# Hutcheson, Hume, Reid and Smith on moral sense, taste, and common sense **Artwork**: **Artist**: Arnaud Quercy **Asset**: IDS-RNI0069 **Serial**: NAN-RDG000120 This is a Stanford Encyclopedia survey documenting the historical positions of 18th-century Scottish philosophers (moral sense theory, natural law, aesthetics of taste, testimony, common sense, conjectural history); it is a piece of intellectual history reporting what Hutcheson, Hume, Reid, Smith, Kames and others argued, and the ideamorphism framework's claims about artistic emission, diffraction through an ouverture, and codex-construction have no real object to grip here beyond incidental shared words like 'sense' or 'taste' that belong to a wholly different inquiry. ## Context ### Declined — `no-purchase` [@source] ### Propositional grid [@p31] > **Read this grid.** “Not evaluated” does **not** mean the source has nothing to say about that proposition. It means **the reading did not instruct it**. That is not a result, and it counts in no denominator. A silence, by contrast, is a finding: the reading touched the proposition without concluding, or noted its absence itself. **Not evaluated (37)** — P1, P2, P3, P3a, P4, P5, P6, P7, P8, P9, P10, P11, P12, P13, P14, P14a, P14b, P15, P16, P16a, P17, P18, P18a, P19, P19a, P20, P21, P22, P23, P24, P25, P26, P27, P28, P29, P30, P31 --- *Overall verdict: **DECLINED:no-purchase** — taxonomy of the August 2026 pass, predating the move to relational verdicts. Kept as metadata: the gap between the two forms is data, not residue. This reading’s judgement is in the grid above.* Reading of 2026-07-15 · model `claude-sonnet-5` · source 83,292 chars · 1 attempt(s) --- ### First pass — kept as written *Reading produced by the T50 RSS pass, before the boundary lens. It is reproduced UNCORRECTED. Keeping it is the point: without it, a changed title is just a changed title — with it, what the second pass refused becomes legible.* **Title it carried :** « Scottish Enlightenment's Theory of Sympathy as Diffractive Reception » > Adam Smith's theory of sympathy—the mechanism by which one mind receives the emotional 'emission' of another and transforms it through their own embodied ouverture—is a proto-ideamorphic account of diffraction. Smith argues that sympathy is NOT perfect transmission (not 1=1); the receiver must imaginatively reconstruct the other's state through their own sensory and emotional apparatus, necessarily losing fidelity to the original while generating new understanding. This is generative loss as epistemic practice: the gap between what was felt and what is received becomes the site where moral knowledge crystallizes. The Scottish emphasis on sentiment, embodiment, and the receiver's active role in meaning-making directly prefigures the ideamorphic inversion of expression (emitter) toward reception (ouverture). Smith's 'impartial spectator' is a codex—a systematic constraint that shapes how moral signals are processed across minds. T50 RSS assessment · 2026-07-15 · remplacée par `boundary-lens-2026-08`