The human mind and the perception of nature: Ideas, judgement and signs in Thomas Reid and early modern philosophy

Since Dugald Stewart's Biographical Memoirs (1810), commentary on the work of Thomas Reid has emphasised Reid's opposition to the sceptical arguments of David Hume. However, Reid may be understood as developing an account of knowledge in light of Hume's arguments rather than simply in opposition to Hume's arguments. This thesis argues that Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), "A Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic" (c.1767, 1774) and Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) may be understood as developing a coherent epistemology while endorsing Hume's rejection of hypothetical principles and metaphysical essences as foundations for philosophical inquiry. Reid is interpreted as being committed to a philosophical position that has some dependence on innate principles but emphasises the role of judgement in perception and the fundamental role of human language in the organisation of experience.;To support this interpretation, the Reid-Hume debate is taken out the context of twentieth-century philosophical commentary and re-situated in the context of eighteenth-century concerns about the justification of Baconian and Newtonian empirical methods. Within this context, Reid and Hume were agreed that empirical methods ought to be justified by a "science of mind", even though they disagreed about the extent to which a justification was possible. Reid argued that Hume had been able to express sceptical doubts about the possibility of justifying empirical methods because he had subscribed to the "theory of ideas". Reid claimed that scepticism arose from the modern theory of ideas because Rene Descartes and John Locke had parcelled ideas with a poor account of human judgement.;In Reid's view, Hume's key argument was that sensations in the mind could not be demonstrated to have a necessary resemblance or causal relation with objects in the external world. Reid claimed that this argument could be accepted without sceptical consequences, so long as judgement was understood as an integral part of the act of perception. In Reid's constructive account of perceptual acquaintance, perceptions of external objects were taken from sensations or signs by way of an act of judgement. To develop this account, Reid turned away from the doctrine of ideas towards a doctrine of signs, which may have been borrowed from ancient Stoic philosophy.