Editing Thomas Reid (section)

==== Exploring sense and language ====
Reid started out with a 'common sense' based on a direct experience of an external reality but then proceeded to explore in two directions—external to the senses, and internal to human language—to account more effectively for the role of rationality.

Reid saw language as based on an innate capacity pre-dating human consciousness, and acting as an instrument for that consciousness.  (In Reid's terms: it is an 'artificial' instrument based on a 'natural' capacity.)    On this view, language becomes a means of examining the original form of human cognition.  Reid notes that current human language contains two distinct elements: first, the acoustic element, the sounds; and secondly the meanings—which seem to have nothing to do with the sounds as such.  This state of the language, which he calls 'artificial', cannot be the primeval one, which he terms 'natural', wherein sound was not an abstract sign, but a concrete gesture or natural sign.  Reid looks to the way a child learns language, by imitating sounds, becoming aware of them long before it understands the meaning accorded to the various groups of sounds in the artificial state of contemporary adult speech.  If, says Reid, the child needed to understand immediately the conceptual content of the words it hears, it would never learn to speak at all.  Here Reid distinguishes between natural and artificial signs:

:"It is by natural signs chiefly that we give force and energy to language; and the less language has of them, it is the less expressive and persuasive.  ...     Artificial signs signify, but they do not express; they speak to the intellect, as algebraic characters may do, but the passions and the affections and the will hear them not: these continue dormant and inactive, till we speak to them in ''the language of nature'', to which they are all attention and obedience."  (p. 52)<ref name=   "  edBrookes"
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His external exploration, regarding the senses, led Reid to his critical distinction between '[[Sense|sensation]]' and '[[perception]]'. While we become aware of an object through the senses, the content of that perception is not identical with the sum total of the sensations caused in our consciousness. Thus, while we tend to focus on the object perceived, we pay no attention to the process leading from sensation to perception, which contains the knowledge of the thing as real.  How, then, do we receive the conviction of the latter's existence?    Reid's answer is, by entering into an immediate intuitive relationship with it, as a child does.  In the case of the adult, the focus is on perceiving, but with the child, it is on receiving of the sensations in their living nature.  For Reid, the perception of the child is different from the adult, and he states that man must become like a child to get past the artificial perception of the adult, which leads to [[David Hume (philosopher)|Hume's]] view that what we perceive is an illusion.  Also, the artist provides a key to the true content of [[empirical evidence|sense experience]], as he engages the 'language of nature':

:"It were easy to show, that the fine arts of the musician, the painter, the actor, and the orator, so far as they are expressive .. are nothing else but the language of nature, which we brought into the world with us, but have unlearned by disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering it."  (p. 53)<ref name=   "  edBrookes"
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:"That without a natural knowledge of the connection between these [natural] signs and the things signified by them, the language could never have been invented and established among men; and, That the fine arts are all founded upon this connection, which we may call the natural language of mankind."  (p. 59)<ref name=   "  edBrookes"
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Thus, for Reid, common sense was based on the innate capacity of man in an earlier epoch to directly participate in nature, and one we find to some extent in the child and artist, but one that from a philosophical and scientific perspective, we must re-awaken at a higher level in the human mind above nature. Why does Reid believe that perception is the way to recognize? Well, to him "an experience is purely subjective and purely negative. It supports the validity of a proposition, only on the fact that I find that it is impossible for me not to hold it for true, to suppose it therefore not true" (Reid, 753). To understand this better, it is important to know that Reid divides his definition of perception into two categories: conception, and belief. "Conception is Reid's way of saying to visualize an object, so then we can affirm or deny qualities about that thing. Reid believes that beliefs are our direct thoughts of an object, and what that object is" (Buras, The Functions of Sensations to Reid). So, to Reid, what we see, what we visualize, what we believe of an object, is that object's true reality. Reid believes in direct objectivity, our senses guide us to what is right since we cannot trust our own thoughts. "The worlds of common sense and of philosophy are reciprocally the converse of each other" (Reid, 841). Reid believes that Philosophy overcomplicates the question of what is real. So, what does Common Sense actually mean then? Well, "common sense is the senses being pulled all together to form one idea" (Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, 164). Common sense (all the senses combined) is how we truly identify the reality of an object; since all that can be perceived about an object, are all pulled into one perception. How do people reach the point of accessing common sense? That's the trick, everyone is born with the ability to access common sense, that is why it is called common sense. "The principles of common sense are common to all of humanity," (Nichols, Ryan, Yaffe, and Gideon, Thomas Reid).

Common sense works as such: If all men observe an item and believe the same qualities about that item, then the knowledge of that item is universally true.  It is common knowledge, which without explanation is held true by other people; so, what is universally seen is universally believed.  "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.  Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge," (Reid, 155).  The combination of the same ideas, of a thing, by multiple people, is what confirms the reality of an object.  Reid also believes that the philosophers of his time exaggerated what is truly real.  Where most philosophers believe that what we see is not fully what that thing is, for example, Descartes, Reid counters this argument simply by stating that "such a hypothesis is no more likely to be true than the common-sensical belief that the world is much the way we perceive it to be," (Nichols, Ryan, Yaffe, and Gideon, Thomas Reid).  Reality is what we make it out to be, nothing more.

Reid also claimed that this discovery of the link between the natural sign and the thing signified was the basis of natural philosophy and science, as proposed by [[Francis Bacon|Bacon]] in his radical method of discovery of the innate laws of nature:

:The great Lord Verulam had a perfect comprehension of this, when he called it ''an interpretation of nature''.  No man ever more distinctly understood, or happily expressed the nature and foundation of the philosophic art.  What is all we know of mechanics, astronomy, and optics, but connections established by nature and discovered by experience or observation, and consequences deduced from them?    (..)    What we commonly call natural ''causes'' might, with more propriety, be called natural ''signs'', and what we call ''effects'', the things signified.  The causes have no proper efficiency or causality, as far as we know; and all we can certainly affirm, is, that nature hath established a constant conjunction between them and the things called their effects; (..).  (p. 59)<ref name=   "  edBrookes"
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