Thomas Reid’s Common Sense Philosophy and C. S. Peirce’s “Critical Common-sensism”

Abstract

The philosophy of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) plays an important role in C. S. Peirce’s pragmatism – also called by Peirce himself “critical commonsensism”. Peirce certainly learned of Reid originally from the lectures by Francis Bowen (1811-1890) in Harvard. What is Peirce’s philosophical debt to Reid, what are the pragmatic elements that he saw in the thoughts of the Scottish philosopher? Peirce had a particular and explicit interpretation of Reid’s “principles of common sense” – they should be taken as “the instinctive result of human experience”. How can Reid’s principles of common sense, that are focused on the very possibility and meaning of everyday human operations, possibly relate to Peirce’s theory of knowledge and belief? These are the questions to be explored in our study.