Notes for a Discussion of Adam Smith and Thomas Reid: Constructivism versus Cognitive Realism?

Notes for a Discussion of Adam Smith and Thomas Reid:

Constructivism versus Cognitive Realism?

[W]e have been endeavoring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination. . . .

-- Adam Smith

Hume and Reid do differ in many ways . . . . [O]n the whole Smith simply finesses the difference between [Hume and Reid] . . . . Smith never endorses Hume’s skeptical arguments . . . . Unlike Reid, on the other hand . . . Smith neither affirms not denies the ultimate truth of common sense beliefs; he merely works within them.

-- Samuel Fleischacker

Adam Smith is cagey.

-- Douglas J. Den Uyl

[A]ny attempt on the part of a philosopher to shun the consequences of his own position is doomed to failure. What he himself declines to say will be said by his disciples, if he has any; if he has none, it may remain eternally unsaid; but it is there, and anybody going back to the same principles, be it several centuries later, will have to face the same conclusion . . . .

-- Étienne Gilson

Definitions:

Epistemic constructivism holds that knowledge is only possible because truths are based on principles that are constructions of human thought, and not because these principles are discovered, detected, or grounded in anything real apart from such thought.

Ontological realism is the thesis that there is a structured world independent of our cognition. Relative to this idea, epistemological realism is the doctrine that in thought we are capable of direct awareness of this world and of knowledge of its structure. Truth is ultimately based on a world whose existence and nature exists apart from our cognition.

Ethical constructivism claims that ethical knowledge is only possible because moral truths are based on principles that are constructions of moral thought, and not because these principles are discovered, detected, or grounded in anything real apart from such thought.

Ethical realism is the doctrine that moral truths are based on a world whose existence and nature exists apart from our cognition.

Structural history is not simply an historical account or explication of a text but a philosophical analysis and explication of the basic assumptions and patterns of thought of a thinker or set of thinkers.

Setting Context for our Discussion:

Positing the possibility that one can be aware of only one’s own states of awareness

“I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, [suspend my judgment], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice. “ Descartes, Meditations I

Ideas are representations like pictures or images

“The light of reason causes me to know clearly that the ideas in me are like pictures, or images which can, in truth fall short of the perfection of objects . . . ." Descartes, Meditations III [emphasis added]

Ideas are what one immediately and directly knows

“Before I proceed on to what I have thought on this subject, I must here ... beg pardon of my reader for the frequent use of the word idea, which he will find in the following treatise. It being the term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking .... I presume it will be easily granted me that there are such ideas in men’s minds; every one is conscious of them in himself; and men’s words and actions will satisfy him that they are in others. Our first inquiry then shall be, how they come into the mind.” Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding [emphasis added].

“Anyone who surveys the objects of human knowledge will easily see that they are all ideas that are either actually imprinted on the senses or perceived by attending to one’s own emotions and mental activities or formed out of ideas of the ﬁrst two types, with the help of memory and imagination, by compounding or dividing or simply reproducing ideas of those other two kinds.” Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge.

“Nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception.” Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“[W]hen we analyze our thoughts or ideas, however compound or sublime, we always find, that they resolve themselves into such simple ideas as were copied from a precedent feeling or sentiment.” Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

No basis to suppose the existence of an “external” world or necessary connections or any knowledge of them

“The mind never has anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objects. The supposition of such a connection is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.” Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“There is nothing that produces any impression, nor consequently can suggest any idea, of the power of necessary connection.” Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Immanuel Kant considered the inability to provide a reasonable basis for an “external” world to be the Scandal of Philosophy and as a result formulated his response

Kant abandons the assumption that truth is primarily the conformity of the mind to things and replaces it with the assumption that things, at least in part, conform to the conditions for the mind knowing them. (He assumes that these conditions are universal and fixed.) Kant’s view is called transcendental idealism. The cost of his approach is, however, that one cannot claim to know what things actually are, and as a result, one cannot appeal to the nature of things to explain either truth or goodness or right(s).

“All objects of an experience possible for us are nothing but appearances, i.e., mere representations, which … have outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself. … The realist … makes these modifications of our sensibility into things subsisting in themselves, and hence makes mere representations into things in themselves.” Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“The senses … never and in no single instance enable us to know things in themselves.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

“Things in themselves … cannot be objects of experience.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Matter … is nothing other than a mere form or a certain mode of representation of an unknown object.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Nothing intuited in space is a thing in itself … what we call outer objects are nothing but representations of our sensibility the form of which is space. The true correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known, through these representations; and in experience no question is ever asked regarding it.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Constructivism

Kant is generally regarded as the source for what is today called “constructivism”—in both its epistemic and ethical versions. In many ways, Kant represents the ultimate result of what Thomas Reid calls “the way of ideas,” because in order to avoid the skepticism about knowledge of the “external” world and causality (or even morality), we must treat what is true (or good) ultimately as a construction of the human mind.

Thomas Reid: His Critique of “The Way of Ideas”

“The Way of Ideas” (or “Ideal Theory” or “Ideal System”) is an overall view of human cognition that Reid found present in the views of many philosophers, particularly such Modern philosophers as Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Though there are important differences in their epistemologies, they all either start from or depend upon in crucial ways the assumption that ideas—be they conceptual or perceptual—are the immediate and direct objects of our cognition. The principal commitment of “the way of ideas” is to mental representations, called “ideas” or “images,” that we know first before we know what they are of or about.

This approach to ideas, which Reid terms as “philosophical” and as deviating from the common language of the “vulgar,” holds that ideas are what we know, not that by which we know.

“When, therefore, in common language, we speak of having an idea of any thing, we mean no more by that expression, but thinking of it. The vulgar allow, that this expression implies a mind that thinks; an act of the mind which we call thinking, and an object about which we think. But besides these three, the Philosophers conceive that there is a fourth, to wit, the idea, which is the immediate object. The idea is in the mind itself, and can have no existence but in a mind that thinks; but the remote or mediate object may be of something external, as the sun or moon; it may be something past or future; it may be something which never existed. This is the philosophical meaning of the word idea; and we may observe, that this meaning of that word is built upon a philosophical opinion: For, if Philosophers had not believed that there are such immediate objects of all our thought in the mind, they would never have used the idea to express them.” Thomas Reid, The intellectual Powers of Man [emphasis added]

“It is a fundamental principle of the ideal system, that every object of thought must have an impression, or an idea, that is, a faint copy of some preceding impression. This is a principle so commonly received, that the author above mentioned [Hume], although his whole system is built upon it, never offers the least proof of it. It is upon this principle, as a fixed point, that he erects his metaphysical engines, to overturn heaven and earth, body and spirit. And indeed, in my apprehension, it is altogether sufficient for the purpose. For if impressions and ideas are the only objects of thought, then heaven and earth, and body and spirit, and every thing you please, must signify only impressions and ideas, or they must be words without any meaning. It seems, therefore, that this notion, however strange, is closely connected with the received doctrine of ideas, and we must either admit the conclusion, or call in question the premises.” Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense

THE CAUSALITY OF KNOWING SHOULD NOT BE UNDERSTOOD IN A PURELY MATERIAL MANNER

“There is no prejudice more natural to man, than to conceive of the mind as having some similitude to body in its operations. Hence men have been prone to imagine, that as bodies are put in motion by some impulse or impression made upon them by contiguous bodies; so the mind is made to think and to perceive by some impression made upon it, or some impulse given to it by contiguous objects . . . .” Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

“To say that an object which I see with perfect indifference makes an impression upon my mind, is not, as I apprehend, good English. If Philosophers mean no more but that I see the object, why should they invent an improper phrase to express what every man knows how to express in plain English? But it evident, from the manner in which this phrase is used by modern Philosophers, that they mean not barely to express by it, my perceiving an object, but to explain the manner of perception. They think that the object perceived acts upon the mind, in some way similar to that in which one body acts upon another, by making an impression upon it. The impression upon the mind is conceived to be something wherein the mind is altogether passive, and has some effect produced in it by the object. But this is a hypothesis which contradicts the common sense of mankind, and which ought not to be admitted without proof.” Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

“I see as little reason . . . to believe that in perception the mind acts upon the object. To perceive an object is one thing, to act upon it is another; nor is the last at all included in the first. To say that I act upon the wall by looking at it is an abuse of language, and has no meaning. Logicians distinguish two kinds of operations of mind: the first kind produces no effect without the mind; the last does. The first they call immanent acts, the second transitive. All intellectual operations belong to the first class; they produce no effect upon any external object. But, without having recourse to logical distinctions, every man of common sense knows that to think of an object, and to act upon it, are very different things.” Reid, Essays On the Intellectual Powers of Man

Rejection of the claim that ideas resemble their objects

“But let us, as becomes philosophers, lay aside authority; we need not surely consult Aristotle or Locke, to know whether pain be like the point of a sword. I have as clear a conception of extension, hardness, and motion as I have of the point of a sword; and with some pains and practice, I can form as clear a notion of the other sensations of touch, as I have of pain. When I do so, and compare them together, it appears to me clear as daylight, that the former are not kin to the latter, nor resemble them in any one feature. They are as unlike, yea as certainly and manifestly unlike, pain is to the point of a sword. It may be true, that those sensations first introduced the material world to our acquaintance; it may be true, that it seldom or never appears without their company; but for all that, they are as unlike as the passion of anger is to those features of the countenance which attend it.” Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense [emphasis added]

According to Reid, the first error of the way of ideas was the assumption that ideas were the immediate and direct objections of human cognition. The second error was that claim that ideas resembled--or were copies or duplicates or likenesses or representations—of their objects. The second error made the so-called problem of knowing reality not immediate, because there was a supposed bridge of likeness or representation provided by ideas. Yet once, the second error was exposed by Hume and others, then the scandal of philosophy was also fully revealed—namely, we have no experiential or rational basis for supposing a world of things that have structures and powers apart from our cognition.

“As it happens sometimes in an arithmetical operation, that two errors balance one another, so that the conclusion is little or nothing affected by them; but when one of them is corrected, and the other left, we are led farther from the truth, than by both together: so it seems to have happened in the Peripatetic philosophy of sensation, compared with the modern. The Peripatetics adopted two errors; but the last served as a corrective to the first, and rendered it mild and gentle, so that their system had no tendency to skepticism. The moderns have retained the first of those errors, but have gradually detected and corrected the last. The consequence hath been, that the light we have struck out hath created darkness, and skepticism hath advanced hand in hand with knowledge, spreading its melancholy gloom, first over the material world, and at last over the whole face of nature. Such a phenomenon as this, is apt to stagger even the lovers of light and knowledge, while its cause is latent; but when it is detected, it may give hopes, that this darkness shall not be everlasting, but that it shall be succeeded by a more permanent light.” Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense

Some of Reid’s basic views about cognition

“Belief must have an object. For he that believes, must believe something; and that which he believes is called the object of his belief.” Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

“I take it for granted that, in most operations of the mind, there must be an object distinct from the operation itself. I cannot see, without seeing something.” Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

“In popular language, idea signifies the same thing as conception, apprehension, notion. To have an idea of anything, is to conceive it. To have a distinct idea, is to conceive it distinctly. To have no idea of it, is not to conceive it at all. It was before observed, that conceiving or apprehending has always been considered by all men as an act or operation of the mind, and on that account has been expressed in all languages by an active verb. When, therefore, we use the phrase of having ideas, in the popular sense, we ought to attend to this, that it signifies precisely the same thing which we commonly express by the active verbs conceiving and apprehending.” Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

“Sensation, taken by itself, implies neither the conception nor belief of any external object. It supposes a sentient being, and a certain manner in which that being is affected, but it supposes no more. Perception implies an immediate conviction and belief of something external; something different both from the mind that perceives, and from the act of perception.” Reid, Essays On the Intellectual Powers of Man

Summary of Reid:

“Reid has repeatedly made it clear that neither the feelings of sensations, of the operations of thinking, are in any way intermediary objects of representations of things. Rather, we must remember that any action or operation is in no way a thing itself, but rather the action or operation of some thing, and that the act of sensing or knowing cannot be separated from the thing sensed or known. While we may, in principle and in theory, examine sensation and perception in their own right, just as any operation can be thought of bracketed from the substances acting or being acted upon, they cannot be defined or fully understood independently of their subject and object.

Hence sensations, which are feelings, and perceptions, which are acts of the mind, have no existence in themselves; their very presence in awareness already presumes as prior the immediate presence of what is sensed or perceived. Once again, the sensation or concept as sign is formal and not instrumental . . . . The sign, being nothing in itself, is the active means by which the properties of bodies are made present, such that the former already implicitly assumes the latter, and is in no way a third thing, but the mode of relation between knower and known.” Sean Michael Connolly, “The Reality of Knowing: The Status of Idea in Aquinas and Reid” (Dissertation: Boston College, 2009).

Adam Smith on Human Cognition*

It seems that Smith thinks of human mental activities as constituted by a system of representation—a type of language, whose parts and relations represent aspects of the world that we cannot access directly. He states that such a system resembles a machine.

“Systems in many respects resemble machines. A machine is a little system, created to perform, as well as to connect together, in reality, those different movements and effects which the artist has occasion for. A system is an imaginary machine invented to connect together in the fancy those different movements and effects which are already in reality performed.” Adam Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects [emphasis added].

“The objects of touch always present themselves as pressing upon, or as resisting the particular part of the body which perceives them, or by which we perceive them. When I lay my hand upon the table, the table presses upon my hand, or resists the further motion of my hand, in the same manner as my hand presses upon the table. But pressure or resistance necessarily supposes externality in the thing which presses or resists. The table could not press upon, or resist the further motion of my hand, if it was not external to my hand. I feel it accordingly as something which is not merely an affection of the hand, but altogether external to and independent of my hand. The agreeable, indifferent, or painful sensation of pressure, accordingly as I happen to press hardly or softly, I feel, no doubt, as affections of my hand; but the thing which presses and which resists I feel as something altogether different from those affections, as external to my hand, and as being altogether independent of it.” Adam Smith, “Of External Senses,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

“To speak accurately, it is not the same visible object which we see at different distances, but a succession of visible objects, which, though they all resemble one another, those especially which follow near after one another; yet are all really different and distinct. But as we know that the tangible object which they represent remains always the same, we ascribe to them too a sameness which belongs altogether to it: and we fancy that we see the same tree at a mile, at half a mile, and at a few yards distance. At those different distances, however, the visible objects are so very widely different, that we are sensible of a change in their appearance. But still, as the tangible objects which they represent remain invariably the same, we ascribe a sort of sameness even to them too.” Adam Smith, “Of External Senses,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects [emphasis added].

Smith claims that our imagination works on our sensations to construct an imagined “steadiness of appearance” of objects of perception. Smith, “Of External Senses,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

Further, Smith’s discussion of Plato seems illustrative of the situation he thinks confronts the knower. “For as Heraclitus had said that no man ever passed the same river twice, because the water which he had passed over once was gone before he could pass over it a second time; so, in the same manner, no man ever saw, or heard, or touched the same sensible object twice. When I look at the window, for example, the visible species, which strikes my eyes this moment, though resembling, is different from that which struck my eyes the immediately preceding moment. When I ring the bell, the sound, or audible species, which I hear this moment, though resembling in the same manner, is different, however, from that which I heard the moment before. When I lay my hand on the table, the tangible species which I feel this moment, though resembling, in the same manner, is numerically different too from that which I felt the moment before. Our sensations, therefore, never properly exist or endure one moment; but, in the very instant of their generation, perish and are annihilated for ever. Nor are the causes of those sensations more permanent. No corporeal substance is ever exactly the same, either in whole or in any assignable part, during two successive, moments, but by the perpetual addition of new parts, as well as loss of old ones, is in continual flux and succession. Things of so fleeting a nature can never be the objects of science, or of any steady or permanent judgment. While we look at them, in order to consider them, they are changed and gone, and annihilated for ever. The objects of science, and of all the steady judgments of the understanding, must be permanent, unchangeable, always existent, and liable neither to generation nor corruption, nor alteration of any kind.” Adam Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Inquiries; Illustrated by the History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

Permanence for knowledge was for plato provided by the universal ideas or forms, but it seems for Smith that permanence (of at least some sort) is provided by our fancy or imagination.

“When two objects, however unlike, have often been observed to follow each other, and have constantly presented themselves to the senses in that order, they come to be connected together in the fancy, that the idea of the one seems, of its own accord, to call up and introduce that of the other. If the objects are still observed to succeed each other as before, this connection, or, as it has been called, this association of their ideas, becomes stricter and stricter, and the habit of the imagination to pass from the conception of the one to that of the other, grows more and more rivetted and confirmed. As its ideas move more rapidly than external objects, it is continually running before them, and therefore anticipates, before it happens, every event which falls out according to this ordinary course of things. When objects succeed each other in the same train in which the ideas of the imagination have thus been accustomed to move, and in which, though not conducted by that chain of events presented to the senses, they have acquired a tendency to go on of their own accord, such objects appear all closely connected with one another, and the thought glides easily along them, without effort and without interruption. They fall in with the natural career of the imagination; and as the ideas which represented such a train of things would seem all mutually to introduce each other, every last thought to be called up by the foregoing, and to call up the succeeding; so when the objects themselves occur, every last event seems, in the same manner, to be introduced by the foregoing, and to introduce the succeeding. There is no break, no stop, no gap, no interval. The ideas excited by so coherent a chain of things seem, as it were, to float through the mind of their own accord, without obliging it to exert itself, or to make any effort in order to pass from one of them to another.

But if this customary connection be interrupted, if one or more objects appear in an order quite different from that to which the imagination has been accustomed, and for which it is prepared, the contrary of all this happens. We are at first surprised by the unexpectedness of the new appearance, and when that momentary emotion is over, we still wonder how it came to occur in that place. The imagination no longer feels the usual facility of passing from the event which goes before to that which comes after. It is an order or law of succession to which it has not been accustomed, and which it therefore finds some difficulty in following, or in attending to. The fancy is stopped and interrupted in that natural movement or career, according to which it was proceeding. Those two events seem to stand at a distance from each other; it endeavours to bring them together, but they refuse to unite; and it feels, or imagines it feels, something like a gap or interval betwixt them. It naturally hesitates, and, as it were, pauses upon the brink of this interval; it endeavours to find out something which may fill up the gap, which, like a bridge, may so far at least unite those seemingly distant objects, as to render the passage of the thought betwixt them smooth, and natural, and easy. The supposition of a chain of intermediate, though invisible, events, which succeed each other in a train similar to that in which the imagination has been accustomed to move, and which links together those two disjointed appearances, is the only means by which the imagination can fill up this interval, is the only bridge which, if one may say so, can smooth its passage from the one object to the other. Thus, when we observe the motion of the iron, in consequence of that of the loadstone, we gaze and hesitate, and feel a want of connection betwixt two events which follow one another in so unusual a train. But when, with Des Cartes, we imagine certain invisible effluvia to circulate round one of them, and by their repeated impulses to impel the other, both to move towards it, and to follow its motion, we fill up the interval betwixt them, we join them together by a sort of bridge, and thus take off that hesitation and difficulty which the imagination felt in passing from the one to the other. That the iron should move after the loadstone seems, upon this hypothesis, in some measure according to the ordinary course of things. Motion after impulse is an order of succession with which of all things we are the most familiar. Two objects which are so connected seem, to our mind, no longer to be disjointed, and the imagination flows smoothly and easily along them.” Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy, Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

“Philosophy is the science of the connecting principles of nature, after the largest experience that common observation can acquire, seems to abound with events which appear solitary and incoherent with all that go before them, which therefore disturb the easy movement of the imagination; which makes its ideas succeed each other, if one may say so, by irregular starts and sallies; and which thus tend, in some measure, to introduce those confusions and distractions we formerly mentioned. Philosophy, by representing the invisible chains which bind together all these disjointed objects, endeavours to introduce order into this chaos of jarring and discordant appearances, to allay this tumult of the imagination, and to restore it, when it surveys the great revolutions of the universe, to that tone of tranquility and composure, which is both most agreeable in itself, and most suitable to its nature. Philosophy, therefore, may be regarded as one of those arts which address themselves to the imagination; and whose theory and history, upon that account, fall properly within the circumference of our subject.” Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

“To introduce order and coherence into the mind’s conception of this seeming chaos of dissimilar and disjointed appearances, it was necessary to deduce all their qualities, operations, and laws of succession, from those of some particular things, with which it was perfectly acquainted and familiar, and along which its imagination could glide smoothly and easily, and without interruption. But as we would in vain attempt to deduce the heat of a stove from that of an open chimney, unless we could show that the same fire which was exposed in the one, lay concealed in the other; so it was impossible to deduce the qualities and laws of succession, observed in the more uncommon appearances of Nature, from those of such as were more familiar, if those customary objects were not supposed, however disguised in their appearance, to enter into the composition of those rarer and more singular phenomena. To render, therefore, this lower part of the great theatre of nature a coherent spectacle to the imagination, it became necessary to suppose, first, That all the strange objects of which it consisted were made up out of a few, with which the mind was extremely familiar: and secondly, That all their qualities, operations and rules of succession, were no more than different diversifications of those to which it had long been accustomed, in these primary and elementary objects.” Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Ancient Physics,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

Why create systems?

“Wonder, therefore, and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature; and they pursue this study for its own sake, as an original pleasure or good in itself, without regarding its tendency to procure them the means of many other pleasures.” Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

“The disparity between the imitated and imitated object is the foundation of the beauty of imitation. It is because the one object does not naturally resemble the other, that we are so much pleased with it, when by art it is made to do so.” Smith, “of the Nature of the Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” Essays on Philosophical Subjects [emphasis added].

Re Newton’s System:

[W]hile we have been endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of Nature, have insensibly been drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles of this one, as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.” Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” Essays On Philosophical Subjects.

Summary of Smith on Human Cognition:

It seems that the senses (with the possible exception of touching) do not provide us with a knowledge of things but of sense impressions that are neither unified nor connected. They are “entirely loose and separate,” and for Smith it is only through the intervention of the imagination we have a world of objects that can be coherent. In effect, imagination or fancy make our world intelligible. Indeed, it provides our world.

Imagination in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS)

“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself.”

Smith, TMS [emphasis added].

“Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality. We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner.

Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness, with deeper commiseration than any other. But the poor wretch, who is in it, laughs and sings perhaps, and is altogether insensible of his own misery. The anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer. The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment.

What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her infant that during the agony of disease cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of all these, forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great. With regard to the future, it is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast, from which, reason and philosophy will, in vain, attempt to defend it when it grows up to a man.

We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we can do is unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress, the regret, the love, and the lamentations of their friends, can yield no comfort to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of their misery. The happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly, is affected by none of these circumstances; nor is it the thought of these things which can ever disturb the profound security of their repose. The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change which has been produced upon them, our own consciousness of that change, from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimated bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in this case. It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.” Smith, TMS.

Some Questions for Discussion:**

A philosophical system (which we would today call “scientific”) is a model or representation of the world. Supposing a reality that exists and is what it is apart from our cognition, what justifies the assumption that the parts and relations of the “imaginary machine” mirror reality? For example, why assume that a theoretical system, for example, price theory, which provides coherent and logical explanations of social interaction, is truly an account (or the best account) of the real situation? And if, the world is actually our world—that is, if we assume that reality is constructed by our imagination—what construction of reality do we choose? Can an appeal to sense experience answer this question, if what we experience is itself only made intelligible by our imagination? Is there some privileged perspective from where to judge this issue? What is Smith’s position on all this?
Regarding the role of imagination in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Reid argues:“That the source of our sympathy with others is our imagining what would be our own feeling if we were in their case does not appear evident nor clearly proved. . . . In the first place, . . . we are not ordinarily conscious of an imaginative activity underlying our sympathetic relations with others, except in those instances wherein we have need to be roused from indifference ‘by moral Reflexion,’ for sympathy is instantaneous and, where genuine, prior to reflection. Secondly, the manner in which sympathy is raised when it cannot be said to ‘flow spontaneously at the Sight of the Object in distress’ is more indirect . . . . Imagining that I am ‘Suffering what he Suffers’ does not of itself ensure that the mere imagination will cause me pain or grief; on the contrary, virtue of that fact alone, it might well ‘give me more pleasure than pain.’ On the other hand, if I were to picture myself as the sufferer, I would immediately realize that ‘Sympathy from others is due to me and agreeable,’ and, therefore, that it was my duty to be sympathetic in like cases. The third objection, . . . if the imagination were truly the basis of sympathy, we would be more inclined to see ourselves ‘in the happy circumstances we see others in than in those that are calamitous," but this is contrary to fact. Sympathy is proportionate to esteem and connections in which we hold or know others and is evoked more by their grief than their joy, provided only that those feelings of anguish are ‘worthy & esteemable. Fourthly, as the human tendency to imitate or to mimic the actions and gestures of others is an original principle, so is sympathy ‘an original Principle in Benevolent Natures.’ To think of it otherwise would be to countenance the ‘Refinement’ of benevolence, resentment, imitation, and ‘every disinterested principle of Human Nature’ into an operation of the imagination. Similarly, and lastly, our grief for the death of a friend is . . . the result of a ‘Natural Passion,’ not of refinement. Far from viewing our grief over the death of a friend or our fear of our own demise as an ‘effusion of Imagination,’ . . . these passions of grief and fear are themselves the cause of those doleful imaginings--not the effects of the operations of the imagination, but the springs which motivate these operations.” David F. Norton and J. C. Stewart-Robinson, “Thomas Reid on Adam Smith's Theory of Morals,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1980), pp. 396-97. (This is a summary from lecture notes of some of Reid’s objections to Smith’s use of imagination in moral theory.)Does Reid have an accurate understanding of how imagination works in Smith’s moral theory? Is appealing to imagination to explain sympathy similar to how imagination smooths over the gaps that we encounter among the objects that we sense? Can imagination do in moral theory what Smith claims it does in philosophical or scientific theory?

*Though I have been considering for some time the views of Thomas Reid in relation to those of Adam Smith regarding human knowledge, it was Andrew Humphries’ paper, “Systems of Representation, Perspective, and the Impartial Spectator in the Works of Adam Smith,” that motivated me to examine some of the quotations from Smith that are cited here. See also,

Brian Glenney: “Adam Smith on Sensory Perception,” in Propriety and Prosperity, ed, David F. Hardwick and Leslie Marsh (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 118-135; “Adam Smith and the Problem of the External World,” The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9.2 (2011); 205-223.

**You are of course free and encouraged to raise your own questions.

Addendum: An Email Exchange re Reid and Smith

“Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They [the senses] never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.” Smith, TMS [emphasis added and changed]

Smith seems to be treating sensations as a “private language”—that is, as being something that one immediately and directly knows that is incapable in principle of being known by others.

But:

Can I say “I am aware (viz., think, conceive, apprehend, perceive, sense, feel, see, touch, hear, taste, smell, etc.) of X” if this awareness is in principle incapable of being made by others?

The issue here is NOT whether my perceiving can be someone else’s perceiving. Indeed, my thoughts, perceptions cannot be the thoughts or perceptions of others. My acts cannot be yours. The issue is rather whether there can be an object of my act of perceiving if that object is in principle incapable of being an object of the acts of perceiving for others. If X is incapable in principle of being known by (that is, being an object for) others, then, how does it become capable of being known by (being an object for) me? IF X’s knowability (intelligibility) is not a function of itself, then how do I know that my perception is of X? If I just say “I am aware of X,” then am I right? What is the measure or standard to which I can appeal to say that I am aware of X? The capability of being known cannot by a function of acts of awareness if acts of awareness are to be understood as being of or about something. And if such acts of awareness are not of or about something, then they are not acts of awareness.

In other words, if X is intelligible (capable of being known) for me, then it must in principle be intelligible (capable for being known) for others. X’s intelligibility (capability of being known) does not come from my acts of perceiving or indeed the acts of perceiving of others. Rather, it comes from the object itself, ultimately the being.

Smith is correct to say that my act of feeling X is not your act of feeling X, but it is not the case that I cannot in principle sense what you are sensing—that is, X. It does not necessarily require an act of the imagination, though that, as well as conceptualization, can figure into the account. This seems to be behind one of Reid’s basic objections, maybe.

Knowledge is epistemological cooperation for Smith.

The presumption above is that knowledge begins in the awareness of something, but if knowledge is what the community of “knowers” correspond together on, then the “of something” and the privacy don’t matter. Incidentally Reid also says we don’t have other people’s sensations.

But the “knowers” must together cooperate “on” something. There is no way they can have knowledge without that knowledge being OF, ON, or ABOUT something. So, it is not clear how that helps Smith at all. It seems that Smith’s points about knowledge being a cooperative process, etc. could easily be maintained without assuming “the way of ideas.”

Re Reid, your activity of sensing is not mine and vice-versa, but this does not apply to what the sensation is OF. For Reid, the OBJECT of awareness cannot as a matter of principle be incapable of being known by others. And the reason for this is that to be real is to be intelligible or knowable. There is similarity here between Reid and Aquinas. (If this is not granted, then we seem to face the problem Anthony Kenny thinks Wittgenstein presents in his private language argument—namely, that we cannot even claim to describe what we are sensing and hence even realize we are sensing. Indeed, in the situation Smith seems to describe, can we wen say that was is having a sensation of pain? )

The idea that knowing is about something is ambiguous. Realists assume it’s about the thing. The way of ideas is that it’s about the idea. Smith may be saying it’s about what cooperatively agree it’s about. That is constructivist but not constructivist in the-way-of-ideas view á la Locke and Hume. Also, the private language argument seems to threaten the idea that anything can be private.

Knowing must be about something, and the realist says it must ultimately be about something which exists and is what it is apart from our cognition, but this does not mean or imply that upon reflection knowing cannot be about acts of knowing. Moreover, this does not mean that knowing cannot be about social realities that we have constructed either through design or simply as the result of human action. The realist need not deny that sociality is crucial to our natures as human beings. Social constructivism does not have to be epistemic and ethical constructivism, though there are some social constructivists who treat it as such. But the question is whether Smith is ultimately an epistemic constructivist, because he seems to accept the views that what we are immediately and directly aware of are our own private mental states, not ultimately beings that exist and have natures apart from our cognition, and that these states can only be made coherent through our imagining or supplying connections (as opposed to discovering connections in the natures of things). Here he seems to follow Hume quite closely.

# 2

The issue might come down to not only whether he follows Hume in adopting “the way of ideas,” but also what type of empiricist Smith is.

There are at least two ways on interpreting the maxim “Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.”

All the objects that are presented in sense experience are also and necessarily recognized by the senses themselves such that if an object is not explicitly recognized by the senses, then it is not presented in sense experience. {Hume}
All objects of knowledge are without exception presented in sense experience, but this does not mean that they are thereby recognized by the senses. (Reid, Aquinas]

As Étienne Gilson once noted, "The senses carry a message which they cannot interpret." There is, then, more to sensory experience than what appears on the surface, so to speak, and it takes human rationality to discover and integrate what the senses present.

Further, Reid seems to suggest that there is no bifurcation of human knowledge into two kinds—the rational/conceptual and the empirical/sensory. Rather, human knowledge is rational and empirical, conceptual and sensory, and though they can be distinguished, they are not separable. In other words, Hume’s fork in which he separates knowledge into relations of ideas and matters of fact (experience), can be challenged from the get-go.

Re the private language argument, it does not deny that there is a private or personal or that there can be knowledge based on what is essentially related to an individual and thus is unique. What the argument denies is that something can be known and be incapable of ever being known by anyone else. That there is something you know and can identify apart from any public criteria. If X is knowable, then it can be universalized, made into a concept about some reality.

P Le Morvan, “Arguments against direct realism and how to counter them,”

American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (3), 221-234

“Lest their position fall prey to these arguments, Direct Realists should:

(i) distinguish causal indirectness from cognitive indirectness and maintain that the causal indirectness of perception does not entail that it is cognitively indirect;

(ii) concede that we cannot (given the laws of physics) directly perceive external physical objects or events without a time lag, however minute, without conceding that this entails that we cannot directly perceive physical objects;

(iii) reject the notion that perceiving a physical object requires perceiving all of its spatial or temporal parts at once;

(iv) maintain that physical objects can appear differently than how they are;

(v) be wary of question-begging reifications of appearances by their opponents;

(vi) concede that doubts can be raised that we are perceiving physical objects without conceding that this entails that we do not perceive physical objects;

(vii) treat sensible qualities as modes of perceptual awareness rather than as objects of awareness.”

Questions for the Discussion:

1) How can we be sure our philosophical systems match reality? Does it matter?

2) Does Reid have a correct understanding of both Smith's theory as well as how sympathy itself generally works?

Other Questions:

1) Does the so called "phantom limb" argument, Hume's "shade of blue" (or now "Yanny and Laurel") refute perceptual realism and support the "way of ideas?"

2) To what degree is Smith like Hume from the readings provided? Are ideas as objects of the mind the same as Smith's use of imagination in representing our world?

3) Is Smith a good deal more "Kantian" than Hume, meaning much less empiricist oriented and more constructivist when it comes to our conceptions of the world?

4) Smith says that wonder is the motivation for philosophy. Is philosophy the model of knowledge or is knowledge more like "common sense" about the objects around us and motivated by other things (perhaps discomfort, practical necessity, etc.)?

5) Are Smith and Reid even talking about the same thing when they speak of sympathy? Is Reid referring to a reaction whereas Smith is referring to a process of corresponding our sentiments?

Additional Questions:

6) Do Reid and Smith have similar projects? Do they mean the same thing by knowledge? In what ways are they alike with regard to common sense and in what ways are they different? Does Shaftsbury have a role here?

7) In what ways is Smith caught up in providing a system, and yet how is he also a critic of systems?

8) Can one compartmentalize various areas of study, for example, natural science, social science, and ethics and politics?