THOMAS REID: ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE ANATOMY OF THE SELF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES VOLUME 78 Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer Editor Keith Lehrer, University ofA rizona, Tucson Associate Editor Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe Board of Consulting Editors Lynne Rudder Baker, University ofM assachusetts at Amherst Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans Allan Gibbard, University ofM ichigan Denise Meyerson, University of Cape Town Fran~ois Recanati, Ecole Poly technique, Paris Stuart Silvers, Clemson University Nicholas D. Smith, Michigan State University The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume. THOMAS REID: ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE ANATOMY OF THE SELF ROGER D. GALLIE University ofN ottingham. United Kingdom Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-90-481-5095-3 ISBN 978-94-015-9020-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9020-4 Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1998 Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1998 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ix CHAPTER 1: PERCEPTION, SENSATION AND FIRST PRINCIPLES - THE INGREDIENTS OF A SENSE I: The place of sensation in perception II: Notions of primary qualities versus notions of secondary qualities 4 III: Is there room for sensation in the case of vision? 5 IV: Causal accounts of perception 7 V: The doctrine of a sense and first principles 8 VI: Sensations and moral feelings 11 CHAPTER 2: THE VARIETIES OF CAUSATION 13 I: Active power, speculative power and physical causation 13 II: The circumstances in which genuine power can be exercised 15 III: Physical causes versus proper causes 18 IV:Establishing physical and agent causes 21 V: Establishing final causes 22 VI: Establishing that someone has seen something 24 CHAPTER 3: ACTION, MOTIVATION AND MORAL PSYCHOLOGY 27 I: Is agency possible? 27 II: Further difficulties for the possibility of agency 29 III: An alternative to agency? 31 IV: The strength of motives: animal motives, instincts and habits 33 V: The affections: their strength and prevalence 35 VI: Rational principles of action: their strength and weakness 39 VII: The variety of explanatory principles and folk psychology 41 CHAPTER 4: LANGUAGE, CONCEPTION AND REPRESENTATION 45 I: The moderate thesis about conception 45 II: The conception of individuals 47 III: The conception of entia rationis 48 IV: Having conceptions of attributes 50 V: The moderate thesis and Fodor's RTM 52 VI: Interpretations of signs and innate possession of conceptions 54 VII: Innate sources of conceptions and innate conceptions 57 VIII: More on innate sources of conceptions 58 v VI ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE ANATOMY OF THE SELF IX: The explanatory power of computational models of mental acts 59 CHAPTER 5: THE NATURE OF PERSONS 63 I: Some problems on the nature of persons 63 II: Indivisibility of the person and the whole man or woman 64 III: Is a totally disembodied existence for persons impossible? 66 IV: On Reid's declaration that the mind is an unextended and indivisible substance 67 V: Can persons having unextended and indivisible minds and no bodies think or act? 70 VI: Active mind, passive matter 73 VII: The unextended and indivisible mind and the survival of death 77 VIII: Survival based on a just administration of the world 79 IX: The soul or mind as a vital principle 81 CHAPTER 6: MORAL JUDGMENT 85 I: Comparing perceptual and moral judgment 85 II: Linguistic arguments for the objectivity of moral assessments 90 III: Reid and the argument from queerness 93 IV: Reid and the argument from relativity 96 V: Obtaining derivative moral principles 99 VI: The availability of particular first principles of morals 103 VII: On the fallibility of the moral faculty 106 VIII: The moral assessment of particular cases 108 CHAPTER 7: PRESENTING MORALITY 113 I: On the need for instruction in morals and for systematic presentations of morals 114 II: Presentations of morals involving one's duties to God 115 Ill: A presentation of morals based on one's position and its duties 116 IV: Perfect versus imperfect obligation 118 V: Presentations of morals by way of rights 119 VI: On presentations of morals by way of one's good upon the whole 121 VII: Presentations of morals by way of the virtues 124 VIII: Hume's two arguments for a distinction between natural and artificial virtues 128 IX: Reid's rejection of Hume's first argument for the distinction 129 X: Benevolent acts and benevolent intentions 132 XI: Regard to justice and regard to gratitude 134 CONTENTS vii XII: Is to act virtuously to act with virtuous intent without an ulterior motive? 135 XIII: The good effects of justice versus those of benevolence 136 XIV: The requirements of justice and natural rights 139 CHAPTER 8: THE JUDGMENT OF BEAUTY 145 I: The sense of beauty and the external sense of taste 145 II: Judments of beauty and judgments of excellence 148 III: Instinctive and rational judgments of beauty and the first principles of taste 151 IV: Reid, Gerard and Kant's antinomy of taste 154 V: Objectivity and realism in aesthetics 157 VI: Does 'beautiful' have distinct meaning? 158 CHAPTER 9: THE SUBLIME, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE NOVEL 161 I: The basic structure of Reid's account of the sublime 161 II: Burke's account of the sublime 163 III: Sublimity and analogy of attribution 165 IV: Reid's account of the nature of beauty 171 V: Expression, and the expression theory of art 174 VI: Reid on natural beauty 180 VII: Reid on novelty 182 BIBLIOGRAPHY 185 INDEX 191 INTRODUCTION I: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF REID Thomas Reid (1710-96) was born at Strachan in Kincardineshire, Scotland, not far from Aberdeen. Reid was fortunate in his family connections. For instance his mother's brother was David Gregory, Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford and close friend of Sir Isaac Newton. Reid entered Marischal College, Aberdeen, at the age of twelve after the usual spell in Aberdeen Grammar School. After a short period as college librarian he married his cousin Margaret Gregory, having gained the position of (Presbyterian) minister at New Machar, in the gift of King's College, Aberdeen, which he held from 1737 till 1752. Although Reid published only one paper, An Essay on Quantity, in this period he was far from intellectually idle; for one thing he familiarised himself with the works of Bishop Butler, especially The Analogy of Religion, which, together with those of Samuel Clarke and Isaac Newton, were to have a profound influence on his mature philosophy. In 1752 Reid was appointed a regent at King's College, Aberdeen. During his regency he not only founded a crucially important discussion group, 'The Wise Club', and familiarised himself with David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature both through his own reading and by exhaustive discussion of it within the group; he also wrote extensively. He composed and delivered his seminal Latin Philosophical Orations. More importantly, he presented as instalments to the Wise Club what was to be published in 1764 as An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, a work which Hume, in a letter to Hugh Blair, admitted to be challenging, and which helped secure his appointment to the chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University later in that same year as successor to Adam Smith. Throughout this period Reid's thought underwent extensive development as is evident from the latest of his philosophical orations. This development came to fruition in Glasgow, culminating in the publication of his two mature works after his retirement in 1780, namely Essays on the Intellectual Powers ofM an (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). In addition, there was a fascinating correspondence, most notably with Lord Kames and his own cousin, James Gregory, and a lively controversy with Joseph Priestley on materialism. Among other things the correspondence shows Reid's thorough acquaintance with the writings of Newton, his thorough grasp of the natural science of his time and an awareness of the limits of the realm of scientific enquiry. II: OUTLINE OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK This work is intended to serve mainly as a study of Reid's moral philosophy and his aesthetics partly by way of an exposition and appraisal of Reid's anatomy of the self. This is his division of the mind in respect of its powers and the assignment of the many principles of action to their appropriate levels. A pervasive topic of the IX x ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE ANATOMY OF THE SELF book will be consideration of the appropriateness of deterministic computational cognitive science models of Reid's accounts of powers and faculties introduced by John Smith III and extensively employed by Keith Lehrer in his important study of Reid's philosophy, Thomas Reid. As students of Reid will be well aware, Reid is a proponent of a moral sense theory of moral assessment, a theory that claims that there is an important analogy between our powers of making moral assessments and our powers of ordinary sensory perception, in particular the power of sight. Reid also accepts that there is a power of the mind analogous to the external·sense of taste 'by which we are capable of discerning and relishing the beauties of nature, and whatever is excellent in the fine arts'. It is therefore necessary to devote some space to explaining Reid's anti-sceptical views on the topic of ordinary perception to aid understanding of how he arrives at his view that moral and aesthetic assessment have important features in common with sensory perception. This is done in chapter I. In addition attention is focused on Reid's insistence that perception is an act of the mind and not a passive reaction to one's surroundings. This is the first area in which consideration of the Lehrer-Smith model is undertaken, principally under the aspect of whatever determinism is involved in such models. In chapter 2 Reid's views on causation are fully presented. In his view there are several kinds of cause. The causes that Reid thinks most important are agents with active power. Reid insists that whatever is an effect of such a cause is contingent. That is to say, the effect might not have occurred in the same circumstances. Reid allows that agents have speculative power whose exercise, unlike that of active power as far as we can conceive its exercise, does not involve the will, although it seems that Reid thinks that its effects are contingent as well. Reid admits that it is established usage to say that heat causes ice to melt. Such effects invariably follow what Reid calls their physical causes, and one question that arises is whether, in any reasonable sense of 'the same circumstances', something physically caused might not have occurred in those circumstances. If so it might then be less objectionable to model Reid's account of agency by way of deterministic computational models in the manner of Lehrer and Smith. In chapter 3 certain obstacles in the way of acceptance of full blooded contingent agent causation are considered, notably difficulties in the wake of Reid's requirement that determinations of the will of an agent with moral liberty leading to her free actions must themselves be freely chosen. The alternative deterministic picture of agency involving the doctrine of the prevalence of the strongest motive is challenged by way of a thorough survey of the wide variety of motives in human nature, ranging from hunger, via emulation and gratitude, to our good upon the whole and our sense of duty. The survey suggests that the notion of strength of motive is clearly applicable only in a few cases, and in even fewer than Reid thinks. Chapter 4 sets forth Reid's view of linguistic representation and considers the relation between the capacity to conceive something, including centaurs, familiar concrete objects and universals, and the capacity to represent it, or its components, linguistically. While it may be conceded that Reid holds that conception of all kinds involves some capacity to represent linguistically there is no sign that Reid accepts the position of Fodor that conceiving or perceiving something requires a relation