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This thread will be shot & unpolished but I feel compelled to poorly list out what may amount to a false argument - tl;dr Reid says that the attempt to ground experience using reason is an absurd act and he uses very simple examples to at least make the prospect questionable.
Can a deaf man through language, the medium of reason, ever acquire a knowledge of music? No. So how can reason, always expressed in the historical and contingent medium of language be used to ground sensation? That is to say that language can ask questions that are absurd
To have knowledge one must assume existence, memory, sensation and more - and to try to "ground" these aspects is as impossible as trying to establish music in a deaf man by words.
Berkeleys' idealism is the belief that all things are ideas, there is no material world and that
Berkeleys' idealism is the belief that all things are ideas, there is no material world and that
the only difference between what we so foolishly distinguish as a current sensation, a memory of a sensation and the imagination of a sensation is the degree, vivacity and intensity, in short the liveliness of this idea as it is presented to us. Reid ingeniously destroys this -
For if the belief in an idea was merely a correspondence with its intensity then what can distinguish an atheist from a theist? For a theist, has an absolute belief in the afterlife - thus he has a vivacious idea, the agnostic accordingly a weak idea. But what of the Atheist?
Does he have a strong idea without belief? Or does he have no idea, and yet total belief without one? Moreover what of love and indifference, and then the third element hate? It divides itself accordingly to expose the false notion. Moreover how could we even devise of the
idea of there being a current sensation, a memory of a sensation and an imaginary sensation if it were all ideas? I would go on but I'm wandering. In short Kant accepts Descartes' dualism by doubling down and trying to ground sensation, but nothing can ground sensation and to
do so is an absurd act.
To conclude:
"I am thinking, says he, therefore I am: and is it not as good reasoning to say, I am sleeping therefore I am? or, I am doing nothing, therefore I am? If a body moves it must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest is must exist likeways."
To conclude:
"I am thinking, says he, therefore I am: and is it not as good reasoning to say, I am sleeping therefore I am? or, I am doing nothing, therefore I am? If a body moves it must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest is must exist likeways."
