Hume and Reid

Abstract

Stroud, among others, argues that Hume was the first to reject the Cartesian detached intellect and study human nature empirically. In fact, Hume’s Science of Man seeks to found the sciences in a way that precludes its appeal to scientific conclusions, and the naturalistic credit here actually belongs to Reid. Reid responded to Hume’s external world skepticism by rejecting the theory of ideas and its attendant Argument from Illusion, but more fundamentally, he rejected the Cartesian assumption that the study of human cognition must begin from introspective evidence alone. Introspection, for Reid, is just one among our faculties, all of which are mostly reliable, but occasionally fallible, so it makes no sense to single it out as uniquely problematic and demand that it be justified in terms of the others. Instead, he investigates our perceptual faculties empirically, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in much the same spirit as contemporary cognitive science.