Common sense in Reid and Grice

by JLS
for the GC

From Harris's book on the free will problem:

"The belief that we are free in our choices and actions is one of Reid’s ‘first principles’, or ‘principles of common sense’. As such, it cannot directly be proven to be true. Reid’s strategy is to establish the naturalness and universality of the belief, and to refute all arguments which purport to show the belief to be false. He is particularly concerned to answer Priestley’s claim that necessitarianism is the conclusion reached by the application of Newtonian method to human action."