Reid and the Problem of the External World

Abstract

The main purpose of this chapter is to understand how Thomas Reid (1710–96) understood what we now call ‘the problem of the external world’: the problem of whether we can have any knowledge of a material world if we have non-inferential knowledge of nothing but the subjective contents of our own minds. According to Reid, this sceptical problem is ill-posed: we do not need to prove the existence of the external world of matter any more than we need to prove the existence of the internal world of mind, since our belief in both is the direct effect of principles which we have by our very constitution. Hence Reid’s brand of common sense realism is best seen not as a solution to the problem of the external world, but as a denial of the Cartesian and representationalist assumptions which made that problem seem possible and urgent in the first place.