Thomas Reid On Perception From Common Sense Perspective

Thomas Reid is a Scottish philosopher and one of the founders of the "common sense" school of philosophy. This paper tries to clearly describe his view on perception from common sense perspective through closely reading and combing his magnum opus An Inquiry Into the Human Mind On the Principles of Common Sense. In Inquiry, Reid stands in a position opposing idealism which leads to a skepticism conclusion of that outside world does not exist through his exploring human senses detailedly."Naturalistic nativism" is his theoretical foundation of Inquiry. He believes that ordinary people can directly perceive outside world just through their senses because of that ordinary people have innate and common natural structures in their bodies and then they don’t need an "idea" as a logical starting point."Common sense and ordinary language" is Reid’s unique perspective in his work of examining human mind. He thinks that ordinary language is a mirror of thoughts of ordinary people. However, he does not wholly believe that each feature of ordinary language can correspondingly represents each feature of common sense and only those features that all languages have in common can reflect common sense. For Reid,"sense conception and perception" are three important notions which associate human mind and outside world. The three are not passively depending on external stimuli but are active powers of human mind. Sense directly connects outside world and then trigger conception. Conception bonded with natural belief finaly forms perception. Distinction between primary quality and secondary quality is basic tool in his human senses analysis. Reid acknowledges Berkeley’s criticism on Locke. Berkeley holds that it is no need to distinguish the two, if primary quality and secondary qualitiy are both ideas. However, Reid tends to believe that the distinction exsits. Comparing Lock, Reid’s distinction based on his direct realism not idealism.