Berkeley and Reid

Abstract Reid reacted strongly to Berkeley’s philosophy. He depicts Berkeley as the exemplar of the theory on which ideas are the immediate objects of mental activity, and presents Berkeley’s idealism and immaterialism as instances of the excesses of that theory. Yet Reid’s theory of perception reveals that Berkeley had a profound and positive influence on him. He follows Berkeley in holding that vision alone does not present us with distance, size, and shape. Those are presented originally only by touch. He also follows Berkeley in holding that a suggestion relation coordinates visible and tangible figure, in opposition to relations such as resemblance, inference, judgment, calculation, or deduction. He adopts Berkeley’s explanation of how we perceive tangible figure by sight—by suggestion—but he is not bound to Berkeley’s heterogeneity thesis, according to which visible and tangible figure are incommensurate. According to Reid, it is both true that visible figure suggests tangible figure and that they are geometrically inter-derivable. Nevertheless, following Berkeley, Reid insists that normal perceivers do not infer tangible figure from visible figure. Rather, our ability to perceive tangible figure by sight is an acquired perception: a perceptual ability acquired through multimodal perception, perceptual development, and perceptual learning.