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New Phenomenalism as an Account of Perceptual Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
To be an Empiricist with respect to knowledge of the natural world, is to insist that all knowledge of that world is rooted in perceptual experience. All claims which go beyond the deliverances of the senses must, in the end, be justified by, and understood in terms of, relations holding between those claims and sensory data. Crucial to the Empiricist case, therefore, is an account of how perception can be a source of knowledge. How can sensory experiences provide, for the owner of those experiences, information about objects and events which exist independently of the experiences themselves?
The following essay scavenges in contemporary sources to arrive at a fresh Empiricist account of perceptual knowledge. There are sufficient parallels with earlier doctrines to call the outcome ‘New Phenomenalism’, but the label is not important. The materials for the thesis have been gathered (and probably twisted) from several current writers, most notably P.F. Strawson and Jonathan Bennett, but no one of these writers is a proponent of the expounded thesis as a whole. As with a composite photograph, no face completely fits.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 9: Impressions of Empiricism , March 1975 , pp. 109 - 121
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1975
References
page 109 note 1 Bennett, J., Locke, Berkely, Hume (Clarendon Press, 1971) chs II, III, VI, XIIIGoogle Scholar; and his Kant's Analytic (Cambridge University Press, 1966)Google Scholar esp. Chs 2, 3, 8, 9, 13–15. Strawson, P. F., Individuals (Methuen, 1959) Pt ICrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his The Bounds of Sense (Methuen, 1966) Pts 1, 2, 4.Google Scholar
page 111 note 1 Hinton, J. M., Experiences (Clarendon Press, 1973) esp. IIb.Google ScholarPubMed
page 111 note 2 For convenience, we shall speak of these disjunctions as if they were between perception and hallucination only.
page 113 note 1 For the debate about seeing as epistemic, see Warnock, G. J., ‘Seeing’Google Scholar, and Vesey, G.N.A., ‘Seeing and Seeing AS’, both in Swartz, R. J., (ed.) Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing (Doubleday, 1965)Google Scholar; Dretske, F.I., Seeing and Knowing (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) esp. ch. 2Google Scholar; Pitcher, G., Perception (Princeton University Press, 1971).Google ScholarPubMed
page 114 note 1 Or, equally, ‘the status of hallucinatory knowledge’. As we said earlier, one cannot elucidate the job done by the concept of perception without, at the same time, spelling out the role of the concept of hallucination.
page 115 note 1 It would be foolish to think that enough has been said here. One of the prime sources for our construction of new phenomenalism, Jonathan Bennett, still cleaves to the vocabulary of logical construction. See, for example, Locke, Berkely, Hume, pp. 133–9, 352–3.Google Scholar
page 115 note 2 F. N. Sibley has some useful remarks about ‘status concepts’ in his ‘Analysing Seeing’, Perception, ed. Sibley, (Methuen, 1971) pp. 122–3.Google Scholar
page 116 note 1 A similar objection applies to certain attempts to solve the Other Minds problem. Many putative solutions start from a model which presupposes that the concept of mind is already in operation. Behaviour is described in a vocabulary which could not be used unless the concept of mind was already playing its explanatory role.
page 116 note 2 If a factual premise seems out of place, then there are Kantian arguments in Strawson and Bennett which seek to show that we must make this distinction.
page 117 note 1 ‘But ‘tis evident, that whenever we infer the cont'd existence of the objects of sense from their coherence, and the frequency of their union, ‘tis in order to bestow on the objects a greater regularity than what is observ'd in our mere perceptions.’ Treatise, I.iv.2. (Selby-Bigge, , p. 197).Google Scholar
page 121 note 1 We should not deny that, on special occasions, particular perceptual claims may be established by appeal to known causal regularities. Such claims, however, arise within the context of other perception claims which are not so established. Grice, H. P., ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’Google Scholar, in R. J. Swartz (ed), op. cit., is particularly instructive on this point.
page 121 note 2 On the notion of an hypothesis without rivals, see Putnam, H.'s ‘Other Minds’, in Logic and Art ed. Rudner, R. and Scheffler, I. (Bobbs-Merril, 1972) pp. 80–2.Google Scholar