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Of course, it all depends on what one means by  justified. A probing discussion of the
issues is to be found in Ernest Sosa,  P. F. Strawson s Epistemologial Naturalism in Lewis
Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson: The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 26
(Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1998).
246 Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology
have to be yet another process of immediate belief formation, a
meta-metaprocess  call it P*  that produced that belief. And so
forth, ad infinitum.
I submit that the mistake lies in regarding taking something for
granted as a special case of believing some proposition. Whatever it
may be  and here I won t try to say  it s not that.
Reid says  over and over  that the principles of Common
Sense are principles that our constitution leads us to believe. If
his analysis of perception, memory, consciousness, and so forth is
correct, then he s right about that  right about it for some of the
principles, anyway. But he s not right about it in the way in which
he thinks he is. What he means is that the principles of Common
Sense are the output of one or another of those indigenous belief-
forming processes that yield their output immediately. What s
right instead is this: If the normal human adult is so constituted
that, in paradigmatic situations, a sensation evoked by some exter-
nal object in turn immediately evokes a belief, about that object,
that it exists as something external, then it will be the case that
normal human adults take for granted, to put it very roughly,
the reliability of their perceptual capacities. The pattern exhib-
ited by the working of our constitution has this phenomenon of
taking-for-granted as its inevitable corollary.
the dependence of philosophy on
common sense
We are now, at last, in a position to speak to the topic with which
I began this chapter: the relation of the philosopher to Common
Sense. The philosopher is related to the principles of Common
Sense in the same way everyone else is  and in the same way the
philosopher is when not doing philosophy. He does, and must,
take them for granted  in his posing of questions, in his raising
of doubts, in his offering of reasons. They are, and must be, the
background of his reflections  not the premisses from which he
draws his conclusions but the ever-present substratum of his philo-
sophical activity. One could put it like this:  though common
sense and my external senses demand my assent to their dictates
upon their own authority, . . . philosophy is not entitled to this
privilege (EIP II, xiv [302b 303a]).
Reid shares with Wittgenstein the conviction that the principles
Common Sense 247
of Common Sense are not infallible; it s possible that something
false should function as such a principle. Reid doesn t even think
that we should dismiss out of hand the philosopher who says he
has discovered a reason for thinking that some element of our
world picture is false.10 Thus he does not ascribe to each of the
principles of Common Sense quite the indubitability that Wittgen-
stein apparently does. But he immediately adds that  When we
come to be instructed by philosophers, we must bring the old
light of common sense along with us, and by it judge of the new
light that the philosopher communicates to us. But when we are
required to put out the old light altogether, that we may follow
the new, we have reason to be on our guard (EIP I, i [224a b]).
In short, the burden of proof is on the person who would oppose
some element of Common Sense. Among other things, Reid s
doctrine of Common Sense is a doctrine concerning burden of
proof. And I judge that philosophers do in fact regard the burden
of proof in philosophical discourse as lying exactly where Reid s
view implies that it lies. The burden lies not on the philosopher
who holds that there are external objects, but on the one who
holds that there are not. Seen in this light, Reid s disagreement
with his fellow philosophers lies in their thinking that they have
successfully borne the burden of proof, whereas Reid thinks they
clearly have not.
Philosophy is like all other human endeavors in that it  has no
other root but the principles of common sense; it grows out of
them, and draws its nourishment from them: severed from this
root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots (IHM
I, iv [101b; B 19]). Rather often philosophers profess to reject
the  principles which irresistibly govern the belief and conduct of
all mankind in the common concerns of life (IHM I, v [102b; B
10
 We do not pretend, that those things that are laid down as first principles may not be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]