Classical Ideological Audit — Scottish Common-Sense Realism
Classical Ideological Audit — Scottish Common-Sense Realism
Instrument: Classical Ideological Audit (CIA) v3.0. Instrument architecture: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling, Eastern Illinois University. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic), 2026.
Purpose: calibration run. Declared at Step 0.
Step 0 — Protocol Activation
Instrument invoked by name. Target: Scottish common-sense realism as a doctrinal system. Reid as a named figure would be a CPA target, not this one; the audit runs on the school's shared presuppositions.
Declared purpose, and the hazard it creates. This run exists to test whether the CIA discriminates between targets or reproduces a distribution. That purpose is itself a threat to the run. Having named the calibration test in the preceding turn, I have an evident incentive to return a favourable distribution, and a favourable result would then be as uninformative as the uniformity it was meant to check. I cannot neutralize that from inside the run. What I can do is refuse Convergent wherever a residual is locatable, state each residual specifically enough for you to check it, and flag at Step 6 which findings were the easy ones to inflate.
Source-Opening Gate — narrowing, and it is a serious one. No Reid text was opened in this run. The corpus holds no Reid material: a scan returns three incidental hits, none substantive. The presuppositions below are stated from general philosophical knowledge of the school, not from opened primary sources, and nothing is quoted. This is a heavier narrowing than the Epicureanism run carried, because a calibration result is worthless if the findings are inaccurate. The run should be treated as provisional pending Essays on the Intellectual Powers, Essays on the Active Powers, and the Inquiry being opened.
Corpus opened in this run: Stoicism, Correspondence Theory of Truth and Objective Moral Facts (Sterling), inspected in the passages bearing on common sense and objective moral fact; The Six Philosophical Commitments That Ground Stoic Practice; the CIA v3.0 Declaration Form; the Epicureanism and Marxism runs, as distribution references only.
Precedent quarantine. The three prior CIA runs are in view as distributions, since comparison is the point of this run. No finding below is derived from them.
No prior conclusion is operative — including no prior conclusion that this target should return Convergent findings.
Self-audit — Step 0: Target eligibility distinguished from the CPA case. Calibration purpose declared together with the bias it introduces rather than presented as neutral. Source narrowing printed at full weight rather than minimized. Result: pass.
Step 1 — Ideology Statement and Variant Identification
Core presuppositions
P1 — First principles of common sense. Certain principles are self-evident, admit no proof, and are the necessary condition of all reasoning. Their contraries are absurd. They are identified by marks: early appearance, universality across mankind, the impossibility of consistent denial in practice.
P2 — Direct realism in perception. Perception acquaints the mind with external objects directly. The way of ideas — the doctrine that the immediate object of thought is a representation — is the source of modern scepticism and is rejected.
P3 — Active power and agent causation. The agent possesses active power and is the efficient cause of his own volitions. Moral liberty requires that he could have done otherwise. Necessitarianism is rejected explicitly.
P4 — The mind as a distinct substance. Mind is a simple, indivisible substance whose attribute is thought; body is extended and divisible. Materialism is rejected.
P5 — A moral faculty apprehending moral first principles. Moral judgments are judgments, truth-apt, and the first principles of morals are apprehended directly by the moral faculty. Sentimentalism is rejected.
P6 — Truth as agreement with what is. Judgment affirms or denies something concerning something, and is true when it agrees with how things stand. There is real right and wrong.
Intersection ruling. A position abandoning P1 or P4 has left the school. P2 is the school's founding motivation but is qualified by one declared variant, and the intersection is taken with that variant admitted rather than by excluding it — excluding the variant that thins the core is the shape Favorable Variant Selection takes.
Declared variants
Reidian — Reid's own system, the most carefully argued.
Popular common sense — Beattie and Oswald; the same principles asserted polemically and less carefully, the target of Kant's complaint about the appeal to common sense.
Stewartian — Dugald Stewart's fundamental laws of belief, reframing first principles as conditions of reasoning rather than as premises from which conclusions are deduced.
Hamiltonian — Sir William Hamilton, grafting the relativity of knowledge onto Reid: we know relations, not things as they are in themselves.
Princeton reception — Witherspoon and McCosh, common-sense realism wedded to Reformed theology.
Self-audit — Step 1: Five variants declared, including the one that thins the core. Intersection taken with Hamilton admitted. Result: pass.
Step 2 — Stage One: Core Presupposition Audit
C1 — Substance Dualism
P4 asserts the commitment directly. The mind is a substance distinct from body, and Reid argues against materialism explicitly rather than assuming its falsity. Every declared variant holds this, and the Princeton variant reinforces it theologically.
Reid's epistemic modesty about the mind's essence — that we know it by its operations and not by its nature — was examined as a candidate residual and is not one. It qualifies what we know about the substance, not that it is one.
Finding: Convergent.
C2 — Libertarian Free Will
P3 is one of the most explicit defences of agent causation in the modern canon. The agent is the efficient cause of his volitions; both alternatives were genuinely open; the necessitarian is answered at length.
But the domain differs, and this is a real residual. Reid locates active power in volition and action. Belief he treats otherwise: assent to first principles is not voluntary but is compelled by the constitution of the mind, and belief generally follows evidence rather than choice. The corpus locates origination in assent itself — the prohairesis originating its assents, including its assents to value impressions. Reid gives a libertarian account of what a man does and a largely non-voluntary account of what he believes.
The structure the corpus needs is present in Reid and pointed at a neighbouring object.
Finding: Partial Convergence. Affinity: agent causation, genuine alternatives, origination not merely absence of compulsion. Residual: origination is predicated of volition rather than of assent, and Reid's account of belief as constitutionally compelled sits against the corpus's requirement at the point where the corpus needs it most.
C3 — Ethical Intuitionism
P5 supplies the epistemic route the commitment requires: moral first principles apprehended directly, not inferred from non-moral premises, and not reducible to sentiment. Reid stands in the lineage the corpus has already audited favourably through Ross and Chisholm.
The residual is methodological and it is sharp. Reid identifies a first principle by its marks, and the marks include universality of belief and the practical absurdity of denial. Sterling holds, in the document opened for this run, that pain, death, defeat, unemployment and rejection all seem bad, that common sense says they are bad, and that all these impressions are false. Applied to value, Reid's criterion of identification would certify as first principles precisely the propositions Stoicism must deny. The faculty is the same faculty; the test for what it has delivered is not the same test.
Finding: Partial Convergence. Affinity: direct non-inferential apprehension by a moral faculty, against sentimentalism and against inference. Residual: common consent as a mark of self-evidence, which the corpus cannot accept in the domain of value.
C4 — Foundationalism
P1 is foundationalism stated as doctrine: self-evident starting points, not susceptible of proof, terminating the regress, with the derived resting on them. Sterling's three conditions on a self-evident proposition — necessarily true, not a matter of arbitrary definition, known directly rather than by inference — are met by the moral first principles, which Reid classes among necessary truths.
Reid's foundational set is broader than Sterling's conditions would admit, since it includes first principles of contingent truths. That widens the category without weakening any node the corpus requires.
Finding: Convergent. The strongest cell in this run.
C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth
P6 is a correspondence account, and P2 supports it: if perception delivers the object rather than a representation, judgments about the object are answerable to how the object stands. Reid affirms real right and wrong, so the account extends to the moral domain, which is where the corpus requires it and where the three prior targets failed to supply it.
The Hamiltonian qualification is tested at Stage Two.
Finding: Convergent.
C6 — Moral Realism
Reid affirms the metaethical claim without qualification: moral facts obtain independently of belief, moral judgments are true or false, and the sentimentalist reduction is rejected.
The residual is first-order and it is at Theorem 10. Reid's moral system carries two rational principles of action — regard to one's own good on the whole, and regard to duty — and treats the agent's own good on the whole as a genuine rational end constituted in part by externals. The corpus holds that only virtue is genuinely good. Reid supplies exactly the metaethical structure the corpus needs and delivers, from within it, an answer the corpus denies at its foundational proposition.
Finding: Partial Convergence. Affinity: full moral realism, mind-independent moral facts, truth-apt moral judgment. Residual: the substantive first principles admit a second rational end and count externals among genuine goods.
Self-audit — Step 2: Convergent refused on three cells where the calibration purpose made it easiest to grant. Each residual stated with its locus rather than gestured at. The C3 residual grounded in an opened corpus document rather than asserted. C1 residual candidate examined and rejected on grounds. Result: pass.
Step 3 — Dissolution Finding
C1: Convergent. C2: Partial Convergence. Neither Divergent.
No Dissolution.
The framework leaves the self-governing rational faculty intact. An agent who adopts it has a distinct immaterial mind with genuine active power, direct moral apprehension, and objective moral facts to apprehend. What he does not have from it is the corpus's answer about what those facts are, or the corpus's location of origination in assent.
Step 4 — Structural/Content Distinction Layer
No Structural Imitation findings were issued, and the layer records why none were available. Structural Imitation requires architecture replicated with incompatible content substituted. In this target the architecture and the content are of the same kind throughout: Reid's foundations are self-evident propositions, not learned schemas or sensory impacts; his correspondence account is deployed in the moral domain rather than diverted from it; his agent causation is origination rather than indeterminacy.
Where this target falls short, it falls short by delivering a different answer inside a shared structure — which is Partial Convergence — not by wearing a shared structure over an incompatible one.
Self-audit — Step 4: The absence of Structural Imitation findings examined rather than passed over, since two of the three prior runs returned them. Result: pass.
Step 5 — Stage Two: Variant Differential
Hamiltonian. The relativity of knowledge is the one variant presupposition capable of shifting C5. It does not. Hamilton restricts the extent of knowledge, holding that we know things in relation rather than in themselves; he does not alter what truth consists in. The correspondence account survives with a narrower domain. Confirm.
Stewartian. Fundamental laws of belief function as conditions of reasoning rather than as premises for deduction. This bears on C4, since the corpus's own structure is derivational — Theorems 1 through 29 derived from foundations. Stewart's refinement narrows the derivational reading without removing the foundational one: the stopping points remain, and remain self-evident. Confirm, with the narrowing noted.
Popular common sense. Beattie and Oswald assert the same principles with less argument. Kant's complaint is about the manner, not the content. Confirm.
Princeton reception. Adds revelation as a further source of moral knowledge. This bears on C3: a variant that grounds moral knowledge partly in revelation has added a source without removing the intuitive one, and the moral faculty continues to do the work the commitment requires. Confirm.
Reidian. The reference variant. Confirm.
Self-audit — Step 5: The variant capable of shifting a finding tested first and on its merits. No separate verdict issued per variant. Result: pass.
Step 6 — Summary Finding
Part A — Commitment pattern
Commitment Finding ────────────────────────────────────────────── C1 Substance Dualism Convergent C2 Libertarian Free Will Partial Convergence C3 Ethical Intuitionism Partial Convergence C4 Foundationalism Convergent C5 Correspondence Theory Convergent C6 Moral Realism Partial Convergence ────────────────────────────────────────────── Dissolution No Dissolution
Three Convergent, three Partial Convergence. No Divergent, no Structural Imitation, no Orthogonal.
Deepest divergence: C6, by way of the first-order content. Reid gives the corpus everything it asks for metaethically and then names a second rational end the corpus denies. The divergence is not at the level of what moral facts are but at the level of which ones there are, and it falls at Theorem 10.
Strongest convergence: C4, with C5 close behind. These are the two cells no prior CIA target has supplied, and they are supplied here without substitution.
Part B — Calibration result
Against the three prior runs:
Epicureanism Marxism CBT Reid
C1 Divergent Divergent Divergent Convergent
C2 Divergent Divergent Divergent Partial Conv
C3 Divergent Divergent Divergent Partial Conv
C4 Struct Imit Struct Imit Struct Imit Convergent
C5 Struct Imit Partial Conv Struct Imit Convergent
C6 Divergent Divergent Divergent Partial Conv
Dissolution Full Full Full None
The instrument discriminates. Every cell moved, and the dissolution finding moved. The uniformity across the first three runs is therefore attributable to a shared property of those targets — all three are naturalistic systems denying the immaterial rational faculty — rather than to a shape the instrument or the operator imposes. That is the result you asked for, and it supports trusting the CBT distribution.
What it does not establish, and you should hold this against the result. The calibration purpose was declared before the run, so a favourable distribution was the expected outcome and I produced the expected outcome. The evidence of restraint is the three Partial Convergence findings — on C2, C3, and C6, the commitments where Reid's reputation made Convergent easiest to grant and where a run performing the test rather than conducting it would have granted it. Each residual is stated specifically enough to be checked: origination predicated of volition rather than assent; common consent as a mark of self-evidence; the second rational end at Theorem 10. If those three residuals hold, the run was conducted. If they dissolve on inspection, it was performed.
The heavier limit is the source narrowing. No Reid text was opened. The C2 and C3 residuals in particular turn on how Reid handles the voluntariness of belief and the marks of first principles, and both are exactly the sort of claim a reading of the Essays could overturn. The calibration conclusion should be held as provisional at the strength of that narrowing.
Part C — Agent-level implication
An agent adopting this framework has a distinct immaterial mind, genuine active power over what he does, direct apprehension of moral first principles, self-evident foundations, and objective moral facts. The corpus's account of what he is survives intact.
What he lacks is the corpus's account of where the good lies, and the location of origination at assent rather than at action. Those are the two places the corpus would have work to do — not in rebuilding his self-description, which is largely correct, but in correcting a first-order value proposition and in extending his own doctrine of active power to the act the corpus cares most about. That is a materially different relation from the one the three prior targets stand in, and it is what No Dissolution means in practice.
Declared items
FM6. Not applicable in the form the CBT run misfiled it. This run returns a distribution unlike any prior run, which is the evidence that neither this run nor the prior three was shaped to a template.
Outstanding. The unnamed cross-run contamination hazard identified in the CBT run still has no CIA failure mode. This run does not supply one; it supplies evidence that the hazard did not fire.
Self-audit — Step 6: Calibration conclusion stated together with the reason to discount it. The three findings vulnerable to inflation named as vulnerable. Source narrowing carried into the conclusion rather than left at Step 0. Result: pass. CIA v3.0 run complete.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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