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

0:08 Mark: Listening to Partially Examined Life Episode 352 Part 2 We've been discussing Thomas Reid's inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense. And we have been talking about smelling and his physiological theory to come after that. The question that I had closed our first half with was to what extent is the idea if Reid is saying we don't, all we're directly, all that we actually have is our impressions and then thinking. But yet he wants to say we have not necessarily inerrant but very reliable access to the things in themselves, to real physical objects.

Right. Because these impressions we cannot help but take as the effects of the causes that are these real things. He also says elsewhere that these real things are thinkable, that this was Berkeley, even though he was, you know, trying to be such a good empiricist. All we can know is our own ideas, which means we can never get out of the circle of ideas. And since ideas do not resemble physical objects, we can never know physical objects. But he did want to allow minds that have the ideas, even though the minds are not themselves ideas, he said.

And I hadn't remembered this feature of Berkeley, but I'll take Reid's word for it, that Berkeley was willing to say, well, we can think about those things even though we can't actually perceive them. And so of course Reid asks, well, why can't we just think about physical external objects even though we can't directly perceive them? And so maybe that's what we're doing is that we are constructing models. And by constructing, people often are like, oh, it's arbitrary. No, it's not. It's not arbitrary. You're constructing it based on the evidence that you have.

And you could be wrong. But you know, God is good. Our faculties work well. We are well designed. So they're typically accurate models insofar as, you know, you have the data to support them.

1:59 Wes: Yeah, it's non arbitrary in, in terms of the fact that we are endowed by nature, right, with these innate dispositions to read the language of sensation in a certain way, to read through it to these objects. Is that arbitrary? I mean, he would talk about God and Providence and we would talk about evolution. You could go even farther and talk about existentialist ontology, which is to say we are also beings. We have important things in common with those other beings that we are going to be aware of in one way or another. And our subjectivity. Right.

Even though it's unusual compared to other beings in the world, animals or inanimate objects, it. Part of how it functions is through this basic ontological. Right. It's through a shared ontological structure with those other objects, which is. I'm thinking of Hegel here, actually. So. But whether or not we get as fancy as that, I think. Yeah, maybe. Maybe the idea is that thinkability, you know, we don't have to think of ourselves as tragically cut off from things in themselves just because we say that they're thinkable and not somehow directly within sensation or intuitable.

3:20 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. Well, and in. You're reminding us that Hegel would say that this ontology is something that's shared, it's a community act. But someone like Peirce would as well, you know, the pragmatist would as well. Right. They would go in that direction of saying that the way in which we understand the world is because of a. You know, it's referring through community action of multiple human beings.

3:47 Wes: Yeah. So our social, you know, thinking of Hegel's recognition. Right. You can think of deep ontological grounds for our social natures and the way in which knowledge implicates them.

3:59 Dylan: Yeah. And then I want to go back and reflect on Tomasello as you know, that that activity is, in his argument, a understandable step in evolution of us as beings. That his articulation would point, is distinct from animals that don't have those kinds of language or those kinds of even implicit ontologies based upon the way they behave.

4:23 Mark: Should we start diving more closely into parts of the text here?

4:29 Wes: Sure.

4:29 Dylan: I'm just.

4:30 Wes: I was looking to see where you've covered quite a bit. I think maybe the thing to do, because it's a little bit puzzling, I think the more one thinks about it. Section three of On Smelling of Chapter Two, which is.

4:47 Mark: Starts on 2728.

4:49 Wes: So he wants to make this distinction between. We've discussed this quite a bit. There's a belief in present existence going along with sensation and a belief in past existence going on with memory. And that imagination is actually the only one of these mental states that is a simple apprehension. So whereas all the ideal system philosophers treated sensations and memories on par with imagination. Right. Which is part of what leads to skeptical problems, treated them as simple apprehensions. For him, they come with these beliefs. But in particular, he'll want to say, and this is on page 28, he will want to say that when I have a memory of a flower that I experienced yesterday, the thing in the past, or the past sensation, that's a little bit unclear, which is the immediate object of my memory and imagination.

So it's not that I just call up an image in the mind that resembles the flower I experienced yesterday, and then the object of my memory is that image in my mind, quote, unquote. The individual thing which I saw and smelled is the object of my memory. Do we buy that?

6:06 Dylan: Well, earlier on the page, I think related to this, he's trying to say that, look, some of these things are just the symbols, right? These are the fundamental pieces. So he says, why sensation should compel our belief of the present existence of a thing, memory of a belief in its past, or existence in imagination, no belief at all. I believe that no philosopher can give a shadow of a reason, but that such is the nature of these operations. They are all simple and original and therefore inexplicable acts of reason, the mind. So he, in a way, is trying, is saying, look, I'm going by the phenomenology, by the thinking through his theory of mind, is just trying to get to what are the things that are. There's no more bottom to it. It's just the way the mind is working is his claim.

6:59 Wes: So what I'm trying to get at, I mean, I think his claim is a little bit counterintuitive, which is why the ideal system exists, right? So the ideal system says, I had a sensation yesterday of a flower. Today, when I remember it, I represent it. I represent it. I'm not having the experience again of the flower. The flower isn't there, and I'm not having a sensation. I'm having a representation. And that representation is the immediate object of my mind. In the same way, the sensation was the immediate object of my mind in the past. And Reid wants to say no. In fact, it's the individual thing which I saw and smelled which is now the object of my mind when I remember it. It's not a representation. That's the object. It's that thing that was, that no longer is here with me.

7:50 Mark: I guess I'm reading this differently, right? So the third paragraph. Philosophers indeed tell me that the immediate object of my memory and the imagination in this case is not the past sensation, but an idea of it. So it's not between. The conflict that you're saying is between is it the past sensation that's being pulled up, or is it the actual object he is just talking about? Is it the past sensation that's pulled up or a faded copy of the past sensation, the object is not one of the options. According to just the text I'm reading

8:19 Wes: here, the reading he's giving. The paragraph starts out with the view that he rejects the ideal system, which is that those philosophers say, I bring up an idea, an image, a phantasm, a species of the odor I smelled. That idea now exists in my mind, in my sensorium. And what I contemplate is that idea. And I find that that idea is a representation of what is past. Or in the case of imagination, what may exist. Right. So one is memory, one is imagination. This is the doctrine of the ideal philosophy. So that he rejects upon the strictest attention. Now he's going to give us his realist account. Memory appears to me to have things that. That are past and not present ideas for its object. This is the radical and.

9:10 Mark: Well, that's. That's ambiguous. That's. Is the thing that is past the flower yesterday or is it the flower sensation yesterday?

9:19 Wes: Well, he speaks ambiguously about this. This is something I paid a lot of attention to. Sometimes he speaks as if it's the past sensation that's the object. Sometimes he speaks as if it's the past thing that's the object. And in the very end of this book he kind of covers both bases. So maybe the way to think of it is it's both in the sense that the thing that I say I'm saying exists is both the past sensation and the thing that caused the past sensation. In a way, they are both the object. But whether it's the past sensation or the past object, it's still quite a radical claim. It's not a present representation.

9:56 Dylan: Lines 35. At the very bottom he says, when I remember the smell of the tuberose, that very sensation which I had yesterday and which has now no more any existence is the immediate object of my memory. And when I imagine it present the sensation itself and not any idea of it, it is the object of my imagination. So it seems to me it's a fundamental act of memory and the memory is being manifest as a instance of it. But I don't know. I guess I'm not seeing the notion that the memory is being somehow a physical mind replaying of the sensation itself.

10:40 Mark: I think you're right, it is not. I think that is actually the point is that this is not a question of. Because we're, I think, dilemma. As I was just putting it was. Memory is. I am right now accessing something that's in my mind right now and I am looking at it. So the question is, did I somehow Pull up that exact sensation from yesterday. I certainly didn't pull up the thing from yesterday because I don't have access to that. Or is it pulling up a faded version of that? It actually sounds like the faded version is better. Right? If you think that memory is like the wax that we had a sensation, an impression, and it created something within me, and then I'm trying to access that module, however, it is stored neurally and things can go wrong.

If you thought that I could actually pull up the very sensation, that just implies that memory is inerrant. But I think neither of these is correct. It's actually just saying that the immediate object is something in the past. So don't think of all mental acts as an examination of current mental contents. You can have a past mental content. That's what memory does.

11:45 Wes: They say these are intentional objects. He's talking about intentional objects. Again, very prescient.

11:52 Seth: Wes.

11:52 Mark: I was thinking, just like you, that, like, early on in this, I had some notes like, isn't he supposed to be a realist? It seems like he's talking about impressions, and we only have access to the impressions. And it's only toward the end of the chapter that he makes it really clear that, oh, the impression, because it gives us the belief and knowledge about the thing that caused the impression, then it's, in effect, about the things in themselves. And I thought this was not an accident. Not that he was just being inconsistent, but that he was actually sort of weaning us off the system of ideas gradually. So that at the beginning of this, just in this chapter, at the beginning of it, he really is talking about just sensations, mental contents. And it's only when he actually explicitly introduces that several sections after the one we're reading, that he's talking about the objects.

12:44 Wes: You remind. You reminded me of what I wanted to say, which is that there is some similarity for me. It helps me to understand it to the way Wittgenstein talks about concepts, right? Because you might think concepts are ultimately imagistic as well, if you have a less sophisticated account of concepts. And in fact, they're not. Right? And so when we read a page and we're reading word after word, we don't understand written language by calling up an image of every single word that we're reading. And even if we did, the image would just be a schematic in a way.

It would just be another word. It would be another signifier. And that, I think, is the way he thinks. The phenomenology of memory works. We can have an Intentional object in the past. And that's not. It's not a crazy, contradictory thing in his system because it's just the way experience works as well. We're taking intentional objects as signifieds beyond the sensory manifold already in the present. And so it works quite well for an account of memory.

13:47 Seth: Well, I'm wondering. I just read through to the end of that section three while you were talking. And I think the work he's trying to get that distinction to do maybe isn't. He's not trying to provide an objective metaphysics. He's saying these are actions of mind, and here is what I get out of those actions. So this is really. He's trying to make the argument in this section that the mere act of sensation provides all the evidence you need and all the evidence you'll ever get for the existence of a thing. And so since, you know, ultimately he's saying that the skeptical argument is the one he's trying to counter in this text.

You know, he may be ambiguous as to whether the object of memory and the object of sensation. He says it's the same object but operated upon by different faculties of the brain. So he's, he's sort of ambiguous as to what, what that would look like. How could a sensation be a memory? What does it mean when for a sensation to become a memory versus a present experience or something like that? I don't know that he's. We're going to get a satisfactory answer for that. But he basically says sensation is evidence for existence, memory is evidence for past existence.

Imagination provides no evidence for anything. And that's what you need to know,

15:23 Dylan: of course, is right or makes sense to be concerned about sensation and how it comes through. But going back to Wes's comment about reading something and what it means to understand that, according to Wittgenstein, is that we're going to have memories of things. And in fact, you know, much of our thinking has nothing to do with sensations at all. They have to do with memories of things. And those memories aren't necessarily have anything to do with sensations. The memory of the book that I read isn't about the sensation of reading.

16:04 Wes: Let's take the memory of the walk I took yesterday.

16:07 Dylan: Fair enough.

16:08 Wes: Because in the ideal system, there's the experience of the walk, right, which is really vivacious, my original experience. But then the memory is kind of like that, but it's just fuzzier and less vivacious. And I don't. It's maybe schematic. It's like a sketch. Those Colors are not filled in or however you want to think about it. Right. It's just a weaker version of the actual experience, of the actual sensations. And I think his claim is actually quite innovative, which is that. No, it's not. You may want to think about it that way, but it's actually not what. That's not what's happening when we have a memory. It's not like having a fuzzy re. Experience of something. It is directed. Yeah. I don't know how you would put it, except to say that it's more like our access to objects through thought.

17:00 Dylan: That's what makes the whole operation of the mind work on both things that are the result of sensations as well as things that are our thoughts. Right. This is. I mean, it's innovative, but it also answers a lot more questions.

17:15 Mark: I think a walk is difficult because it is over time and it was not a sensation.

17:20 Wes: Let's get back to smell.

17:22 Mark: It was. Right, so a particular smell.

17:24 Wes: Yeah.

17:25 Dylan: What you had on your walk.

17:27 Mark: Yes.

17:27 Wes: Now we know why the smelling is. Yeah, I.

17:30 Mark: You know, the smell of cat pee in my house with my. My misbehaving.

17:35 Wes: Forget about the rose. Let's go straight to cat pee.

17:37 Mark: Yeah. I mean, that is very distinct. And I can kind of close my eyes and try to summon that to mind. I can't summon it to the degree of vividness that I would react in a negative way as I would if actually struck by the smell. But it does seem like the idea in that version. Like if you're actually going through the effort to picture it, it seems like the idea. The old. The version he's arguing against is correct. It's just that usually when you're remembering a walk, it has been so processed from those initial reactions that you wouldn't even say it's a pale version or it's a series of images. It's more like, I remember that I went on a walk.

18:14 Seth: No, no, I disagree with that.

18:16 Wes: Well, but that's just. The cat pee example is really good because I can. I feel like, yeah, I do kind of smell it. When you evoke it. I can kind of smell it. Yeah, I'm not, but I kind of am. And so that. That intuition is counter evidence to his.

18:31 Seth: I would contest that because I was just about to say that the memory of a smell is nothing like the experience of smelling it. Like to me that they're qualitatively completely different things. It's not a reimagining, a weaker reimagining of the experience itself.

18:49 Wes: I'm kind of Torn.

18:50 Dylan: Yeah, I am, too. Because, like, I know that we haven't done the taste, but. But when I think about whether I want to have something for dinner, I often imagine I, like, chew it in my mouth. I'm like, what do I want to have for dinner? And I guess I think the same thing is about thinking. If I'm remembering being at the pool when I was a teenager, when I was a pool rat, and I'm just trying to put myself back in the presence of that and thinking about what I see and what the environment is like, I will be recreating, like, the smell that I have. What is the smell of chlorine to me? Not just the idea of chlorine, but something there's, you know, and I. And I don't know physiologically if. If I'm just making shit up, you know, or if I'm actually, you know, there's something being triggered about.

19:44 Seth: I guess that would be. The question is could we see whether the. The things that, like when you smell chlorine, like, map what goes on in your brain and what things get fired and all that, and then, you know, you have a strong memory of smelling chlorine and see if the same thing happens, it seems like we could settle that.

20:03 Dylan: I wouldn't be surprised at all if that was the case because of, you know, the observations that the having things that make you smile will create certain sensations in you and certain hormonal reactions, and then the act of smiling will do the same thing, even in the absence of that.

20:21 Wes: Well, imagine tasting spaghetti sauce. Can't you taste marinara pasta? Marinara sauce? Yeah, I was going to say marinara. I wanted to make sure I was very specific without it, without meat.

20:32 Mark: I think all these examples are pointing out how similar memory and imagination are, where he's pointing out that the primary testimony of memory, as was there was a smell. But when I said, I'm imagining, let's summon up the cat pee memory. It's not actually a specific memory of. Remember when I walked in the room yesterday and it really reeked of that? No, it's just like it's built up over time. So it is the concept of cat pee.

20:59 Dylan: Yeah. Mine was the concept of going to the pool, maybe that specific pool, but not that specific time that I went to that specific pool on that specific day.

21:07 Wes: I mean, he himself says, you know, you couldn't, you know, if someone were blind from birth, you would never. It's like the Mary experiment, right? You would never be able to tell that person what color Is like they had to have had the experience. So he's well aware of the significance of qualium. And you know, if I'm remembering a cat pee smell or taste of spaghetti sauce, hopefully not at the same time. There's got to be, you know, the. I can't have the concept without having had the qualia part of.

21:40 Dylan: We went back to this, we went back to sensations and you know, and it makes sense. This is. Reid does this himself. Right. He's going to sensations to try to understand the mind. But I am drawn to his pointing to the connection to memory and imagination as given purchase for how you think about things. And he refers to cause and effect in our understanding of what a law of nature is. That's not sensation. Right. And that's not even memory. Right. That's acts that are in imagination, that we are able to then put them together to come up with a characteristic of a claim about the world that then when we have other sensations, we see it as confirming or denying.

22:32 Mark: I mean, according to his opponents, it's always a matter of putting things together in imagination. Presumably you can think about cause and effect in general or wonder. Is there a cause and effect in this? But that's all derivative from a primary experience we have of something as being caused. It's not imagined. It's not primarily a matter of imagination. It's primarily a matter of perception.

22:53 Dylan: Yeah, I guess maybe I'm just. Maybe I'm. I'm diverting from. No one thinks about the world in terms of Newton's laws the way Newton did. They're presented with that framework. And that framework is an act of imagination about interpreting the world. Right. This is true for all kinds of things that we interact with the world with. We're not interacting with them as derived from sensation. We don't build up the world from sensation. We don't build up the world from all kinds of experiences of cat pee and tasting marinara sauce. We bring to the world those acts of imagination. Right. Because of our social interactions and the way in which we. Yeah. For our social interactions, you know.

23:37 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think that's. Imagination is one way of talking about theory ladenness.

23:42 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, that would be right.

23:43 Wes: Experience, the stuff, the way the mind works things over in advance.

23:49 Mark: Yeah. I think this is the model building thing. So the whole figuring out where things are in the stereo space by hearing when I close my eyes is something that we learn and is informed by experience. But do we build it out of experience? It's not in the way that the Human empiricist maybe thinks that we do, that we explicitly make these judgments or something. It's more that we get these, you know, I see something over there and it makes a sound and then I have that encoding in my head so I don't have to make a judgment, explicit judgment. Later I just experience it even with my eyes closed as it's happening over to my right.

24:32 Dylan: Yeah, I'm realizing he doesn't really talk about this.

24:34 Seth: Right.

24:34 Dylan: He points to it. And I think that he would say that the model building, like the example that you gave of, you know, that you interact with the world with is the small version that we can explore very directly with respect to sensation. That becomes making a law of nature or thinking about concepts and acts of imagination in general, writing a novel.

24:58 Seth: So I thought in the section on smelling, when he's talking about our natural propensity to identify the source of our sensations, you know, the only way that you would identify the source of a smell would be to approach the object and have the smell increase in intensity. And you would learn presumably that say, for example, when you're right up on top of a rose that's in bloom, you're going to get this intense smell. But if you smell at a distance, it's less intense or, you know, whatever. And I think in the case of hearing it would be the same thing where you, you know, if you're hearing something and you're.

As you get closer to it, it would get louder and as you brought it into focus in your, in your sensation, you would hear it in both ears and whatever that. It seems to me that not like language, that you could conceivably talk about the senses having that as part of their equipment to be able to help you get to that point and stay in line with the notion that the senses give us some kind of immediate information about what we sense. So it wouldn't just be the existence of a rose, it would be the existence of a rose that's at a distance or the existence of a rose that's much closer.

You know, that maybe somebody came up behind me with a rose and I could smell it and it was intense and I was like, okay, there has to be a rose close to me, that sort of thing. Whereas I think it gets a lot less clear. Although maybe not when you're talking about vision in the chair or the three dimensional object. Right.

26:50 Wes: That.

26:51 Seth: I don't know, maybe vision is just so wired that you do it fundamentally does deliver three dimensional images to you at some point. You know, as part of the. The basic experience is three dimensional. But to be able to say that's a chair. And I know that because of X, Y and Z, I don't think could conceivably be attributed just to sensation.

27:15 Mark: I should say that, yes. So we're going to do this vision chapter next time. I mean, maybe touch if you want to. Nobody read that yet, but the vision by itself is 125 pages in this, whereas the smelling chapter is much shorter than that. It's 30 pages or whatnot. I guess there will be a lot of subtlety that gets in here. Even though, as we were saying, he doesn't actually say that much about smelling here. He just kind of goes into his epistemic theory once he's established that the object of smell doesn't seem very much like the sensation of smell. Now let's talk about other things for a while. It's actually, I had to read the taste chapter, which is only like three pages long, to get more about smell.

27:58 Dylan: I mean, the beginning of smell is basically a summary of, in a few sentences of the scientific account of the mechanics of smelling. You know, effluvia goes up your nose. We process that. It's always nice to think that in addition to roses, when you smell the cat pee, it's because there are little particles of cat pee going in your nose.

28:24 Wes: Lovely.

28:25 Mark: Well, it even refers to my intro. I refer to a soul accounting for my unique scent. And that's actually just somebody else's view that he refers to in passing is like, I don't really care what the metaphysical basis of smell is for these purposes. I'm just, I'm really concerned with the epistemology of it. So you know, let's just establish the physiological stuff that there, there is not conflict about. And maybe there is more to know. But he sort of is, is happy for his purposes. Right? You don't actually need to know. You don't need to be a neurologist of smell to accomplish what he's trying to accomplish in this paper.

29:00 Wes: Yeah, so we've discussed section three, right. The first two sections where he discusses smell. We've discussed, I think section three, which is about. Right, the objects of sensation and memory and whether they're simple apprehensions. He'll go on to say in section four he wants to make this claim, and again, in the domain of theory ladenness, that there are judgment and belief in some cases precedes apprehension. So again, contrary to the ideal system, you don't start out with these simple apprehensions. These ideas and then build them up into beliefs.

You need beliefs from the ground up. What are those beliefs? Well, in the case of sensation, the belief that the sensation and the object causing it exist. Later on in section seven, he'll talk about there's an implicit belief in the subject that I am having this sensation. So this sounds very much right. It should be very reminiscent of Kant's Apperception. And I think all of our experiences are accompanied by this implicit attribution of the experience to a subject. So these are the kind of a priori judgments or beliefs that he points to. But of course we could, you know, the way Kant does, we could expand them endlessly to talk about this very, very complicated structure that must precede any having an experience at all.

So I don't know if we want to talk about that Section 7 or, you know, we could.

30:35 Mark: He's just, he's going off on, on Locke and on Descartes and I feel like we've already sketched out the differences that he has from these folks. That sort of bringing back to mind the specifics of Locke's philosophy is not entirely on point here, but if there's anything that people had big notes about, we can certainly get into them.

30:57 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked about most of what's in this smelling section.

31:02 Seth: Do you want to talk about Hume's response or the conclusion, or do you want to talk about the language section?

31:08 Mark: I mean, the conclusion is interesting in that he gives this sort of a different version of the history of philosophy and how and equate, you know, draws this explicit comparison between the Aristotelians, the Peripatetics, as he calls them, and the Cartesians in that both of them in different ways. I really like this distinction he makes between, okay, the careful way to do philosophy is to really pay attention to your experience. It's really hard to do that because your mind just goes straight to the objects. So this is, this actually sounds in the section like he's against common sense, because common sense sense doesn't like to do the hard work that philosophy does.

It's just that philosophy, when done right, is not going to end up contravening common sense. But in terms of the. How the common person might understand the workings of the mind are not going to be very reliable because they don't have the patience. Instead, they like to use analogies they like. So he says, like if somebody is a, a sailor, they're going to, and they do an analysis of the mind, they're going to See things comparable to the parts of the sailboat in the mind. That's just the way they're going to describe it. And we are so built.

You know, we've talked before about how all language is metaphorical. It is built on metaphors. And so the way that we talk about the inner world, just calling it inner, that is an adjective that belongs to physical things. And saying we apprehend. I wasn't even aware. Yeah, we conceive, I mean, I guess, yeah, that's like giving birth to. Yeah, we use conceive in a mental sense so often. Right. Again, this is the way it works. It starts as a metaphor and then we become used to the new. So now I didn't even think of all these words as explicitly physical.

But yeah, this is the error that people made. So the ancients, you know, they were kind of in line with common sense, focused on the external things. And when they tried to describe the mind, right, they said, oh, what is there in something in the world? Well, it has content, you know, it has matter and it has form. Well then we must think of the mind in terms of, you know, like think about Aristotle. Oh, maybe the mind, you know, the soul is the form of the body, like, but that's just something that is illicitly imported by metaphor from descriptions of the external world.

And then he says, but with Descartes, you know, he at least got rid of that. But on the other hand, since he started, I only know for sure the things inside. Then he said that they spiritualized the physical improperly, that they thought that there must be, you know, since our ideas must resemble the things that they represent. Therefore, you know, per Berkeley, I guess everything supposedly external actually is an idea as well. Right. They're just mental contents.

33:54 Wes: Yeah, he gives a nice long bullet, I guess a five point account of how the new system goes wrong. So maybe we could go over that.

34:04 Mark: Yeah, because.

34:05 Wes: And again, he thinks, right, Descartes, he thinks all these systems are essentially Cartesian. Whether it's Locke, Berkeley, Hume, they're all the ideal system. They all rest on this central premise about us having only access to our own ideas rather than the external world. It's nice. That positive part about Descartes is that he went that reflective way. He trusted less in analogical reasoning, although he didn't escape it fully as Reid thinks he has. But, but yeah, took it too far. Tried to basically spiritualize the body and its qualities.

I think is the way, is the way Reid puts it, in the sense that we only know external things by way of knowing mental representations according to that account. So whereas you know, the ancients took the material world for granted and reasoned according to an analogy, right? Impressions on the mind or like a seal on wax. Descartes did what Descartes in the other early moderns finish my thought.

35:13 Mark: Well, I mean I would just finish it the way I finished it, that it can't be something exactly the same. Because if Descartes is working with metaphors from the external to say that, oh, and then he imported those metaphors back out to the external, that would make no sense. So it can't be linguistic in a logical.

35:32 Wes: Doesn't get to that until the fifth bullet point. But, but for this first we're actually, we're in the second point now. But what Descartes did was right. The Cartesian principles quote stripped or matter was stripped of all its qualities because people realized that this whole resemblance idea doesn't work right.

35:55 Mark: So first was secondary, that we said, you know, the normal person thinks that the sound is out in the world and the color is out in the world. And Locke says no, no, no, those are all in your mind. But he, he leaves shape and figure and extension out in the world and Berkeley takes those into the mind too. So in that way we're degrading the physical.

36:16 Wes: Yeah, Berkeley, space and time are also right. The primary qualities are also just in the mind, not just the secondary qualities. And then, you know, Kant's pivot point. Kant takes all of that for granted. He says he wants to avoid both of those extremes, right? Both spiritualizing and physical and reifying, let's say, okay, the third point, point three, modern skepticism naturally issues from this new system. So there's no way to have the ideal system and not get to skepticism. Even though Berkeley tried very hard to avoid skepticism. Berkeley was very anti skeptical and Reid was a big fan of Berkeley for that reason before he concluded that it couldn't work, that Hume was right, that

37:01 Mark: Hume knocked Berkeley right.

37:03 Wes: So one of the things he says here, you know, he goes back to Descartes again in this idea that you could deduce everything from the cogito. And he makes an interesting point. So he says first of all, I guess he points to the deficiencies of Descartes science, which is to say that Descartes is into extension and motion as explanatory of everything. He leaves out solidity and force and particles and all that Newtonian stuff. But even that's not enough, right? Because we know that there are these self organizing forms like salts and crystals and Ultimately life, right.

The organic. There's way more going on than in Descartes system. But nevertheless, Descartes and his followers tried to do philosophy of mind on analogy to his pretty simple material system, which is to start with ideas as analogous to matter, right? Simple apprehension, simple ideas. And to talk of their relations on analogy to motion. So you can see here that they are ironically, they're using modern science as their analogy or modern science and where it is at that point. But they're doing something that will lead, he says, inevitably to skepticism.

38:19 Mark: Even though Hume's a skeptic, does he really undercut what science is trying to do? It seems like he just reinterprets what science is trying to do. That it just, it's giving us patterns and we don't see the powers that are in the patterns. We don't. You know, it makes it very nominalistic. It makes it so that when you come up with a scientific theory, you're stating a regularity and you're trying to predict what's going to happen next. And you know, induction is never going to actually be, be something we can be certain of according to Hume, right. Even if just because the sun has always rised in the past, it doesn't mean it's going to rise in the future. There is no real universality to any scientific law. But you can still like, well, there are hypotheses, there are theories, so we can do all of science.

39:06 Wes: And science is about undermine science. It just undermines common sense, or if you want to put that pejoratively, metaphysics, the metaphysics of common sense, folk metaphysics.

39:19 Dylan: So I don't completely get that right, because maybe it's just sort of the philosophers standing an arm's length distance away and just basically saying what you think you're doing is not what you think you're doing, what you're actually doing. You think you're finding out how the world works, using those causal relations to find new ways and new understanding, go deeper and understand more underpinnings about how the world works. But that's not actually what you're doing. You're just finding what happens to be coincidences of action. Well, to me, if you take that skeptical argument seriously, then I mean, it just seems like it means there's no purchase on the world based at all on observations of conjunction. If you refuse to call them cause and effect, if you refuse to say that that exists, then it seems to me that you just say that you don't know anything about the world.

40:18 Mark: Right? You're a computer that can predict, you've been set up with the appropriate data to then predict the next thing. But the computer explicitly does not know

40:28 Dylan: anything and you could never figure anything out. So I mean this is a.

40:32 Mark: Well I thought figuring out. It depends what you mean by that.

40:35 Dylan: Figuring out assumes that there's cause and effect, right?

40:38 Mark: Well you can make a prediction based on the past data. So that's what a scientific theory is supposed to do is that if we build this thing according to these specifications, we can do engineering because we're assuming that there is regularity, understanding that there is no ultimate philosophical grounding for that assumption applying universally.

40:59 Dylan: It's just making me feel like skepticism is such horseshit that I just, I mean it's because it is, it denies the very thing that is leading to the power in the name that you

41:11 Wes: could make us Americans

41:14 Dylan: just because you could possibly be wrong about that. And that's what to me what Reid is particularly clear about.

41:22 Mark: So anyway, yes, for Reid real skepticism is like being mad and yeah at all. You should either just stop doing philosophy or you know, you should stop using reasoning to defend this thing that is supposed to totally undermine reason. It's just that I don't think Hume actually thinks that he's totally undermining reasoning itself. And Descartes explicitly does not.

41:46 Dylan: Right.

41:46 Wes: And also we should recall, right, the only philosopher we could call skeptical is Hume. All the others consider themselves anti skeptical. And when Descartes sets up his skeptical argument, he's just trying to refute the skeptic through reductio ad absurdum. Say look, if you were deceived about everything, you wouldn't be able to doubt the fact or be deceived about the fact that there was someone being deceived. You could put it in a variety of different ways and then you sort of build out the world from there. And Reid's point is. Well, yes, you know, he understands that those earlier philosophers are anti skeptical but they said the seeds of skepticism are in there.

They don't reach escape velocity with their anti skeptical arguments. And by trying to formulate those articles they just get sucked into skepticism, which is where we get with Hume. And Reid's point is we don't have actual arguments against skepticism except that at a ground level when we begin philosophizing we make all sorts of assumptions. And so it becomes right there's something self contradictory about skepticism ultimately.

42:54 Dylan: Well, and not just that we make all kinds of assumptions, but also that we have access. I mean it's the realest Argument we have access to our sense, our sensations are access to the world. And he is clarifying, you know, it's not in the overly simplistic way that the skeptics are trying to characterize it as Reid is taking a. Rather than trying to find grant all the skeptical claims and then try to figure out a way to still save the world and save our understanding of the world despite skepticism, which is I think a way he would characterize Descartes and Berkeley. He's saying the very way in which you're thinking about the world, that is the way in which you're understanding the operation of the mind and it's drawing conclusions about the world is wrong.

43:51 Wes: So these assumptions are very much like Moore's Moorean propositions, right. What Moore calls the propositions of common sense and what Wittgenstein would just call the rules of the language game. So like this is that I think Reid is onto the anti skeptical insight that is really fleshed out in Moore and Wittgenstein which is that there's actually something very deeply self contradictory about skepticism. It contradicts the very frame in which which one is reasoning it. It's like I'm trying to make a move in chess which isn't part of the game of chess.

44:29 Mark: I don't know if he goes, if Reid goes. I mean I buy Reid's account of the history of philosophy, of modern philosophy. I think that Hume makes a good point over these other figures and that Descartes was very arbitrary in supposing that oh well, the existence of my perceptions, that's certain the existence of myself, well that can be concluded from the existence of my perceptions. And Reid says no, no, those are actually equally certain. You don't need to conclude one from the other. And you might as well just grant as just obvious and given the existence of external objects as well that these are all but yeah, but once you take the Cartesian move that you move into this spiral down to Humeanism is inevitable.

I completely buy that and I like Reid's general response that this is when we have a sensation of something, we're given the belief that that thing exists. And though again we're not always right, we are in general right. And these judgments are, he says these original and natural judgments are the inspiration of the Almighty. They're not just simple apprehensions reasoning right. If we had to just have a sensation of something and reason to its, you know, the chair really is there would leave us in the dark. But these direct us to the common affairs of mankind.

They are the common sense of mankind. Anything manifestly contrary to these principles is absurd and it's metaphysical lunacy to be reasoned out of them. So, yeah, his overall point, I don't know. I really like this general approach.

46:01 Seth: I agree. And I was dreading revisiting not only this topic, but this vein, this strain of conversation about it. But I came away really impressed with Reid and also then sad that none of his contemporaries read him and saved us several hundred years of nonsense leading to Moore and victory. Could have just bypassed them.

46:31 Dylan: Well, he's apparently just reading the Wikipedia page. He apparently was taught in philosophy in the 19th century.

46:39 Mark: Yeah, I think he's in the top 10 figures to come out of this period. He's, you know, this is not, this is not someone completely lost to history.

46:48 Seth: Well, I can tell you. Can you? In the 15 years that we've been doing this, can you count on more than one hand the number of times you can recall any of the philosophers we've read citing Thomas Reid versus Berkeley, Hume, Locke? Particularly when you talk about Moore and Quine, Davidson, Wittgenstein, Frege, all those clowns.

47:12 Mark: Now that he's on, we're gonna see them everywhere. We're gonna see the references, everything.

47:17 Seth: What's the name of that phenomenon?

47:18 Wes: I'm pretty sure Kant wrote about Reid and tried to rebut Reid.

47:23 Dylan: Well, he wrote about him according to the thing I read in Wikipedia. He never read him. He tried to rebut him, but he never read him. Oh, really?

47:32 Wes: Okay.

47:32 Dylan: I mean, that was the claim.

47:34 Seth: Maybe Reid just sent him a partial manuscript like he did Hume in English.

47:38 Mark: He was just like, I can't judge the whole thing. You got to judge me the whole thing. And he's like, okay, so I sent you the second half. Now, well, I didn't have both halves in front of me at the same time. I just couldn't judge. Yeah, but it is a lot to ask somebody to read your 200 page plus manuscript and give an opinion on it. So even if you kiss his ass, he kisses his ass so much in this that, like, oh, it's not that these guys were just so, so wrong. It's because. Because they're such geniuses that they would go astray from common sense.

48:10 Seth: Sense.

48:10 Mark: And. But they did so in an enlightening way that can give us the path to figure out how to correct that. You know, he's trying to not, not

48:18 Wes: all of it in the main body of the book is so nice. I mean, he calls something from Hume monstrous. At some point And Hume alludes to this. He says, you know, I'm not going to even respond to the part where he's being a, being a complete asshole. I wish philosophers could just be, you know, above board and nice. But there is a little bit of vitriol. But yeah, their exchange itself, yeah, Reid is just kissing Hume's ass and Hume is kind of being very charitable and nice to read.

48:47 Mark: All right, well we'll get more on this next episode. He definitely was a pleasure to read and so I'm happy to spend to reread for another two weeks here before we talk again. Thanks everybody for supporting. You know you can reach out to us plot comment on the blog post of this episode, Twitter or Facebook and let us know what you would like us to cover.

49:06 Seth: But why not pick up this book?

49:08 Mark: Why not read this along with us? It's really painless. Good night everybody.

49:13 Seth: Good night.

49:14 Wes: Good night.