“The emotions produced by a fine landscape and the singing of birds, being similar in a considerable degree, readily unite, though their causes are little connected.” This sentence, from Kames's Elements of Criticism, passes no judgment on the accuracy or truth value of responses to landscapes and birdsongs, and considers only the similarity and relation of those responses. As in that one example, core epistemological questions are consistently sidestepped throughout Common Sense philosophy and aesthetics, in favor of concern with the properties of experiences rather than with the information they might provide. Faced with the spectacle of Lockean empiricism's trajectory into Humean skepticism – with the way that basing knowledge only on one's senses could never lead to certainty about the truth value of one's knowledge – Scottish Common Sense philosophy, as its name implies, worked to regain a basic faith in the senses. And faith is the operative word, because the Common Sense philosophers do not really disprove skepticism, but rather adopt a strategic blindness to the fact that we have no way of knowing if our experience is at all trustworthy. In practice this led to, among other things, a body of writing on psychology and aesthetics which is largely descriptive, outlining how thoughts and emotions follow from one another and from objects in the external world. The result is an assertive and analytic account of the mind, but not an argument for the accuracy and validity of the mind's impressions.