1 Yolton, John W., Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Other writings by the same author on the topic include “On Being Present to the Mind: A Sketch for the History of an Idea,” Dialogue 14 (1975): 373–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Ideas and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (1975): 145–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 He does not desire to banish all uses of the word “idea” from our vocabulary: “To have an idea of something is to conceive i t … [I]n the popular sense, it signifies precisely the same thing which we commonly express by the active verbs, conceiving or apprehending. When the word is taken in this popular sense, no man can possibly doubt whether he has ideas” (Thomas Reid, Philosophical Works, Vol. 1: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, with notes and supplementary dissertations by Sir William Hamilton, and an introduction by Harry Bracken [Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967], p. 224). It is only in the “philosophical sense as the immediate objects of all our thoughts in the mind” that Reid declares ideas to be “a mere fiction of philosophers.”

3 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 5.

4 Ibid., p. 5.

5 Ibid., p. 4.

6 Another poor historian of philosophy, Immanuel Kant, seems to be guilty of similar offences, as he refers to Descartes' philosophy, in his “Refutation of Idealism,” as problematic idealism, on the grounds that it “pleads incapacity to prove, through immediate experience, any existence except our own” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965], p. 244).

7 In truth, even the title of Yolton's book is a trifle misleading, for while it begins with an earnest and indulgent analysis of Descartes, there is precious little exegesis of Reid's views anywhere in the work, certainly not enough to bring out the singular elements within his theory of perceptual acquaintance.

8 It bears mention that Yolton is not alone in following this path. He finds support in comments made by Alquié in his annotated version of Descartes: Oeuvres philosophiques, textes établis, présentés et annotés par Ferdinand Alquié, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1963–73); Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève, “Le Domaine propre de l'homme chez les cartésiens,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 2, 2 (October 1964): 157–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Langage humain et signes naturels dans le cartésienisme,” in Le langage; actes du 13. Congrés des sociétés dephilosophie de langue française (Neuchatel: La Baconnière, 1966), Vol. 2, pp. 132–36Google Scholar; and Marin, Louis, La Critique du discours sur la “Logique de Port-Royal” et les “Pensées” de Pascal (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975).Google Scholar

9 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 22.

10 Ibid., p. 30.

11 It would appear that the term “semiotic” would be preferable to “semantic” in this context, since semiotics deals with signs, which can be natural, while semantics deals principally with symbols and their meanings, which are manmade entities. To minimize confusion, I will not insist on this point, but abide by Yolton's terminology.

12 Descartes, René, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by Cottingham, John, Stoothoff, Robert, and Murdoch, Dugald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), Vol. 1, p. 81.Google Scholar

13 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 25.

14 Ibid., p. 13.

15 Ibid., p. 37.

16 Reid, Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, p. 224.

17 Descartes, Writings, Vol. 2, p. 28.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., pp. 74–75.

20 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 32.

21 Ibid.

22 The only passages he does cite are from Alquié and Gilson—hardly the kind of support that his allegations require.

23 Descartes, Writings, Vol. 2, pp. 66–67.

24 Ibid., p. 75. Emphasis added.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 81. Emphasis added.

27 Ibid., p. 216.

28 Ibid., p. 280.

29 Ibid., p. 216. Emphasis added.

30 Ibid., p. 82. Emphasis added.

31 Ibid. Emphasis added.

32 Reid, Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, p. 272.

33 Descartes, Writings, Vol. 1, p. 165.

34 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 38. Emphasis added.

35 Descartes, Writings, Vol. 1, p. 81.

36 Ibid., p. 165.

37 It is worth noting that we do find Reid and Descartes in agreement on this point, as Reid himself acknowledges (Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, p. 272). Nevertheless, the two thinkers integrated this conviction into quite different philosophical agendas. Descartes employed the non-resemblance consideration in an effort to overthrow the scholastic doctrine of sensible species or forms, while Reid called upon it in his critique of the ideal system. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Descartes, the scholastic doctrine had, by Reid's time, receded sufficiently to have become just another item in the history of philosophy, an error worth avoiding, but one which had few, if any, proponents worth refuting.

38 Descartes, Writings, Vol. 1, p. 337. Emphasis added.

39 Ibid., p. 167.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 56. And Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 24.

42 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, pp. 18–19.

43 Descartes, Writings, Vol. 1, p. 106. Emphasis added.

44 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 13. Emphasis added.

45 Reid, Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, p. 310.

46 Ibid., p. 311.

47 Ibid., p. 122.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., Emphasis added.

50 Ibid., p. 324. In his work An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Reid observes “hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, figure and motion, do all suppose extension and cannot be conceived without it” (Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, p. 123). Take care to ignore Hamilton's commentary on this point (as on so many others). Reid does not go on to claim that extension is a posteriori; only that without sensory input of the sort that communicates the above qualities, our notion of extension or space will never be activated; that is, whoever might dwell (speaking purely hypothetically) in a complete void, would have no sense of spatiality. Kant himself, whom Hamilton treats as conceiving space to be genuinely a priori, nevertheless declares that “in the order of time … we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins” (Kant, Critique, p. 41). This is all Reid has in mind in making his own similar claim.

51 Reid, Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, p. 454.

52 Ibid., p. 455.

53 Ibid., pp. 441–61.

54 For further treatment of this a priori element in Reid's theory of perception, see Madden, Edward H., “The Metaphilosophy of Commonsense,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 20 (1983): 23–36Google Scholar; Madden, Edward H., “Was Reid a Natural Realist?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 17 (1986): 255–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Manns, James W., Reid and His French Disciples (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), pp. 18–23.Google Scholar

55 Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, p. 30.

56 Descartes, Writings, Vol. 1, p. 45.

57 Ibid., p. 284.

58 Ibid., p. 285.

59 Reid, Philosophical Works, p. 314.

60 And if we should doubt our eyes, our fingers can easily be called upon to alleviate (or confirm) such doubts. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Manns, Reid, pp. 30–37.

61 Reid, Philosophical Works, p. 122.