Beyond Impressions and Ideas

Abstract

Thomas Reid was a persistent and acute critic of the philosophy of David Hume. It is Reid's contention that Hume's theory cannot account for the facts of human conception and belief.1 Hume's theory is deficient in that impressions and ideas are inadequate to account for the intentionality of human thought, the fact that human thoughts have objects, ones that may not exist. Impressions and ideas are also inadequate to account for the facts of belief, especially the fact of negative belief. Reid recognizes the genius of the attempt to account for human conception and belief in terms of impressions and ideas. He calls Hume the most acute metaphysician of the age and remarked, in correspondence, that if Mr. Hume were to stop writing, he and his cohorts in Aberdeen would have nothing to discuss. Reid remarks as well, however, that it is genius and not the lack of it that leads to false philosophy. Reid is not a mere modus tollens critic of Hume. Unlike G. E. Moore, Reid does not rest content with arguing that Hume's theory cannot account for the facts but contends that we need not despair of a bet ter.2 Reid's philosophy is an attempt to offer a better theory. I shall describe Reid's destructive and constructive efforts to refute the philosophy of Hume. Reid's theory postulates certain innate conceptual operations of the mind that he considers necessary to account for the facts of human concep tion. Some of these operations are operations on other operations of the mind, that is, they are metamental operations based on consciousness of the lower level operations. It is notable that intentionality and consciousness are the two features of the mental that are the most problematic from the standpoint of contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind.3 Reid's theory explains the connection between these two features, namely, that intentionality presupposes consciousness. To account for intentionality, according to Reid, it is necessary to sup pose that we have general conceptions which result from directing our atten tion to mental operations, what he calls abstracting and generalizing, to form general conceptions which are essential for communication and the ac quisition of knowledge. Some conceptions and beliefs arise from innate principles of the human mind. Reid argues that the beliefs to which such principles give rise are justified without reasoning, though he admits that all faculties of the mind are fallible. Our original perceptual beliefs concerning the external world are beliefs of this kind, ones that are justified without