able to predict and act. And he says, you know, people who ascribe regularity to one off instances are superstitious in some sense. It's like if you think the blackbird flew over and this thing happened, so the blackbird must have been the cause. You're clearly not doing what human beings normally do and should be doing. And I think that's actually been borne out, if I'm not mistaken, by modern psychology.

Right. Human beings are. We're just wired to try to find patterns in data. That's what we do. That's why conspiracy theories are such a thing. Right. And that's why we have confirmation bias and all this. It's like we want to see that things are tied together and it's just the way we. And it's probably an evolutionary trait.

40:37 Mark: And when we see causality. I think he wants to go with the everyday conception of causality that Hume explicitly rejects is that the reason that you're wrong about the bird causing the event is, well, you didn't have a good epistemic system, right. That you only saw one instance of it. But even if you saw a lot of instance of it, it still wouldn't be the case because there is not a real causal connection. The bird is not exhibiting a power over the you getting an A on your test or whatever the event was that you thought was related to the bird. So there really is an objective fact of the matter that some things are exerting a power on another thing. And this is just part of the furniture that we're equipp with for how we understand the world. Even though we don't know what these powers ultimately are?

41:27 Seth: We don't know, but we posit that there is one.

41:31 Dylan: Yep.

41:31 Wes: Well, do we not know what the powers really are? That sounds very Cartesian or ideal system way of thinking.

41:37 Seth: Well, the way he says it is, if there's a law of nature, so to speak, that we know, we would cite it. But if we see regularity and we don't have an explanatory law at this point, we presume that such a thing is intact until we discover it. Or prove it or whatever the case may be.

41:55 Dylan: And we need to be a little bit careful about regularity here. At first I realized I was misunderstanding what you meant, Seth. It's not regularity in the sense of everything is staying the same. It's that the differences we see, the changes we see have patterns in them, and so the causes have effects that have a regularity to them. And that sequence of cause and effect allows us to make decisions about what's going to happen. So that's the kind of regularity we're talking about.

42:28 Wes: He talks about this in section 9 of chapter 2 on smelling on page 41. This is where he says that superstition basically has the same grounds as science. Yes, our desire to find connections between things. But in the case of superstition, we conclude, quote, unquote, rashly from too few instances. If we just had more data, we could build a better model, let's say. So this is all in the service of saying he wants to make a point about this is in service of a larger argument. He wants to deny that the quote, unquote, vulgar, right? So. So that the average naive realist person believes that the qualia are out there in the things.

So in the case of smell, Hume would say, and this is one thing Hume didn't found kind of incomprehensible in their exchange. Hume would want to say, well, the vulgar think that the smell of the rose is out there in the rose, the qualia is out there, and they just don't make this distinction between what's in their heads and what's out there. And Reid wants to make this very subtle point about causality and about the word smell. So he wants to say the word smell is an equivocation. It really has two meanings in common language. One of them is the qualia is our subjective experience of the smell, and the other is the thing that's causing it.

Right? The little particles that the rose is giving off that'll ultimately bind to the epithelium of our nose and produce nerve impulses and all that stuff that becomes a brain state that becomes the smell. Reid wants to say, yeah, no, the average person is not actually confusing those things. It's just a feature of language that those. That the cause and effect are so regularly together that we didn't feel the need to have a different word to denote the two. So I use smell for my subjective feeling of the smell and the smell for the thing out there.

It's a smell, which is to say, you know, maybe the particles or Whatever you want to say, the causes. So, in a way, one name serves both things. But I think this connection also gives you an insight into his epistemology, which is that we, in a way, we can know the causes by the effects. It doesn't. We don't have to know the things in themselves by the copies. We could know the causes by the effects. Maybe that's the way to put it.

44:51 Mark: That's the way that we know them. Yeah.

44:53 Dylan: And he starts this off at this chapter, really pointing at those powers. Right. So in order to further understand how we come to conceive a quality or virtue in the rose, which we call smell, and what this smell is, it is proper to observe that the mind begins very early to thirst after principles which may direct it to the exertion of its powers. And then he moves right on to cause. Then this, when found, we call the cause of it, not in a strict and philosophical sense, as if the feeling were really affected or produced by that cause, but in the proper sense for the mind to satisfy if there is a constant conjunction between them. And such causes are really nothing other than laws of nature.

45:41 Wes: So he'll go on to say it's very similar with magnetism.

45:45 Dylan: Yep.

45:46 Wes: Magnetism signifies both the power of the magnet to pull the iron and the tendency of the iron to move towards the magnet.

45:52 Dylan: Yep.

45:52 Wes: We give the name magnetism to both. Same. Same thing with gravitation. Right. The pulling property and the being pulled property. Both those properties we think of as gravitation.

46:03 Mark: Well, that's why I was saying that we don't know what those things are.

46:06 Wes: Well, this is what I'm about to address that point. So, yeah, yeah.

46:09 Mark: We attribute to cause some vague, indistinct notion of power to produce the effect.

46:13 Wes: Right. So that's. Right. I wanted to connect. Yeah. This to your previous point, Mark, which is, yeah, Locke is perfectly happy to say, yes, secondary qualities correspond to some. This is Locke's word, power in the body. In the body that produces the secondary quality. So that in the case of color, for instance, the color is not out there in the object. It's power. Right. To reflect a certain wavelength of light, blah, blah, blah. And that makes it sound like. Well, we don't really know the power by way of knowing the qualia. Am I wrong? Do we. Do we not know the causes by knowing the effects? Do we not, in some sense know the powers by knowing their effects on our consciousness?

46:56 Mark: Well, we don't know why that the rose causes that smell unless you do some botanical research, apart from Just smelling it into the rose. You really don't know.

47:07 Wes: Leave it.

47:07 Mark: You certainly don't have a theory of smell that like you don't see the little pieces of the rose flying off into your nose or whatever. No, no, no.

47:13 Dylan: But Mark, this becomes just the process of doing investigations that you ask a question of why and why and why and why again, down and down and down. It doesn't obviate the observation that he's making. You know, at the bottom of page 42. You know, the vulgar are commonly charged by philosophers with the absurdity of imagining the smell in a rose to be something like the sensation of. Of smelling. But I think unjustly, for they neither give the same epithets to both, nor do they reason in the same manner from them.

47:45 Mark: What is.

47:46 Dylan: So this is the thing that Wes has been talking about, that there's the difference between the smell and the smelling. What is smell in the rose? It is the quality or virtue of the rose or of something proceeding from it, which we perceive by the sense of smelling. And this is all we know of that nature. But what is smelling? It is the act of the mind, but is never imagined to be quality of the mind. Okay, so the mind is acting on the sensations.

48:13 Seth: Right, because you can't smell in the past or the future. Yeah, yeah. Smelling is being in the presence of the thing. Remembering the smell is something different. But like, if you are actively, as you said, attending to it, to a sensation, you are very much in the present and very much in the presence of the object that is producing that.

48:42 Wes: I think we're talking about remembering smelling. Now we're supposed to make a Proust reference. Right, but we're not going to do it.

48:47 Mark: I was just trying to put together a song of like, I remember the smell of some. Like, I've never heard that.

48:55 Wes: It's the madeleine. Right? It's the cookie. And then that this becomes the pivot point for an entire novel, or some would say 10 novels.

49:03 Seth: That's part two, Wes. We're going to spend the entirety of part two fleshing out.

49:07 Mark: So an odor brings to memory, but it's much different than the memory of the odor.

49:12 Wes: Yes, good point.

49:13 Dylan: Yes.

49:14 Wes: But Mark, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought what you were trying to get at was the extent to which our access to what I'm calling the Qualia, right? The subjective experience of the smell of the rose, the pleasant scent, the extent to which that actually constitutes, quote, unquote, knowledge of the external world, when the external world seems to be something so different from that subjective experience. Right. It tells us the scent of the rose. Our experience of it tells us nothing about the fact that there are these little tiny particles and they're doing what they do or the biology of the brain, all that stuff, as Dylan's pointed out.

We have to go investigate that, to find that out and use our imagination. Right. On the other hand, we do, right? We can distinguish a rose from a dung pile. There are important things we know about the external world that come with this ability. Anyway, I'm not certain, but I think in line with Reid, I would want to say that there's something about knowing the effects, right, the subjective effects of certain external causes, those effects on our consciousness, that there's something that we can say that, well, that is knowledge of the external world and that's the way it works.

In fact, maybe there is no other knowledge. I don't know if I want to put that strongly, but yeah, I was

50:33 Mark: trying to think of how this relates to Quine's idea that all physical objects are theoretical entities that we build, we construct. I mean, it's just that he doesn't use this Kantian language of us constructing reality. Like, he just seems like he doesn't like that. No, we actually, as you're saying, we learn about reality from this stuff, but we only learn insofar as we have some sort of model that the various experiences that we've had allow us to build. And so he talks about, for instance in the hearing chapter, how the idea of hearing something with closing your eyes and locating something in space just by hearing it.

You know, the stereophonic effect is something that we learn if a baby. It's hard to prove this either way because it seems like as soon as you can interpret audio signals, if you both of your ears are working, then you're going to be know that you hear something to your right, you turn to your right, and so is that something you have to build?

51:34 Seth: This is a good question, and maybe we should save it for the next part, But I think there's a question because it's clearly the capability he's talking about is. Is developed. It's not something he's not talking about. I mean, to some extent he's talking about babies and how we process things, but he's also talking a much more sophisticated level of processing. And we should talk about that.

51:58 Mark: Yeah. Let's start up, continue from this point with our second half. You can get that if you're a supporter already, should be the next thing in your feed or at least very soon. If you want to become a supporter, go to partially examinedlife.comsupport thanks for listening.

52:12 Seth: Thanks.

52:12 Wes: Thank you.