I think you're drastically under-selling Reid here. As much as I love Huemer, his defense of common sense philosophy isn't as thorough or as impressive as Reid's.
I'm guessing you're mostly familiar with Reid through his Inquiry, which you have pictured here. In there, he definitely makes the Bayesian point you mention here. His overall approach mostly uses this as an explanation for why we should test theories against common sense, though. His overall account of the role common sense plays in philosophy is far more complex than that.
In the Inquiry, he frequently refers to the idea that philosophy has no other roots than common sense, and that it therefore cannot stand in judgment of it. In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, though, he explains quite thoroughly what he means by this. First, he has a clear definition of what counts as common sense. He defines common sense as consisting of presuppositions of ordinary thought, language, and behavior. Reid claimed, and I think recent work by people like Noam Chomsky and Paul Bloom has shown, that our minds come pre-equipped with concepts and beliefs that underwrite how we experience, understand, and engage with the world. These innate conceptual frameworks carry with them metaphysical commitments, and a basic picture of reality that we bring with us into everything that happens in our lives. Our minds break the world up into objects with properties, for example. Common sense is therefore incompatible with philosophical views according to which there are only properties, but no objects.
Since these presuppositions shape the way we make judgments in the first place, we literally have no other source than common sense from which any of our judgments could ultimately arise. Rejecting common sense, on this definition, would be equivalent to rejecting the legitimacy of all the judgments that presuppose it. Common sense has to set the priors on the issues it speaks to because it's literally impossible to make rational judgments at all from any other point without presupposing the legitimacy of those judgments in the background. All judgments come from the same roots, and you can't cut yourself off from them without destroying the tree.
I think this is a much better defense of using common sense for your priors. On this account of common sense, though, the number of beliefs that qualify is a lot lower. The fact that a belief is widely held, especially just in your particular culture, isn't enough to qualify it as part of common sense. The overall shape of the world certainly isn't part of the presuppositions built into perception, or perceptual judgments, for example, so the belief that the world is flat could never be part of or contradictory to common sense.
In fact, in general, no particular, broad views about the nature of reality not already presupposed by those frameworks could be knowable without a great deal of thought and research, if at all. We know there are objects because we see them. We know there are minds because we have them. We know there are principles of logic and mathematics, because we think and reason in accordance with them. We know there are facts about how we should act because we judge ourselves and others by them. But that's about it.
I'm starting to get off the topic of Bayes and Reid, though, so I should probably stop here. The good news is that I think there's actually a much better defense of common sense as the source of our priors than you thought in Reid's work. The possibly not as good news is that the elements of common sense there are to appeal to probably isn't as broad as you tend to use the term in some of your writing.
There is a serious tension between common-sense knowledge about human beings and knowledge sought by professional psychologists. All too often, psychologists have conducted and published research that simply confirms what most people already know. For example, a classic explanation for human aggression is the frustration-aggression hypothesis proposed by Dollard et al. in 1939. The hypothesis is that when people are blocked from achieving their goals, they become frustrated and respond aggressively. Duh. The hypothesis has been confirmed numerous times, but what is the gain? We already knew this from common sense because humans have been observing each other for thousands of years and have accumulated a vast store of accurate, common-sense knowledge about the causes of human behavior.
n principle, formal experiments might refine common-sense psychological knowledge, specifying parameters such as what kind and degree of frustration under what circumstances lead to what kind of aggression, but psychological measurement is so crude that refinement is rare.
On the other hand, if professional psychologists propose a hypothesis that contradicts common sense (and actually they often try to do this to get attention for their insightfulness and ability to generate genuinely new knowledge), they are likely to be wrong for the reasons described by Bryan. It is a double-bind: pointlessly confirming psychological knowledge we already have from common sense or proposing an idea that contradicts common sense and is likely to be wrong.
There is a third possibility for professional psychologists: creating and playing with abstract models and laboratory phenomena that delight other professional colleagues but have little connection to everyday experience in the real world.
This is not to say that all psychological research is pointless. For example, evolutionary psychology has confirmed predictions from the theory of natural selection that would have never occurred to non-psychologists. But such gems are few and far between.
No other public intellectual alive today abuses the term "common sense" more frequently or more shamelessly than Bryan Caplan. Just do a search for how often he resorts to the term when trying to make an argument.
Consider Scott Alexander's reply to Bryan's attempt to use it yet again a few days ago in the form of the bell curve horseshoe-opinions meme: "Guy who thinks education doesn't work, parenting doesn't matter, and we need open borders: "Yeah, people's common sense seems like a good guide."
Or consider Bryan himself, "The real problem is that in politics, common sense is not so common."
Which is cute, because all he has to do is define the 'common' (widely held) and 'sense' (intuitive conviction) out of "common sense". And then replace it with 'uncommon' (only a few enlightened intellectuals like me bite the bullet in adopting the implications of the logic of our principles) and 'counterintuitive' (the product of subtle rational analysis which most people can't or won't do and which strikes them as a radical and undesirable conclusion resulting from a flawed argument.)
That is, just define the thing as its opposite. Which, by the principle of explosion, allows one to 'prove' literally anything.
This is why it is not "anti-intellectual bias" but, ahem, actual common sense for most ordinary people to be skeptical of anything public intellectuals or lawyers say, because their experience is that this is a typical semantic bait-and-switch word game these advocates like to play to manipulate opinions.
The links to Huemer’s articles aren’t correct.
Saw this as well. They went to a random site advertising internet upgrades.
Here's the mystery paper: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/mystery.htm
The Rand paper (Why I Am Not an Objectivist): https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/rand.htm
I think the last one might be this one (Moral Objectivism): https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/obj.htm
Try the logic of this recent gem I saw:
"All the Austrian economists, like Milton Friedman and Bryan Caplan, are Jews."
I think you're drastically under-selling Reid here. As much as I love Huemer, his defense of common sense philosophy isn't as thorough or as impressive as Reid's.
I'm guessing you're mostly familiar with Reid through his Inquiry, which you have pictured here. In there, he definitely makes the Bayesian point you mention here. His overall approach mostly uses this as an explanation for why we should test theories against common sense, though. His overall account of the role common sense plays in philosophy is far more complex than that.
In the Inquiry, he frequently refers to the idea that philosophy has no other roots than common sense, and that it therefore cannot stand in judgment of it. In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, though, he explains quite thoroughly what he means by this. First, he has a clear definition of what counts as common sense. He defines common sense as consisting of presuppositions of ordinary thought, language, and behavior. Reid claimed, and I think recent work by people like Noam Chomsky and Paul Bloom has shown, that our minds come pre-equipped with concepts and beliefs that underwrite how we experience, understand, and engage with the world. These innate conceptual frameworks carry with them metaphysical commitments, and a basic picture of reality that we bring with us into everything that happens in our lives. Our minds break the world up into objects with properties, for example. Common sense is therefore incompatible with philosophical views according to which there are only properties, but no objects.
Since these presuppositions shape the way we make judgments in the first place, we literally have no other source than common sense from which any of our judgments could ultimately arise. Rejecting common sense, on this definition, would be equivalent to rejecting the legitimacy of all the judgments that presuppose it. Common sense has to set the priors on the issues it speaks to because it's literally impossible to make rational judgments at all from any other point without presupposing the legitimacy of those judgments in the background. All judgments come from the same roots, and you can't cut yourself off from them without destroying the tree.
I think this is a much better defense of using common sense for your priors. On this account of common sense, though, the number of beliefs that qualify is a lot lower. The fact that a belief is widely held, especially just in your particular culture, isn't enough to qualify it as part of common sense. The overall shape of the world certainly isn't part of the presuppositions built into perception, or perceptual judgments, for example, so the belief that the world is flat could never be part of or contradictory to common sense.
In fact, in general, no particular, broad views about the nature of reality not already presupposed by those frameworks could be knowable without a great deal of thought and research, if at all. We know there are objects because we see them. We know there are minds because we have them. We know there are principles of logic and mathematics, because we think and reason in accordance with them. We know there are facts about how we should act because we judge ourselves and others by them. But that's about it.
I'm starting to get off the topic of Bayes and Reid, though, so I should probably stop here. The good news is that I think there's actually a much better defense of common sense as the source of our priors than you thought in Reid's work. The possibly not as good news is that the elements of common sense there are to appeal to probably isn't as broad as you tend to use the term in some of your writing.
Common sense is usually right but commonly missing whereas vulgar opinion is always everywhere.
There is a serious tension between common-sense knowledge about human beings and knowledge sought by professional psychologists. All too often, psychologists have conducted and published research that simply confirms what most people already know. For example, a classic explanation for human aggression is the frustration-aggression hypothesis proposed by Dollard et al. in 1939. The hypothesis is that when people are blocked from achieving their goals, they become frustrated and respond aggressively. Duh. The hypothesis has been confirmed numerous times, but what is the gain? We already knew this from common sense because humans have been observing each other for thousands of years and have accumulated a vast store of accurate, common-sense knowledge about the causes of human behavior.
n principle, formal experiments might refine common-sense psychological knowledge, specifying parameters such as what kind and degree of frustration under what circumstances lead to what kind of aggression, but psychological measurement is so crude that refinement is rare.
On the other hand, if professional psychologists propose a hypothesis that contradicts common sense (and actually they often try to do this to get attention for their insightfulness and ability to generate genuinely new knowledge), they are likely to be wrong for the reasons described by Bryan. It is a double-bind: pointlessly confirming psychological knowledge we already have from common sense or proposing an idea that contradicts common sense and is likely to be wrong.
There is a third possibility for professional psychologists: creating and playing with abstract models and laboratory phenomena that delight other professional colleagues but have little connection to everyday experience in the real world.
This is not to say that all psychological research is pointless. For example, evolutionary psychology has confirmed predictions from the theory of natural selection that would have never occurred to non-psychologists. But such gems are few and far between.
No other public intellectual alive today abuses the term "common sense" more frequently or more shamelessly than Bryan Caplan. Just do a search for how often he resorts to the term when trying to make an argument.
Consider Scott Alexander's reply to Bryan's attempt to use it yet again a few days ago in the form of the bell curve horseshoe-opinions meme: "Guy who thinks education doesn't work, parenting doesn't matter, and we need open borders: "Yeah, people's common sense seems like a good guide."
Or consider Bryan himself, "The real problem is that in politics, common sense is not so common."
Which is cute, because all he has to do is define the 'common' (widely held) and 'sense' (intuitive conviction) out of "common sense". And then replace it with 'uncommon' (only a few enlightened intellectuals like me bite the bullet in adopting the implications of the logic of our principles) and 'counterintuitive' (the product of subtle rational analysis which most people can't or won't do and which strikes them as a radical and undesirable conclusion resulting from a flawed argument.)
That is, just define the thing as its opposite. Which, by the principle of explosion, allows one to 'prove' literally anything.
This is why it is not "anti-intellectual bias" but, ahem, actual common sense for most ordinary people to be skeptical of anything public intellectuals or lawyers say, because their experience is that this is a typical semantic bait-and-switch word game these advocates like to play to manipulate opinions.