Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception (review)

Thanks in no small part to the recognition afforded it by such established figures as William Alston, Keith Lehrer, Alvin Plantinga, and others, Thomas Reid’s (1710–96) philosophy is, at long last, getting the serious attention that it deserves. Ryan Nichols is among the generation of younger scholars who are making Reid’s work a focus of their research, and he has written an excellent book examining Reid’s views on perception.

Previous treatments have been either in articles or part of a larger discussion of Reid’s philosophy as a whole or, more often perhaps, of his epistemological views. The focus on Reid’s epistemology is understandable since what inspired him was the unacceptably skeptical implications of the inherited “theory of ideas”—i.e., the view that the immediate object of thought is always some mind-dependent object, as opposed to worldly objects and properties. But if one is to reject the picture of perception that is part-and-parcel of “the ideal theory,” one needs something to put in its place. And perception is both the topic of Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) and thoroughly discussed in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers (1785). So Reid’s theory of perception merits serious attention, and in this book it receives just that; with consideration given to: Reid’s method; the role of sensation in perception and the sense in which they are/are not perceptual-cognitive objects; Reid’s difficult discussion of “visible figure”; our conceptions of primary and secondary qualities, as well as Reid’s novel take on that distinction; Reid’s response(s) to the Molyneux problem; his provocative and, at times, conflicting claims about “acquired perception”; and whether or in what sense(s) Reid takes perception, in its different forms, to be “direct.”

In discussing these matters, Nichols faces the challenge of connecting Reid’s views with current debates and concepts without being Procrustean or objectionably anachronistic. On both counts he does a fine job. Many of the more involved matters are reserved for footnotes, and faced with a choice between maintaining traction on what Reid actually says and gaining a friction-free “Reidian answer” to certain current philosophical debates (210), Nichols consistently opts for the former. Through it all, Nichols exhibits an excellent grasp of the relevant texts, including those which are less well known (e.g., the Philosophical Orations) and several unpublished sources.

One place where I think Nichols goes astray, however, is over the interpretation of passages like the following, in which Reid emphasizes the “unaccountability” of various aspects of the mind and its operations: “For anything we can discover, we might have been so framed as to have all the sensations we now have by our senses, without any impression upon our organs, and without any conception of any external object. For anything we know, we might have been so made as to perceive external objects, without any impressions on bodily organs, and without any of those sensations which invariably accompany perception in our present frame”; and, “We know that such is our constitution, that in certain circumstances we have certain conceptions; but how they are produced we know no more than how we ourselves are produced” (218). As Nichols sees it, the “philosophical pessimism” expressed in such passages makes it clear “why Reid does not claim in print to possess perceptual knowledge of external objects, as opposed to ‘informations of the sense’”; indeed, he says, “Reid is reluctant to allow knowledge even that external objects produce our conceptions of what seem to us to be external objects” (ibid.).

While the above passages—like Reid’s remarks on perceptual error (219–22)—may be a corrective to glib attributions of doctrines of direct perception and direct perceptual knowledge to Reid, Nichols’ interpretation of them has Reid seriously entertaining some kind of “perceptual skepticism” (218). Yet, Reid’s view seems to be that “the perception of external objects by our senses” is pleonastic (see Hamilton edition of Reid...