ABSTRACT
Patrick Rysiew* Department of Philosophy, The University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3045, Victoria BC V8W
3P4 Canada (Received 8 October 2013; final version received 25 October 2013)
By Reid’s own account, ‘That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious’ (FP#7), has a special place among the First Principles of Contingent Truths. Some have found that claim puzzling, but it is not. Contrary to what’s usually assumed, certain FPs preceding FP#7 do not already assert the better part of what FP#7 explicitly states. FP#7 is needed because there is nothing epistemological in the FPs that precede it; and its special place among the FPs is a straightforward consequence of its being both perfectly general and distinctively epistemological. Keywords: first principles; reliability; Thomas Reid; Philip De Bary; Keith Lehrer
1. Introduction Central to Reid’s philosophy is common sense and its defense; central to the latter are the First Principles he articulates. But Reid’s presentation gives rise to various problems of interpretation – for instance, whether first principles are general or particular, whether they are principles of truth or of evidence, in what sense they can really be said to be ‘self-evident’, in what sense they are things ‘we all believe’, and so on.1 Another such concern, and the one to be addressed here, is just how to understand one of the First Principles of Contingent Truths (hereinafter, ‘First Principles’) and its relation to the rest. This is First Principle #7, which speaks to the ‘non-fallaciousness’ of ‘the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error’.
