Notes on Reid

The "moment" at which the "connexion" between two things, starting with induction but becoming substantially more, becomes obvious and plain to the mind, in the present tense, is the root of commonsense epistemology.

Resistance to reality serves an obvious purpose. That purpose is stagnation. It is achieved by eliminating ideological threats. Careful and unanimous belief is maintained in a vacuum by social silence. If nobody's ideas penetrate, change is optional. If there is not reality, there is no "other."

Another thing needs to be said first about sociability. We normally assume that knowing another means a similar thing as knowing the self. We assume wrongly that the process for each is the same. Because we cannot "enter" another's private thoughts, we can only know a person as a dynamic object. It is not that different on a fundamental level from being aware of a chair. For our purposes, it is only important we realize that self-awareness and sociability are different.

Once we realize this distinction, we realize how important our subconscious belief in reality is to knowing others. Certainly in the sense that we share ideas with them, our personal belief about reality is all-important. If we can deny their existence by a general concept - hard skepticism about external reality - we can slip comfortably into an unexamined solipsism (the stance that the self is the only knowable reality).