 It is Reid’s contention that, so long as one is working within a Cartesian framework of ideas, our relations to others must be a taken to be a matter of probability, hypothesis, or conjecture, and this he takes to be at odds with the conviction with which, for example, the child interacts with her nurse. While the Cartesian recognizes only the solitary operations of mind, Reid proposes that we also recognize the social operations of mind (Reid 1785 [1969: 71]).