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THOMAS REID ON MOLYNEUX'S QUESTION
Author(s) -
HOPKINS ROBERT
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0114.2005.00231.x
Subject(s) - argumentative , epistemology , ideal (ethics) , modality (human–computer interaction) , perception , test (biology) , philosophy , sociology , psychology , cognitive science , computer science , artificial intelligence , paleontology , biology
Reid's Inquiry discusses two versions of Molyneux's question, offering opposing answers. The first version is used to address whether there are any properties originally perceived in both touch and vision. Although it is tempting to think the second discussion serves the same purpose, this would render pointless various novel features of the question Reid then frames. Instead, I suggest, Reid's second question provides the acid test of one of his central claims against the Ideal system, that the blind can form a conception of visible figure. The issue is not the cross‐modality of perceptual representations, but the amodality of a central concept, as befits the Inquiry's central argumentative ambitions.