By: RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW
An ‘idea’, as casting of its gross effect, are much like mental apparatuses in the faculties of excitations. In that the environmentally traitful characterization to things outside the mind, for which of our inherent perceptions of the world are brought between the mind and what the mind endorses by the representation as having the apprehensive and ever-changing purposiveness intending to dialectic awareness. That of relating to the mind, decline to fix one among alternatives as the one to be taken, accepted or adopted. The electrifying circuitry belong to its independent existence, that, nonetheless, these excitabilities carry over the validity of something (as a belief, course of action, or point of view). Such irreproachable conveyance to the mind, in close association to renounce of its character, is that for which of perceiving the world and its surrounding surfaces, that in itself, has permissively presented a dramatic quality that does not rest exclusively on the
theory of relativity or quantum mechanics.
Perhaps, the most startling and potentially revolutionary implications, in human terms is a new perspective on the relationship between mind and the world that is utterly different from that sanctioned by classical physics. René Descartes, for reasons of which was among the first to realize that mind or consciousness in the mechanistic world-view of classical physics appeared to exist in a realm separate and distinct from nature. The prospect was that the realm of the mental is a self-contained and self-referential island universe with no real or necessary connection with the universe itself.
It also tends the belief . . . that all men dance to the tune of an invisible piper. Yet, this may not be so, as whenever a system is really complicated, indeterminacy comes in, not necessarily because of ‘h’, the Planck constant, but because to make a prediction so we must know manythings that the stray consequences of studying them will disturb the status quo, due to which formidable comminations can never therefore answer-history is not and cannot be determined. The supposed causes may only produce the consequences we expect. This has rarely been more true of those whose thought and action in science and life became interrelated in a way no dramatist would dare to conceive, this itself has some extraordinary qualities if determinacy, which in physics is so reluctant to accept.
A presence awaiting to the future has framed its proposed new understanding of the relationship between mind and world within the larger context of the history of mathematical physics, the origin and extensions of the classical view of the fundamentals of scientific knowledge, and the various ways that physicists have attempted to prevent previous challenges to the efficacy of classical epistemology. There is no basis in contemporary physics or biology for believing in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have moderately described as ‘the disease of the Western mind’. The dialectic orchestrations will serve as background for understanding a new relationship between parts and wholes in physics, with a similar view of that relationship that has emerged in the co-called ‘new biology’ and in recent studies of the evolution of a scientific understanding to a more conceptualized representation of ideas, and includes its allied ‘content’.
Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy quickly realized that there appears of nothing in viewing nature that shows possibilities of reconciliation between a full-fledged comparison, as between Plotinus and Whitehead view for which posits of itself outside the scope of concerns, in that the comparability is with the existent idea of ‘God’, especially. However, that ‘the primordial nature of God’, whom in which is eternal, a consequent of nature, which is in flux, as far as, this difference of thought remains but comprises no bearing on the relationship or either with the quantum theory, as it addresses the actual notion that authenticates the representation of actual entities as processes of self-creation.
Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Plotonic and Whitehead connect upon the issue of the creation of the sensible world may by looking at actual entities as aspects of nature’s contemplation. The contemplation of nature is obviously an immensely intricate affair, involving a myriad of possibilities, therefore one can look at actual entities as, in some sense, the basic elements of a vast and expansive process.
We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas with the aid of precise deduction, as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality out in three-dimensional co-ordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s 'Principia Mathematica' in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modeling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes’s merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternities' are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism’, which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter. In that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason, causally by the traditional Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.
The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau’s attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Goethe and Friedrich Schelling proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism ( the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness ) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion’, as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Schelling, in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and ‘undivided wholeness’.
The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the 'incommunicable powers' of the 'immortal sea' empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.
The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he deuced that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favors reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defense of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
The mechanistic paradigm of the late n nineteenth century was the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach’s critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, 'relativistic' notions.
Two theories unveiled and unfolding as their phenomenal yield held by Albert Einstein, attributively appreciated that the special theory of relativity ( 1905 ) and, also the tangling and calculably arranging affordance, as drawn upon the gratifying nature whom by encouraging the finding resolutions upon which the realms of its secreted reservoir in continuous phenomenons, in additional the continuatives as afforded by the efforts by the imagination were made discretely available to any the unsurmountable achievements, as remain obtainably afforded through the excavations underlying the artifactual circumstances that govern all principle ‘forms’ or ‘types’ in the involving evolutionary principles of the general theory of relativity ( 1915 ). Where the special theory gives a unified account of the laws of mechanics and of electromagnetism, including optics. Before 1905 the purely relative nature of uniform motion had in part been recognized in mechanics, although Newton had considered time to be absolute and postulated absolute space. In electromagnetism the ether was supposed to give an absolute bases respect to which motion could be determined. The Galilean transformation equations represent the set of equations:
χʹ = χ ‒ vt
yʹ = y
zʹ = z
tʹ = tThey are used for transforming the parameters of position and motion from an observer at the point ‘O’ with co-ordinates ( z, y, z ) to an observer at Oʹ with co-ordinates ( χʹ, yʹ zʹ ). The axis is chosen to pass through O and Oʹ. The times of an event at ‘t’ and tʹ in the frames of reference of observers at O and Oʹ coincided. ‘V’ is the relative velocity of separation of O and Oʹ. The equation conforms to Newtonian mechanics as compared with Lorentz transformation equations, it represents a set of equations for transforming the position-motion parameters from an observer at a point O ( χ, y, z) to an observer at Oʹ
( χʹ, yʹ, zʹ ), moving compared with one another. The equation replaces the Galilean transformation equation of Newtonian mechanics in reactivity problems. If the x-axes are chosen to pass through Oʹ and the time of an event are t and tʹ in the frame of reference of the observers at O and Oʹ respectively, where the zeros of their time scales were the instants that O and Oʹ supported the equations are:
χʹ = β( χ ‒ vt )
yʹ = y
zʹ =z
tʹ = β( t ‒ vχ / c2 ),
Where ‘v’ is the relative velocity of separation of O, Oʹ, c is the speed of light, and β is the function
(1 ‒ v2 / c2 )-½.
Newton’s laws of motion in his 'Principia,' Newton ( 1687 ) stated the three fundamental laws of motion, which are the basis of Newtonian mechanics.
The First Law of acknowledgement concerns that all bodies persevere in its state of rest, or uniform motion in a straight line, but in as far as it is compelled, to change that state by forces impressed on it. This may be regarded as a definition of force.
The Second Law to acknowledge is, that the rate of change of linear momentum is propositional to the force applied, and takes place in the straight line in which that force acts. This definition can be regarded as formulating a suitable way by which forces may be measured, that is, by the acceleration they produce,
F = d( mv ) / dt
i.e., F = ma = v( dm / dt ),
Where F = force, m = masses, v = velocity, t = time, and ‘a’ = acceleration, from which case, the proceeding majority of quality values were of non-relativistic cases of, dm / dt = 0, i.e., the mass remains constant, and then
F = ma.
The Third Law acknowledges, that forces are caused by the interaction of pairs of bodies. The forces exerted by ‘A’ upon ‘B’ and the force exerted by ‘B’ upon ‘A’ are simultaneous, equal in magnitude, opposite in direction and in the same straight line, caused by the same mechanism.
Appreciating the popular statement of this law in terms of significant 'action and reaction' leads too much misunderstanding. In particular, any two forces that happen to be equal and opposite if they act on the same body, one force, arbitrarily called 'reaction,' are supposed to be a consequence of the other and to happen subsequently, as two forces are supposed to oppose each other, causing equilibrium, certain forces such as forces exerted by support or propellants are conventionally called 'reaction,' causing considerable confusion.
The third law may be illustrated by the following examples. He gravitational force exerted by a body on the earth is equal and opposite to the gravitational force exerted by the earth on the body. The intermolecular repulsive force exerted on the ground by a body resting on it, or hitting it, is equal and opposite to the intermolecular repulsive force exerted on the body by the ground. More general system of mechanics has been given by Einstein in his theory of relativity. This reduces to Newtonian mechanics when all velocities relative to the observer are small compared with those of light.
Einstein rejected the concept of absolute space and time, and made two postulates (i) he laws of nature are the same for all observers n uniform relative motion, and (ii) The speed of light in the same for all such observers, independently of the relative motions of sources and detectors. He showed that these postulates were equivalent to the requirement that co-ordinates of space and time used by different observers should be related by Lorentz transformation equations. The theory has several important consequences.
The transformation of time implies that two events that are simultaneous according to one observer will not necessarily be so according to another in uniform relative motion. This does not affect the construct of its sequence of related events so does not violate any conceptual causation. It will appear to two observers in uniform relative motion that each other’s clock runs slowly. This is the phenomenon of ‘time dilation’, for example, an observer moving with respect to a radioactive source finds a longer decay time than found by an observer at rest with respect to it, according to:
Tv = T0 / ( 1 ‒ v2 / c2 ) ½
Where Tv is the mean life measurement by an observer at relative speed ‘v’, and T0 is the mean life maturement by an observer at rest, and ‘c’ is the speed of light.
This formula has been verified in innumerable experiments. One consequence is that no body can be accelerated from a speed below ‘c’ with respect to any observer to one above ‘c’, since this would require infinite energy. Einstein educed that the transfer of energy δE by any process entailed the transfer of mass δm where δE = δmc2, hence he concluded that the total energy ‘E’ of any system of mass ‘m’ would be given by:
E = mc2
The principle of conservation of mass states that in any system is constant. Although conservation of mass was verified in many experiments, the evidence for this was limited. In contrast the great success of theories assuming the conservation of energy established this principle, and Einstein assumed it as an axiom in his theory of relativity. According to this theory the transfer of energy ‘E’ by any process entails the transfer of mass m = E/c2./ hence the conservation of energy ensures the conservation of mass.
In Einstein’s theory inertial and gravitational masses are assumed to be identical and energy is the total energy of a system. Some confusion often arises because of idiosyncratic terminologies in which the words mass and energies are given different meanings. For example, some particle physicists use 'mass' to mean the rest-energy of a particle and 'energy' to mean ‘energy other than rest-energy’. This leads to alternate statements of the principle, in which terminology is not generally consistent. Whereas, the law of equivalence of mass and energy such that mass ‘m’ and energy ‘E’ are related by the equation E = mc2, where ‘c’ is the speed of light in a vacuum. Thus, a quantity of energy ‘E’ has a mass ‘m’ and a mass ‘m’ has intrinsic energy ‘E’. The kinetic energy of a particle as determined by an observer with relative speed ‘v’ is thus ( m ‒ m0 )c2, which tends to the classical value ½mv2 if ≪ C.
Attempts to express quantum theory in terms consistent with the requirements of relativity were begun by Sommerfeld ( 1915 ), eventually. Dirac ( 1928 ) gave a relativistic formulation of the wave mechanics of conserved particles ( fermions ). This explained the concept of spin and the associated magnetic moment, which had been postulated to account for certain details of spectra. The theory led to results of extremely great importance for the theory of standard or elementary particles. The Klein-Gordon equation is the relativistic wave equation for ‘bosons’. It is applicable to bosons of zero spin, such as the ‘pion’. In which case, for example the Klein-Gordon Lagrangian describes a single spin-0, scalar field:
L = ½[∂t∂t‒ ∂y∂y‒ ∂z∂z] ‒ ½(2πmc / h)22
In this case:
∂L/∂(∂) = ∂μ
leading to the equation:
∂L/∂ = (2πmc/h)22+
and hence the Lagrange equation requires that:
∂μ∂μ + (2πmc / h)2 2 = 0.
Which is the Klein-Gordon equation describing the evolution in space and time of field ‘’? Individual ‘’ excitation of the normal modes of represents particles of spin -0, and mass ‘m’.
A mathematical formulation of the special theory of relativity was given by Minkowski. It is based on the idea that an event is specified by there being a four-dimensional co-ordinates, three of which are spatial co-ordinates and one in a dimensional frame in a time co-ordinates. These continuously of dimensional co-ordinate give to define a four-dimensional space and the motion of a particle can be described by a curve in this space, which is called 'Minkowski space-time.' In certain formulations of the theory, use is made of a four-dimensional do-ordinate system in which three dimensions represent the spatial co-ordinates χ, y, z and the fourth dimension are ‘ict’, where ‘t’ is time, ‘c’ is the speed of light and ‘I’ is √ - 1, points in this space are called events. The equivalent to the distance between two points is the interval ( δs ) between two events given by Pythagoras law in a space-time as:
δs )2 = ij ηij δ χi χj.
Where'
χ = χ1, y = χ2, z = χ3 . . . , t = χ4 and η11 ( χ ) η33 ( χ ) = 1? η44 ( χ ) = 1:
is componded by the Minkowski metric tensor. The distances between two points are variant under the ‘Lorentz transformation’, because the measurements of the positions of the points that are simultaneous according to one observer in uniform motion with respect to the first. By contrast, the interval between two events is invariant.
The equivalents to a vector in the four-dimensional space are consumed by a ‘four vector’, in which has three space components and one of time component. For example, the four-vector momentum has a time component proportional to the energy of a particle, the four-vector potential has the space co-ordinates of the magnetic vector potential, while the time co-ordinates corresponds to the electric potential.
The special theory of relativity is concerned with relative motion between non-accelerated frames of reference. The general theory reals with general relative motion between accelerated frames of reference. In accelerated systems of reference, certain fictitious forces are observed, such as the centrifugal and Coriolis forces found in rotating systems. These are known as fictitious forces because they disappear when the observer transforms to a nonaccelerated system. For example, to an observer in a car rounding a bend at constant velocity, objects in the car appear to suffer a force acting outward. To an observer outside the car, this is simply their tendency to continue moving in a straight line. The inertia of the objects is seen to cause a fictitious force and the observer can distinguish between non-inertial ( accelerated ) and inertial
(Nonaccelerated) frames of reference.
A further point is that, to the observer in the car, all the objects are given the same acceleration irrespective of their mass. This implies a connection between the fictitious forces arising from accelerated systems and forces due to gravity, where the acceleration produced is independent of the mass. Near the surface of the earth the acceleration of free fall, ‘g’, is measured with respect to a nearby point on the surface. Because of the axial rotation the reference point is accelerated to the centre of the circle of its latitude, hence ‘g’ is not quite in magnitude or direction to the acceleration toward the centre of the earth given by the theory of ‘gravitation’ in 1687 Newton presented his law of universal gravitation, according to which every particle evokes every other particle with the force, ‘F’ given by:
F = Gm1 m2 / χ2,
Where m1, m2 is the masses of two particles a distance ‘χ’ apart, and ‘G’ is the gravitational constant, which, according to modern measurements, has a value
6.672 59 x 10-11 m3 kg -1 s -2.
For extended bodies the forces are found by integrations. Newton showed that the external effect of a spherical symmetric body is the same as if the whole mass were concentrated at the centre. Astronomical bodies are roughly spherically symmetrical so can be treated as point particles to a very good approximation. On this assumption Newton showed that his law was consistent with Kepler’s Laws. Until recently, all experiments have confirmed the accuracy of the inverse square law and the independence of the law upon the nature of the substances, but in the past few years evidence has been found against both.
The size of a gravitational field at any point is given by the force exerted on unit mass at that point. The field intensity at a distance ‘χ’ from a point mass ‘m’ is therefore Gm/χ2, and acts toward ‘m’ Gravitational field strength is measured in the newton per kilogram. The gravitational potential ‘V’ at that point is the work done in moving a unit mass from infinity to the point against the field, due to a point mass. Importantly, ( a ) Potential at a point distance ‘χ’ from the centre of a hollow homogeneous spherical shell of mass ‘m’ and outside the shell:
V = ‒ Gm/χ
The potential is the same as if the mass of the shell is assumed concentrated at the centre, ( b ) At any point inside the spherical shell the potential is equal to its value at the surface:
V = ‒ Gm/r
Where ‘r’ is the radius of the shell, thus there is no resultant force acting at any point inside the shell and since no potential difference acts between any two points. ( c ) potential at a point distance ‘χ’ from the centre of a homogeneous solid sphere and outside the sphere is the same as that for a shell;
V = ‒ Gm/χ
(d) At a point inside the sphere, of radius ‘r’:
V = ‒ Gm( 3r2 ‒ χ2 ) /2r3
The essential property of gravitation is that it causes a change vin motion, in particular the acceleration of free fall ( g ) in the earth’s gravitational field. According to the general theory of relativity, gravitational fields change the geometry of spacetime, causing it to become curved. It is this curvature of spacetime, produced by the presence of matter, that controls the natural motions of matter, that controls the natural motions of bodies. General relativity may thus be considered as a theory of gravitation, differences between it and Newtonian gravitation only appearing when the gravitational fields become very strong, as with ‘black holes’ and ‘neutron stars’, or when very accurate measurements can be made.
Accelerated systems and forces due to gravity, where the acceleration produced are independent of the mass, for example, a person in a sealed container could not easily determine whether he was being driven toward the floor by gravity or if the container were in space and being accelerated upward by a rocket. Observations extended in space and time could distinguish between these alternates, but otherwise they are indistinguishable. His leads to the ‘principle of equivalence’, from which it follows that the inertial mass is the same as the gravitational mass. A further principle used in the general theory is that the laws of mechanics are the same in inertial and non-inertial frames of reference.
Still, the equivalence between a gravitational field and the fictitious forces in non-inertial systems can be expressed by using Riemannian space-time, which differs from Minkowski Space-time of the special theory. In special relativity the motion of a particle that is not acted on by any force is represented by a straight line in Minkowski Space-time. In general relativity, using Riemannian Space-time, the motion is represented by a line that is no longer straight, in the Euclidean sense but is the line giving the shortest distance. Such a line is called geodesic. Thus, a space-time is said to be curved. The extent of this curvature is given by the ‘metric tensor’ for spacetime, the components of which are solutions to Einstein’s ‘field equations’. The fact that gravitational effects occur near masses is introduced by the postulate that the presence of matter produces this curvature of the space-time. This curvature of space-time controls the natural motions of bodies.
The predictions of general relativity only differ from Newton’s theory by small amounts and most tests of the theory have been carried out through observations in astronomy. For example, it explains the shift in the perihelion of Mercury, the bending of light or other electromagnetic radiations in the presence of large bodies, and the Einstein Shift. Very close agreements between the predications of general relativity and their accurately measured values have now been obtained.
Reiteratively, assumptions upon which Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) stretches toward its central position are (i) inertial frameworks are equivalent for the description of all physical phenomena, and (ii) the speed of light in empty space is constant for every observer, regardless of the motion of the observer or the light source, although the second assumption may seem plausible in the light of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which failed to find any difference in the speed of light in the direction of the earth’s rotation or when measured perpendicular ti it, it seems likely that Einstein was not influenced by the experiment, and may not even have known the results. As a consequence of the second postulate, no matter how fast she travels, an observer can never overtake a ray of light, and see it as stationary beside her. However, near her speed approaches to that of light, light still retreats at its classical speed. The consequences are that space, time and mass turn relative to the observer. Measurements composed of quantities in an inertial system moving relative to one’s own reveal slow clocks, with the effect increasing as the relative speed of the systems approaches the speed of light. Events deemed simultaneously as measured within one such system will not be simultaneous as measured from the other, forthrightly time and space thus lose their separate identity, and become parts of a single space-time. The special theory also has the famous consequence ( E = mc2 ) of the equivalences of energy and mass.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity ( 1916 ) treats of non-inertial systems, i.e., those accelerating relative to each pother. The leading idea is that the laws of motion in an accelerating frame are equivalent to those in a gravitational field. The theory treats gravity not as a Newtonian force acting in an unknown way across distance, but a metrical property of a space-time continuum that is curved in the vicinity of matter. Gravity can be thought of as a field described by the metric tensor at every point. The classic analogy is with a rock sitting on a bed. If a heavy objects where to be thrown across the bed, it is deflected toward the rock not by a mysterious force, but by the deformation of the space, i.e., the depression of the sheet around the object, a called curvilinear trajectory. Interestingly, the general theory lends some credit to a vision of the Newtonian absolute theory of space, in the sense that space itself is regarded as a thing with metrical properties of it’s. The search for a unified field theory is the attempt to show that just as gravity is explicable as a consequence of the nature of a space-time, are the other fundamental physical forces: The strong and weak nuclear forces, and the electromagnetic force. The theory of relativity is the most radical challenge to the ‘common sense’ view of space and time as fundamentally distinct from each other, with time as an absolute linear flow in which events are fixed in objective relationships.
After adaptive changes in the brains and bodies of hominids made it possible for modern humans to construct a symbolic universe using complex language system, something as quite dramatic and wholly unprecedented occurred. We began to perceive the world through the lenses of symbolic categories, to construct similarities and differences in terms of categorical priorities, and to organize our lives according to themes and narratives. Living in this new symbolic universe, modern humans had a large compulsion to code and recode experiences, to translate everything into representation, and to seek out the deeper hidden and underlying logic that eliminates inconsistencies and ambiguities.
The mega-narrative or frame tale served to legitimate and rationalize the categorical oppositions and terms of relations between the myriad number of constructs in the symbolic universe of modern humans were religion. The use of religious thought for these purposes is quite apparent in the artifacts found in the fossil remains of people living in France and Spain forty thousand years ago. And these artifacts provided the first concrete evidence that a fully developed language system had given birth to an intricate and complex social order.
Both religious and scientific thought seeks to frame or construct reality in terms of origins, primary oppositions, and underlying causes, and this partially explains why fundamental assumptions in the Western metaphysical tradition were eventually incorporated into a view of reality that would later be called scientific. The history of scientific thought reveals that the dialogue between assumptions about the character of spiritual reality in ordinary language and the character of physical reality in mathematical language was intimate and ongoing from the early Greek philosophers to the first scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. But this dialogue did not conclude, as many have argued, with the emergence of positivism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was perpetuated in a disguise form in the hidden ontology of classical epistemology -the central issue in the Bohr-Einstein debate.
The assumption that a one-to-one correspondence exists between every element of physical reality and physical theory may serve to bridge the gap between mind and world for those who use physical theories. But it also suggests that the Cartesian division be real and insurmountable in constructions of physical reality based on ordinary language. This explains in no small part why the radical separation between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes ( 1596-1650 ) remains, as philosophical postmodernism attests, one of the most pervasive features of Western intellectual life.
Nietzsche, in an effort to subvert the epistemological authority of scientific knowledge, sought of a legitimate division between mind and world much starker than that originally envisioned by Descartes. What is not widely known, however, is that Nietzsche and other seminal figures in the history of philosophical postmodernism were very much aware of an epistemological crisis in scientific thought than arose much earlier, that occasioned by wave-particle dualism in quantum physics. This crisis resulted from attempts during the last three decades of the nineteenth century to develop a logically self-consistent definition of number and arithmetic that would serve to reinforce the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality. As it turned out, these efforts resulted in paradoxes of recursion and self-reference that threatened to undermine both the efficacy of this correspondence and the privileged character of scientific knowledge.
Nietzsche appealed to this crisis in an effort to reinforce his assumption that, without ontology, all knowledge ( including scientific knowledge ) was grounded only in human consciousness. As the crisis continued, a philosopher trained in higher mathematics and physics, Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, attempted to preserve the classical view of correspondences between mathematical theory and physical reality by deriving the foundation of logic and number from consciousness in ways that would preserve self-consistency and rigour. This afforded effort to ground mathematical physics in human consciousness, or in human subjective reality, was no trivial matter, representing a direct link between these early challenges and the efficacy of classical epistemology and the tradition in philosophical thought that culminated in philosophical postmodernism.
Since Husserl’s epistemology, like that of Descartes and Nietzsche, was grounded in human subjectivity, a better understanding of his attempt to preserve the classical view of correspondence not only reveals more about the legacy of Cartesian dualism. It also suggests that the hidden and underlying ontology of classical epistemology was more responsible for the deep division and conflict between the two cultures of humanists-social scientists and scientists-engineers than was previously thought. The central question in this late-nineteenth-century debate over the status of the mathematical description of nature was the following: Is the foundation of number and logic grounded in classical epistemology, or must we assume, in the absence of any ontology, that the rules of number and logic are grounded only in human consciousness? In order to frame this question in the proper context, we should first examine in more detail the intimate and ongoing dialogue between physics and metaphysics in Western thought.
The history of science reveals that scientific knowledge and method did not emerge as full-blown from the minds of the ancient Greek any more than language and culture emerged fully formed in the minds of 'Homo sapient’s sapient. ' Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into grater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political and an economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential features of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The philosophical debate that led to conclusions useful to the architects of classical physics can be briefly summarized, such when Thale’s fellow Milesian Anaximander claimed that the first substance, although indeterminate, manifested itself in a conflict of oppositions between hot and cold, moist and dry. The idea of nature as a self-regulating balance of forces was subsequently elaborated upon by Heraclitus ( d. after 480 BC ), who asserted that the fundamental substance is strife between opposites, which is itself the unity of the whole. It is, said Heraclitus, the tension between opposites that keeps the whole from simply 'passing away.'
Parmenides of Elea ( b. c. 515 BC ) argued in turn that the unifying substance is unique and static being. This led to a conclusion about the relationship between ordinary language and external reality that was later incorporated into the view of the relationship between mathematical language and physical reality. Since thinking or naming involves the presence of something, said Parmenides, thought and language must be dependent upon the existence of objects outside the human intellect. Presuming a one-to-one correspondence between word and idea and actual existing things, Parmenides concluded that our ability to think or speak of a thing at various times implies that it exists at all times. Hence the indivisible One does not change, and all perceived change is an illusion.
These assumptions emerged in roughly the form in which they would be used by the creators of classical physics in the thought of the atomists. Leucippus : l. 450-420 BC and Democritus ( c. 460-c. 370 BC ). They reconciled the two dominant and seemingly antithetical concepts of the fundamental character of being-Becoming ( Heraclitus ) and unchanging Being ( Parmenides )-in a remarkable simple and direct way. Being, they said, is present in the invariable substance of the atoms that, through blending and separation, make up the thing of changing or becoming worlds.
The last remaining feature of what would become the paradigm for the first scientific revolution in the seventeenth century is attributed to Pythagoras ( b c. 570 BC ). Like Parmenides, Pythagoras also held that the perceived world is illusory and that there is an exact correspondence between ideas and aspects of external reality. Pythagoras, however, had a different conception of the character of the idea that showed this correspondence. The truth about the fundamental character of the unified and unifying substance, which could be uncovered through reason and contemplation, is, he claimed, mathematical in form.
Pythagoras established and was the cental figure in a school of philosophy, religion and mathematics; He was apparently viewed by his followers as semi-divine. For his followers the regular solids ( symmetrical three-dimensional forms in which all sides are the same regular polygons ) and whole numbers became revered essences of sacred ideas. In contrast with ordinary language, the language of mathematics and geometric forms seemed closed, precise and pure. Providing one understood the axioms and notations, and the meaning conveyed was invariant from one mind to another. The Pythagoreans felt that the language empowered the mind to leap beyond the confusion of sense experience into the realm of immutable and eternal essences. This mystical insight made Pythagoras the figure from antiquity most revered by the creators of classical physics, and it continues to have great appeal for contemporary physicists as they struggle with the epistemological implications of the quantum mechanical description of nature.
Yet, least of mention, progress was made in mathematics, and to a lesser extent in physics, from the time of classical Greek philosophy to the seventeenth century in Europe. In Baghdad, for example, from about A.D. 750 to A.D. 1000, substantial advancement was made in medicine and chemistry, and the relics of Greek science were translated into Arabic, digested, and preserved. Eventually these relics reentered Europe via the Arabic kingdom of Spain and Sicily, and the work of figures like Aristotle universities of France, Italy, and England during the Middle Ages.
For much of this period the Church provided the institutions, like the reaching orders, needed for the rehabilitation of philosophy. But the social, political and an intellectual climate in Europe was not ripe for a revolution in scientific thought until the seventeenth century. Until later in time, lest as far into the nineteenth century, the works of the new class of intellectuals we called scientists, whom of which were more avocations than vocation, and the word scientist do not appear in English until around 1840.
Copernicus (1473-1543 ) would have been described by his contemporaries as an administrator, a diplomat, an avid student of economics and classical literature, and most notable, a highly honoured and placed church dignitaries. Although we named a revolution after him, his devoutly conservative man did not set out to create one. The placement of the Sun at the centre of the universe, which seemed right and necessary to Copernicus, was not a result of making careful astronomical observations. In fact, he made very few observations in the course of developing his theory, and then only to ascertain if his prior conclusions seemed correct. The Copernican system was also not any more useful in making astrological calculations than the accepted model and was, in some ways, much more difficult to implement. What, then, was his motivation for creating the model and his reasons for presuming that the model was correct?
Copernicus felt that the placement of the Sun at the centre of the universe made sense because he viewed the Sun as the symbol of the presence of a supremely intelligent and intelligible God in a man-centred world. He was apparently led to this conclusion in part because the Pythagoreans believed that fire exists at the centre of the cosmos, and Copernicus identified this fire with the fireball of the Sun. the only support that Copernicus could offer for the greater efficacy of his model was that it represented a simpler and more mathematical harmonious model of the sort that the Creator would obviously prefer. The language used by Copernicus in 'The Revolution of Heavenly Orbs,' illustrates the religious dimension of his scientific thought: 'In the midst of all the sun reposes, unmoving. Who, indeed, in this most beautiful temple would place the light-giver in any other part than from where it can illumine all other parts?'
The belief that the mind of God as Divine Architect permeates the working of nature was the guiding principle of the scientific thought of Johannes Kepler ( or Keppler, 1571-1630 ). For this reason, most modern physicists would probably feel some discomfort in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of that word. Physical laws, wrote Kepler, 'lie within the power of understanding of the human mind; God wanted us to perceive them when he created us of His own image, in order . . . that we may take part in His own thoughts. Our knowledge of numbers and quantities is the same as that of God’s, at least insofar as we can understand something of it in this mortal life.'
Believing, like Newton after him, in the literal truth of the words of the Bible, Kepler concluded that the word of God is also transcribed in the immediacy of observable nature. Kepler’s discovery that the motions of the planets around the Sun were elliptical, as opposed perfecting circles, may have made the universe seem a less perfect creation of God on ordinary language. For Kepler, however, the new model placed the Sun, which he also viewed as the emblem of a divine agency, more at the centre of mathematically harmonious universes than the Copernican system allowed. Communing with the perfect mind of God requires as Kepler put it 'knowledge of numbers and quantity.'
Since Galileo did not use, or even refer to, the planetary laws of Kepler when those laws would have made his defence of the heliocentric universe more credible, his attachment to the god-like circle was probably a more deeply rooted aesthetic and religious ideal. But it was Galileo, even more than Newton, who was responsible for formulating the scientific idealism that quantum mechanics now force us to abandon. In 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Great Systems of the World,' Galileo said about the following about the followers of Pythagoras: 'I know perfectly well that the Pythagoreans had the highest esteem for the science of number and that Plato himself admired the human intellect and believed that it participates in divinity solely because it is able to understand the nature of numbers. And I myself am inclined to make the same judgement.'
This article of faith-mathematical and geometrical ideas mirror precisely the essences of physical reality was the basis for the first scientific law of this new science, a constant describing the acceleration of bodies in free fall, could not be confirmed by experiment. The experiments conducted by Galileo in which balls of different sizes and weights were rolled simultaneously down an inclined plane did not, as he frankly admitted, their precise results. And since a vacuum pumps had not yet been invented, there was simply no way that Galileo could subject his law to rigorous experimental proof in the seventeenth century. Galileo believed in the absolute validity of this law in the absence of experimental proof because he also believed that movement could be subjected absolutely to the law of number. What Galileo asserted, as the French historian of science Alexander Koyré put it, was 'that the real are in its essence, geometrical and, consequently, subject to rigorous determination and measurement.'
The popular image of Isaac Newton ( 1642-1727 ) is that of a supremely rational and dispassionate empirical thinker. Newton, like Einstein, had the ability to concentrate unswervingly on complex theoretical problems until they yielded a solution. But what most consumed his restless intellect were not the laws of physics. In addition to believing, like Galileo that the essences of physical reality could be read in the language of mathematics, Newton also believed, with perhaps even greater intensity than Kepler, in the literal truths of the Bible.
For Newton the mathematical languages of physics and the language of biblical literature were equally valid sources of communion with the eternal writings in the extant documents alone consist of more than a million words in his own hand, and some of his speculations seem quite bizarre by contemporary standards. The Earth, said Newton, will still be inhabited after the day of judgement, and heaven, or the New Jerusalem, must be large enough to accommodate both the quick and the dead. Newton then put his mathematical genius to work and determined the dimensions required to house the population, his rather precise estimate was 'the cube root of 12,000 furlongs.'
The pint is, that during the first scientific revolution the marriage between mathematical idea and physical reality, or between mind and nature via mathematical theory, was viewed as a sacred union. In our more secular age, the correspondence takes on the appearance of an unexamined article of faith or, to borrow a phrase from William James ( 1842-1910 ), 'an altar to an unknown god.' Heinrich Hertz, the famous nineteenth-century German physicist, nicely described what there is about the practice of physics that tends to inculcate this belief: 'One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and intelligence of their own that they are wiser than we, wiser than their discoveries. That we get more out of them than was originally put into them.'
While Hertz made this statement without having to contend with the implications of quantum mechanics, the feeling, the described remains the most enticing and exciting aspects of physics. That elegant mathematical formulae provide a framework for understanding the origins and transformations of a cosmos of enormous age and dimensions are a staggering discovery for bidding physicists. Professors of physics do not, of course, tell their students that the study of physical laws in an act of communion with thee perfect mind of God or that these laws have an independent existence outside the minds that discover them. The business of becoming a physicist typically begins, however, with the study of classical or Newtonian dynamics, and this training provides considerable covert reinforcement of the feeling that Hertz described.
Perhaps, the best way to examine the legacy of the dialogue between science and religion in the debate over the implications of quantum non-locality is to examine the source of Einstein’s objections tp quantum epistemology in more personal terms. Einstein apparently lost faith in the God portrayed in biblical literature in early adolescence. But, as appropriated, . . . the 'Autobiographical Notes' give to suggest that there were aspects that carry over into his understanding of the foundation for scientific knowledge, . . . 'Thus I came -despite the fact that I was the son of an entirely irreligious [ Jewish ] Breeden heritage, which is deeply held of its religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt end at the age of 12. Though the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence waw a positively frantic [ orgy ] of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the stat through lies that it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience. . . . It was clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt ti free myself from the chains of the ‘merely personal’. . . . The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of the given possibilities swam as highest aim half consciously and half unconsciously before the mind’s eye.'
What is more, was, suggested Einstein, belief in the word of God as it is revealed in biblical literature that allowed him to dwell in a ‘religious paradise of youth’ and to shield himself from the harsh realities of social and political life. In an effort to recover that inner sense of security that was lost after exposure to scientific knowledge, or to become free once again of the ‘merely personal’, he committed himself to understanding the ‘extra-personal world within the frame of given possibilities’, or as seems obvious, to the study of physics. Although the existence of God as described in the Bible may have been in doubt, the qualities of mind that the architects of classical physics associated with this God were not. This is clear in the comments from which Einstein uses of mathematics, . . . 'Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can discover, by means of purely mathematical construction, those concepts and those lawful connections between them that furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience remains, of course, the sole criteria of physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.'
This article of faith, first articulated by Kepler, that ‘nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas’ allowed for Einstein to posit the first major law of modern physics much as it allows Galileo to posit the first major law of classical physics. During which time, when the special and then the general theories of relativity had not been confirmed by experiment and many established physicists viewed them as at least minor heresies, Einstein remained entirely confident of their predictions. Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, who visited Einstein shortly after Eddington’s eclipse expedition confirmed a prediction of the general theory ( 1919 ), described Einstein’s response to this news: When I was giving expression to my joy that the results coincided with his calculations, he said quite unmoved, 'But I knew the theory was correct,' and when I asked, what if there had been no confirmation of his prediction, he countered: 'Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord -the theory is correct.'
Einstein was not given to making sarcastic or sardonic comments, particularly on matters of religion. These unguarded responses testify to his profound conviction that the language of mathematics allows the human mind access to immaterial and immutable truths existing outside of the mind that conceived them. Although Einstein’s belief was far more secular than Galileo’s, it retained the same essential ingredients.
What continued in the twenty-three-year-long debate between Einstein and Bohr, least of mention? The primary article drawing upon its faith that contends with those opposing to the merits or limits of a physical theory, at the heart of this debate was the fundamental question, 'What is the relationship between the mathematical forms in the human mind called physical theory and physical reality?' Einstein did not believe in a God who spoke in tongues of flame from the mountaintop in ordinary language, and he could not sustain belief in the anthropomorphic God of the West. There is also no suggestion that he embraced ontological monism, or the conception of Being featured in Eastern religious systems, like Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The closest that Einstein apparently came to affirming the existence of the ‘extra-personal’ in the universe was a ‘cosmic religious feeling’, which he closely associated with the classical view of scientific epistemology.
The doctrine that Einstein fought to preserve seemed the natural inheritance of physics until the advent of quantum mechanics. Although the mind that constructs reality might be evolving fictions that are not necessarily true or necessary in social and political life, there was, Einstein felt, a way of knowing, purged of deceptions and lies. He was convinced that knowledge of physical reality in physical theory mirrors the preexistent and immutable realm of physical laws. And as Einstein consistently made clear, this knowledge mitigates loneliness and inculcates a sense of order and reason in a cosmos that might appear otherwise bereft of meaning and purpose.
What most disturbed Einstein about quantum mechanics was the fact that this physical theory might not, in experiment or even in principle, mirrors precisely the structure of physical reality. There is, for all the reasons we seem attested of, in that an inherent uncertainty in measurement made, . . . a quantum mechanical process reflects of a pursuit that quantum theory in itself and its contributive dynamic functionalities that there lay the attribution of a completeness of a quantum mechanical theory. Einstein’s fearing that it would force us to recognize that this inherent uncertainty applied to all of physics, and, therefore, the ontological bridge between mathematical theory and physical reality -does not exist. And this would mean, as Bohr was among the first to realize, that we must profoundly revive the epistemological foundations of modern science.
The world view of classical physics allowed the physicist to assume that communion with the essences of physical reality via mathematical laws and associated theories was possible, but it made no other provisions for the knowing mind. In our new situation, the status of the knowing mind seems quite different. Modern physics distributively contributed its view toward the universe as an unbroken, undissectable and undivided dynamic whole. 'There can hardly be a sharper contrast,' said Melic Capek, 'than that between the everlasting atoms of classical physics and the vanishing ‘particles’ of modern physics as Stapp put it: 'Each atom turns out to be nothing but the potentialities in the behaviour pattern of others. What we find, therefore, are not elementary space-time realities, but rather a web of relationships in which no part can stand alone, every part derives its meaning and existence only from its place within the whole'’
The characteristics of particles and quanta are not isolatable, given particle-wave dualism and the incessant exchange of quanta within matter-energy fields. Matter cannot be dissected from the omnipresent sea of energy, nor can we in theory or in fact observe matter from the outside. As Heisenberg put it decades ago, 'the cosmos appears to be a complicated tissue of events, in which connection of different kinds alternate or overlay or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. This means that a pure reductionist approach to understanding physical reality, which was the goal of classical physics, is no longer appropriate.
While the formalism of quantum physics predicts that correlations between particles over space-like separated regions are possible, it can say nothing about what this strange new relationship between parts ( quanta ) and whole ( cosmos ) was by means an outside formalism. This does not, however, prevent us from considering the implications in philosophical terms, as the philosopher of science Errol Harris noted in thinking about the special character of wholeness in modern physics, a unity without internal content is a blank or empty set and is not recognizable as a whole. A collection of merely externally related parts does not constitute a whole in that the parts will not be 'mutually adaptive and complementary to one and another.'
Wholeness requires a complementary relationship between unity and differences and is governed by a principle of organization determining the interrelationship between parts. This organizing principle must be universal to a genuine whole and implicit in all parts that constitute the whole, even though the whole is exemplified only in its parts. This principle of order, Harris continued, 'is nothing really in and of itself. It is the way parts are organized and not another constituent addition to those that constitute the totality.'
In a genuine whole, the relationship between the constituent parts must be ‘internal or immanent’ in the parts, as opposed to a mere spurious whole in which parts appear to disclose wholeness due to relationships that are external to the parts. The collection of parts that would allegedly constitute the whole in classical physics is an example of a spurious whole. Parts constitute a genuine whole when the universal principle of order is inside the parts and thereby adjusts each to all that they interlock and become mutually complementary. This not only describes the character of the whole revealed in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It is also consistent with the manner in which we have begun to understand the relation between parts and whole in modern biology.
Modern physics also reveals, claims Harris, a complementary relationship between the differences between parts that constituted contentual representations that the universal ordering principle that is immanent in each of the parts. While the whole cannot be finally disclosed in the analysis of the parts, the study of the differences between parts provides insights into the dynamic structure of the whole present in each of the parts. The part can never, nonetheless, be finally isolated from the web of relationships that disclose the interconnections with the whole, and any attempt to do so results in ambiguity.
Much of the ambiguity in attempted to explain the character of wholes in both physics and biology derives from the assumption that order exists between or outside parts. But order in complementary relationships between differences and sameness in any physical event is never external to that event -the connections are immanent in the event. From this perspective, the addition of non-locality to this picture of the dynamic whole is not surprising. The relationship between part, as quantum event apparent in observation or measurement, and the undissectable whole, revealed but not described by the instantaneous, and the undissectable whole, revealed but described by the instantaneous correlations between measurements in space-like separated regions, is another extension of the part-whole complementarity to modern physics.
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to a higher level of complexity, and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a singular point of significance as a whole that evinces of the ‘progressive principal order’ of complementary relations its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts ( quanta ), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain, like all physical phenomena can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe be a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, If one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific descriptions of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, which can be dismissed, undermined or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
While we have consistently tried to distinguish between scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation based on this knowledge -there is no empirically valid causal linkage between the former and the latter. Those who wish to dismiss the speculative assumptions as its basis to be drawn the obvious freedom of which id firmly grounded in scientific theory and experiments there is, however, in the scientific description of nature, the belief in radical Cartesian division between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics. Seemingly clear, that this separation between mind and world was a macro-level illusion fostered by limited awarenesses of the actual character of physical reality and by mathematical idealization that were extended beyond the realm of their applicability.
Thus, the grounds for objecting to quantum theory, the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between every element of the physical theory and the physical reality it describes, may seem justifiable and reasonable in strictly scientific terms. After all, the completeness of all previous physical theories was measured against the criterion with enormous success. Since it was this success that gave physics the reputation of being able to disclose physical reality with magnificent exactitude, perhaps a more comprehensive quantum theory will emerge to insist on these requirements. rectly. Yet, the philosophical doctrine, that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind co- ordinated, that, to say, that real objects compromising the ‘external world’ are but to exist as in some way correlated to the mental operations in assemblance to the contributive distribution of dynamic functions. Objects comprising the external world are not independent of cognizing minds, but only existing as in some concomitance to the mental operations. Eternal mind-independent forms or archetypes of the things in the material world. Neoplatonism made them thoughts in the mind of God who created the world. The much criticized ‘new way of ideas’, so much a part of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, began with Descartes’ consciousable extension of ‘idea’ to cover whatever is in human minds too, an extension, of which, Locke made much use. Nonetheless, are they like mental images, of things outside the mind: Or non-representational, like ‘sensations’? If representational are they mental objects, standing between the mind and what they represent, or are they acts and modifications of a mind perceiving the world directly? Yet, are they neither objects nor acts, but dispositions? Malebranche and Arnauld (and then Leibniz) famously disagreed about scholars disagree about how Arnauld, Descartes, Locke and Malebranche in fact understood them.
Although given to rise of many problems of especially of interpretation, but narrative descriptions define a space of philosophical problems. Nonetheless, ‘ideas’ are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way, they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting and unstable private presences. What is more, that ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notable in the Timaeus, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of idea as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Nonetheless, ideas give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. Ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way, they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. Ideas give to provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation having no real existence but existing in a fancied imagination. It is not reason but ‘the imagination’ that is found to be responsible for our making the empirical inferences that we do. There are certain general ‘principles of the imagination’ according to which ideas naturally come and go in the mind under certain conditions. It is the task of the ‘science of human nature’ to discover such principles, but without itself going beyond experience. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing of the first sort. We get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, when the mind makes such a transition and that is what lead us too attributive necessity, to the reflation between things of the two kinds, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is.
A similar appeal to certain ‘principles of the imagination’ is what explains our belief in a world of enduring objects. Experience alone cannot produce that belief, everything we directly perceive is ‘momentary and fleeting’. And whatever our experience is like, no reasonable reservation could ensure us the existence of something independent of our impressions, which continues to exist when they cease. The series of our constantly changing sense impressions presents us with observable features which Hume calls ‘constancy ‘ and ‘coherence’, and these naturally operate on the mind in such a way as eventually to produce ‘the opinion of a continued and distinct existence’. The explanation is complicated, but it is meant to appeal only to psychological mechanisms which can be discovered by ‘careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from [the mind’s] different circumstances and situations’.
We believe not only in bodies, but also in persons, or selves, which continue to exist through time, and this belief too can be explained only by the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’. We never directly perceive anything we can call ourselves: The most we can be aware of in ourselves are our constantly changing momentary perceptions, not the mind or self which has them. For Hume, there is nothing that really binds the different perceptions together, we are led into the ‘fiction’ that they form a unity only because of the way in which the thought of such series of perceptions works upon the mind. ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, . . . there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different: Whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitutes the mind.
Leibniz’s held, in opposition to Descartes, that adult humans can have experiences of which they are unaware: Experiences of which effect what they do, but which are not brought to self-consciousness. Yet there are creatures, such as animals and babies, which completely lack the ability to reflect of their experiences, and to become aware of them as experiences of theirs. The unity of a subject’s experience, which stems from his capacity to recognize all his experience as his, was dubbed by Kant ‘the transcendental unity of apperception - Leibniz’s term for inner awareness or self-consciousness. In contrast with ‘perception’ or outer awareness -. However, this apprehension of unity is transcendental, than empirical, because it is presupposed in experience and cannot be derived from it. Kant used the need for this unity as the basis of his attempted refutation of scepticism about the external world. He argued that my experiences could only be united in self-consciousness if at least some of them were experiences of a law-governed world of objects in space. Outer experience is thus a necessary condition of inner awareness.
Here we seem to have a clear case of ‘introspection’, derived from the Latin ‘intro’ (within) + ‘specere’ (to look), introspection is the attention the mind gives to itself or to its own operations and occurrences. I can know there is a fat hairy spider in my bath by looking there and seeing it. But how do I know that I am seeing it rather than smelling it, or that my attitude to it is one of disgust than delight? One indistinct interpretation is to consider that: By a subsequent introspective act of ‘looking within’ and implementation to the psychological state - my seeing the spider. Introspection, therefore, is a mental occurrence, which, has as its object, some other psychological state like perceiving, desiring, willing, feeling, etc. In being a distinct awareness-episode it is different from a greater or higher degree to what is expected in the ordinary or naturalized course of events of belonging or what is typically a general ‘self-consciousness’ which characterizes all or some of our mental history.
The awareness generated by an introspective act can have varying degrees of complexity. It might be a simple knowledge of (mental) things’ - such as a particular perception-episode, or it might be the more complex knowledge of truths about one’s own mind. In this latter full-blown judgement form, introspection is usually the self-ascription of psychological properties and, when linguistically expressed, results in statements like ‘I am watching the spider’ or ‘I am repulsed’.
In psychology this deliberate inward look becomes a scientific method when it is ‘directed toward answering questions of theoretical importance for the advancement of our systematic knowledge of the laws and conditions of mental processes’. In philosophy, introspection (sometimes also called ‘reflection’) remains simply ‘that notice which mind takes of its own operations and has been used to serve the following important functions:
(1) Methodological: Thought an operation or process carried out to resolve an uncertainty, experiments that added much to our understanding of subsequent contributions, occurring, or carried out at a time after something else in events disapproved by prediction, and truly a powerful tool in philosophical inquiry, such as the act or an instance of seeking truth, information, or knowledge about something. The Ontological Argument, for example, asks us to try to think of the most perfect being as lacking existence and Berkeley’s Master Argument challenges us to conceive of an unseen tree, conceptual results are then drawn from our failure or success. From such experiments to work, we must not only have (or fail to have) the relevant conceptions but also know that we have (or fail to have) them - presumably by introspection.
(2) Metaphysical: A metaphysical of mind needs to take cognizance of introspection. One can argue for ‘ghostly’ mental entities for ‘Qualia’, for ‘sense-data’ by claiming introspective awareness of them. First-person psychological reports can have special consequences for the nature of persons and personal identity: Hume, for example, was content to reject the notion of a soul-substance because he failed to find such a thing by ‘looking within’. Moreover, some philosophers argue for the existence of additional manifestations guised in the vista of perspective facts - the fact of ‘what it is like’ to be the person I am or to have an experience of such-and-such-a-kind. Nonetheless, this introspection as our access to such facts becomes important when we construct a complete metamorphosis in the metaphysical constitution of the world.
(3) Epistemological: Surprisingly, the most important use made of introspection has been in an accounting for our knowledge of the outside world. According to a foundationalist theory of justification an empirical belief is either basic and ‘self-justifying’ or justified in relation to basic beliefs. Basic beliefs therefore, constitute the rock-bottom of all justification and knowledge. Now introspective awareness is said to have a unique epistemological status in it, we are said to achieve the best possibly epistemological position and consequently, introspective beliefs and thereby constitute the foundation of all justification.
Coherence is a major player in the theatre of knowledge. There are coherence theories of belief, truth and justification where these combine in various ways to yield theories of knowledge, coherence theories of belief are concerned with the content of beliefs. Consider a belief you now have, the belief that you are reading a page in a book. So what makes that belief the belief that it is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book than the belief that you have something other of a preoccupation? The same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has is the role it plays within a network of relations to other beliefs, the role in inference and implication, for example, I infer different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from different things than I refer other beliefs from.
The input of perception and the output of an action supplement the central role of the systematic relations the belief has to other beliefs, but the systematic relations give the belief the special content it has. They are the fundamental source of the content of beliefs. That is how coherence comes to be. A belief that the content that it does because of the away in which it coheres within the system of beliefs, however, weak coherence theories affirm that coherence is one determinant of the content of belief as strong coherence theories on the content of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the content of belief.
Nonetheless, the concept of the given-referential immediacy as apprehended of the contents of sense experience is expressed in the first person, and present tense reports of appearances. Apprehension of the given is seen as immediate both in a causal sense, since it lacks the usual causal chain involved in perceiving real qualities of physical objects, and in an epistemic sense, since judgements expressing it are justified independently of all other beliefs and evidence. Some proponents of the idea of the ‘given’ maintain that its apprehension is absolutely certain: Infallible, incorrigible and indubitable. It has been claimed also that a subject is omniscient with regard to the given - if a property appears, then the subject knows this.
Without some independent indication that some of the beliefs within a coherent system are true, coherence in itself is no indication of truth. Fairy stories can cohere, however, our criteria for justification must indicate to us the probable truth of our beliefs. Hence, within any system of beliefs there must be some privileged class with which others must cohere to be justified. In the case of empirical knowledge, such privileged beliefs must represent the point of contact between subject and world: They must generate or impose of a set up, if only to bring into existence, the perceptions that when challenged, however, we justify our ordinary perceptual beliefs about physical properties by appeal to beliefs about appearances. The latter seem more suitable as foundational, since there is no class of more certain perceptual beliefs to which we appeal for their justification.
The argument that foundations must be certain was offered by Lewis (1946). He held that no proposition can be probable unless some are certain. If the probability of all propositions or beliefs were relative to evidence expressed in others, and if these relations were linear, then any regress would apparently have to terminate in propositions or beliefs that are certain. But Lewis shows neither that such relations must be linear nor that redresses cannot terminate in beliefs that are merely probable or justified in themselves without being certain or infallible.
Arguments against the idea of the given originate with Kant (1724-1804), who argues that percepts without concepts do not yet constitute any form of knowing. Being non-epistemic, they presumably cannot serve as epistemic foundations. Once we recognize that we must apply concepts of properties to appearances and formulate beliefs utilizing those concepts before the appearances can play any epistemic role, it becomes more plausible that such beliefs are fallible. The argument was developed by Wilfrid Sellars (1963), which according to him, the idea of the given involves a confusion between sensing particulars (having sense impressions), which is non-epistemic, and having non-inferential knowledge of propositions referring to appearances. The former may be necessary for acquiring perceptual knowledge, but it is not itself a primitive kind of knowing. Its being non-epistemic renders it immune from error, but also unsuitable for epistemological foundations. The latter, non-referential perceptivities for being knowledge, are fallible, requiring concepts acquired through trained responses to public physical objects.
Contemporary foundationalist’s deny the coherentist’s claim whole eschewing the claim that foundations, in the form of reports about appearances, are infallible. They seek alternatives to the given as foundations. Although arguments against infallibility are sound, other objections to the idea of foundations are not. That concepts of objective properties are learned prior to concepts of appearances, for example, implied neither that claims about appearances are less certain than claims about objective properties, nor that the latter are prior in chains of justification. That there can be no knowledge prior to the acquisition and consistent application of concepts allows for propositions whose truth requires only consistent applications of concepts, and this may be so for some claims about appearances, least of mention, coherentists would add that such genuine belief’s stands in need of justification themselves and so cannot be foundations.
Coherentists will claim that a subject requires evidence that he applies concepts consistently that he is able, for example, consistently to distinguish red from other colours that appear. Beliefs about red appearances could not then be justified independently of other beliefs expressing that evidence. To say that part of the doctrine of the given that holds beliefs about appearances to be self-justified, we require an account of how such justification is possible, how some beliefs about appearances can be justified without appeal to evidence. Some foundationalists simply assert such warrant as derived from experience, but, unlike appeals to certainty by proponents of the given.
It is, nonetheless, an explanation of this capacity that enables its developments as an epistemological corollary into an essential metaphysical dualism. The world of ‘matter’ is known through external/outer sense-perception. So cognitive access to ‘mind’ must be based on a parallel process of introspection which ‘thought . . . not ‘sense’, as having nothing to do with external objects: Yet [put] is very like it, and might properly enough be called ‘internal sense’. However, having mind as object, is not sufficient to make a way of knowing ‘inner’ in the relevant sense be because mental facts can be grasped through sources other than introspection. To point, is significantly given in somewhat of a tenable provision in the giving validation for the manifested implications are that some ‘inner perceptions’ provide a kind of access to the mental not obtained otherwise - it is a ‘look within from within’. Stripped of metaphor this indicates the following epistemological features:
1. Only I can introspect my mind.
2. I can introspect only my mind.
3 Introspective awareness is superior to any other knowledge of contingent facts that I or others might have.
Tenets of (1) and (2) are grounded in the Cartesian of ‘privacy’ of the mental. Normally, a single object can be perceptually or inferentially grasped by many subjects, just as the same subject can perceive and infer different things. The epistemic peculiarity of introspection is that, is, is exclusive - it gives knowledge only of the mental history of the subject introspecting.
The tenet (2) of the traditional theory is grounded in the Cartesian idea of ‘privileged access’. The epistemic superiority of introspection lies in its being and infallible source of knowledge. First-person psychological statements which are its typical results cannot be mistaken. This claim is sometimes supported by an ‘imaginability test’, e.g., the impossibility of imaging that I believe that I am in pain, while at the same time imaging evidence that I am not in pain. An apparent counter-example to this infallibility claim would be the introspective judgement ‘I am perceiving a dead friend’ when I am really hallucinating. This is taken to by reformulating such introspective reports as ‘I seem to be perceiving a dead friend’. The importance of such privileged access is that introspection becomes a way of knowing immune from the pitfalls of other sources of cognition. The basic asymmetry between first and third person psychological statements by introspective and non-introspective methods, but even dualists can account for introspective awareness in different ways:
(1) Non-perceptual models - Self-scrutiny need not be perceptual. My awareness of an object ‘O’ changes the status of ‘O’. It now acquires the property of ‘being an object of awareness’. On the basis of this or the fact that I am aware of ‘O’, such an ‘inferential model’ of awareness is suggested by the Bhatta Mimamsa school of Indian Epistemology. This view of introspection does not construe it as a direct awareness of mental operations but, interestingly, we will have occasion to refer to theories where the emphasis on directness itself leads to a non-perceptual, or at least, a non-observational account of introspection.
(2) Reflexive models - Epistemic access to our minds need not involve a separate attentive act. Part of the meaning of a conscious state is that I know in that state when I am in that state. Conscious perception is here conceived as an awareness of ‘phosphorescence’ attached to some mental occurrence and in no need of a subsequent illustration to reveal itself. Of course, if introspection is defined as a distinct act then reflexive models are really accounts of the first-person access that makes no appeal to introspection.
(3) Public-mind theories and fallibility/infallibility models - the physicalists’ denial of metaphysically private mental facts naturally suggests that ‘looking within’ is not merely like perception but is perception. For Ryle (1900-76). Mental states are ‘iffy’ behavioural facts which, in principle, are equally accessible to everyone by the same means: One’s own self-awareness therefore is, in effect, no different in type from anyone else’s observations about one’s mind.
A more interesting move is for the physicalists to retain the truism that I grasp that I am sad in a very different way from that in which I know you to be sad. This directedness or non-inferential nature of self-knowledge can be preserved in some physicalists theories of introspection. For instance, Armstrong’s identification of mental states with causes of bodily behaviour and of the latter with brain states, makes introspection the process of acquiring information about such inner physical causes. But since introspection is itself a mental state, it is a process in the brain as well: And since its grasp of the relevant causal information is direct, it becomes a process in which the brain scans itself. Alternatively, some broadly ‘functionalist’ views of mental states of an invitation whose propositional indication is to convey an idea indirectly for being to mind, finding to its point or points through which imply or abdicate the underlying proposals as to be the sign of, or that point in the direction of, in that to offer (as an idea or theory) for consideration, i.e., this I suggest, is what really happened. Once, again, as we imagine ourselves to represent another thing indirectly, figuratively, and sometimes obscurely by evoking a thought, image, or concept of, say-, the meaning of a poem is often suggested in its title. Nevertheless, the machine-analogue of the introspective situation correlate as parallel corespondents for that which of the machine or an expression involving explicit or implied comparison of things basically unlike but with some striking similarities, e.g., the metaphorical table with the instruction ‘Print: ‘I’ am in state ‘A’ when in state ‘A’, results in the output ‘I’ am in state ‘A’ when expounding the ‘view of mental states that views of mental states suggests ’ of something has occurred. Similarly, if we define mental states and events functionally, we can say that introspection occurs when an occurrence of a mental state ‘M’ directly results in awareness of ‘M’. Observe with care that this way of emphasizing directness yields a non-perceptual and non-observational model of introspection. The machine in printing ‘I am positioned in state A’, (when it is not making a ‘verbal mistake’) just because it is in state ‘A’. There is no computation of information or process of ascertaining involved. The latter, at best, consist simply in passing through a successive sequence of states.
Furthering towards the legitimate question: How do I know that I am seeing a spider? Was interpreted as a demand for the faculty or information-processing-mechanism whereby I come to acquire this knowledge? Peculiarities of first-person psychological awareness and reports were carried over as peculiarities of this mechanism. However, the question need not demand the search for a method of knowing but rather for an explanation of the special epistemic features of first-person psychological statements. In that, the problem of introspection (as a way of knowing) dissolves but the problem of explaining ‘introspective’ or first-person authority remains.
Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: ‘S’ believes that ‘p’, where ‘p’ is a proposition towards which an agent, ‘S’, exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief is of this sort. If I trust what you say, I believe you. And someone may believe in Mrs. Collins, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all beliefs are ‘reducible’ to propositional belief, belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought as matter of my believing, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in free markets or in God, a matter of your believing those free-market economies are desirable or that God exists.
By or in accord with establishments of a kind, inconsistently and usually spoused doubtfully uncertain, no matter how, that non-propositional believing can, in every case, be reduced in this way. Debated on this point has a tendency to focus on the perceivable apparency that for being other than seems to be the case, where the fundamental dissemblance as being the distinction between capabilities of being distinguished as differing, but nonetheless distinct particularly and yet separately peculiar are the specifically diverent ‘belief-that’ and ‘belief-in’. Even so, the appearing capability by, at least applicable means for which the state or form appears pretentiously appeasing, in that which one in this distinction is to belief in God: St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-64), accepted or advanced as true or real on the basis of less than convincing evidence in supposing that to believe in God is simply to believe that certain truths hold, such that God exists, that he is benevolent, etc. Others ague that belief-in is a distinctive attitude, one that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional belief together with some further attitude.
H.H. Price (1969) defends the claim that there is different sorts of belief-in, some, but not all, reducible to beliefs-that. If you believe in God, you believe that God exists, that God is good, etc. But, according to Price, your belief involves, in addition, a certain complex pro-attitude toward its object. One might attempt to analyse this further attitude in terms of additional beliefs-that: ‘S’ believes in ‘χ’ exists (and perhaps holds further factual beliefs about ‘χ’) (2) ‘S’ believes that ‘χ; is good or valuable in some respect? ; and (3) ‘S’ believes that χ’s being good or valuable in this respect is it is a good thing. An analysis of this sort, however, fails adequately to capture the further affective component of belief-in. Thus, according to Price, if you believe in God, your belief is merely that certain truths hold: You possess, in addition, an attitude of commitment and trust towards God.
Notoriously, belief-in outruns the evidence for the corresponding belief-that. Does this diminish its rationality? If belief-in presupposes belief-that, it might be thought that the evidential standards for the former must be, at least, as, high as standards for the latter. And any additional pro-attitude might be thought to require further layers of justification not required for cases of belief-that.
Some philosophers have argued that, at least for cases in which belief-in is synonymous with faith (or, faith-in), evidential thresholds for constituent propositional beliefs are diminished. You may reasonably have faith in God or Mrs. Collins, even though beliefs about their respective attributes, were you to harbour them would be evidentially standard.
Belief-in may be, in general, less susceptible to alteration in the face of unfavourable evidence than belief-that. A believer who encounters evidence against God’s existence may remain unshaken in his belief, in part because the evidence does not bear in his pro-attitude. So long as this is united with his belief that God exists, the belief may survive epistemic buffeting - and reasonably so - in a way that an ordinary propositional belief that would not.
What is at stake here is the appropriateness of distinct types of explanation. That ever since the times of Aristotle (384-322 Bc) philosophers have emphasized the importance of explanatory knowledge. In simplest terms, we want to know not only what is the case but also why it is. This consideration suggests that we define explanation as an answer to a why-question. Such a definition would, however, be too broad, because some why-questions are request for consolation (Why did my son have to die?) Or moral justification (Why should women not be paid the same as men for the same work?) It would also be too narrow because some explanations are responses to how-questions (How does radar work?) Or how-possibly-questions (How is it possible for cats always to land on four feet?)
In its most general effect, ‘to explain’ means to make clear, to make plain, or to provide understanding. Definitions of this sort used philosophically un-helped, for the terms used in the definitions are no less problematic than the term to be defined. Moreover, since a wide variety of things require explanation, and since many different types of explanation exist, a more complex explanation is required. The term ‘explanandum’ is used to refer to that which is to be explained: The term ‘explanans’ ascribe to call or direct attention to that which does the explaining. The explanans and the explanandum taken together constitute the explanation.
One common type of explanation occurs when deliberate human actions are explained in terms of conscionable purposes. ‘Why did you go to the pharmacy yesterday? ‘Because I had a headache and needed to get some aspirin’. It is tacitly assumed that aspirin is an appropriate medication for headaches and that going to the pharmacy would be an efficient way of getting some. Such explanations are, of course, teleological, referring, as they do to goals. The explanans are not the realisation of a future goal - if the pharmacy happened to be closed for stocktaking the aspirin would not have been obtained there, but that would not invalidate the explanation. Some philosophers would say that the antecedent desire to achieve the end is what does the explaining: Others might say that the explaining is done by the nature of the goal and the fact that the action promoted the chances of realizing it. In any case, it should not be automatically assumed that such explanations are causal. Philosophers differ considerably on whether these explanations are to be framed in terms of cause or reason.
The distinction between reason and causes is motivated in good part by a desire to separate the rational from the natural order. Many who have insisted on distinguishing reasons from causes have failed to distinguish two kinds of reason. Consider my reason for sending a letter by express mail. Asked why I did so, I might say I wanted to get it there in a day, or simply: To get it there in a day. Strictly, the reason is expressed by ‘to get it there in a day’. But what this expresses are my reasons only because I am suitably motivated, in that I am in a reason state, wanting to get the letter there in a day. - especially wants reason states, beliefs and intentional - and not reasons strictly so called, that are candidates for causes. The latter are abstract contents of propositional altitudes, as the former are psychological elements that play motivational roles.
It has also seemed to those who deny that reasons are causes that the former justifies, as well as explain the actions for which they are reasons, whereas the role of causes is at most to explain. Another claim is that the relation between reasons (and here reason states are often cited explicitly) and the action they explain is non-complementary to fact: Whereas, the relation of causes to their effects is contingent. The ‘logical connection argument’ proceeds from this claim to the conclusion that reasons are mot causes.
All the same, the explanation as framed in terms of reason and causes, and there are many differing analyses of such concepts as intention and agency. Expanding the domain beyond consciousness. Freud maintained, in addition, that much human behaviour can be explained in terms of unconscious wishes. These Freudian explanations should probably be construed as basically causal.
Problems arise when teleological explanations are offered in other context. The behaviour of non-human animals is often explained in terms of purpose, e.g., the mouse ran to escape from the cat. In such cases the existence of conscious purpose seems dubious. The situation is still more problematic when a super-empirical purpose is invoked -, e.g., the explanation of living species in terms of God’s purpose, or the vitalistic explanation of biological phenomena in terms of an entelechy or vital principle. In recent years an ‘anthropic principle’ has received attention in cosmology. All such explanations have been condemned by many philosophers as anthropomorphic.
The preceding objection, for and all, that philosophers and scientists often maintain that functional explanations play an important and legitimate role in various sciences such as evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. For example, the case of the peppered moth in Liverpool, the change in colour and back again to the light phase provided adaption to a changing environment and fulfilled the function of reducing predation on the species. In the study of primitive societies anthropologists have maintained that various rituals, e.g., a rain dance, which may be inefficacious in brings about their manifest goals, e.g., producing rain. Actually fulfil the latent function of increasing social cohesion at a period of stress, e.g., theological and/or functional explanations in common sense and science often take pains to argue that such explanations can be analysed entirely in terms of efficient causes, thereby escaping the change of anthropomorphism, yet not all philosophers agree.
Mainly to avoid the incursion of unwanted theology, metaphysics, or anthropomorphism into science, many philosophers and scientist - especially during the first half of the twentieth century - held that science provides only descriptions and predictions of natural phenomena, but not explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, be that it may, a series of influential philosophers of science - including Karl Pooper (1935) Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim (1948) and Hempel (1965) - maintained that empirical science can explain natural phenomena without appealing to metaphysics and theology. It appears that this view is now accepted by a vast majority of philosophers of science, though there is sharp disagreement on the nature of scientific explanation.
The previous approach, developed by Hempel Popper and others became virtually a ‘received view’ in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this view, to give scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is to show how this phenomenon can be subsumed under a law of nature. A particular rupture in a water pipe can be explained by citing the universal law that water expands when chilled to the freezing point, and the fact that the temperature of the water in the pipe dropped below the freezing point. General laws, as well as particular facts, can be explained by subsumption. The law of conservation of linear momentum can be explained by derivation from Newton’s second and third laws of motion. Each of these explanations is a deductive argument: The premisses constitute the explanans and the conclusion is the explanandum. The explanans contain one or more statements of universal laws and, in many cases, statements describing initial conditions. This pattern of explanation is known as the ‘deductive-nomological model’ any such argument shows that the explanandum had to occur given the explanans.
Moreover, in contrast to the foregoing views - which stress such factors as logical relations, laws of nature and causality - a number of philosophers have argued that explanation, and not just scientific explanation, can be analysed entirely in pragmatic terms.
During the past half-century much philosophical attention has been focussed on explanation in science and in history. Considerable controversy has surrounded the question of whether historical explanation must be scientific, or whether history requires explanations of different types. Many diverse views have been articulated: the foregoing brief survey does not exhaust the variety.
In everyday life we encounter many types of explanation, which appear not to raise philosophical difficulties, in addition to those already of mention. Prior to take-off a flight attendant explains how to use the safety equipment on the aeroplane. In a museum the guide explains the significance of a famous painting. A mathematics teacher explains a geometrical proof to be a bewildered student. A newspaper story explains how a prisoner escaped. Additional examples come easily to mind. The main point is to remember the great variety of context in which explanations are sought and given.
Another item of importance to epistemology is the widely held notion that non-demonstrative inference can be characterized as the inference to the best explanation. Given the variety of views on the nature of explanation, this popular slogan can hardly provide a useful philosophical analysis.
The inference to the best explanation is claimed by many to be a legitimate form of non-deductive reasoning, which provides an important alternative to both deduction and enumerative induction. Some would claim it is only through reasoning to the best explanation that one can justify beliefs about the external world, the past, theoretical entities in science, and even the future. Consider belief about the external world and assume that we know what we do about our subjective and fleeting sensations. It seems obvious that we cannot deduce any truths about the existence of physical objects from truths describing the character of our sensations. But neither can we observe a correlation between sensations and something other than sensations since by hypothesis all we have to rely on ultimately is knowledge of our sensations. Nonetheless, we may be able to posit physical objects as the best explanation for the character and order of our sensations. In the same way, various hypotheses about the past might best explain present memory: Theatrical postulates in physics might best explain phenomena in the macro-world, and it is possible that our access to the future is through past observations. But what exactly is the form of an inference to the best explanation?
When one given to acquaintance its presentation is such as an inference in ordinary discourse it often seems to have as of:
1. ‘O’ is the case
2. If ‘E’ had been the case ‘O’ is what we would expect,
Therefore there is a high probability that:
3. ‘E’ was the case.
This is the argument form that Peirce (1839-1914) called ‘hypophysis’ or ‘abduction’. To consider a very simple example, we might upon coming across some footsteps on the beach, reason to the conclusion that a person walking along the beach recently by noting that if a person had walked along the beach one would expect to find just such footsteps.
But is abduction a legitimate form of reasoning? Obviously, if the conditional in (2) above, is read as a material conditional such arguments would be hopelessly based. Since the proposition that ‘E’ materially implies ‘O’ is entailed by ‘O’, there would always be an infinite number of competing inferences to the best explanation and none of them would seem to lend support to its conclusion. The conditionals we employ in ordinary discourse, however, are seldom, if ever, material conditionals. Such that the vast majority of ‘if . . . , . Then . . . ‘ statements do not seem to be truth-functionally complex. Rather, they seem to assert a connection of some sort between the states of affairs referred to in the antecedent (after the ‘if’) and in the consequent (after the ‘then’). Perhaps the argument form has more plausibility if the conditional is read in this more natural way. But consider an alternative footsteps explanation:
1. There are footprints on the beach
2. If cows wearing boots had walked along the beach recently one would expect to find such footprints
Therefore. There is a high probability that:
3. Cows wearing boots walked along the beach recently.
This inference has precisely the same form as the earlier inference to the conclusion that people walked along the beach recently and its premisses are just as true, but we would be or have no doubt regarding both the conclusion and the inference as simply silly. If we are to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate reasoning to the best explanation, it would seem that we need a more sophisticated model of the argument form. It would seem that in reasoning to an explanation we need criteria for choosing between alternative explanations. If reasoning to the best explanation is to constitute a genuine alternative to inductive reasoning. It is important that these criteria not be implicit premisses which will convert our argument into an inductive argument. Thus, for example, if the reason we conclude that people rather than cows walked along the beach are only that we are implicitly relying on the premiss that footprints of this sort are usually produced by people. Then it is certainly tempting to suppose that our inference to the best explanation was really a disguised inductive inference of the form:
1. Most footprints are produced by people.
2. Here are footprints
Therefore in all probability,
3. These footprints were produced by people.
If we follow the suggestion made above, we might construe the form of reasoning to the best explanation, such that:
1. ‘O’ (a description of some phenomenon).
2. Of the set of available and competing explanations E1, E2 . . . , En capable of explaining ‘O’, E1 is the best according to the correct criteria for choosing among potential explanations.
Therefore in all probability,
3. E1.
Here too, is a crucial ambiguity in the concept of the best explanation. It might be true of an explanation E1 that it has the best chance of being correct without it being probable that E1 is correct. If I have two tickets in the lottery and one hundred, other people each have one ticket, I am the person who has the best chance of winning, but it would be completely irrational to conclude on that basis that I am likely too win. It is much more likely that one of the other people will win than I will win. To conclude that a given explanation is actually likely to be correct on must hold that it is more likely that it is true than that the distinction of all other possible explanations is correct. And since on many models of explanation the number of potential explanations satisfying the formal requirements of adequate explanation is unlimited. This will be a normal feat.
Explanations are also sometimes taken to be more plausible the more explanatory ‘power’ they have. This power is usually defined in terms of the number of things or more likely, the number of kinds of things, the theory can explain. Thus, Newtonian mechanics were so attractive, the argument goes, partly because of the range of phenomena the theory could explain.
The familiarity of an explanation in terms of explanations is also sometimes cited as a reason for preferring that explanation to fewer familiar kinds of explanation. So if one provides a kind of evolutionary explanation for the disappearance of one organ in a creature, one should look more favourably on a similar sort of explanation for the disappearance of another organ.
Evaluating the claim that inference to the best explanation constitutes a legitimate and independent argument form. One must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that explanations that satisfy a given criterions, simplicities, for example, are more likely to be correct. While it might be nice if the universe were structured in such a way that simple, powerful, familiar explanations were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our universe discovered only a posteriori. If the reasoning to the explanation relies on such criteria, it seems that one cannot without circularity use reasoning to the best explanation to discover that the reliance on such criteria is safe. But if one has some independent way of discovering that simple, powerful, familiar explanations are more often correct, then why should we think that reasoning to the best explanation is an independent source of information about the world? Again, why should ‘we’ be used tom indicate requirements by immediate or future needs and or purposes, justly as tangible the substantial objective of something one is bound to or forbear is our obligation to obey the law, least of mention, the opportunity by which we are not a state of affairs or combination of circumstances favourable to some others at end, only by asking to conclude that it would be more perspicuous to represent the reasoning this way:
1. Most phenomena have the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanations available
2. Here is an observed phenomenon, and E1 is the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanation available.
Therefore, in all probability,
3. This is to be explained by E1.
But the above is simply an instance of familiar inductive reasoning.
There are various ways of classifying mental activities and states. One useful distinction is that between the propositional attitudes and everything else. A propositional attitude in one whose description takes a sentence as complement of the verb. Belief is a propositional attitude: One believes (truly or falsely as the case may be), that there are cookies in the jar. That there are cookies in the jar is the proposition expressed by the sentence following the verb. Knowing, judging, inferring, concluding and doubts are also propositional attitudes: One knows, judges, infers, concludes, or doubts that a certain proposition (the one expressed by the sentential complement) is true.
Though the propositions are not always explicit, hope, fear, expectation. Intention, and a great many others terms are also (usually) taken to describe propositional attitudes, one hopes that (is afraid that, etc.) there are cookies in the jar. Wanting a cookie is, or can be construed as, a propositional attitude: Wanting that one has (or ingest or whatever) a cookie, intending to eat a cookie is intending that one will eat a cookie.
Propositional attitudes involve the possession and use of concepts and are, in this sense, representational. One must have some knowledge or understanding of what χ’s are in order to think, believe or hope that something is ‘χ’. In order to want a cookie, intend to eat one must, in some way, know or understand what a cookie is. One must have this concept. There is a sense in which one can want to eat a cookie without knowing what a cookie is - if, for example, one mistakenly thinks there are muffins in the jar and, as a result wants to eat what is in the jar (= cookies). But this sense is hardly relevant, for in this sense one can want to eat the cookies in the jar without wanting to eat any cookies. For this reason(and this sense) the propositional attitudes are cognitive: They require or presuppose a level of understanding and knowledge, this kind of understanding and knowledge required to possess the concepts involved in occupying the propositional state.
Thought there is sometimes disagreement about their proper analysis, non-propositional mental states, yet do not, at least on the surface, take propositions as their object. Being in pain, being thirsty, smelling the flowers and feeling sad are introspectively prominent mental states that do not, like the propositional attitudes, require the application or use of concepts. One doesn’t have to understand what pain or thirst is to experience pain or thirst. Assuming that pain and thirst are conscious phenomena, one must, of course, be conscious or aware of the pain or thirst to experience them, but awareness of must be carefully distinguished from awareness that. One can be aware of ‘χ’, - thirst or a toothache - without being aware that, that, e.g., thirst or a toothache, is that like beliefs that and knowledge that, are a propositional attitude, awareness of is not.
As the examples, pain, thirst, tickles, itches, hungers are meant to suggest, the non-propositional states have felt or experienced [‘phenomenal’] quality to them that is absent in the case of the propositional attitudes. Aside from whom it is we believe to be playing the tuba, believing that John is playing the tuba is much the same as believing that Joan is playing the tuba. These are different propositional states, different beliefs, yet, they are distinguished entirely in terms of their propositional content - in terms of what they are beliefs about. Contrast this with the difference between hearing John play the tuba and seeing him play the tuba. Hearing John plays the tuba and perceiving that John is immersed in the engaging activity of which he plays the tuba is different, not just (as do beliefs) in what they are of or about (for these experiences are, in fact, of the same thing: John playing the tuba), but in their qualitative character, the one involves a visual, the other of an auditory, experience. The difference between seeing John play the tuba and hearing John play the tuba, then, a ‘sensationalistic’ response not a cognitive difference.
Some mental states are a combination of sensory and cognitive elements. Being afraid of and/or feelings of trepidation, sadness and anger, joy and depression, are ordinarily thought of in this way sensations are: Not in terms of what propositions (if any) they represent, but (like visual and auditory experience) in their intrinsic character, in how they appreciate the person experiencing them. But when we describe a person for being afraid that, sad that, upset that (as opposed too merely thinking or knowing that) so-and-so happened, we typically mean to be describing the kind of sensory (feeling or emotional) quality accompanying the cognitive state. Being afraid that the dog is going to bite me are both to think (that he might bite me) - a cognitive state - and feel fear or apprehension (sensory) at the prospect.
The perceptual verbs exhibit this kind of mixture, this duality between the sensory and the cognitive. Verbs like ‘to hear’, ‘to say’, and ‘to feel’ is [often] used to describe propositional (cognitive) states, but they describe these states in terms of the way (sensory) one comes to be in them. Seeing that there are two cookies left by seeing. Feeling that there are two cookies left is coming to know this in a different way, by having tactile experiences (‘sensations’).
On this model of the sensory-cognitive distinction (at least it is realized in perceptual phenomena). sensations are a pre-conceptual, a pre-cognitive, vehicle of sensory information. The terms ‘sensation’ and ‘sense-data’ (or simply ‘experience’) were (and, in some circles, still are) used to describe this early phase of perceptual processing. It is currently more fashionable to speak of this sensory component in perception as the percept, the sensory information store, is generally the same: An acknowledgement of a stage in perceptual processing in which the incoming information is embodied in ‘raw’ sensory (pre-categorical, pre-recognitional) forms. This early phase of the process is comparatively modular - relatively immune to, and insulated from, cognitive influence. The emergence of a propositional [cognitive] states - seeing that an object is red - depends, then, on the earlier occurrence of a conscious, but nonetheless, non-propositional condition, seeing (under the right condition, of course) the red object. The sensory phase of this process constitutes the delivery of information (about the red object) in a particular form (visual): Cognitive mechanisms are then responsible for extracting and using this information - for generating the belief (knowledge) that the object is red. (The belief of blindness suggests that this information can be delivered, perhaps in degraded form, at a non-conscious level.)
To speak of ‘sensations of red objects, tuba and so forth, is to say that these sensations carry information about an object’s colour, its shape, orientation, and position and (in the case of an audition) information about acoustic qualities such as pitch, timbre, volume. It is not to say that the sensations share the properties of the objects they are sensations of or that they have the properties they carry information about. Auditory sensations are not loud and visual sensations are not coloured. Sensations are bearers of nonconceptualized information, and the bearer of the information that something is red need not itself be red. It need not even be the sort of thing that could be red: It might be a certain pattern of neuronal events in the brain. Nonetheless, the ‘sensation, though not itself red, will (being the normal bearer of the information) typically according to the subjects who sustainable uphold the experience as belief, or tendency to believe, that something red is being experienced. Hence the existence of hallucinations.
Just as there are theories of the mind, that would deny the existence of any state of mind whose essence was purely qualitative (i.e., did not consist of the state’s extrinsic, causal, properties) there are theories of perception and knowledge - cognitive theories - that denies a sensory component to ordinary sense perception. The sensor y dimension (the look, feel, smells, taste of things) is (if it is not altogether denied) identified with some cognitive condition (knowledge or belief) of the experienced. All seeing (not to mention hearing, smelling and feeling) becomes a form of believing or knowing. As a result, organisms that cannot know cannot have experiences. Often, to avoid these striking counterintuitive results, implicit or otherwise unobtrusive (and, typically, undetectable) forms of believing or, knowing.
Aside, though, from introspective evidence (closing and opening one’s eyes, if it changes beliefs at all, doesn’t just change beliefs, it eliminates and restores a distinctive kind of conscionable experience), there is a variety of empirical evidence for the existence of a stage in perceptual processing that is conscious without being cognitive (in any recognizable sense). For example, experiments with brief visual displays to make known what has been or should be concealed, that when subjects are exposed for momentary succinct intervals to information-rich stimuli, there is persistence (at the conscious level) of what is called an image or visual icon that embodies more information about the stimulus than the subject can cognitively process or report on. Subjects can use to one’s advantage the information in this persisting image by reporting on any part of the absent array of numbers (the y can, for instance, reports of the top three numbers, the middle three or the bottom three). They cannot, however, identify all nine numbers. They report seeing all nine, and the y can identify any one of the nine, but they cannot identify all nine. Knowledge and brief, recognition and identification - these cognitive states, though present for any two or three numbers in the array, are absent for all nine numbers in the array. Yet, the image carries information about all nine numbers (how else accounts for subjects’ ability to identify any number in the absent array?) Obviously, then, information is there, in the experience itself, whether or not it is, or even can be. As psychologists conclude, there is a limit on the information processing capacities of the latter (cognitive) mechanisms that are not shared by the sensory stages themselves.
Perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses. This includes most of what we know. Some would say it includes everything we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm, ring. In each case we come to know something - that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up - that the light has turned green - by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe in coming to know a fact - that the melon is overripe - by one’s sense of touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Seeing a rotten kumquat is not at all like the experience of smelling, tasting or feeling a rotten kumquat. Yet all these experiences can result in the same knowledge - Knowledge that the kumquat is rotten. Although the experiences are much different, they must, if they are to yield knowledge, embody information about the kumquat: The information that it is rotten. Seeing that the fruit is rotten differs from smelling that it is rotten, not in what is known, but how it is known. In each case, the information has one rather than another or more of the same source - the rotten kumquat, - but it is, so top speak, delivered via different channels and coded and re-coded in different experiential neuronal excitations as stimulated sense attractions.
It is important to avoid confusing perceptual knowledge of facts, e.g., that the kumquat is rotten, with the perception of objects, e.g., rotten kumquats. It is one thing to see (taste, smell, feel) a rotten kumquat, and quite another to know (by seeing or tasting) that it is a rotten kumquat. Some people, after all, do not know what kumquats to look like. They see a kumquat but do not actually realize or attain to its vision (do not see that) it is a kumquat. Again, some people do not know what a kumquat smell like. They smell a rotten kumquat and - thinking, perhaps, that this is a way this strange fruit is supposed to smell - does not realize from the smell, i.e., do not smell that it is a rotted kumquat. In such cases people see and smell rotten kumquats - and in this sense perceive rotten kumquat - and never know that they are kumquats - let alone rotten kumquats. They cannot, not at least by seeing and smelling, and not until they have learned something about (rotten) kumquats. Since the topic as such is incorporated in the perceptual knowledge - knowing, by sensory means, that something if ‘F’ -, we will be primary concerned with the question of what more, beyond the perception of F’s, is needed to see that (and thereby know that) they are ‘F’. The question is, however, not how we see kumquats (for even the ignorant can do this) but, how we know (if, that in itself, that we do) that, that is what we see.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this is that it is meant that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fat, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, or see, by her expression that is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of obtainable knowledge is particularly prevalent in the case of vision but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noisemakers so that we can, for example, hear (by the bells) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get away. When we obtain knowledge in this way. It is clear that unless one sees - hence, comes to know. Something about the gauge (that it reads ‘empty’), the newspaper (which is says) and the person’s expression, one would not see (hence, know) what one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot - not at least in this way - hear that one’s visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, b’s being ‘G’, obtains. When this occurs, the knowledge (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) is derived, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.
Though perceptual knowledge about objects is often, in this way, dependent on knowledge of fats about different objects, the derived knowledge is sometimes about the same object. That is, we see that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing, not that some other object is ‘G’, but that ‘a’ is itself ‘G’. We see, by her expression, that she is nervous. She tells that the fabric is silk (not polyester) by the characteristic ‘greasy’ feel of the fabric itself (not, as I do, by what is printed on the label). We tell whether it is an oak tree, a Porsche car, a geranium, an igneous rock or a misprint by its shape, colour, texture, size, behaviour and distinctive markings. Perceptual knowledge of this sort is also deprived - derived from the more basic facts (about ‘a’) we use to make the identification. In this case the perceptual knowledge is still indirect because, although the same object is involved, the facts we come to know about it are different than the facts that enable us to know it.
Derived knowledge is sometimes described as inferential, but this is misleading, at the conscious level there is no passage of the mind from premise to conclusion, no reasoning, no problem-solving. The observer, the one who sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ (or ‘a’ is itself) as ‘G’, need not be (and typically is not) aware of any process of inference, any passage of the mind from one belief to another. The resulting knowledge, though logically derivative, is psychologically immediate. I could see that she was getting angry: So, I moved my hand. I did not, - at least not at any conscious level - infers (from her expression and behaviour) that she was getting angry. I could (or, so it seemed to me) see that she was getting angry. It is this psychological immediacy that makes indirect perceptual knowledge a species of perceptual knowledge.
The psychological immediacy that characterises so much of our perceptual knowledge - even (sometimes) the most indirect and derived forms of it - does not mean that learning is not required to know in this way. One is not born with (may, in fact, never develop) the ability to recognize daffodils, muskrats and angry companions. It is only after a long experience that one is able visually to identify such things. Beginners may do something corresponding to inference: They recognize relevant features of trees, birds, and flowers, factures they already know how to perceptually identify, and then infer (conclude), on the basis of what they see, and under the guidance of more expert observers, that it’s an oak a finch or a geranium. But the experts (and we are all experts on many aspects of our familiar surroundings) do not typically go through such a process. The expert just sees that it’s an oak, a finch or a geranium. The perceptual knowledge of the expert is still dependent, of course, since even an expert cannot see what kind of flower it is if she cannot first see its colour and shape, but it is to say, that the expert has developed identification skills, as this unfolding amplification has gainfully elaborated on or upon the progressive advance from a lower or simpler to a higher or more complex form that no longer require the sort of conscious inferential process that characterize a beginner’s efforts.
Coming to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’ obviously requires some background assumption on the part of the observer, an assumption to the effect that ‘a’ is ‘F’ (or perhaps only probable ‘F’) when ‘b’ is ‘G’. If one negates into its interacted opposition, the opposing opposition would not be to take on or present a false or deceptive appearance, if to take something for granted or as true or existent especially as a basis for action or reasoning, whereas a lecturer who talks above the heads of his listeners presupposes too extensive a knowledge on their part. Only, that, we now of existing or in progress that seems toadyish is contemporaneously assuming of such probability (as taken to be granted) that the gauge is properly connected, and does not, thereby assume that it would not register ‘empty’, unless the tank was nearly empty, then even if one could see that it registered ‘empty’, one would not learn ( hence, would not see) that one needed gas. At least, one would not see it by consulting the gauge. Likewise, in trying to identify birds, its no use being able to see their markings if one doesn’t know something about which birds have which marks - sometimes of the form: A bird with these markings is (probably) a finch.
It would seem, moreover, that these background assumptions, if they are to yield knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, as they must if the observer is to see (by b’s being ‘G’) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, must they qualify as knowledge. For if this background fact is not known, if it is not known whether ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’, then the knowledge of b’s being ‘G’, taken by itself, powerless to generate the knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If the conclusion is to be known to be true, both the premises used to reach that conclusion must be known to be true. Or so it would seem.
Externalism/Internalism are most generally accepted of this distinction if that a theory of justification is internalist, if and only if it requires that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person. Internal to his cognitive perspective, and external, if it allows that, at least, part of the justifying factor need not be thus accessible, so they can be external to the believers’ cognitive perspective, beyond his understanding. As complex issues well beyond our perception to the knowledge or an understanding, however, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalist and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any very explicit explication.
The externalism/internalism distinction has been mainly applied to theories of epistemic justification. It has also been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and in a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought content.
The internalist requirement of cognitive accessibility can be interpreted in at least two ways: A strong version of internalism required that the believer actually be aware of the justifying factor in order to be justified: While a weaker version would require only that he be capable of becoming aware of them by focussing his attention appropriately, but without the need for any change of position, new information etc. Though the phrase ‘cognitively accessible’ suggests the weak for internalism, wherefore, the idea that epistemic justification requires that the believer actually have in his cognitive possession a reason for thinking that the belief is true.
It should be carefully noticed that when internalism is construed by either that the justifying factors literally are internal mental states of the person or that the internalism. On whether actual awareness of the justifying elements or only the capacity to become aware of them is required, comparatively, the consistency and usually through a common conformity brings upon some coherentists views that could also be internalist, if both the belief and other states with which a justification belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible. In spite of its apparency, it is necessary, because on at least some views, e.g., a direct realist view of perception, something other than a mental state of the believer can be cognitively accessible, not sufficient, because there are views according to which at least, some mental states need not be actual (strong versions) or even possible (weak versions) objects of cognitive awareness.
Obviously too, a view that was externalist in relation to a strong version of internalism (by not requiring that the believer actually be aware of all justifying factors) could still be internalist in relation to a weak version (by purposively requiring of something as wanted or needed relevance, as, perhaps, to convey (as an idea) to the mind as any means to secure pease for being, at least, and, that is to say, to amend of corrections as being capable of becoming aware of them). Nonetheless, the character type of descriptions carries tom pass over without giving due attention, yet not properly or sufficiently attended to or cared for, seems to obligate or obliged of the choices that are anywhere afar or in-between, however, the inclining inclinations for which we are considerably to some extent or in some degree to its place as, perhaps, dis-placed of the opportunity that every once and then are subject to show or a disposition to show kindness or compassion. Therefore, the subsequent occurrences in space and time , changes the order or sequence of space and time changes, for any order or successive sequence, as following a set arrangement, design, or pattern, is that, of which this point is the custom for which of needs or requirement is to employ as the pressing lack of something essential. The state or fact or its interpretations are to having a sovereign reality, that having recently come into existence, perhaps, in the beginning we were confused but soon enough we fully understood, such is the responsibility as heralded by normative navigation between or conferred by something that limits or qualifies an agreement or offer such induce such conditions that any provisionary adequacy finds an order for containing or some sorts of dependency on stabilized conditions of agreement. Our raising the needed remission for, after all, in the absence of our requirement is left in lacking the adequacy for being incomplete, hence our wanting, as a displacing quality value holds to an analogous employment for which the mental act and its point fully directed object of endowment, and the excitation of our believing, where inturn the enacting capacity of enabling desire always lends toward action.
The most prominently recent externalist views have been versions of ‘reliabilism’, whose main requirement for justification is roughly that the belief is produced in a way or to a considerable degree in which of subject matter conducting a process that makes of objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless, be epistemically justified in accepting it. Thus, such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps, even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.
An alterative to giving an externalist account of epistemic justification, one which may be more defensible while still accommodating many of the same motivating concerns, is especially given to some externalists account of knowledge directly, without relying on an intermediate account of justification. Such a view will obviously have to reject the justified true belief account of knowledge, holding instead that knowledge is true belief which satisfies the chosen externalist condition, e.g., is a result of a reliable process, and, perhaps, further conditions as well. This makes it possible for such a view to retain an internalist account of epistemic justification, though the centralities are seriously diminished. Such an externalist account of knowledge can accommodate the common sense conviction that animals, young children and unsophisticated adults possess knowledge though not the weaker conviction that such individuals are epistemically justified in their belief. It is also, at least. Vulnerable to internalist counter-examples, since the intuitions involved there pertains more clearly to justification than to knowledge, least of mention, as with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. An objection to externalist accounts of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the content of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. So, then, the adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem as if part of all of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirements for justification.
Externalists, however, argue that the indirect knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, though it may depend on the knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’, does not require knowledge of the connecting fact, the fact that ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’. Simple belief (or, perhaps, justified beliefs, there are stronger and weaker versions of externalism) in the connecting fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge of the fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge e of the connected fact. Even if, strictly speaking, I don’t know she is nervous whenever she fidgets like that, I can nonetheless, see and hence know, that she is nervous by the way she fidgets, if I (correctly) assume that his behaviour r is a reliable expression of nervousness. One need not know the gauge is working well to make observations (acquire observational knowledge) with it. All that is required, besides the observer believing that the gauge is reliable, is that the gauge, in fact, be reliable, i.e., that the observer’s background beliefs be true. Critics of externalisms have been quick to point out that this theory has the unpalatable consequence that knowledge can be made possible by - and, in this sense, be made to rest on - lucky hunches (that turn out true) and unsupported (even irrational) beliefs. Unavoidably, internalist have frequently argued, that if one is apprehensively to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ on the basis of b’s being ‘G’, one should have (as a bare minimum) some justification for thinking that ‘a’ is ‘F’, or is probably ‘F’, when ‘b’ is ‘G’. The significance as arising from one’s inmost self is conducted or carried out without rigidity or prescribed procedure and informative standards which basic underlying or constituting entities, suchlike the substance that the inner significance or central meaning of something written or said is essentially the stuff for being, as such of a thing would maintain whatever is apprehended as having actual, distinct, and demonstrable existence, as its virtue is not a thing, but an attribute of a thing. What is more, in ‘form’, that succeeds by an ordinary language, one that is communicatively communicable conveying completely the essences of mind. The valuing quality as acknowledged as being positive, deriving or derivable by reasoning from a part to a whole, from particulars to generals, or from the individual to the universal.
Whatever view is one, may take about these matters (with the possible exception of extreme externalism) indirect perception obviously requires some understanding (knowledge? Justification? Belief?) Of the general relationship between the fact one comes to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) and the facts (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enable one to know it. And it is this requirement on background knowledge or understanding that leads to questions to questions about the possibility of indirect perceptual knowledge. Is it really knowledge? The first question is inspired by sceptical doubts about whether we can ever know the connecting facts in question. How is it possible to learn, to acquire knowledge of, the connecting fact’s knowledge of which is necessary to see? Besides, with reference to b’s being ‘G’, and that ‘a’ is ‘F’? These connecting facts do not appear to be perceptually knowable. Quite the contrary, they appear to b e general truths knowable (if knowable at all) by inductive inference e from past observations. And if one is sceptical about obtaining knowledge in this indirect, inductive way one is, perforce, sceptical about the existence of the kind of indirect knowledge, including indirect perceptual knowledge of the set described, in that depends on it.
Even if one puts aside such sceptical questions, however, there yet remains a legitimate concern about the perceptual character of this kind knowledge. If one sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’, is really seeing that ‘a’ is ‘F’? Isn’t perception merely a part - and, from an epistemological standpoint, the less significant part - of the process whereby one comes to know that ‘a’ is ‘F?’. One must, it is true, sere that ‘b’ is ‘G’, but this is only one of the premises needed to reach the conclusion (knowledge) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. There is also the background knowledge that is essential to the process. If we think of a theory as any factual proposition, or set of factual propositions, that cannot itself be known in some direct observational way, we can express this worry by saying that indirect perception is always theory-loaded: Seeing (indirectly)that ‘a’ is ‘F’ is only possible if the observer already has knowledge of (justification for, belief in) some theory, the theory ‘connecting’ the fast one cannot come to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) with the fact (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enables one to know it.
This, of course, reverses the standard foundationalist picture of human knowledge. Instead of theoretical knowledge depending on, and being derived from, perception, perception (of the indirect sort) presupposes a prior realization to knowledge.
Foundationalists are quick to point out that this apparent reversal in the structure of human knowledge is only apparent. Our indirect perception of facts depends on theory, yes, but this merely shows that indirect perceptual knowledge is not part of the foundation. To reach the kind of perceptual knowledge that lies at the foundation, we need to look at a form of perception that is purified of all theoretical elements. This then, will be perceptual knowledge pure and direct. No background knowledge or assumptions about connecting regularities are needed in direct perception because the known facts are presented directly and immediately and not (as, in indirect perception) on the basis of some other facts. In direct perception all the justification (needed for knowledge) is right there in the experience itself.
What, then, about the possibility of perceptual knowledge pure and direct, the possibility of coming to know, on the basis of sensory experience, that ‘a’ is ‘F’ where this does not require assumptions or knowledge that has a source outside the experience itself? Where is this epistemological ‘pure gold’ to be found?
There are, basically, two views about the nature of direct perceptual knowledge (coherentists would deny that any of our knowledge is basic in this sense). These views (following traditional nomenclature) can be called ‘direct realism’ and ‘representationalism’ or ‘representative realism’. A representationalist restricts direct perceptual knowledge to objects of a very special sort: Ideas, impressions, or sensations, sometimes called sense-data - entities in the mind of the observer. One directly perceives a fact, e.g., that ‘b’ is ‘G’, only when ‘b’ is a mental entity of some sort - a subjective appearance or sense-data - and ‘G’ is a property of this datum. Knowledge of these sensory states is supposed to be certain and infallible. These of or relating to ‘sensation or the senses are sensory perceptions and contain sensory facts. One cannot be mistaken about these facts for these facts are, in reality, facts about the way things appear to be, and one cannot be mistaken about the way things appear to be. Normal perception of external conditions, then, turns out to be (always) a type of indirect perception. One ‘sees’ that there is a tomato in front of one by seeing that the manifestation (of the tomato) has a certain quality (reddish and bulgy) and inferring as this is topically said to be automatic and unconscious, on the basis of certain background assumptions, e.g., that there typically is a tomato in front of one when one has experiences of this sort, that there is a tomato in front of one. All knowledge of objective reality, then, even what commonsense regards as the most direct perceptual knowledge, is based on an even more direct knowledge of the appearances.
For the representationalist, then, perceptual knowledge of our physical surroundings is always theory-loaded and indirect. Such perception is with which is carried conveying or transported from one place to another, but to put something before another for acceptance or consideration may that of offering to the theory that there is some regular, some uniform correlations between the way things appear (known in the perceptually direct way) and the way things actually are (known, if known at all, in a perceptual indirect way).
The second view, direct realism, refuses to restrict perceptual knowledge, to an inner world of subjective experience. Though the direct realist is willing to concede that much of our knowledge of the physical world is indirect, however, direct and immediate it may sometimes feel, some perceptual knowledge of physical reality is direct. What makes it direct is that such knowledge is not based on, nor in any way dependent on, other knowledge and belief. The justification needed for the knowledge is right there in the experience itself.
To understand the way this is supposed to work, consider an ordinary example, ‘S’ identifies a banana (learns that it is a banana) by noting its shape and colour - perhaps, even tasting and smelling it (to make sure it’s not wax). In this case the perceptual knowledge that is a banana is (the direct realist admits) indirect, dependence on S’s perceptual knowledge of its shape, colour, smell, and taste. ‘S’ learns that it is a banana by seeing that it is yellow, banana-shaped, etc. Nonetheless, S’s perception of the banana’s colour and shape is direct. ‘S’ does not see that the object is yellow, for example, by seeing, knowing, believing anything more basic - either about the banana or anything else, e.g., his own sensations of the banana. ‘S’ has learned to identify such features, of course, but when ‘S’ learned to do is not an inference, even a unconscious inference, from other things been believed. What ‘S’ acquired was a cognitive skill, a disposition to believe of yellow objects he saw that they were yellow. The exercise of this skill does not require, and in no way depends on, having of any other beliefs. S’ effectual capability to produce desired results with a minium expenditure of energy, time, or resources successes depend on this operating in certain special conditions, of course, ‘S’ will not, perhaps, be able to visually identify yellow objects in drastically reduced lighting, at funny viewing angles, or when afflicted with certain nervous disorders. But these facts about ‘S’ can see that something is yellow does not show that his perceptual knowledge (that ‘a’ is yellow) in any way deepens on a belief )let alone knowledge) that he is in such special conditions. It merely shows that direct perceptual knowledge is the result of exercising a skill, initially, we were confused but soon enough we fully understood and set up the formalities for becoming, as introduced as members, all of which the identifications, ability, or proficiencies were addressed by an inept masterly accomplishment or done with proficiency or skill, that like any skill requires certain conditions for its successful employment. An expert basketball player cannot shoot accurately in a hurricane. He needs normal conditions to do what he has learned to do. So also, with individuals who have developed perceptual (cognitive) skills. They need normal conditions to do what they have learned to do. They need normal conditions to see, for example, that something is yellow. But they do not, any more than the basketball player, have to know they are in these conditions to do what being in these conditions enables them to do.
This means, of course, that for addressing of some realists direct perceptual knowledge is fallible and corrigible. Whether ‘S’ sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ depends on his being caused to believe that ’a’ is ‘F’ in conditions that are appropriate for an exercise of that cognitive skill. If conditions are right, then ‘S’ sees (hence, knows) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If they aren’t, he doesn’t. Whether or not ‘S’ knows depends, then, not on what else, if anything, ‘S’ believes, but on the circumferences in which ‘S’ comes to believe. This being so, this type of direct realism is a form of externalism, direct perception of objective facts, pure perceptual knowledge of external events, is made possible because what is needed, by way of justification for such knowledge has been reduced. Background knowledge - and, in particular, the knowledge that the experience does, and suffices for knowing - is not needed.
This mans that the foundations of knowledge are fallible. Nonetheless, though fallible, they are in no way derived. That is what make them foundations. Even if they are brittle, as foundations sometimes are, everything else rests upon them
The theory of representative realism holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature are independent of us and of our perceptual experience of it, and (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself:
Clause 1. Makes representative realism a species of realism.
Clause 2. Makes it a species of causal theory of perception.
Clause 3. Makes it a species of representative as opposed to direct realism.
Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. Its act/object analysis is traditionally a major plank in arguments for representative realism. According to the act/object analysis of experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects (whatever is perceived), but also to experiences like hallucinations and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences nonetheless, appear to represent something. And their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which have been treated as properties, Meinongian objects (which may not exist or have any form of being), and, more commonly, private mental entities with sensory qualities. (The term ‘sense-data’ is now usually applied to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects of sense experiences, as in the work of G.E. Moore.) Act/object theorists may also differ on the relationship between objects of experience and objects of perception. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘indirectly aware’). Meinongians, however, may simply treat objects of perception as existing objects of experience.
Realism in any area of thought is the doctrine that certain entities allegedly associated with that area are indeed real. Common sense realism - sometimes called ‘realism’, without t qualification - says that ordinary things like chairs and trees and people are real. Scientific realism says that theoretical posits like electrons and fields of force and quarks are equally real. And psychological realism says mental states like pain and beliefs are real. Realism can be upheld - and opposed - in all such areas, as it can with differently or more finely drawn provinces of discourse: For example, with discourse about colours, about the past, about possibility and necessity, or about matters of moral right and wrong. The realist in any such area insists on the reality of the entities in question in the discourse.
If realism itself can be given a fairly quick characterization, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of opposition, for they are legion. Some opponents deny that there are any distinctive posits associated with the area of discourse under dispute: A good example is the emotivity doctrine that moral discourse does not posit values but serves only, like applause and exclamation, to express feelings. Other opponents deny that the entities posited by the relevant discourse exist, or, at least, exists independently of our thinking about them: Here the standard example is ‘idealism’. And others again, insist that the entities associated with the discourse in question are tailored to our human capacities and interests and, to that extent, are as much a product of invention as a matter of discovery.
Nevertheless, one us e of terms such as ‘looks’, ‘seems’, and ‘feels’ is to express opinion. ‘It looks as if the Labour Party will win the next election’ expresses an opinion about the party’s chances and does not describe a particular kind of perceptual experience. We can, however, use such terms to describe perceptual experience divorced from any opinion to which the experience may incline us. A straight stick half in water looks bent, and does so to people completely familiar with this illusion who have, therefore, no inclination to hold that the stick is in fact bent. Such users of ‘looks’, ‘seems’, ‘taste’, etc. are commonly called ‘phenomenological’.
The act/object theory holds that the sensory experience recorded by sentence employing sense is a matter of being directly acquainted with something which actually bears the red to me. I am acquainted with a red expanse (in my visual field): when something tastes bitter to me I am directly acquainted with a ‘sensa’tion with the property of being bitter, and so on and so forth. (If you do not understand the term ‘directly acquainted’, stick a pin into your finger. The relation you will then bear to your pain, as opposed to the relation of concern you might bear to another’s pain when told about it, is an instance e of direct acquaintance e in the intended sense.)
The act/object account of sensory experience combines with various considerations traditionally grouped under the head of the argument for illusion to provide arguments for representative realism, or more precisely for the clause in it that contents that our senorily derived information about the world comes indirectly, that what we are most directly acquainted with is not an aspect of the world but an aspect for our mental sensory responses to it. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned refractive illusion, that of a straight stick in water looking bent. The act/object account holds that in this case we are directly acquainted with a bent shape. This shape, so the argument runs, cannot be the stick as it is straight, and thus, must be a mental item, commonly called a sense-datum. And, ion general sense-data-visual, tactual, etc. - is held to be the objects of direct acquaintance. Perhaps the most striking uses of the act/object analysis to bolster representative realism turns on what modern science tells us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. Modern science tells us that the objects of the physical world around us are literally made up of enormously many, widely separated, tiny particles whose nature can be given in terms of a small number of properties like mass, charge, spin and so on. (These properties are commonly called the primary qualities, as primary and secondary qualities represent a metaphysical distinction with which really belong to objects in the world and qualities which only appear to belong to them, or which human beings only believe to belong to them, because of the effects those objects produce ion human beings, typically through the sense organs, that is to say, something that does not hold everywhere by nature, but is producing in or contributed by human beings in their interaction with a world which really contains only atoms of certain kinds in a void. To think that some objects in the world are coloured, or sweet ort bitter is to attribute to objects’ qualities which on this view they do not actually possess. Rather, it is only that some of the qualities which are imputed to objects, e.g., colour, sweetness, bitterness, which are not possessed by those objects. But, of course, that is not how the objects look to us, not how they present to our senses. They look continuous and coloured. What then can be these coloured expanses with which we are directly acquainted, be other than mental sense-data?
Two objections dominate the literature on representative realism: One goes back to Berkeley (1685-1753) and is those representative realism leads straight to scepticism about the external world, the other is that the act/object account of sensory awareness is to be rejected in favour of an adverbial account.
Traditional representative realism is a ‘veil of perception’ doctrine, in Bennett’s (1971) phrase. Lock e’s idea (1632-1704) was that the physical world was revealed by science to be in essence colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent and that we perceive it by, to put it metaphorically, throwing a veil over it by means of our senses. It is the veil we see, in the strictest sense of ‘see’. This does not mean that we do not really see the objects around us. It means that we see an object in virtue of seeing the veil, the sense-data, causally related in the right way to that object, an obvious question to ask, therefore, is what justifies us in believing that there is anything behind the veil, and if we are somehow justified in believing that there is something behind the veil. How can we be confident of what it is like?
One intuition that lies at the heart of the realist’s account of objectivity is that, in the last analysis, the objectivity of a belief is to be explained by appeal to the independent existence of the entities it concerns: Epistemological objectivity, this is, is to b e analysed in terms of ontological notions of objectivity. A judgement or belief is epistemological notions of objectivity, if and only if it stands in some specified reflation to an independently existing determinate reality. Frége (1848-1925), for example, believed that arithmetic could comprise objective knowledge only if the numbers it refers to, the propositions it consists of, the functions it employs, and the truth-values it aims at, are all mind-independent entities. And conversely, within a realist framework, to show that the members of a given class of judgements are merely subjective, it is sufficient to show that there exists no independent reality that those judgements characterize or refer to.
Thus, it is favourably argued that if values are not part of the fabric of the world, then moral subjectivity is inescapable. For the realist, the, of epistemological notions of objectivity is to be elucidated by appeal to the existence of determinate facts, objects, properties, events and the like, which exit or obtain independent of any cognitive access we may have to them. And one of the strongest impulses towards platonic realism - the theoretical commitment to the existence of abstract objects like sets, numbers, and propositions - stems from the widespread belief that only if such things exist in their own right as can we allow that logic, arithmetic and science are indeed objective. Though ‘Platonist’ realism in some sense accounts for mathematical knowledge, it postulates such a gulf between both the ontology and the epistemology of science and that of mathematics that realism is often said to make the applicability of mathematics in natural science into an inexplicable mystery
This picture is rejected by anti-realists. The possibility that our beliefs and theories are objectively true is not, according to them, capable of being rendered intelligible by invoking the nature and existence of reality as it is in and of itself. If our conception of epistemological objective notions is minimal, requiring only ‘presumptive universality’, then alternative, non-realist analysers of it can seem possible - and eve n attractive. Such analyses have construed the objectivity of an arbitrary judgement as a function of its coherence with other judgements, of its possession of grounds that warrant it. Of its conformity to some prior rules that constitute understanding, of its verifiability (or falsifiability), or if its permanent presence in the mind of God. One intuitive common to a variety of different anti-realist theories is such that for our assertions to be objective, for our beliefs to comprise genuine knowledge, those assertions and beliefs must be, among other things, rational, justifiable, coherent, communicable and intelligible. But it is hard, the anti-realist claims, to see how such properties as these can be explained by appeal to entities as they are on and of themselves. On the contrary, according to most forms of anti-realism, it is only the basis of ontological subjective notions like ‘the way reality seems to us’, ‘the evidence that is available to us’, ‘the criteria we apply’, ‘the experience we undergo’ or ‘the concepts we have acquired’ that epistemological notion of objectivity of our beliefs can possibly be explained.
The reason by which a belief is justified must be accessible in principle to the subject hold that belief, as Externalists deny this requirement, proposing that this makes it discernable knowing of the perceptive difficulties to achieve in most normal contexts. The internalist-Externalists debate is sometimes also viewed as a debate between those who think that knowledge can be naturalized (Externalists) and those who do not (internalist) naturalists hold that the evaluative notions used in epistemology can be explained in terms of non-evaluative concepts - for example, that justification can be explained in terms of something like reliability. They deny a special normative realm of language that is theoretically different from the kinds of concepts used in factual scientific discourse. Non-naturalists deny this and hold to the essential difference between normative and the factual: The former can never be derived from or constituted by the latter. So internalists tend to think of reason and rationality as non-explicable in natural, descriptive terms, whereas, Externalists think such an explanation is possible.
Although the reason, . . . to what we think to be the truth. The sceptic uses an argumentive strategy to show the alternatives strategies that we do not genuinely have knowledge and we should therefore suspend judgement. But, unlike the sceptics, many other philosophers maintain that more than one of the alternatives are acceptable and can constitute genuine knowledge. However, it seems dubitable to have invoked hypothetical sceptics in their work to explore the nature of knowledge. These philosophers did no doubt that we have knowledge, but thought that by testing knowledge as severely as one can, one gets clearer about what counts as knowledge and greater insight results. Hence there are underlying differences in what counts as knowledge for the sceptic and other philosophical appearances. As traditional epistemology has been occupied with dissassociative kinds of debate that led to some forming radicalism. Various types of beliefs were proposed as candidates for sceptic-proof knowledge, for example, those beliefs that are immediately derive by many as immune to doubt. Nevertheless, that they all had in common was that empirical knowledge began with the data of the senses, that this was safe from scepticism and that a further superstructure of knowledge was to be built on this firm basis.
It might well be observed that this reply to scepticism fares better as a justification for believing in the existence of external objects, than as a justification of the views we have about their nature. It is incredible that nothing independent of us is responsible for the manifest patterns displayed by our sense-data, but granting this leaves open many possibilities about the nature of the hypnotized external reality. Direct realists often make much of the apparent advantage that their view has in the question of the nature of the external world. The fact of the matter is, though, that it is much harder to arrive at tenable views about the nature of external reality than it is to defend the view that there is an external reality of some kind or other. The history of human thought about the nature of the external world is littered with what are now seen (with the benefit of hindsight) to be egregious deviations from truth or accuracy, as departing from what is or is generally held to be acceptable, - the four element philosophies, phlogiston, the crystal spheres, vitalism, and so on. It can hardly be an objection to a theory that makes the question of the nature of external reality much harder than the question of its existence.
The way we talk about sensory experience certainly suggests an act/object view. When something looks thus and so in the phenomenological sense, we naturally describe the nature of our sensory experience by saying that we are acquainted so ‘given’. But suppose that this is a misleading grammatical appearance, engendered by the linguistic propriety of forming complete, putatively referring expressions like ‘the bent shape on my visual field’, and that there is no more a bent shape in existence for the representative realist to contend to be a mental sense-data, than there is a bad limp in existence when someone has, as we say, a bad limp. When someone has a bad limo, they limp badly, similarly, according to adverbial theorists, when, as we naturally put it, I am aware of a bent shape, we would better express the way things are by saying that I sense bent shape-ly. When the act/object theorist analyses as a feature of the object which gives the nature of the sensory experience, the adverbial theorist analyses as a mode of sense which gives the nature of the sensory experience. (The decision between the act/object and adverbial theories is a hard one.)
In the best-known form the adverbial theory of experience proposes that the grammatical object of a statement attributing an experience to someone be analysed as an adverb. For example,
(1) Rod is experiencing a pink square
Is rewritten as:
Rod is experiencing (pink square)-ly
This is presented as an alterative to the act/object analysis, according to which the truth of a statement like (1) requires the existence of an object of experience corresponding to its grammatical object. A commitment to the explicit adverbialization of statements of experience is not, however, essential to adverbialism. The core of the theory has to have existence or a place of consistency, where in agreement or harmony of parts, traits, or futures are adversely consist to its place or stationed occupancy endowed by the congruity of self. In the denial of objects of experience, as opposed to objects of perception, and coupled with the view that the role of the grammatical object is a statement of experience is to characterize more fully the sort of experience which is being attributed to the subject. The claim, then, is that the grammatical object is functioning as a modifier, and, in particular, as a modifier of a verb. If this is so, it is perhaps appropriate to regard it as a special kind of adverb at the semantic level.
Nonetheless, in the arranging accordance to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness in the event of experiencing that object. Such as these experiences are, it is, nonetheless. The experiences are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act, object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which h have been treated as properties. However, and, more commonly, private mental objects in which may not exist have any form of being, and, with sensory qualifies the experiencing imagination may walk upon the corpses of times’ generations, but this has also been used as a unique application to is mosaic structure in its terms for objects of sensory experience or the equivalence of the imaginations striving from the mental act as presented by the object and forwarded by and through the imaginistic thoughts that are released of a vexing imagination. Finally, in the terms of representative realism, objects of perception of which we are ‘directly aware’, as the plexuity in the abstract objects of perception exists if objects of experience.
As aforesaid of its being traditionally held as a representative ‘realism’ and also, allied with the act/object theory. But we can approach the debate or by rhetorical discourse as meant within dialectic awareness, for which representative realism and direct realism are achieved by the mental act in abdication to some notion of regard or perhaps, happiness, all of which the prompted excitations of the notion expelling or extractions of information processing. Mackie (1976( argues that Locke (1632-1704) can be read as approaching the debate ion television. My senses, in particular my eyes and ears, ‘tell’ me that Carlton is winning. What makes this possible is the existence of a long and complex causal chain of electromagnetic radiation from the game through the television cameras, various cables between my eyes and the television screen. Each stage of this process carries information about preceding stages in the sense that the way things are at a given stage depends on the way things are at preceding stages. Otherwise, the information would not be transferred from the game to my brain. There needs to be a systematic covariance between the state of my brain and the state unless it obtains between intermediate members of the long causal chain. For instance, if the state of my retina did not systematically remit or consign with the state of the television screen before me, my optic nerve would have, so to speak, nothing to go on to tell my brain about the screen, and so in turn, it would have nothing to go on to tell my brain about the game. There is no information at a distance’.
A few of the stages in this transmission of information between game and brain are perceptually aware of them. Much of what happens between brain and match I am quite ignorant about, some of what happens I know about from books, but some of what happens I am perceptually aware of the images on the scree. I am also perceptually aware of the game. Otherwise, I could not be said to watch the game on television. Now my perceptual awareness of the match depends on my perceptual awareness of the screen. The former goes by means of the latter. In saying this I am not saying that I go through some sort of internal monologue like ‘Such and such images on the screen are moving thus and thus. Therefore, Carlton is attacking the goal’. Indeed, if you suddenly covered the screen with a cloth and asked me (1) to report on the images, and (2) to report in the game. I might well find it easier to report on the game than on the images. But that does not mean that my awareness of the game does not go by way of my awareness of the images on the screen. The shows that I am more interested in the game than in the screen, and so am storing beliefs about it in preference e to beliefs about the screen.
We can now see how elucidated representative realism independently of the debate between act/object and adverbial theorists about sensory experience. Our initial statement of representative realism talked of the information acquired in perceiving an object being most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about objects itself, in the act/object, sense-data approach, what is held to make that true is that the fact that what we are immediately aware of it’s mental sense-datum. But instead, representative realists can put their view this way: Just as awareness of the match game by means of awareness of the screen, so awareness of the screen foes by way of awareness of experience., and in general when subjects perceive objects, their perceptual awareness always does by means of the awareness of experience.
Why believe such a view? The worldly provision by our senses is so very different from any picture provided by modern science. It is so different in fact that it is hard to grasp what might be meant by insisting that we are inline or continuity of epistemologically as if or by its action the state of being in or coming into close association or connection with the world.
An argument from illusion is usually intended to establish that certain familia r facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception and called naïve or direct realism. There are, however, many different versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully. Some of these premisses (the nature of the appeal to illusion):Others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion (the kind of direct realism under attack). In distinguishing important differences in conflict with the case inferring the versions of direct realism. One might be taken to be vulnerable to familiar facts about the possibility of perceptual illusion.
A crude statement of direct realism would concede to the connection with perception, such that we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties: We do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-data. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To talk that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-data theorists had favoured. At least, many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting to in terms of a technical and philosophical controversial concept such as acquaintance. Using such a notion, we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surfaces, or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious version of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all parts or constituents of physical objects.
We know things by experiencing them, and knowledge of acquaintance. (Russell changed the preposition to ’by’) is epistemically prior to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge about things. Indeed, ‘sensa’tion has ‘the one great value of trueness or freedom from mistake’.
A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing is more or less distant causal y, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a ‘sensa’tion. The things we have knowledge of acquaintance e include ordinary objects in the external world, such as the Sun.
Grote contrasted the imaginistic thoughts involved in knowledge of acquaintance with things, with the judgements involved in knowledge about things, suggesting that the latter but not the former are contentful mental states. Elsewhere, however, he suggested that every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about a thing involves a form, idea, or what we might call conceptual propositional content, referring the thought to its object. Whether contentful or not, thoughts constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as r relatively indistinct, although this indistinctness does not imply incommunicability. Yet, thoughts constituting knowledge about a thing are relatively distinct, as a result of ‘the application of notice or attention’ to the ‘confusion or chaos’ of ‘sensa’tion. Grote did not have an explicit theory of reference e, the relation by which a thought of or about a specific thing. Nor did he explain how thoughts can be more or less indistinct.
Helmholtz (1821-94) held unequivocally that all thoughts capable of constituting knowledge, whether ‘knowledge which has to do with notions’ or ‘mere familiarity with phenomena’ are judgements or, we may say, have conceptual propositional contents. Where Grote saw a difference e between distinct and indistinct thoughts. Helmholtz found a difference between precise judgements which are expressible in words and equally precise judgement which, in principle, are not expressible in words, and so are not communicable.
James (1842-1910), however, made a genuine advance over Grote and Helmholtz by analysing the reference relations holding between a thought and the specific thing of or about which it is knowledge. In fact, he gave two different analyses. On both analyses, a thought constituting knowledge about a thing refers to and is knowledge about ‘a reality, whenever it actually or potentially terminates in’ a thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with that thing. The two analyses differ in their treatments of knowledge of acquaintance. On James’s first analyses, reference in both sorts of knowledge is mediated by causal chains. A thought constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance with a thing refers to and is knowledge of ‘whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles’. The concepts of a thought ‘operating in’ a thing or ‘terminating in’ another thought are causal, but where Grote found chains of efficient causation connecting thought and referent. James found teleology and final causes. On James’s later analysis, the reference involved in knowledge of acquainting e with a thing is direct. A thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as a constituent and the thing and the experience of it is identical.
James further agreed with Grote that pure knowledge of acquaintance with things, eg., sensory experience, is epistemically prior to knowledge about things. While the epistemic justifications involved in knowledge about all thoughts about things are fallible and their justification is augmented by their mutual coherence. James was unclear about the precise epistemic status of knowledge of acquaintance. At times, thoughts constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance are said to posses ‘absolute veritableness’ and ‘the maximal conceivable truth’, suggesting that such thoughts are genuinely cognitive and that they provide an infallible epistemic foundation. At other times, such thoughts are said not to bear truth-values, suggesting that ‘knowledge’ of acquaintance is not genuine knowledge at all, but only a non-cognitive necessary condition of genuine knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge about things.
What is to a greater extent, that, Russell (1872-1970) agreed with James that knowledge of things by acquaintance ‘is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truth’. That the mental states involved when one is acquainted with things do not have propositional contents. Russell’s reasons were to seem as having been similar to James’s. Conceptually unmediated reference to particulars is necessary for understanding any proposition mentioning a particular and, if scepticism about the external world is to be avoided, some particulars must be directly perceived. Russell vacillated about whether or not the absence of propositional content renders knowledge by acquaintance incommunicable.
Russell agreed with James that different accounts should be given of reference as it occurs in knowledge by acquaintance and in knowledge about things, and that in the former case reference is direct. But, Russell objected on the number of grounds to James’s causal account of the indirect reference involved in knowledge about things. Russell gave a descriptional rather than a causal analysis of that sort of reference. A thought is about a thing when the content of the thought involves a definite description uniquely satisfied by the thing referred to. Yet, he preferred to speak of knowledge of things by description, than of knowledge about things.
Russell advanced beyond Grote and James by explaining how thoughts can be more or less articulate and explicit. If one is acquainted with a complex thing without being aware of or acquainted with its complexity, the knowledge one has by acquaintance e with that thing is vague and inexplicit. Reflection and analysis can lead to distinguish constituent parts of the object of acquaintance and to obtain progressively more distinct, explicit, and complete knowledge about it.
Because one can interpret the reflation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not epistemic, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge, it is important to distinguish the views read as ontological theses from a view one might call epistemological direct realism: In perception we are, on, at least some occasions, non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence e of a physical object. A view about what the object of perceptions is. Direct realism is a type of realism, since it is assumed that these objects exist independently of any mind that might perceive them: And so it thereby rules out all forms of idealism and phenomenalism, which holds that there are no such independently existing objects. Its being a ‘direct realism rule out those views’ defended under the rubic of ‘critical realism’, of ‘representative realism’, in which there is some non-physical intermediary - usually called a ‘sense-data’ or a ‘sense impression’ - that must first be perceived or experienced in order to perceive the object that exists independently of this perception. According to critical realists, such an intermediary need not be perceived ‘first’ in a temporal sense, but it is a necessary ingredient which suggests to the perceiver an external reality, or which offers the occasion on which to infer the existence of such a reality. Direct realism, however, denies the need for any recourse to mental go-betweens in order to explain our perception of the physical world.
This reply on the part of the direct realist does not, of course, serve to refute the global sceptic, who claims that, since our perceptual experience could be just as it is without there being any real property at all, we have no knowledge of any such properties. But no view of perception alone is sufficient to refute such global scepticism. For such a refutation we must go beyond a theory that claims how best to explain our perception of physical objects, and defend a theory that best explains how we obtain knowledge of the world.
All is the equivalent for an external world, as philosophers have used the term, is not some distant planet external to Earth. Nor is the external world, strictly speaking, a world. Rather, the external world consists of all those objects and events which exist external to the perceiver. So the table across the room is part of the external world, and so is the room in part of the external world, and so is its brown colour and roughly rectangular shape. Similarly, if the table falls apart when a heavy object is placed on it, the event of its disintegration is a pat of the external world.
One object external to and distinct from any given perceiver is any other perceiver. So, relative to one perceiver, every other perceiver is a part of the external world. However, another way of understanding the external world results if we think of the objects and events external to and distinct from every perceiver. So conceived the set of all perceivers makes up a vast community, with all of the objects and events external to that community making up the external world. Thus, our primary considerations are in the concern from which we will suppose that perceiver are entities which occupy physical space, if only because they are partly composed of items which take up physical space.
What, then, is the problem of the external world. Certainly it is not whether there is an external world, this much is taken for granted. Instead, the problem is an epistemological one which, in rough approximations, can be formulated by asking whether and if so how a person gains of the external world. So understood, the problem seems to admit of an easy solution. There is knowledge of the external world which persons acquire primarily by perceiving objects and events which make up the external world.
However, many philosophers have found this easy solution problematic. Nonetheless, the very statement of ‘the problem of the external world itself’ will be altered once we consider the main thesis against the easy solution.
One way in which the easy solution has been further articulated is in terms of epistemological direct realism. This theory is a realist in so far as it claims that objects and events in the external world, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. And this theory is epistemologically direct since it also claims that in perception people often, and typically acquire immediate non-inferential knowledge of objects and events in the external world. It is on this latter point that it is thought to face serious problems.
The main reason for this is that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-inferentially is claimed that I do not gain immediate non-inferential perceptual knowledge that thee is a brown and rectangular table before me, because I would know such a proposition unless I knew that something then appeared brown and rectangular. Hence, knowledge of the table is dependent upon knowledge of how it appears. Alternately expressed, if there is knowledge of the table at all, it is indirect knowledge, secured only if the proposition about the table may be inferred from propositions about appearances. If so, epistemological direct realism is false’
This argument suggests a new way of formulating the problem of the external world:
Problems of the external world: Can firstly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe how the external world appears, i.e., upon appearances?
Unlike our original formulation of the problem of the external world, this formulation does not admit of an easy solution. Instead, it has seemed to many philosophers that it admits of no solution at all, so that scepticism regarding the eternal world is only remaining alternative.
This theory is a realist in just the way described earlier, but it adds, secondly, that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived, as are many of their features such as their colour, shapes, and textures.
Often perceptual direct realism is developed further by simply adding epistemological direct realism to it. Such an addition is supported by claiming that direct perception of objects in the external world provides us with immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects. Seen in this way, perceptual direct realism is supposed to support epistemological direct realism, strictly speaking they are independent doctrines. One might consistently, perhaps even plausibly, hold one without also accepting the other.
Direct perception is that perception which is not dependent on some other perception. The main opposition to the claim that we directly perceive external objects comes from direct or representative realism. That theory holds that whenever an object in the external world is perceived, some other object is also perceived, namely a ‘sensum’ - a phenomenal entity of some sort. Further, one would not perceive the external object if one would not perceive the external object if one were to fail to receive the ‘sensum’. In this sense the ‘sensum’ is a perceived intermediary, and the perception of the external object is dependent on the perception of the ‘sensum’. For such a theory, perception of the ‘sensum’ is direct, since it is not dependent on some other perception, while perception on the external object is indirect. More generally, for the indirect t realism., all directly perceived entities are ‘sensum’. On the other hand, those who accept perceptual direct realism claim that perception of objects in the external world is typically direct, since that perception is not dependent on some perceived intermediaries such as ‘sensum’.
It has often been supposed, however, that the argument from illusion suffices to refute all forms of perceptual direct realism. The argument from illusion is actually a family of different arguments rather than one argument. Perhaps the most familiar argument in this family begins by noting that objects appear differently to different observers, and even to the same observers on different occasions or in different circumstances. For example, a round dish may appear round to a person viewing it from directly above and elliptical to another viewing it from one side. As one changing position the dish will appear to have still different shapes, more and more elliptical in some cases, closer and closer to round in others . In each such case, it is argued, the observer directly sees an entity with that apparent shape. Thus, when the dish appears elliptical, the observer is said to see directly something which is elliptical. Certainly this elliptical entity is not the top surface of the dish, since that is round. This elliptical entity, a ‘sensum’, is thought to be wholly distinct from the dish.
In seeing the dish from straight above it appears round and it might be thought that then directly sees the dish rather than a ‘sensum’. But, it relatively sets in: The dish will appear different in size as one is placed at different distances from the dish. So even if in all of these cases the dish appears round, it will; also appear to have many different diameters. Hence, in these cases as well, the observer is said to directly see some ‘sensum’, and not the dish.
This argument concerning the dish can be generalized in two ways. First, more or less the same argument can be mounted for all other cases of seeing and across the full range of sensible qualities - textures and colours in addition to shapes and sizes. Second, one can utilize related relativity arguments for other sense modalities. With the argument thus completed, one will have reached the conclusion that all cases of non-hallucinatory perception, the observer directly perceives a ‘sensum’, and not an external physical object. Presumably in cases of hallucination a related result holds, so that one reaches the fully general result that in all cases of perceptual experience, what is directly perceived is a ‘sensum’ or group of ‘sensa’, and not an external physical object, perceptual direct realism, therefore, is deemed false.
Yet, even if perceptual direct realism is refuted, this by itself does not generate a problem of the external world. We need to add that if no person ever directly perceives an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-inferential knowledge of such objects. Armed with this additional premise, we can conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects, it is indirect and based upon immediate knowledge of ‘sensa’. We can then formulate the problem of the external world in another way:
Problems of the external world: Can, secondly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based upon propositions about directly perceived ‘sensa’?
It is worth nothing the differences between the problems of the external world as expounded upon its first premise and the secondly proposing comments as listed of the problems of the external world, we may, perhaps, that we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world that are inferrable from propositions about appearances.
Some philosophers have thought that if analytical phenomenalism were true, the situational causalities would be different. Analytic phenomenalism is the doctrine that every proposition about objects and events in the external world is fully analysable into, and thus is equivalent in meaning to, a group of inferable propositions . The numbers of inferable propositions making up the analysis in any single propositioned object and or event in the external world would likely be enormous, perhaps, indefinitely many. Nevertheless, analytic phenomenalism might be of help in solving the perceptual direct realism of which the required deductions propositioned about objects and or events in the external world from those that are inferable from prepositions about appearances. For, given analytical phenomenalism there are indefinite many in the inferrable propositions about appearances in the analysis of each proposition taken about objects and or events in the external world is apt to be inductive, even granting the truth of a analytical phenomenalism. Moreover, most of the inferable propositions about appearances into which we might hope to analyse of the external world, then we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world would be complex subjunctive conditionals such as that expressed by ‘If I were to seem to see something red, round and spherical, and if I were to seem to try to taste what I seem to see, then most likely I would seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. But propositionally inferrable appearances of this complex sort will not typically be immediately known. And thus knowledge of propositional objects and or event of the external world will not generally be based on or upon immediate knowledge of such propositionally making appearances.
Consider upon the appearances expressed by ‘I seem to see something red, round, and spherical’ and ‘I seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. To infer cogently from these propositions to that expressed by ‘There is an apple before me’ we need additional information, such as that expressed by ‘Apples generally cause visual appearance of redness, roundness, and spherical shape and gustatory appearance of sweetness and tartness’. With this additional information., the inference is a good on e, and it is likely to be true that there is an apple there relative to those premiered. The cogency of the inference, however, depends squarely on the additional premise, relative only to the stated inferrability placed upon appearances, it is not highly probable that thee is an apple there.
Moreover, there is good reason to think that analytic phenomenalism is false. For each proposed translation of an object and eventfully external world into the inferrable propositions about appearances. Mainly enumerative induction is of no help in this regard, for that is an inference from premisses about observed objects in a certain set-class having some properties ‘F’ and ‘G’ to unobserved objects in the same set-class having properties ‘F’ and ‘G’, to unobserved objects in the same set-class properties ‘F’ and ‘G’. If satisfactory, then we have knowledge of the external world if propositions are inferable from propositions about appearances, however, concerned considerations drawn upon appearances while objects and or events of the external world concern for externalities of objects and interactive categories in events, are. So, the most likely inductive inference to consider is a causal one: We infer from certain effects, described by promotional appearances to their likely causes, described by external objects and or event that profited emanation in the concerning propositional state in that they occur. But, here, too, the inference is apt to prove problematic. But in evaluating the claim that inference constitutes a legitimate and independent argument from, one must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that be so, that a given criterion, simplicity, were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our selves in discovery of an reference to the best reconciled.
Defenders of direct realism have sometimes appealed to an inference to the best explanation to justify prepositions about objects and or events in the external world, we might say that the best explanation of the appearances is that they are caused by external objects. However, even if this is true, as no doubt it is, it is unclear how establishing this general hypophysis helps justify specific ordination upon the proposition about objects and or event in the external world, such as that these particular appearances of a proposition whose inferable properties about appearances caused by the red apple.
The point or points of generalization are cogent inductive inference for being to reconcilate of bring propositioned to propositions in or about the experience of appearances, such that the propositions about objects and or events in the external world are available only with some added premiss expressing the requisite causal relation, or perhaps some other premiss describing some other sort of correlation between appearances and external objects. So there is no reason to think that indirect knowledge secured if the prepositions about its outstanding objectivity from realistic appearances, if so, epistemological direct realism must be denied. And since deductive and inductive inferences from appearance to objects and/or events in the external world are propositions which seem to exhaust the options, no solution to its argument that sustains us of having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe the external world as it appears at which point that is at hand. So unless there is some solution to this, it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take
If the argument leading to some additional premise as might conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects if is directly and based on or upon the immediate knowledge of ‘sensa’, such that having knowledge of propositions about objects and or events in the external world based on or upon propositions about directly perceived ‘sensa’? Broadly speaking, there are two alternatives to both the perceptual indirect realism, and, of course, perceptual phenomenalism. In contrast to indirect realism, and perceptual phenomenalism is that perceptual phenomenalism rejects realism outright and holds instead that (1) physical objects are collections of ‘sensa’, (2) in all cases of perception, at least one ‘sensa’ is directly perceived, and, (3) to perceive a physical object one directly perceives some of the ‘sensa’ which are constituents of the collection making up that object.
Proponents of each of these position try to solve the conditions not engendered to the species of additional persons ever of directly perceiving an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects in different ways, in fact, if any the better able to solve this additional premise, that we would conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects than related doctrines for which time are aforementioned. The answer has seemed to most philosophers to be ‘no’, for in general indirect realists and phenomenalists have strategies we have already considered and rejected.
In thinking about the possibilities of such that we need to bear in mind that the term for propositions which describe presently directly perceived ‘sensa’. Indirect realism typically claim that the inference from its presently directly perceived ‘sensa’ to an inductive one, specifically a causal inference from effects of causes. Inference of such a sort will perfectly cogent provides we can use a premiss which specifies that physical objects of a certain type are causally correlated with ‘sensa’ of the sort currently directly perceived. Such a premiss will itself be justified, if at all, solely on the basis of propositions described presently directly perceived ‘sensa’. Certainly for the indirect realist one never directly perceives the causes of ‘sensa’. So, if one knows that, say, apples topically cause such-and-such visual ‘sensa’, one knows this only indirectly on the basis of knowledge of ‘sensa’. But no group of propositionally perceived ‘sensa’ by itself supports any inferences to causal correlations of this sort. Consequently, indirect realists are in no p position to solve such categorically added premises for which knowledge is armed with additional premise, as containing of external objects, it is indirect and based on or upon immediate knowledge of ‘sensa’. The consequent solution of these that are by showing that propositions would be inductive and causal inference from effects of causes and show inductively how derivable for propositions which describe presently perceived ‘sensa’.
Phenomenalists have often supported their position, in part, by noting the difficulties facing indirect t realism, but phenomenalism is no better off with respect to inferrable prepositions about objects and events responsible for unspecific appearances. Phenomenalism construes physical objects as collections of ‘sensa’. So, to infer an inference from effects to causes is to infer a proposition about a collection from propositions about constituent members of the collective one, although not a causal one. Nonetheless, namely the inference in question will require a premise that such-and-such directly perceived ‘sensa’ are constituent of some collection ‘C’, where ‘C’ is some physical object such as an apple. The problem comes with trying to justify such a premise. To do this, one will need some plausible account of what is mean t by claiming that physical objects are collections of ‘sensa’. To explicate this idea, however, phenomenalists have typically turned to analytical phenomenalism: Physical objects are collections of ‘sensa’ in the sense that propositions about physical objects are analysable into propositions about ‘sensa’. And analytical phenomenalism we have seen, has been discredited.
If neither propositions about appearances or propositions accorded of the external world can be easily solved, then scepticism about an external world is a doctrine we would be forced to adopt. One might even say that it is here that we locate the real problem of the external world. ‘How can we avoid being forced into accepting scepticism’?
In avoiding scepticism, is to question the arguments which lead to both propositional inferences about the external world and appearances. The crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon the incorporate perceptual direct realism. To help see that the answer is ‘no’ we may note that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the dish appears elliptical is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is elliptical. But is there an entailment present? Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old’ entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old. And there are countless other examples like this one, where we will resist the inference from a property ‘F’ appearing to someone to claim that ‘F’ is instantiated in some entity.
Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and the like. Such a move, however, requires an arrangement which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might be.
If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing a knowledge of objects and/or events in the external world primarily by perceiving them. Also, its theory is a realist in addition that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived as are many of their characteristic features. Hence, there will no longer be any real motivation for it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take. Of course, even if perceptual directly realism is reinstated, this does not solve, by any means, the main reason for which that knowledge of objects in the external world seem to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-reference, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. That problem might arise even for one who accepts perceptual direct realism. But, there is reason to be suspicious in keeping with the argument that one would not know that one is seeing something blue if one failed to know that something looked blue. In this sense, there is a dependance of the former on the latter, what is not clear is whether the dependence is epistemic or semantic. It is the latter if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is fort something to look blue. This may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependent relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about how objects’ appar, but this fact doe not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.
Along with ‘consciousness’, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and baring at best problematic relationship to any other events, such as happening in an external world or similar stream of either possessor. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and world, and in spite of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge both ‘idealism’ and ‘scepticism’ are common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing that experience have contents: ‘Content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation has that makes it semantically evaluable. Thus, a statement is something said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content: A term is sometimes said to have a concept as its content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a useful term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have, a representation’s content is just whatever it is that underwrites its semantic evaluation.
A great deal of philosophical effort has been lavished on the attempt to naturalize content, e.g., to explain in non-semantic, non-intentional terms what it is for something to be representation (have ‘content’), and what it is for something to gave some particular content than some other. There appear to be only our types of theory that have been proposed: Theories that ground representation in (1) similarity, (2) covariance (3) functional roles, and (teleology.
Similarity theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘χ’ in virtue of being similar to ‘χ’. This has seemed hopeless to most as a theory of mental representation because it appears to require that things in the brain must share properties with the thingos they represent: To represent a cat as furry appears to require something furry in the brain. Perhaps, a notion of similarity that is naturalized and does not involve property sharing can be worked out, but it is not obvious how.
Covariance theories hold that r’s representing ‘χ’ is grounded in the fact that r’s occurrence covaries with that of ‘χ’. This is most compelling when one thinks about detection systems: The firing of neural structure in the visual system is said to represent vertical orientations if its firing covaries with the occurrence of vertical lines in the visual field. Dretske (1981) and Fodor (1987) have, in different ways, attempted to promote this idea into a general theory of content.
Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents χ’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘χ’. Teleological theories differ, depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps, the most important distinction is that between historical theories and functions, as historical theories individuate functional states, hence content, in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘χ’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘χ’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical stares being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘χ’ according to historical theories.
Theories of representational content may be classified according to whether they are atomistic or holistic and according to whether they are externalistic or internalistic. Primarily, the alternative was for something expressed or implied by the intendment for integrating the different use of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalisms’ has to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined: According to an internalist view of content, the contents of such intentional states depend only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individual’s mind or brain, and not at all on his physical and social environment. While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors.
As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalisms derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, etc., that motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief of thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment - e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatorial criteria employed by the experts in his social group etc. - not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.
An objection to externalist accounts of content is that to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors - which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.
The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist way: If part or all of the justification in which if only part of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else, but such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.
Atomistic theories take a representation’s content to be something that representation’s relation to other representations. What Fodor (1987) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a
cow
, a mental representation with the same content as the word ‘cow’, if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how
cow
’s must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrast with atomistic theories in taking the relations a representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a
cow
if it behaves like a
cow
behaves in inference.
Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls ‘short-armed’ functional role theories are internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as teleological theories that invoker an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by ‘external’ factors. Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories, following Burge, 1979) have the consequence that molecule for molecule identical cognitive systems might yet harbor representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning ‘narrow’ content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then contents is, in the first instance ‘wide’ content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attached to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce ‘narrow’ content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent in internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor’s idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contexts (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.
The actions made rational by content-involving states are actions individuated in part by reference to the agent’s relations to things and properties in his environment, wanting to see a particular movie and believing that building over there is a cinema showing it makes rational the action of walking in the direction of that building. Similarly, for the fundamental case of a subject who has knowledge about his environment, a crucial factor in masking rational the formation of particular attitudes is the way the world is around him. One may expect, then, that any theory that links the attributing of contents to states with rational intelligibility will be committed to the thesis that the content of a person’s states depends in part upon his relations to the world outside him we can call this thesis of externalism about content.
Externalism about content should steer a middle course. On the one hand, the relations of rational intelligibility involve not just things and properties in the world, but the way they are presented as being - an externalist should use some version of Frége’s notion of a mode of presentation. Moreover, many have argued that there exists its ‘sense’, or ‘mode of presentation’ (something ‘intention’ is used as well). After all, ‘is an equiangular triangle’ and,‘is an equilateral triangle’ pick out the same things not only in the actual world, but in all possible worlds, and so refer - insofar as to the same extension, same intension and (arguably from a causal point of view) the same property, but they differ in the way these referents are presented to the mind. On the other hand, the externalist for whom considerations of rational intelligibility are pertinent to the individuation =of content is likely to insist that we cannot dispense with the notion of something in the world - an object, property or relation - being presented in a certain way, if we dispense with the notion of something external being presented in a certain way, we are in danger of regarding attributions of content as having no consequences for how an individual relates to his environment, in a way that is quite contrary to our intuitive understanding of rational intelligibility.
Externalism comes in more and less extreme transformations: Consider a thinker who sees a particular pear, and thinks a thought ‘that pear is ripe’, where the demonstrative way of thinking of the pear expressed by ‘that pear’ is made available to him by his perceiving the pear. Some philosophers, including Evans (1982) and McDowell (1984), have held that the thinker would be employing a different perceptually based ways of thinking were he perceiving a different pear. But externalism need not be committed to this, in the perceptual state that makes available the way of thinking, the pear is presented as being in a particular direction from the thinker, at a particular distance, and as having certain properties. A position will still be externalist if it holds that what is involved in the pear’s being so presented is the collective role of these components of content in making intelligible in various circumstances the subject’s relations to environmental directions, distances and properties of objects. This can be held without commitment to the object-dependence of the way of thinking expressed by ‘that pear’. This less strenuous form of externalism must, though, addressed the epistemological argument offered in favour of the more extreme versions, to the effect that only they are sufficiently world-involving.
Externalism about content is a claim about dependence, and dependence comes in various kinds. The apparent dependence of the content of beliefs on factors external to the subject can be formulated as a failure of supervenience of belief content upon facts about what is the case within the boundaries of the subject’s body. In epistemology normative properties such as those of justification and reasonableness are often held to be supervening on the class of natural properties in a similar way. The interest of supervenience is that it promises a way of trying normative properties closely to natural ones without exactly reducing them to natural ones: It can be the basis of a sort of weak naturalism. This was the motivation behind Davidson’s (1917-2003) attempt to say that mental properties supervene into physical ones - an attempt which ran into severe difficulties. To claim that such supervenience falters to make a modal claim: That there can be two persons the same in respect of their internal physical states (and so in respect to those of their disposition that are independent of content-involving states), who nevertheless differ in respect of which beliefs there have. Putnam’s (1926- ) celebrated examples of a community of Twin Earth, where the water-like substance in lakes and rain is not H2O, but some different chemical compound XYZ - ‘twater’ - illustrates such failure of supervenience. A molecule-for-molecule replica of you on twin earth has beliefs to the effect that ‘twater’ is thus-and-so. Those with any chemical beliefs on twin earth may well not have any beliefs to the effect that water is thus-and-so, even if they are replicas of persons on earth who do have such beliefs. Burge emphasized that this phenomenon extends far beyond beliefs about natural kinds.
In the case of content-involving perceptual states, it is a much more delicate matter to argue for the failure of supervenience, the fundamental reason for this is that attribution of perceptual content is answerable not only to factors on the input side - what in certain fundamental cases causes the basic idea or the principle subject to be in the perceptual state - but also to factors on the output side - what the perceptual state is capable of helping to explain amongst the subject’s actions. If differences in perceptual content always involve differences in bodily described actions in suitable counterfactual circumstances, and if these different actions always have distinct neural bases, perhaps, there will after all be supervenience of content-involving perceptual states on internal states
This connects with another strand in the abstractive imagination, least of mention, of any thinker who has an idea of an objective spatial world - an idea of a world of objects and phenomena which can be perceived but which are not dependent upon being perceived for their existence - must be able to think of his perception of the world as being simultaneously due to his position in the world, and to the condition of the world at that position. The very idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world brings with it the idea of the subject as being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. That also, of perception it is highly relevant to his psychological self-awareness to have of oneself as a perceiver of the environment.
However, one idea that has in recent times been thought by many philosophers and psychologists alike to offer promise in the connection is the idea that perception can be thought of as a species of information-processing, in which the stimulation of the sense-organs constitutes an input to subsequent processing, presumably of a computational form. The psychologist J.J. Gibson suggested that the senses should be construed as systems the function of which is to derive information from the stimulus-array, as to ‘hunt for’ such information. He thought, least of mention, that it was enough for a satisfactory psychological theory of perception that his logical theory of perception that his account should be restricted to the details of such information pick-up, without reference to other ‘inner’ processes such as concept-use. Although Gibson has been very influential in turning psychology away from the previously dominant ‘’sensa’’tion-based framework of ideas (of which gestalt psychology was really a special case), his claim that reliance on such a notion of information is enough has seemed incredible to many. Moreover, its notion of ordinary one to warrant the accusation that it presupposes the very idea of, for example, concept-possession and belief that implicates the claim to exclude. The idea of information espoused bu Gibson (though it has to be said that this claim has been disputed) is that of ‘information about’, not the technical one involved in information theory or that presupposed by the theory of computation.
There are nevertheless important links between these diverse uses, however, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without perception and can never observe anything but the perception. However, the idea is that specifying the content of as perceptual experience involves saying what ways of filling out a space around the origin with surfaces, solids, textures, light and so forth, are consistent with the correctness or veridicality of the experience. Such contents are not built from propositions, concepts, senses or continuants of material objects.
Where the term ‘content’ was once associated with the phrase ‘content of consciousness’ to pick out the subjective aspects of mental states, its use in the phrase ‘perceptual content’ is intended to pick out something more closely akin to its old ‘form’ the objective and publicly expressible aspects of mental states. The content of perceptual experience is how the world is represented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as much as such a theory of perception can be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception. What relation is there between the content of a perceptual state and conscious experience? One proponent of an intentional approach to perception notoriously claims that it is ‘nothing but the acquiring of true or false beliefs concerning the current state of the organism’s body or environment, but the complaint remains that we cannot give an adequate account of conscious perception, given that ‘nothing but’ elements of this account. However, an intentional theory of perception need not be allied with any general theory of ‘consciousness’, one which explains what the difference is between conscious and unconscious states. If it is to provide an alternative to a sense-data theory, the theories need only claim that where experience is conscious. Its content is constitutive, at least in part, of the phenomenological character of that experience. This claim is consistent with a wide variety of theories of consciousness, evens the view that no account can be given.
An intentional theory is also consistent with either affirming or denying the presence of subjective features in experience. Among traditional sense-data theorists of experience. H.H. Price attributed in addition an intentional content to perceptual consciousness. Whereby, attributive subjective properties to experience - in which case, labelled ‘’sensa’’tional properties, in the qualia - as well as intentional content. One might call a theory of perception that insisted that all features of what an experience is like ae determined by its intentional content, a purely intentional theory of perception.
Mental events, states or processes with content include seeing the door is shut, believing you are being followed and calculating the square root of 2. What centrally distinguishes states, events or processes - henceforth, simply stares - with content is that they involve reference to objects, properties or relations. A mental state exists only in the mind such that of a specific condition for a state with content a specific condition for a state with content to refer to certain things. When the state has correctness or fulfilment by whether its referents have the properties the content specifies for them.
This highly generic characteristic of content permits many subdivisions. It does not in itself restrict contents to conceptualized content, and it permits contents built from Frége’s sense as well as Russellian contents built from objects and properties. It leaves open the possibility that unconscious states, as well as conscious states, have contents. It equally, allows the states identified by an empirical computational psychology to have content. A correct philosophical understanding of this general notion of content is fundamental not only to the philosophy of mind and psychology, but also to the theory of knowledge and to metaphysics.
Perceptions make it rational for a person to form corresponding beliefs and make it rational to draw certain inferences. Belief s and desire s make rational the formation of particular intentions, and the performance of the appropriate actions. People are frequently irrational of course, but a governing ideal of this approach is that for any family of content, there is some minimal core of rational transition to or from states involving them, a core that a person must respect if his states are to be attributed with those contents of all rational interpretative relations. To be rational, a set of beliefs, desires, and actions as well s perceptions, decisions must fit together in various ways. If they do not, in the extreme case they fail to consider to ascertain the reaching mutuality as concessions to comprise of fringing benefits attributable of the mind at all - no rationality, no agent. This core notion of rationality in philosophy f mind thus concerns a cluster of personal identity conditions, that is, holistic coherence requirements upon the system of elements comprising a person’s mind, it is as well as in philosophy where it is often succumbing to functionalism about content and meaning appears to lead to holism. In general, transitions among mental states and between mental states and behaviour depend on the contents of the mental states themselves. In consideration that I infer from sharks being in the water to the conclusion that people shouldn’t be swimming. Suppose I first think that sharks are dangerous, but then change my mind, coming to think that sharks are not dangerous. However, the content that the first belief affirms can’t be the same as the content that the second belief denies, because the transition relations, e.g., the inference form sharks being in the water to what people should do, so, I changed my mind, as a functionalist reply is to say that some transitions are relevant to content individuation, whereby others are not. Appeal to a traditional analytic clear/synthetic distinction clearly won’t do. For example, ‘dogs’ ‘and cats’ would have the same content on such a view. It could not be analytic that dogs bark or that cats meow, since we can imagine a non-barking breed of dog and a non-meaning breed of cat. If ‘Dogs are animals’ is analytic, as ‘Cats are animals’. If ‘Cats are adult puppies ‘. Dogs are not cats’ - but then cats are not dogs. So a functionalist’s account will not find traditional analytic inferences of ‘dogs’ from the meaning of ‘cat’. Other functionalist acceptation to holism for ‘narrow content’, attempting to accommodate intuitions about the stability of content be appealing too wide content.
Within the clarity made of inference it is unusual to find it said that, an inference is a (perhaps very complex) act of thought by virtue of which act (1) I pass from a set of one or more propositions or statements to a proposition or statement and (2) it appears that the latter is true in the former is or are. This psychological characterization has increased to a greater degree in the literature under more of less inessential variation.
It is natural to desire a better characterization of inference, but attempts to do so by construing a fuller psychological explanation fail to comprehend the grounds on which inference will be objectively valid - a point elaborated made by Gottlob Frége. And attempts to a better understand the nature about inference through the device of the representation of inference by formal-logical calculations to the informal inference they are supposed to represent or reconstruct, and (2) leaves us worried about the sense of such formal derivation. Are these derivations inferences? And aren’t informal inferences needed in order to apply the rules governing the constructions of forma derivation (inferring that this operation is an application of that formal rule)? These are concerns cultivated by, fr example, of Wittgenstein. That, insofar as coming up with a good and adequate characterization of inference - and even working out what would count as a good and adequate characterization - is a hard and by no means nearly solved philosophical problem.
It is still, of ascribing states with content to an actual person has to proceed simultaneously with attribution of a wide range of non-rational states and capacities. In general, we cannot understand a person’s reasons for acting as he does without knowing the array of emotions ans ‘’sensa’’tions to which he is subject: What he remembers and what he forgets, an how he reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which play a fundamental role in individuating content, cannot be understood purely in terms relating to minimal rationality. A perception of the world as being a certain way is not (and could not be) under a subject’s rational control. Though it is true and important that perceptions give for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reason - observational beliefs about the environment - have contents which can only be elucidated by inferring which can only be elucidated by inferring back to perceptual experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states yield under the deferring beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning what they provide reasons for judging or doing: For frequently these latter judgements and actions can be individuated without reference back to the states that provide reasons for them.
What is the significance for theories of content to the fact that it is almost certainly adaptive for members of a species to have a system of states with representational content which are capable of influencing their actions which are capable? According to teleological theories of content, a constitutive account of content - one which says what it is for a state to have a given content - must make use of the notions of natural function and teleology. The intuitive idea is that for a belief state to have a given content ‘p’ is for the belief-forming mechanism which produced it to have the function (perhaps derivatively) of producing that state only when it is the case that ‘p’. But if content itself proves to resist elucidation in terms of natural function and selection, it is still a very attractive view that selection must be mentioned - such as a sentence - with a particular content, even though that content itself may be individuated by other means.
Contents are normally specified, by ‘that, . . .’ clauses, and it is natural to suppose that a content has the same kind of sequential and hierarchical structure as the sentence that specifies it. This supposition would by widely accepted for conceptual content. It is, however, a substantive thesis that all content is conceptual. One way of treating one sort of perceptual content is to regard the content as determined by a spatial type, the type under which the region of space around the perceiver must fall if the experience with that content is to represent the environment correctly. The type involves a specification of surfaces and features in the environment, and their distances and direction from the perceiver’s body as origin. Supporters of the view that the legitimacy of using these spatial types in giving the content of experience does not undermine the thesis that all content is conceptual, such supporters will say that the spatial type is just a way of capturing what can equally be captured by conceptual components such as ‘that distance’, or ‘that direction’, where these demonstratives are made available by the perception in question.
In specifying representative realism the significance this theory holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of it, (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, and (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself. Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘independently aware’) are always distinct from objects of experience (of which we are ‘directly aware’) Meinongians, however, may simply that object of perception as existing objects of experience.
Armstrong (1926- ) not only sought to explain perception without recourse to sense-data or subjective qualities but also sought to equate the intentionality of perception with that of belief. There are two aspects to this: The first is to suggest that the only attitude towards a content involved in perception is that of believing, and the second is to claim that the only content involved in perceiving is that which a belief may have. The former suggestion faces an immediate problem, recognized by Armstrong, of the possibility of having a perceptual experience without acquiring the correspondence belief. One such case is where the subject already possesses the requisite belief - rather than leading to the acquisition of, belief. The more problematic case is that of disbelief in perception. Where a subject has a perceptual experience but refrains from acquiring the correspondence belief. For example, someone familiar with Muller-Lyer illusion, in which lines of equal length appear unequal, is likely to acquire the belief that the lines are unequal on encountering a recognizable example of the illusion. Despite that, the lines may still appear unequal to them.
Armstrong seeks to encompass such cases by talk of dispositions to acquire beliefs and talk of potentially acquiring beliefs. On his account this is all we need say to the psychological state enjoyed. However, once we admit that the disbelieving perceivers still enjoys a conscious occurrent experience, characterizing it in terms of a disposition to acquire a belief seems inadequate. There are two further worries. One may object that the content of perceptual experiences may play a role in explaining why a subject disbelievers in the first place: Someone may fail to acquire a perceptual belief precisely because how things appear to her is inconsistent with her prior beliefs about the world. Secondly, some philosophers have claimed that there can be perception without any correspondence belief. Cases of disbelief in perception are still examples of perceptual experience that impinge on belief: Where a sophisticated perceiver does not acquire the belief that the Müller-Lyer lines are unequal, she will still acquire a belief about how things look to her. Dretske (1969) argues for a notion of non-epistemic seeing on which it is possible for a seismical subject to be perceiving something whole lacking any belief about it because she has failed to notice what is apparent to her. If we assume that such non-epistemic seeing, nevertheless, involves conscious experience e it would seem to provide another reason to reject Armstrong’s view and admit that if perceptual experiences are intentional states then they are a distinct attitude-type from that of belief. However, even if one rejects Armstrong’s equation of perceiving with acquiring beliefs or disposition to believe, one may still accept that he is right about the functional links between experience and belief, and the authorities that experience has over belief, an authority which, can nevertheless be overcome.
It is probably true that philosophers have shown much less interest in the subject of the imagination during the last fifteen tears or so than in the period just before that. It is certainly true that more books about the imagination have been written by those concerned with literature and the arts than have been written by philosophers in general and by those concerned with the philosophy of mind in particularly. This is understandable in that the imagination and imaginativeness figure prominently in artistic processes, especially in romantic art. Still, those two high priests of romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge, made large claims for the role played by the imagination in views of reality, although Coleridge’s thinking on this was influenced by his reading of the German philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly Kant and Schelling. Coleridge distinguished between primary and secondary imagination, both of them in some sense productive, as opposed to merely reproductive. Primary imagination is involved in all perception of the world in accordance with a theory which, as Coleridge derived from Kant, while secondary imagination, the poetic imagination, is creative from the materials that perception provides. It is this poetic imagination which exemplifies imaginativeness in the most obvious way.
Being imaginative is a function of thought, but to use one’s imagination in this way is not just a matter of thinking in novel ways. Someone who, like Einstein for example, presents a new way of thinking about the world need not be by reason reason alone, but this supremely imaginative (though of course, he may be). The use of new concepts or a new way of using already existing concepts is not in itself an exemplification of the imagination. What seems crucial to the imagination is that it involves a series of perspectives, new ways of seeing things, in a sense of ‘seeing’ that need not be literal. It thus involves, whether directly or indirectly, some connection with perception, but in different ways. To make clear in the similarities and differences between seeing proper and seeing with the mind’s eye, as it is sometimes put. This will involve some consideration of the nature and role of images, least of mention, that there is no general agreement among philosophers about how to settle neurophysiological problems in the imagery of self.
Connections between the imagination and perception are evident in the ways that many classical philosophers have dealt with the imagination. One of the earliest examples of this, the treatment of ‘phantasia’ (usually translated as ‘imagination’) in Aristotles ‘De Anima III. 3. seems to regard the imagination as a sort of half-way house between perception and thought, but in a way which makes it cover appearances in general, so that the chapter in question has as much to do with perceptual appearances, including illusions, as it ha s to do with, say. Imagery. Yet, Aristotle also emphasizes that imagining is in some sense voluntary, and that when we imagine a terrifying scene we are not necessarily terrified, any more than we need be when we see terrible things in a picture. How that fits in with the idea that an illusion is or can be a function of the imagination is less than clear. Yet, some subsequent philosophers, Kant on particular. Followed in recent times by P.F. Strawson have maintained that all perception involves the imagination, in some sense of that term, in that some bridge is required between abstract thoughts and their perceptual instance. This comes out in Kant’s treatment of what he calls the ‘schematism’, where he rightly argues that someone might have an abstractive understanding of the concept of a dog without being able to recognize or identify any dogs. It is also clear that someone might be able to classify all dogs together without any understanding of what a dog is. The bridge that needs to be provided to link these two abilities Kant’s ascriptions unfold to the imagination.
In so arguing Kant goes, as he so often does, beyond Hume who thought of the imagination in two connected ways. First, there is the certainty that there exist. Hume thinks, ideas which are either copies of impressions provided by the senses or are derived from these. Ideas of imagination are distinguished from those of memory, and both of these from impression and sense, by their lesser vivacity. Second, the imagination is involved in the processes, mainly associated of ideas, which take one form on ideas to another, and which Hume uses to explain, for example, our tendency to think of objects as having no impression on them, ideas or less images, is the mental process which takes one from one idea to another and thereby explains our tendency to believe things go beyond what the senses immediately justify. The role which Kant gives to the imagination in relation to perception in general is obviously a wider and fundamental role than that Hume allows. Indeed, one might take Kant to be saying that were there not the role that he, Kant insists on there would be no place for the role which Hume gives it. Kant also allows for a free use of the imagination in connection with the arts and the perceptions of beauty, and this is a more specified role than that involved in perception overall.
In the retinal vision by the seeing of things we normally see them as such-and-such, is to be construed and in how it relate s to a number of other aspects of the mind ‘s functioning - ‘’sensa’’tion, concept and other things of other aspects of the mind’s functioning - ‘’sensa’’tion, concepts, and other things involved in our understanding of things, belief and judgement, the imagination, our action is related to the world around us, and the causal processes involved in the physics, biology and psychology of perception. Some of the last were central to the considerations that Aristotle raised about perception in his ‘De Anima’.
Nevertheless, there are also special, imaginative ways of seeing things, which Wittgenstein (1889-1951) emphasized in his treatment of ‘see-as’ in his ‘Philosophical Investigations II. Xi. And on a piece paper as standing up, lying down, hanging from its apex and so on is a form of ‘seeing-as’ which is both more special and more sophisticated than simply seeing it as a triangle. Both involve the application of concepts to the objects of perception, but the way in which this is done in the two cases is quite different. One might say that in the second case one has to adopt a certain perceptive, a certain point of view, and if that is right it links up with what had been said earlier about the relation and difference between thinking imaginatively and thinking in novel ways.
Wittgenstein (1953) used the phrase ‘an echo of a thought is sight’ in relation to these special ways of seeing things, which he called ‘seeing aspects’. Roger Scruton has spoken of the part played in it all by ‘unasserted thought’, but the phrase used by Wittgenstein brings out more clearly one connection between thought and a form of sense-perception. Wittgenstein *1953) also compares the concepts of an aspect and that of seeing-as with the concept of an image, and this brings out a point about the imagination that has not been much evident in what has been said so far - that imagining something is typically a matter of picturing it in the mind and that this involves images in some way, however, the picture view of images has come under heavy philosophical attack. First, there have been challenges to the sense of the view: Mental images are not with real eyes: They cannot be hung on real walls and they have no objective weight or colour. What, then, can it mean to say, that images are pictorial? Secondly, there have been arguments that purport to show that the view is false. Perhaps, the best known of these is founded on the charge that the picture theory cannot satisfactorily explain the independency of many mental images. Finally, there have been attacks on the evidential underpinning of the theory. Historically, the philosophical claim that images are picture-like rested primarily on an appeal to introspection. And today less about the mind than was traditionally supposed. This attitude towards introspection has manifested itself in the case of imagery in the view that what introspection really shows about visual images is not that they are pictorial but only that what goes on in imagery is experimentally much like what goes on in seeing. This aspect is crucial for the philosophy of mind , since it raises the question of the status of images, and in particular whether they constitute private objects or stares in some way. Sartre (1905-80), in his early work on the imagination emphasized, following Husserl (1859-1938), that image are forms of consciousness of an object, but in such a way that they ‘present’ the object as not being: Wherefore, he said, the image ‘posits its object as nothingness’, such a characterization brings out something about the role of the form of consciousness of which having of images may be a part, in picturing something the images are not themselves the object of consciousness. The account does less, however, to bring out clearly just what images are or how they function.
As part of an attemptive grappling about the picturing and seeing with the mind’s eye, Ryle (1900-76 ), has argued that in picturing, say, Lake Ontario, in having it before the mind’s eye, we are not confronted with a mental picture of Lake Ontario: Images are not seen. We nevertheless, can ‘see’ Lake Ontario, and the question is what this ‘seeing’ is, if it is not seeing in any direct sense. One of the things that may make this question difficult to answer is the fact that people’s images and their capacity for imagery vary, and this variation is not directly related to their capacity for imaginativeness. While an image may function in some way as a ‘presentation’ in a train of imaginative thought, such thought does not always depend on that: Images may occur in thought for which it is not really representational at all, are not, strictly speaking, ‘of’ anything. If the images are representational, can one discover things from one’s images that one would not know from otherwise? Many people would answer ‘no’, especially if their images are generally fragmentary, but it is not clear that this is true for everyone. What is more, and this affects the second point, fragmentary imagery which is at best ancillary to process of though in which it occurs may not be in any obvious sense representational, even if the thought itself is ‘of’ something.
Another problem with the question what it is to ‘see’ Lake Ontario with the mind’s eye is that the ‘seeing’ in question may or may not be a direct function of ‘memory’. For one who has seen Lake Ontario, imaging it may be simply a matter of reproduction in some form in the original vision, and the vision may be reproduced unintentionally and without any recollection of what it is a ‘vision’ of. For one who has never been it the task of imagining it depends most obviously on the knowledge of what sort of thing Lake Ontario is and perhaps on experiences which are relevant to that knowledge. It would be surprising, to say the least, if imaginative power could produce ‘seeing’ that was not constructed from any previous seeing. But that the ‘seeing’ is not itself a seeing in the straightforward sense is clear, and on this negative point what Ryle says, and other s have said, seems clearly right. As to what ‘seeing’ is in a positive way, Ryle answers that it involves fancying something and that this can be assimilated to pretending. Fancying that one is seeing Lake Ontario is thus, at least, like pretending that one is doing that thing. But is it?
Along the same course or lines, there is in fact a great difference between say, imaging that one is a tree and pretending to be a ‘tree’. Pretending normally involves doing something, and even when there is no explicit action on the part of the pretender, as when he or she pretends that something or other is the case, there is at all events an implication of possible action. Pretending to be a tree may involve little more that standing stock-still with one’s arms spread out like branches. To imagine being a tree (something that is founded that some people deny to be possible, which is to my mind a failure of imagination) need imply no action whatever, (Imagining being a tree is different in this respect from imagining that one is a tree, where this means believing falsely, that one is a tree, one can imagine being a tree without this committing one to any beliefs on that score). Yet, of imagining being a tree does seem to involve adopting the hypothetical perspective of a tree, contemplating perhaps, that it is like to be a fixture in the ground with roots growing downward and with branches (somewhat like arms) blown by the wind and with birds perching on them.
Imagining something seems in general to involve change of identity on the part of something or other, and in imagining being something else, such as a tree, the partial change of identity contemplated is in oneself. The fact that the change of identity contemplated cannot be completely done, in not gainsay, the point that it is a change o f identity which is being contemplated. One might raise the question whether something about the ‘self’ is involved in all imaginings. Berkeley (1685-17530 even suggests that imagining a solitary unperceived tree involves a contradiction, in that a imagine that is to imagine oneself perceiving it. In fact, there is a difference between imagining a object, solitary or not, and imagining oneself seeing that of an object. The latter certainly involves putting oneself imaginatively in the situation pictured: The former involves contemplating the object from a point of view, that from that point of view which one would oneself have if one were viewing that point of view to which reference has already been made, in a way that clearly distinguishes picturing something from merely thinking of it.
This does not rule out the possibility that an imaginistic representation might sway or come into one’s mind which one recognizes as some kind of depiction of a scene. But when actually picturing a scene, it would not be right to say that one imagines the scene by way of a contemplation of an image which plays the part of as picture of it. Moreover, it is possible to imagine a scene without any images occurring, the natural interpretation of which would be that they are pictures of that scene. It is not impossible for one imagining say, the GTA is to report on request the occurrences of images which are not in any sense pictures of the GTA -, not of that particular city and perhaps not even of a city at all. That would not entail that he or she was not imagining the GTA: A report to or associated with the GTA, thought by others to be of the GTA.
This raises a question which is asked by Wittgenstein (1953) -, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him’? To which Wittgenstein replies ‘Not its looking like him’, and furthering he suggests that a person’s account of what his imagery represents is decisive. Certainly it is so when the process of imagination which involves the imagery is one that the person engages in intentionality. The same is not true, as Wittgenstein implicitly acknowledges in the same context, if the imagery simply comes to mind without there being any intention, in that case, one self-influential occurring measure may not recognize to whether in what the image is an image of.
Nevertheless, all these complicate and question what the status of mental images is. However, it might seem that they stand in relation to imagining as ‘’‘sensa’’tions’ stand to perception, except that the occurrence of ‘’sensa’’tions is a passive set-organization of specific presentiments, while the occurrence of an image can be intentional, and in the context of an active flight of imagination is likely to be so. ‘’sensa’’tions give perceptions a certain phenomenal character, providing they’re sensuous, as opposed to conceptual content. Intentional action has been interesting symmetric and asymmetric to perception. Like perceptual experience, the experiential component of intentional action is causally self-referential. If, for example, I can now walk to my car, then the condition of satisfaction of the preset experience is that there be certain bodily movements, and that this very experience of acting cause those bodily movements. Furthering, like perceptual experience, the experience of acting is topically a conscious mental event, is that perception is always concept-dependent at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is, at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something but that are such that the attribution of concepts them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much the objects figure causally in their behaviour. There are, nevertheless, important links between these diverse uses. We might call a theory which attributes to perceptual states as content in the new sense as ‘an intentional theory’ of perception. On such a view, perceptual states represent the subjecting environment and body are. The content of perceptional experiences is how the world is presented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as such as such a theory of perception cn be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception, such will deal with the content of consciousness. The ruminative contemplation, where with concepts looms largely and has, perhaps the overriding role, it still seems necessary for our thought to be given a focus in thought-occurrences such as images. These have sometimes been characterized as symbols which are the material of thought, but the reference to symbols is not really illuminating. Nonetheless, while a period of thought in which nothing of this kind occurs is possible, the general direction of thought seems to depend on such things occurring from time to time. The necessary correlations that are cognizant, insofar as when we get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, thereof: Which of us attribute a necessity to the relation between things of two particular kinds of things. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing on the first sort. That of saying, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is. In the case of the imagination images seem even more crucial, in that without therm it would be difficult, to say, at least, for the point of view or perspective which is important for the imagination to be given a focus.
Of the same lines, that it would be difficult for this to be so, than impossible, since it is clear that entertaining a description of a scene, without there being anything that a vision of it, could sometimes give that perceptive. The question still arises whether a description could always do quite what an image can do in this respect. The point is connected with an issue over which there has been some argument among psychologists, such as S.M. Kosslyn and Z.W. Pylyshyn, concerning what are termed ‘analogue’ versus ‘propositional’ theories of representation. This is an argument concerning whether the process of imagery is what Pylyshyn (1986) calls ‘cognitively penetrable’, i.e., such that its function is affected by beliefs or other intellectual processes expressible in propositions, or whether, it can be independent of cognitive processes although capable itself of affecting the mental life because of the pictorial nature of images (the ‘analogue medium’). One example, which has embarked upon that argument, is that in which people are asked whether two asymmetrically presented figures can be made to coincide, the decision on which may entail some kind of material rotation of one or more of the figures. Those defending the ‘analogue’ theory, point to the fact that there is some relation between the time taken and the degree of the rotation required, this suggests that some processes involving changing images is identify with. For some who has little or no imagery this suggestion, may seem unintelligible. Is it enough for one to go through an intellectual working out of the possibilities, as based on features of the figures that are judged relevant? This could not be said to be unimaginative as long as the intellectual process involved reference to perceptive or points of view in relation to the figures, the possibility of which the thinker might be able to appreciate. Such an account of the process of imagination cannot be ruled out, although there are conceivable situations in which the ‘analogue’ process of using images might be easier. Or, at least, it might be easier for those who have imagery most like the actual perception of a scene: For others situation might be difficult.
The extreme of the former position is probably provided by those who have so-called ‘eidetic’ imagery, where having an image of a scene is just like seeing it, and where, if it is a function of memory as it most likely is, it is clearly possible to find out details of the scene imagined by introspection of the image. The opposite extreme is typified by those for whom imagery, to the extent it occurs at all, is at best ancillary to propositionally styled thought. But, to repeat the point made unasserted, will not count as imagination unless it provides a series of perspectives on its object. Because images are or can be perceptual analogues and have a phenomenal character analogous to what ‘’sensa’’tions provide in perception they are ,most obviously suited. In the working of the mind, to the provision of those perspectives. Bu t in a wider sense, imagination enters the picture whenever some link between thought and perception is required, as well as making possible imaginative forms of seeing-as. It may thus justifiably be regarded as a bridge between perception and thought.
The plausibility to have a firm conviction in the reality of something as, perhaps, as worthy of belief and have no doubt or unquestionably understood in the appreciation to view as plausible or likely to apprehend the existence or meaning of comprehensibility whereas, an understandable vocation as to be cognizant of things knowably sensible. To a better understanding, an analogous relationship may prove, in, at least, the explanation for the parallels that obtain between the ‘objects of contents of speech acts’ and the ‘objects or contents of belief’. Furthermore, the object of believing, like the object of saying, can have semantic properties, for example:
What Jones believes is true.
And:
What Jones believes entails, what Smith believes.
One fixed or accepted way of doing or something credible or believing hypophysis, is, then, that the object of belief is the same sort of entity as what is uttered in speech acts (or what is written down).
The second theory also seems supported by the argument of which our concerns conscribe in the determination of thought, for which our ability to think certain thoughts appears intrinsically connected with the ability to think certain others. For example, the ability to think that John hit Mary goes hand in hand with the ability to think that Mary hits John, but not with the ability to think that Toronto is overcrowded. Why is this so? The ability to produce or understand certain sentences is intrinsically connected with the ability to produce or understand certain others. For example, there are no native speakers of English who know how to say ‘John hits Mary’, but who do not know how to say ‘Mary hits John’. Similarly, there are no native speakers who understand the former sentence but not the latter. These facts are easily explained if sentences have a syntactic and semantic structure, but if sentences are taken to be atomic, these facts are a complete mystery. What is true for sentences are true also for thoughts. Thinking thoughts involving manipulating mental representations. If mental representations with a propositional content have a semantic and syntactic structure like that of sentences. It is no accident that one who is able to think that John hits Mary is thereby, able to think that Mary hits John. Furthermore, it is no accident that one who can think these thoughts need not thereby be able to think thoughts, having different components - for example, the thought that Toronto is overcrowded. And what goes here for thought goes for belief and the other propositional attitudes.
If concepts of the simple (observational) grades were internal physical structures that had in this sense, an information-carrying function, a function they acquired during learning, then instances as such types would have a content that (like a belief) could be either true or false. After learning, tokens of these structure types, when caused by some sensory stimulation, would ‘say’ (i.e., mean) what it was their function to ‘tell’ (inform about). They would therefore, quality as beliefs - at least of the simple observational sort.
Any information-carrying structure carries all kinds of information. If, for example, it carriers information ‘A’, it must also carry the information that ‘A’ or ‘B’. As I conceived of it, learning was supposed to be a process in which a single piece if this information is selected for special treatment, thereby intensifying the semantic content, - and, finding its meaning, - of subsequent tokens of that structure type. Just as we conventionally give artefacts and instruments information-providing functions, thereby making their activities and states - pointer readers, flashing lights, and so on - representations of the conditions, so learning converts neural states that carry information - ‘pointers readers’ in the head, so to speak - into structures that have the function to providing some vital piece of the information they carry are also presumed to serve as the meanings of linguistic items, underwriting relations of translation, definition, synonymy, antinomy and semantic implications. Much work in the semantics of natural language takes itself to be addressing conceptual structure.
Concepts have also been thought to be the proper objects of ‘philosophical analysis’. ‘Analytic’ philosophers when they ask about the nature of justice, knowledge or piety and expect to discover answers by means of introspective reflection, yet the expectation that one sort of thing could serve all these tasks went hand in hand with what has come to be called the ‘Classical View’ of concepts, according of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for their satisfaction, which are known to any competent user of them, the standard example is the especially simple one [bachelor], which seems to be identified to [eligible unmarried male]. A more interesting, but problematic one has been [knowledge], whose analysis was traditionally thought to be [justified true belief].
The notional representation that treat relations as a sub-class of property brings to contrast with property is ‘concept’, but one must be very careful, since ‘concept’, has =been used by philosophers and psychologists to serve many different purposes. One use has it that certain factors of conceiving of some aspect of the world. As such, concepts have a kind of subjectivity as having to contain the different individuals might, for example, have different concepts of birds, one thinking of them primarily as flying creatures and the other as feathered. Concepts in this sense are often described as a species of ‘mental representation’, and as such they stand in sharp contrast to the notion of a property, since a property is something existing in the world. However, it is possible to think of a concept as neither mental nor linguistic and this would allow, though it doesn’t dictate, that concepts and properties are the same kind of thing. Nonetheless, the function of learning is naturally to develop, as things inasmuch as they do, in some natural way, either (in the case of the senses) from their selectional history or (in the casse of thought) from individual learning. The result is a network of internal representations that have, in different ways, the power to represent: Experiences and beliefs.
This does, however, leave a question about the role of the senses in this total cognitive enterprise. If it is learning that, by way of concepts, is the source of the representational powers of thought, from whence comes the representational powers of experience? Or should we even think of experience in representational terms? We can have false beliefs, but are there false experiences? On this account, then, experience and thought are both representational. The difference resides in the source of heir representational powers, learning in the case of thoughts, evolution in the case of experience.
Though, perception is always concept-dependent, at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly in the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something, but that are such that the attribution of concepts to them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much is as there is much that the object figures causally in their behaviour. Moreover, that consciousness presents the object in such a way that the experience has certain phenomenal character, which derived from the ‘’sensa’’tions which the causal processes involved set up. This is most evident is the case of ‘touch’ (which being a ‘contact sense’ provides a more obvious occasion for speaking of ‘’sensa’’tions than do ‘distance senses’ such as sight). Our tactual awareness of the texture of a surface is, to use a metaphor, ‘coloured’ by the nature of the ‘’sensa’’tions that the surface produces in our skin, and which we can be explicitly aware of if our attention is drawn to them (something that gives one indication of how attention too is involved in perception).
It has been argued, that the phenomenal character of n experience is detachable from its contentual content in the sense that an experience of the same phenomenal character could occur even if the appropriate concepts were not available. Certainly the reverse is true - that a concept-mediated awareness of an object could occur without any ‘’sensa’’tion-mediated experience - as in an awareness of something absent from us. It is also the case, however, that the look of something can be completely changed by the realization that it is to be seen as ‘χ’ rather than ‘y’. To the extent that, that is so, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience should be viewed as the results of the way in which ‘’sensa’’tions produced in us by objects blend with our ways of thinking of and understanding those objects (which, it should be noted, are things in the world and should not be confused with the ‘’sensa’’tions which they produce).
In the study o ff other parts of the natural world, we agree to be satisfied with post-Newtonian ‘best theory’ arguments: There is no privileged category of evidence that provides criteria for theoretical constructions. In the study of humans above the neck, however, naturalistic theory does not suffice: We must seek ‘philosophical explanations’, require that theoretical posits specified terms of categories of evidence selected by the philosopher (as, in the radically upon unformulated notions such as ‘access in principle’ that have no place in naturalistic inquiry.
However, one evaluates these ideas, that clearly involve demands beyond naturalism, hence, a form of methodological/epistemological dualism. In the absence of further justification, it seems to me fair to conclude, that inability to provide ‘philosophical explanation’ or a concept of ‘rule-following’ that relies on access to consciousness (perhaps ‘in principle’) is a merit of a naturalistic approach, not a defect.
A standard paradigm in the study of language, given its classic form by Frége, holds that there is a ‘store of thoughts’ that is a common human possession and a common public language in which these thoughts are expressed. Furthermore, this language is based on a fundamental relation between words and things - reference or denotation - along with some mode of fixing reference )sense, meaning). The notion of a common public language has never been explained, and seems untenable. It is also far from clear why one should assume the existence of a common store of thoughts: The very existence of thoughts had been plausibly questioned, as a misreading of surface grammar, a century earlier.
Only those who share a common world can communicate, only those who communicate can have the concept of an inter-subjective, objective world. As a number of things follow. If only those who communicate have the concept of an objective world, only those who communicate can doubt, whether an external world exists. Yet i is impossible seriously (consistently) to doubt the existence of other people with thoughts, or the existence of an external world, since to communicate is to recognize the existence of other people in a common world. Language, that is, communication with others, is thus essential to propositional thought. This is not because it is necessary to have the words to express a thought (for it is not); it is because the ground of the sense of objectivity is inter-subjectivity, and without the sense of objectivity, of the distinction between true and false, between what is thought to be and what is the case, there can be nothing rightly called ‘thought’.
Since words are also about things, it is natural to ask how their intentionality is connected in that of thoughts. Two views have been advocated: One view takes thought content to be self-subsistent relative to linguistic content, with the latter dependent on or upon the former. The other view takes thought content to be derivative upon linguistic content, so that there can be no thought without a bedrock of language. Appeals to language at this point are apt to founder on circularity, since words take on the powers of concepts only insofar as they express themselves. Thus, there seems little philosophical illumination to be got from making thought depend upon language. Nonetheless, it is not mad entirely clear what it amounts to assert or deny, that there is an inner language of thought. If it if by means of merely that concepts (thought-constituents) are structured in such a way as to be isomorphic with spoken language, then the claim is trivially true, given some natural assumption. But if it means that concepts just are ‘syntactic’ items orchestrated into strings of the same, then the claim is acceptable only in so far as syntax is an adequate basis for meaning - which, on the face of it, it is not. Concepts n doubt have combinatorial powers comparable to those of words, but the question is whether anything else can plausibly be meant by the hypothesis of an inner langage.
Yet, it appears undeniable that the spoken language does not have autonomous intentionality, but instead derives its meaning from the thoughts of speakers - though language may augment one’s conceptual capacities. So thought cannot post-date spoken language. The truth seems to be that in human psychology speech and thought are interdependent in many ways, but that there is no conceptual necessity about this. The only ‘language’ on which thought essentially depends is that of the structured system of concepts itself: Thought depends on or upon there being isolable concepts that can join with others to produce complete propositions. But this is merely to draw attention to a property of any system of concepts must have; It is not to say what concepts are or how they succeed in moving between thoughts as they do.
Finally, there is the old question of whether, or to what extent, a creature who does not understand a natural language can have thoughts. Now it seems pretty compelling that higher mammals and humans raised without language have their behaviour controlled by mental states that are sufficiently like our beliefs, desires and intentions to share those labels. It also seems easy to imagine non-communicating creatures who have sophisticated mental lives (they build weapons, dams, bridges, have clever hunting devices, etc.). at the same time, ascriptions of particular contents to non-language-using creatures typically seem exercises in loose speaking (does the dog really believe that there is a bone in the yard?), and it is no accident that, as a matter of fact, creatures who do not understand a natural language have at best primitive mental lives. There is no accepted explanation of these facts. It is possible that the primitive mental failure to master natural languages, but the better explanation may be Chomsky’s, that animal’s lack a special language faculty to our species, as, perhaps, the insecurity that is felt, may at best resemble the deeper of latencies that cradles his instinctual primitivities, that have contributively distributed the valuing qualities that amount in the result to an ‘approach-avoidance’ theory. As regards the wise normal human raised without language; this might simply be due to the ignorance and lack of intellectual stimulation such a person would be predetermined to. It also might be that higher thought requires a neural language with a structure comparable to that of a natural language, and that such neural languages are somehow acquired: As the child learns its native language. Finally, the ascribed states of languageless creatures are a difficult topic that needs more attention. It is possible that as we learn more about the logic of our ascriptions of propositional content, we will realize that these ascriptions are egocentrically based on a similarity to the language in which we express our beliefs. We might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to a creature who does not speak something a lot like one of our natural languages, or who does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure.. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.
The relation between language and thought is philosophies a chicken-or-egg problem. Language and thought are evidently importantly related, but how exactly are they related? Does language come first and make thought possible, or is it vice versa? Or are they on a par, each making the other possible.
When the question is stated this generally, however, no unqualified answer is possible. In some respects thought is prior, and in other respects neither is prior. For example, it is arguable that a language is an abstract pairing of expressions and meaning, a function in the set-theoretic sense from expressions onto meaning. This makes sense of the fact that Esperanto is a language no one speaks, and it explains why it is that, while it is a contingent fact that ‘La neige est blanche’ means that snow is white among the French. It is a necessary truth that it means that in French. But if natural languages such as French and English are abstract objects in this sense, then they exist in possible worlds in which there are no thinkers in this respect, then, language as well as such notions as meaning and truth in a language, is prior to thought.
But even if languages are construed as abstract expression-meaning pairings, they are construed that way as abstractions from actual linguistic practice - from the use of language in communicative behaviour - and there remains a clear sense in which language is dependent on thought. The sequence of inscribes ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome. This is a contingent fact, dependent on the way we use ‘Naples’. Rome and the other parts of that sentence. Had our linguistic practices been different, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome has something to do with the beliefs and intentions underlying our use of the words and structures that compose the sentence. More generally, it is a platitude that the semantic features that specify and sounds have in a population of speakers are, at least, partly determined by the ‘propositional attitudes’ those speakers have in using those inscriptions and sounds or in using the parts and structures that compose them. This is the same platitude, of course, which says that meaning depends at least partly on use: For the use in question is intentional use in communicative behaviour. So, here, is one clear sense in which language is dependent on thought: Thought is required to imbue inscriptions and sounds with the semantic features they have in populations of speakers.
The sense in which language does depend on thought can be wedded to the sense in which language does not depend on thought in the ways that: We can say that a sequence of ascriptions or sounds (or, whatever) σ means ‘q’ in a language ‘L’, construed as a function from expressions onto meaning, iff L(σ) = q. this notion of meaning-in-a-language, like the notion of a ;language, is a mere set-theoretic notion that is independent of thought in that it presupposes nothing about the propositional attitudes of language users: σ can mean ‘q’ in ‘L’ even if ‘L’ has never been used. But then we can say that σ also means ‘q’ in a population ‘P’ jus t in case members of ‘P’ use some language in which σ ,means ‘q’: That is, just in case some such language is a language of ‘P’. The question of the moment then becomes: What relation must a population ‘P’ bear to a language ‘L’ in order for it to be the case that ‘L’ is a language of ‘P’, a language member of ‘P’, literally speak? Whatever the answer to this question is, this much seems right: In order for a language to be a language of a population of speakers, those speakers in their produce sentences of the language in their communicative behaviour. Since such behaviour is intentional, we know that the notion of a language
‘s being the language of a population of speakers presupposes the notion of thought. And since that notion presupposes the notion of thought, we also know that the same is true of the correct account of the semantic features expressions have in populations of speakers.
This is a pretty thin result, not one likely to be disputed, and the difficult questions remain. We know that there is some relation ‘R’ such that a language ‘L’ is used by a population ‘P’ iff ‘L’ bears ‘R’ to ‘P’. Let us call this relation, whatever it turns out to be, the ‘actual-language reflation’. We know that to explain the actual-language relation is to explain the semantic features expressions have among those who are apt to produce those expressions. And we know that any account of the relation must require language users to have certain propositional attitudes. But how exactly is the actual language relation to be explained in terms of the propositional attitude of language users? And what sort of dependence might those propositional attitudes in turn have those propositional attitudes in turn have on language or on the semantic features that are fixed by the actual-language relation? Let us, least of mention, begin once again, as in the relation of language to thought, before turning to the relation of thought to language.
All must agree that the actual-language relation, and with it the semantic features linguistic items have among speakers, is at least,, partly determined by the propositional attitudes of language users. This still leaves plenty of room for philosophers to disagree both about the extent of the determination and the nature of the determining propositional attitude. At one end of the determination spectrum, we have those who hold that the actual-language relation is wholly definable in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. This position in logical space is most famously occupied by the programme, sometimes called ‘intention-based semantics’, of the late Paul Grice and others. The foundational notion in this enterprise is a certain notion of speaker meaning. It is the species of communicative behaviour reported when we say, for example, that in uttering ‘ll pleut’, Pierre meant that it was raining, or that in waving her hand, the Queen meant that you were to leave the room, intentional-based semantics seeks to define this notion of speaker meaning wholly in terms of communicators’ audience-directed intentions and without recourse to any semantic notion. Then it seeks to define the actual-language relation in terms of the now-defined notion of speaker meaning, together with certain ancillary notions such as that of some conventional regularity or practice, they are defined wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. The definition of the actual-language relation in terms of speaker meaning will require the prior definition in terms of speaker meaning of other agent-semantic notions, such as the notions of speaker reference and notions of illocutionary act, and this, too, is part of the intention-based semantics.
Some philosophers object to the intentional-based semantics because they think it precludes a dependence of thought on the communicative use of language. This is a mistake. Even if the intentional-based semantic definitions are given a strong reductionist reading, as saying that public-language semantic property (i.e., those semantic properties that supervenes on use in communicative behaviour) it might still be that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had mastery of a public-language. However, our generating causal explanatory y generalizations, and subject to no more than the epistemic indeterminacy of other such terms. The causal explanatory approach to reason-giving explanations also requires an account of the intentional content of our psychological states, which makes it possible for such content to be doing such work. By the early 1970s, and many physicalists looked for a way of characterizing the primary and priority of the physical that is free from reductionist implications. As we have in attestation, the key attraction of supervenience to physicalists has been its promise to deliver dependence without reduction. For example, of moral theory has seemed encouraging as Moore and Hare, who made much of the supervenience of the moral on the naturalistic, were at the same time, strong critics of ethical naturalism, the principal reductionist position in ethical theory. And thee has been a broad consensus among ethical theorists that Moore and Hare were right, that the moral, or more broadly the normative, is supervening on the non-moral without being reducible to it. Whether or not this is plausible (that is a separate question), it would be no more logically puzzling than the idea that one could not have any propositional attitudes unless one had one’s with certain sorts of contents. there is no pressing reason to think that the semantic needs to be definable in terms of the psychological. Many intention-based semantic theorists have been motivated by a strong version of ‘physicalism’, which requires the reduction of all intentional properties (i.e., all semantic and propositional-attitude properties) to physical , or at least, topic-neutral or functional properties, for it is plausible that there could be no reduction of the semantic and the psychological to the physical without a prior reduction of the semantic to the psychological. But it is arguable that such a strong version of physicalism is not what is required in order to fit the intentional into the natural order.
So, the most reasonable view about the actual-language relation is that it requires language users to have certain propositional attitudes, but there is no prospect of defining the relation wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. It is further plausible that any account of the actual-language relation must appeal to speech acts such as speaker meaning, where the correct account of these speech acts is irreducibly semantic (they will fail to supervene on the non-semantic propositional altitudes of speakers in the way that intentions fail to supervene on an agent’s beliefs and desires). If this is right, it would still leave a further issue about the ‘definability’ of the actual-language relation, and if so, will any irreducibly semantic notions enter into that definition other than the sorts of speech act notions already alluded to? These questions have not been much discussed in the literature as there are neither an established answer nor competing schools of thought. Such that the things in philosophy that can be defined, and that speech act notions are the only irreducibly semantic notions the definition must appeal to.
Our attentions to consider of the dependence of thought on language, as this the claim that propositional attitudes are relations to linguistic items which obtain at least, partly by virtue of the content those items have among language users. This position does not imply that believers have to be language users, but it does make language an essential ingredient in the concept of belief. However, we might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to who does not speak something, a lot like does not have internal states with natural-langage-like structure. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.
Although our mediated concerns on or upon ‘naturalism’, which as based within the philosophy of science. Philosophy is ordinarily, more than an overall approach to the subject than a set of specific doctrines. In philosophy it may be characterized only by the most general ontological and epistemological principles and then more by what it opposes than by what it processes.
Apart from the desire for an ultimate foundation for knowledge, a common objection to naturalistic approaches in the philosophy of science is that such approaches are limited to the mere description of what scientists do. The philosophy of science, it is claimed, is concerned to develop ‘normative’ models of how science should be pursed - that is, model of scientific rationality. But thee is a way in which naturalists can also be normative. Naturalists are not limited merely to description of what scientist say and do. They can also develop ‘theoretical explanations’ for example, cognitive or evolutionary explanations - of how science works. Just as theoretical mechanics provide a basis for designing rockets, so a powerful theoretical account of how science works could provide a basis for sound advice on scientific practice and politics. So those who use the desire for normative analysis as an argument against naturalism beg the question by assuming a notion of rationality that goes beyond ‘conditional’ or ‘instrumental’ rationality. Say there is as something of an idea in the Theory of meaning in the past hundred years, whereby the thesis that the meaning of an indicative sentence is given by its truth-condition. On this conception, to understand conditionals. on this conception to understand a sentence is t o know its truth-conditions. Much more than brief, a truth-condition of a statement is the condition the world must meet if the statement is to be true. To know this condition is equivalent to knowing the meaning of the statement, least of mention, the most influential idea in the past hundred tears is the thesis that the meaning of an indicative sentence is given by its truth-condition. On this conception, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions. The conception was first clearly formulated by Frége, was developed in a distinctive way by the early Wittgenstein, and is a leading idea of Davidson. The conception has remained so central that those who offer opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it.
The concept of meaning and truth-conditions, need not and should not be advanced as being in itself a complete account of meaning. For instance, one who understands a language must hae some idea of the range of speech acts conventionally performed by the various types of sentences in the language , and must have some idea of the significance of various kinds of speech acts. The claim of the theorist of truth-conditions should rather be targeted on the notion of content: If two indicative sentences differ in what they strictly and literally say, then this difference is fully accounted for by the difference in their truth-conditions: It is this claim, and its attendant problems, is to the considerations as have been place on or upon the tables controlling jurisdiction, to dissect and suturing left as a lacerated curiosity never looked upon.
The meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituents. This is indeed just a statement of what it is for an expression to be semantically complex. I t is one of the initial attractions of the condition of meaning as truth-conditions that it permits a smooth and satisfying account of the way in which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituents. On the truth-conditional conception, to give the meaning of an expression is to state the contribution it makes to the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs. For singular terms - proper names, indexicals, and certain pronoun’s - this is, done by stating the reference of the term in question. For predicates, it is done either by stating the conditions under which the predicate is true of arbitrary objects, or by stating the conditions under which arbitrary atomic sentences containing it are true. The meaning of a sentence-forming operator is given by stating its contribution to the truth-conditions of a complete sentence, as a function of the semantic values of the sentences on which it operates. For an extremely y simple, but nevertheless structured language, we can state that contributions various expressions make to truth-conditions as follows:
A1: The referent of ‘London’ is London.
A2: The referent of ‘Paris’ is Paris.
A3: Any sentence of the form ‘a is beautiful’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘a’ is beautiful.
A4: Any sentence of the form ‘a is larger than b’ is true if and only if the referent of ‘a’ is larger than the referent of ‘b’.
A5:Any sentence of the form ‘It’s not the case that ‘A’ is true if and only if it is not the case that ‘A’ is true.
A6: Any sentence of the form ‘A’ and ‘B’ is true if and only if ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is true.
The principal A1-A6 form a simple theory of truth for a fragment of English. In this theory it is possible to derive these consequences: ‘Paris is beautiful’, that ‘London is larger than Pars ant it is not the case if London is beautiful’, is true if and only if London is larger than Paris and it is not the case that London is beautiful (from A1-A5): and in general, for any sentence ‘A’ of this simple language, we can derive something of the form ‘A’ is true if and only if ‘A’.
The theorist of truth conditions should insist that not every true statement about the reference of an expression is fit to be an axiom in a meaning-giving theory of truth for a language. The axiom written as:
‘London’ refers to the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666
Is a true statement about the reference of ‘London’. It is a consequence of a theory which substitutes this axiom for (A1) in our simple truth theory that ‘London is beautiful’, is true if ans only if the city in which there was a huge fire in 1666 is beautiful. Since a subject can understand the name of ‘London’ without knowing that last-mentioned truth condition, this replacement axiom is not fit to be an axiom in a meaning-specifying truth theory, it is, of course. Incumbent on a theorist of meaning as true conditions to state the constraints on the acceptability of axioms in a way which does not presuppose any prior, non-truth conditional conception of meaning.
Among the many challenges facing the theorist of truth conditions, two are particularly salient and fundamental. First, the theorist has to answer the charge of triviality or vacuity. Second, the theorist must offer an account of what it is for a person’s language to be truly describable by a semantic theory containing a given semantic axiom.
We can take the charge of triviality first, in that it would run thus: Since the content of a claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true amounts to no more than the claim that Paris is beautiful, we can trivially describe understanding a sentence, if we wish, as knowing its truth-conditions, but this gives us no substantive account of understanding whatsoever. Something other than grasp of truth conditions must provide the substantive account. The charge rests on or upon hast has been called the ‘redundancy theory of truth’, the theory which, somewhat more discriminatingly, Horwich calls the ‘minimal theory’, states that the concept of truth is exhausted by the fact that it conforms to the equivalence principle, the principle that for any proposition of ‘p’, it is true that ‘p’ if and only if ‘p’. Many different philosophical theories of truth will, with suitable qualifications, accept that equivalence principle. The distinguishing feature of the minimal theory is its claim that the equivalence principle exhausts the notion of truth. It is, however, not widely accept ed, both by opponents and supporters of truth conditional theories of meaning, that it is inconsistent to accept both the minimal theory of truth nd a truth conditional account of meaning. If the claim that the sentence ‘Paris is beautiful’ is true is exhausted by its equivalence to the claim that Paris is beautiful, it is circular to try to explain the sentences meaning in terms of its truth conditions. The minimal theory of truth has been endorsed by Ramsey (1903-30), Ayer (1910-98), the later Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Quine (1908-20000, Strawson (1919- ), Horwich and - confusingly and inconsistent if this article is correct - Frége himself. But is the minimal theory correct?
The minimal theory treats instances of the equivalence principle s definitional truth for a given sentence. But in fact, it seems that each instance of the equivalence principle can itself be explained. He truths from which such an instance as:
‘London is beautiful’ is true if and only if London is beautiful,
can be explained are precisely A1 and A3 above. This would be a pseudo-explanation if the fact that ‘London’ refers to London consists in part in the fact that ‘London is beautiful’ has the truth-condition it does. But that is very implausible, it is, after all, possible to understanding the name ‘London’ without understanding the predicate ‘is beautiful’.
A second problem with the minimal theory, is that, it seems impossible to calculably formulate it without at some point relying implicitly on features and principles involving truths which go beyond anything countenanced by the minimal theory: If the minimal theory teats truth as a predicate of anything linguistic, be it utterances, types-in-a-language, or whatever, then the equivalence schema will cover all cases, but only those in the theorist’s own language. Some account has to be given f truth for sentences of their languages. Speaking of the truth of language-independent propositions or thought will only postpone, not avoid this issue, since at some point principles have to be stated associating these language-independent entities with sentences of particular languages. The defender of the minimalist Theory is likely to say that if a sentence ‘S’ is true if and only if ‘p’. Now the best translation of a sentence must preserve the concept expressed in the sentence. Constraints involving a general notion of truth are pervasive in a plausible philosophical Theor y of concepts. It is, for example, a condition of adequacy on an individuating account of any concepts that there exists of what is called ‘Determination Theory’, for that account - that is, a specification of how the account contributes to fixing the semantic value of that concept. The notion of a concept’s semantic value is the notion of something which makes a certain contribution to the truth conditions of thoughts in which the concept occurs. But this is to presuppose, than to elucidate a general notion of truth.
It is, nonetheless, that this response allows us to answer two challenges to the conception of meaning as truth conditions. Firs t, there was the question left hanging earlier, of how the theorist of truth conditions is to say what makes one axiom of a semantic theory correct t than another, when the two axioms assign the same semantic values, bu t do so by means of different concepts. Since the different concepts will have different possession conditions, the dovetailing accounts, at the deeper level of what it is for each axiom to be correct for a person’s language will be differently accounted. Second, there is a challenge repeatedly made by the minimalist theorist of truth, to the effect that the theorist of meaning as truth-conditions should give some non-circular account of what it is to understand a sentence, or to be capable of understanding all sentences containing a given constituent. For each expression in a sentence, the corresponding dovetailing account, togther with the possession condition, supplies a non-circular account of what it is to understand any sentence containing that expression. The combined accounts for each of the expressions which comprise a given sentence together constitute a non-circular account of what it is to understand the complete sentence. Taken together, the y allow the theorist of meaning as truth-conditions fully to met the challenge .
Once, again, the representationalist is to conclude of something as distinguished from the substances of which it is made, and taken to realize a perceptual change in attitude of making different or becoming different, such, then, is perceptual knowledge of our physical surroundings is always theory-loaded and indirect. Such perception is ‘loaded’ with the theory that there is some regular, some uniform, correlations between the way things appear (known in a perceptually direct way) and the way things actually are (known, if known at all , in a perceptually indirect way). Direct realism, refuses to restrict direct perceptual knowledge to an inner world of subjective experience. Though the direct realist is willing to concede that mu h of our knowledge of the physical world is indirect, however, direct and immediate it may sometimes feel, some perceptual knowledge of physical reality is direct. What makes it direct is that such knowledge is not based on, nor in any way dependent on, other knowledge and belief. The justification needed for the knowledge is right there in the experience itself.
To understand the way this is supposed to work, consider an ordinary example. ‘S’ identifies a banana (learns that it is a banana) by noting its shape and colour - perhaps, even tasting and smelling it (to make sure it’s not wax). In this case the perceptual knowledge that it is a banana is (the direct realist admits) that it is a banana on S’s perceptual knowledge of its shape, colour, smell, and taste. ‘S’ learns that it is a banana by seeing that it is yellow, banana-shaped, etc. Nonetheless, S’s perception of the banana’s colour and shape is direct. ‘S’ doers not see that the object is yellow, for example, by seeing (knowing, believing) anything more basic - either about the banana or anything else (e.g., his own ‘’sensa’’tion of the banana). ‘S’ has learned to identify such features, of course, but what ‘S’ learned to do is not make an inference, even a unconscious s inference, from other things he believes. What ‘S’ acquired was a cognitive skill, a disposition to believe of yellow objects he saw that they were yellow. The exercise of this skill does not require, and in no way, depends on, having of any other beliefs. S’s identificatory successes will depend on his operating in certain special conditions,, of course, ‘S’ will not, perhaps, be able to visually identify yellow objects in drastically reduced lighting, at funny viewing angles, or when afflicted with certain nervous disorders. But these facts about when ‘S’ can see that something is yellow does not show that something is yellow does not show that his perceptual knowledge (that ‘a’ is yellow) in any way depends on a belief (let alone knowledge) that he is in such special conditions. It merely shows that direct perceptual knowledge is the result of exercising a skill, an identificatory skill, that like any skill, requires certain conditions for its successful exercise. An expert basketball player cannot shoot accurately in a hurricane. He needs normal conditions to do what he has learned to do. So also, wit h individuals who have developed perceptual (cognitive) skills. They need normal conditions to do what they have learned to do. They need normal conditions to see, for example, that something is yellow. But they do not, any more than the basketball player, have to know they are in these conditions to do what being in these conditions enables them to do.
This means, of course, that for the direct realist direct perceptual knowledge is fallible and corrigible. Whether ‘S’ sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ depends on his being caused to believe that ‘a’ is ‘F’ in conditions that are appropriate for an exercise of that cognitive skill. If conditions are right, then ‘S’ sees (hence, knows) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If they aren’t, he doesn’t. Whether or not ‘S’ knows depends, then, not on what else (if anything) ‘S’ believes, but on the circumstances in which ‘S’ comes to believe. This being so, this type of direct realism is a form of externalism: the externalist holds that one’s propositional attitudes cannot be characterized without reference to the world - the environment - in which one ids situated. The reason that this is only of the contrasts that there can be different sorts of externalism. Thus, one ort of externalist might insist that you could not have, say, a belief that grass is green unless it could be shown that there was some relation between you, the believer, and grass. Clearly, these forms of externalism entail only the weakest kind of commitment to the existence of things in the environment. However, some externalists hold that propositional attitudes require something stronger. Thus, it might be said that in order to believe that grass is green, you must have withstood or gone-through a direct experience - some causal contact - with it during your lifetime. Or an even stronger version might hold that there are beliefs that require that you be in direct contact with the subject matter of these beliefs in order to so much as have them. Obviously, such a strong form of externalism is implausible in connection with a general belief about grass, for example, that it is green. But when it comes to what are called ‘singular beliefs’, matters are not so clear. For example, on seeing something bird-like outside the window of my study, I may say: ‘That I never did see a bird on that occasion - it was only a movement of a leaf which I had mistaken for one. In this case, one sort of externalist would insist that, since nothing in my environment answers to the expression ‘that bird’ for which I simply do not have the belief that, that bird was a green-finch. And this is true even if I myself am convinced that I have the belief, we can think we believe and desire various things - that our attitudes have certain contents - though we might well just be wrong.
Still, direct perception of objective facts, pure perceptual knowledge of external events, is made possible because what is needed (by way of justification) for such knowledge has been reduced. Background knowledge - and, in particular, the knowledge that the experience does, indeed, suffices for knowing - isn’t needed. This means that the foundations of knowledge are fallible. Nonetheless, though fallible, they are in no way derived. That is what make them foundational. Even if they are brittle, as foundations sometimes are, everything else rests upon them.
Habermas (1929- ) methodology of the social science is fully presented in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Against positivism he insists the social sciences cannot adopt the ‘objectivising’ attitude of causal explanation, but must seek to understand human practices, by focussing on the explanations the participants themselves would give for their actions. But again the relativistic tendencies of Hermeneutical and Wittgenstein socialists he insists that social science can nevertheless criticize these practices on theoretical and theoretical grounds. However, the objects posited exist and have their character fixe independently of the dispositions of participants in the discourse to assert and believe things about them. Thus the epistemic states of the participants have no causal influence on the existence or character of those objects, not are the objects supervening in any way - that is, non-causally dependent - on such epistemic states. In short, the entities posited in the discourse enjoy a substantial kind of objectivity.
Together with a general bias towards the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation of images, this was developed by Locke, Berkeley and Hume into a full-scale view of the understanding as the domain of images, although they were all aware of anomalies that were later regarded as fatal to this doctrine. Supposed process of forming an idea by abstraction out what is common to a variety of instances: A process stressed, for example, by Aquinas in his moderate solution to the problem of universal abstraction is not lying. The problem to suppose that qualities such as substance, only to the sensible bodies that give rise to our ideas of them, but also in a spiritual realm or other domain quite outside the reach of experience. Locke is vehemently attacked by Berkeley for this and related errors.
In addition, concepts that was the focus of despite between Locke and Berkeley, Locke had highlighted the problem of the way in which a particular idea, as it might be of a person or a general exaggeration of a cow. His solution was to ;postulate an abstraction of the general kind away from the particular qualities of example, until eventually we have an idea of the right degree of generality: One that encompasses all and only persons, or cows. Berkeley took the greatest exception to this account, arguing instead that all ideas are perfectly particular, and only become general in the use we make of them. His animosity arose partly because he believed that the doctrine of abstraction enabled Locke to deceive himself that we can make sense of things that are actually unintelligible, as objects with no colour, in animate causes, and qualities of things dissociated from the sensory effects they have on us.
Even still, the defects in the account were exposed by Kant, who realized that the understanding needs to be thought of more in terms of rules and organizing principles than of any kind of copy of what is given in experience. Kant also recognized the danger of the opposite extreme (that of Leibniz) of failing to connect the elements of understanding with those of experience at all (Critique of Pure Reason).
It has become more common to think of ideas, or concepts as dependent upon social and especially linguistic structures, than the self-standing creations of an individual mind, but the tension between the objective and the subjective aspects of the matter lingers on, for instance in debates out the possibility of objective knowledge of indeterminacy in translation, and of identity between the thoughts people entertain at one time and those that they entertain at another.
The characteristic distinction of what exists of essentially something that forms part of its character and otherwise the structure of a thing so that to find by its explanation or resolving inclination for something to find an answer as a problem of obscurities is much more difficult of its unfolding. However, our theoretical concern has taken priority in the set-classes by privation, so that to reconsider or reevaluate the enabling capacities of being thought about, such is the concepts that are easy enough to be thinkable. Thoughtfully, the act or process of thinking permits of itself the cogitations as characterized by or exhibiting the power to think. The conceptual representation in the apprehension as caught by the notion for existing or dealing with what exists in the mind. A consciousable awareness that knows of the cognizant designation for which of studies point directly of mediate naturalism, such of acting or activated without apparent thought or deliberation, this premeditated consideration that which can be known as having existence in space or time for which by its bearing virtue is not a thing, but an attribute of a thing.
Of what exists in the mind as a representation (as of something comprehended) or as a formulation (as of a plan) absorbs in the apprehensions towards belief. That is, ‘ideas’, as eternal, mind-independent forms or archetypes of the things in the material world. Neoplatonism made them thoughts in the mind of God who created the world. The much criticized ‘new way of ideas’, so much a part of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophy, began with Descartes’ conscious extension of ‘idea’ to cover whatever is in human minds too, an extension of which Locke made much use. But are they like mental images, of things outside the mind, or non-representational, like ‘’sensa’’tions? If representation as standing between the mind and what they represent, or are they acts and modifications of a mind perceiving the world directly? Finally, are they neither objects nor acts, but dispositions? Malebanche and Arnauld (and then Leibniz) famously disagreed about how ‘ideas’ should be understood, and recent scholars disagree about how Arnauld, Descartes, Locke and Malebranche in fact understood them.
Contemporary philosophy of mind, following cognitive science, uses the term ‘representation’ to mean just about anything that can be semantically evaluated. Thus, representations may be said to be true, to refer, to be accurate, and etc. Representations thus conceived comes in many varieties. The most familiar are pictures, three-dimensional models, e.g., statues, scale model, linguistic text (including mathematical formulas) and various hybrids of these such as diagrams, maps, graphs and tables. It is an open question in cognitive science whether mental representation, which is our real topic, but at which time it falls within any of these or any-other familiar provinces.
The representational theory of cognition and thought is uncontroversial in contemporary cognitive science that cognitive processes are processes that manipulate representations. This idea seems nearly inevitable. What makes the difference between processes that are cognitive-solving a problem, say- and those that are not-a patellar reflex, for example-is just that cognitive processes are epistemically assessable. A solution procedure can be justified or correct, as a reflex cannot. Since only things with content can be epistemically assessed, processes appears to count as cognitive only in so far as they implicate representations.
It is tempting to think that thoughts are the mind’s representations: Aren’t thoughts just those mental states that have semantic content? This is, no doubt, harmless enough provided we keep in mind that cognitive science may attribute to thoughts properties and contents that are foreign to commonsense. First, most of the representations hypothesized by cognitive science do not correspond to anything common sense would recognize as thoughts. Standard psycholinguistic theory, for instance, hypothesizes the construction of representations of the syntactic structures of the utterances one hears and understands. Yet we are not aware of, and non-specialists do not even understand, the structures represented. Thus, cognitive science may attribute thoughts where common sense would not. Second, cognitive science may find it useful to individuate thoughts in ways foreign to common sense.
However, least of mention, concepts occupy mental states having content: A belief may have the content that I will catch the train, or a hope may have the content that the prime minister will resign. A concept is something which is capable of being a constituent of such contents. More specifically, a concept is a way of thinking of something-a particular object, or property, or relation, or some other entity.
Several different concepts may each be ways of thinking of the same object. A person may think of himself in the first-person way, or think of himself as the spouse of Mary Smith, or as the person located in a certain room now. More generally, a concept ‘c’ is such-and-such, without believing ‘d’ is such-and-such. As words can be combined to form structured sentences, concepts have also been conceived as combinable into structured complex contents. When these complex contents are expressed in English by ‘that . . . ‘ clauses, as in our opening examples, they will be capable of being true or false, depending on the way the world is.
Concepts are to be distinguished from stereotypes and from conceptions. The stereotypical spy may be a middle-level official down on his luck and in need of money. Nonetheless, we can come to learn that Anthony Blunt, art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, is a spy: We can come to believe that something falls under a concept while positively disbelieving that the same thing falls under the stereotype associated with the concept. Similarly, a person’s conception of a just arrangement for resolving disputes may involve something like contemporary Western legal systems. But whether or not it would be correct, it is quite intelligible for someone to reject this conception by arguing that it does not adequately provide for the elements of fairness and respect which are required by the concept of justice.
A fundamental question for philosophy is: What individuates a given concept-that is, what makes it the one it is, than any other concept? One answer, which has been developed in great detail, is that it is impossible to give a non-trivial answer to this question (Schiffer, 1987). An alternative approach, favoured by most, addresses the question by starting from the idea that a concept is individuated by the condition which must be satisfied if a thinker is to poses that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other contributing attributes whose contents contain it as a constituent. So, to take a simple case, one could propose that the logical concept ‘and’ is individuated by this condition: It is the unique concept ‘C’ to posses which a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basing them on any further inference or information: From any two premisses ‘A’ and ‘B’, ‘ABC’ can be inferred, and from any premiss ‘ABC’. Each of ‘A’ and ‘B’ can be inferred. Again, a relatively observational concept such as ‘round’ can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker finds specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are not based on perception to those judgements that are. A statement which individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to poses it can be described as giving the ‘possession condition’ for the concept.
A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for ‘and’ does not. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experiences, least of mention, to which have to be made in defence of the possession conditions for relatively observational concepts. What we must avoid is mention of the concept in question as such within the content of the attributes attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposed possession of the concept in an account which was meant to elucidate its possession. In talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That a thinker’s mastery of a concept is inextricably tied to how he finds it natural to go on in new cases in applying the concept.
Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering the others. Two of the families which plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of some simple concepts 0, 1, 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers there are 0, so-and-so’s, there is 1 so-and-so, . . . ; and the family consisting of the concepts ‘belief’ and ‘desire’. Such families have come to be known as ‘local holism’. A local holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demands that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form: Belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for a thinker to poses them is to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For these and other possession conditions to individuate properly, it is necessary that there be some ranking of the concept treated. The possession conditions for concepts higher in the ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower levels in the ranking.
A possession condition may in various ways make a thinker’s possession of a particular concept dependent on or upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world as being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience to the subject’s environment. If this is so, then mention of such experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that concept dependent in part upon the environmental relations to the thinker. Burge (1979) has also argued from intuitions about particular examples that, even though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinker’s social environment is varied,. A possession condition which properly individuates such a concept must take into account his linguistic relations.
Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kripke. For any judgement whose content involves a given concept, there is a ‘correctness condition’ for that judgement, a condition which is dependent in part on or upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into the territory of a thinker’s reasons for making judgements. A thinker’s visual perception can give him good reason for judging ‘That man is bald’; even if the man he sees is Rostropovich. All these normative connections must be explained by a theory of concepts. One approach to these matters is to look to the possession condition for a concept, and consider how the referent of the concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent of the concept is that object, or property, or function . . . which makes the practices of judgement and inference in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessarily good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permits us to say what it is about a thinker’s previous judgements that makes it the case that he is employing one concept than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would also allow us to say how the correctness condition is determined for a judgement in which the concept is applied to newly encountered object. The judgement is correct if the new object had the property which in fact makes the judgement practices in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.
What is more, that innate ideas have been variously defined by philosophers either as ideas consciously present to the mind prior to sense experience (the-dispositional sense), or as ideas which we have an innate disposition to form (though we need not be actually aware of them at any particular time, e.g., as babies)-the dispositional sense.
Understood in either way they were invoked to account for our recognition of certain truths without recourse to experiential truths without recourse verification, such as those of mathematics, or justify certain moral and religious claims which were held to be capable of being known by introspection of our innate ideas. Examples of such supposed truths might include ‘murder is wrong’ or ‘God exists’.
One difficulty with the doctrine is that it is sometimes formulated as one about concepts or ideas which are held to be innate and at other times as one about a source of propositional knowledge. In so far as concepts are taken to be innate the doctrine relates primarily ti claim about meaning: Our idea of God, for example, is taken as a source for the meaning of the word God. When innate ideas are understood propositionally heir suppose d innateness is taken as evidence for their truth. However, this clearly rests the assumption that innate prepositions have an unimpeachable source, usually taken to be God, but then any appeal to innate ideas to justify the existence of God is circular. Despite such difficulties the doctrine of innate ideas had a long and influential history until the eighteenth century and the concept has in recent decades been revitalized through its employment in Noam Chomsky’s influential account of the mind’s linguistic capabilities.
The attraction of the theory has been felt strongly by those philosophers who have been unable to give an alternative account of our capacity to recognize that some proposition cannot be justified solely on the basis of an appeal to sense experience. Thus Plato argued that, for example, recognition of mathematical truths could only be explained on the assumption of some form of recollection. Since there was no plausible post-natal source the recollection must refer back to a pre-natal acquisition of knowledge. Thus understood, the doctrine of innate ideas supposed the view that there were important truths innate in human beings and it was the senses which hindered their proper apprehension.
The ascetic implications of the doctrine were important in Christian philosophy y throughout the Middle Ages and the doctrine featured powerfully in scholastic teaching until its displacement by Locke’s philosophy in the eighteenth century. It had in the meantime acquired modern expression in the philosophy of Descartes who argued that we can come to know certain important truths before we have any empirical knowledge at all. Our idea of God, for example, and our coming to recognize that God must necessarily exist, are, Descartes held, logically independent of sense experience. In England the Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More and Ralph Cudworth added considerable support.
Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and his alternative empiricist account was powerful enough to displace the doctrine from philosophy y almost totally. Leibniz, in his critique of Locke, attempted to defend it with a sophisticated dispositional version of the theory, but it attracted few followers.
The empiricist alternative to innate ideas as an explanation of the certainty of propositions was in the direction of construing all necessary truths as analytic. Kant’s refinement of the classification of propositions with the fourfold distinction, analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori did nothing to encourage a return to the innate ideas doctrine, which slipped from view. The doctrine may fruitfully be understood as the production of confusion between explaining the genesis of ideas or concepts and the basis for regarding some propositions as necessarily true.
Nevertheless, according to Kant, our knowledge arises from two fundamentally different faculties of the mind, sensibility and understanding. He criticized his predecessors for running these faculties together. Leibniz for treating sensing as a confused mode of understanding and Locke for treating understanding as an abstracted mode of sensing. Kant held that each of the faculties operates with its own distinctive type of mental representation. Concepts, the instruments of the understanding, are mental representations that apply potentially to many things in virtue of their possession of a common feature. Intuitions, the instrument of sensibility, are representation s that refer to just one thing and to that thing is played in Russell’s philosophy by ‘acquaintance’ though intuitions objects are given to us, Kant said; through concepts they are thought.
Nonetheless, it is famous Kantian thesis that knowledge is yielded neither by intuitions nor by concepts alone, but only by the two in conjunction, ‘Thoughts without content are empty’, he says in an often quoted remark, and ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’. Exactly what Kant means by the remark is a debated question, however, answered in different ways by scholars who bring different elements of Kant’s text to bear on it. A minimal reading is that it is only propositionally structured knowledge that requires the collaboration of intuition and concept: This view allows that intuitions without concepts constitute some kind of non-judgmental awareness. A stronger reading is that it is reference or intentionality that depends on intuition and concept together, so that the blindness of intuition without concept is its referring to an object. A more radical view, yet is that intuitions without concepts are indeterminate, a mere blur, perhaps nothing at all. This last interpretation, though admittedly suggested by some things Kant says, is at odds with his official view about the separation of the faculties.
Least that ‘content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation had that makes it semantically evaluable. Wherefore, a statement is sometimes said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content, whereby its term is sometimes said to have a concept as it s content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have: A representation’s content is just whatever it is underwrite s its semantic evaluation.
According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the cas e unless I believe that such and such is the cas e. other s think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude. For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entails psychological certainty (Prichard, 1950; Ayer, 1956) or conviction (Lehrer, 1974) or acceptance (Lehrer, 1989). Nonetheless, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These argument s are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief, or a facsimile, are mutually incompatible (the incompatibility thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so ha t each may exist without the other, however, the two may also coexist of the separability thesis.
The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible (Republic). Nonetheless this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps knowledge involves some factor that compensates for the fallibility of belief.
A.Duncan-Jones (1938 & Vendler, 1978) cites linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people oftentimes say ‘I don’t believe she is guilty. I know she is’, where ‘just’ makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: ‘You didn’t hurt him, you killed him’.
H.A.Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis which hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty, as both infallibility and psychological certitude gives the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that knowledge never does, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, Prichard gives us no good reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, only to suggest that we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D.Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley’s version which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief, whereas knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although knowledge might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is ‘what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions’. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say, ‘I am unsure whether my answer is true, still, I know it s correct’. Nonetheless, this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim, such as a claim to know something, and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While ‘I know such and such’ might be true even if I am sure of whether such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.
Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Radford’s view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example, that Jean has forgotten that he learned some English history years prior and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur’? Since he forgo t that he took history, he considers his correct responses to be no more than guesses. Nonetheless, when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A fortiori he would deny being sure, or having the right to be sure, that, nonetheless that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would nonetheless insist that Jean knows when the Battle occurred, since clearly he remembered the correct date. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Jean to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, least of mention, that Woozley attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge, we ought, at least, believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is ;intentionally misleading’.
Those who agree with Radford’s defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Jean lacks beliefs about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when he seeks them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting the Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example. Or one could adopt a behaviorist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bain’s (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and hasn’t Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviorist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
D.M.Armstrong (1973) takes a different tack against Radford, Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that point, however, Armstrong suggests that Jean believes that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. What is more, that Armstrong insists, Jean also believes that the Battle did occur in 1066. After-all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and had he forgotten being ‘taught’ this and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 1066,m we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean’s false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted as a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radford’s original case as one in which Jean’s true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Wherefore, Jan consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to claim that knowledge entails belief.
Armstrong’s response to Radford was to reject Radford’s claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee requires the knowledge Radford attributes to him (Sorenson, 1982). If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Jean believes both that 1066 is and that is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Jean knowledge on the grounds that people who believe the denial of what they believe cannot be aid to know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to liken the examinee’ case to examples of ignorance given in recent attacks on ‘externalisms’. This account of knowledge (needless to say, externalists themselves would tend not to favour this strategy). Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1895): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. Again, for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the Prime Minister of Canada is in New York, even though she has every reason to believe that the Premier is in Ottawa Canada. In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she arrived at her belief about the whereabouts of the Prime Minister through the power of her clairvoyance. Yet, surely Samantha’s belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the Prime Minister is. But, Radford’s examinee is a little different. Even if Jean lacks the belief which Radford denies him, Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Jean’s memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, Jean has every reason to suppose that his response is merely guesswork, and so he has every reason to consider his belief as false. His belief would be an irrational one, and wherefore, one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
The externalism/internalism distinction has been mainly applied if it requires that all of the factors needed for a belief to be epistemically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person. However, epistemologists often use the distinction between internalist and externalist theories of epistemic justification without offering any explicit explication. Also, it has been applied in a closely related way to accounts of knowledge and in a rather different way to accounts of belief and thought content.
Perhaps the clearest example of an internalist position would be a foundationalist view according to which foundational beliefs pertain to immediately experienced states of mind and other beliefs are justified by standing in cognitively accessible logical or inferential relations to such foundational beliefs. Similarly, a coherentist view could also be internalist, if both he beliefs or other states with which a justificadum belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible.
Also, on this way of drawing the distinction, a hybrid view to which some of the factors required for justification must be cognitively accessible while others need not and in general will not be, would count as an externalist view. Obviously too, a view that was externalist in relation to forms or versions of internalist, that by not requiring that the believer actually be aware of all justifying factors could still be internalist in relation for which requiring that he at least be capable of becoming aware of them.
The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of reliabilism, whose main requirement for justification is roughly that the beliefs be produced in a way or via a process that makes it objectively likely that the belief is true. What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, nonetheless be epistemically justified in accepting it. Thus such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, rather than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply charged the subject.
As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy of language more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, and etc., that motivates the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief or thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment-, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatory criteria employed by the experts in his social group, and etc., -not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.
An objection to externalist accounts of content is that they seem unable to do justice to our ability to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors pertaining to the environment, the n knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors-which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.
The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist account of justification: That, if part or all of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to the content and the status of that content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible: Thus, contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else: But such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.
If the world is radically different from the way it appears, to the pointy that apparent epistemic vices are actually truth-conducive, presumably his should not make us retrospectively term such vices ‘virtues’ even if they are and have always been truth-conducive. Suggestively, it would simply make the epistemic virtue qualities which a truth-desiring person would want to have. For even if, unbeknown to us, some wild sceptical possibility is realized, this would not affect our desires (it being, again, unknown). Such a characterization, moreover, it would seem to fit the virtues in our catalogue. Almost by definition, the truth-desiring person would want to be epistemically conscientious. And, given what seems to be the conditions pertaining to human life and knowledge, the truth-desiring person will also want to have the previously cited virtues of impartiality and intellectual courage.
Are, though, truth and the avoidance of error rich enough desires for the epistemically virtuous? Arguably not. For one thing, the virtuous inquirer aims not so much at having true beliefs as at discovering truths - a very distinctive notion. Perpetual reading of a good encyclopaedia will expand my bank of true beliefs without markedly increasing human-kinds basic stock of truths. For Aristotle, too, one notes that true belief is not, as such, even a concern: The concern, is the discovery of scientific or philosophical truth. But, of course, the mere expansion of our bank of truths-even of scientific and philosophical truths-is not itself the complete goal of its present. Rather, one looks for new truths of an appropriate kind-rich, deep, explanatorily fertile, say. By this reckoning, then, the epistemically virtuous person seeks at least three related, but separate ends, to discover new truths, to increase one’s explanatory understanding, to have true than false beliefs.
Another important area of concern for epistemologists is the relation between epistemic virtue and epistemic justification. Obviously, an epistemically virtuous person must itself, I take it, be virtuous. But is a virtuously formed belief automatically a justified one? I would hold that if a belief is virtuously formed, this fully justifies that person in having it: However, the belief itself may lack adequate justification, as the evidence for it may be, through no fault of this person, still inadequate). Different philosophers on this point or points, ae, however, apparently to have different intuitions.
Hegel’s theory of justification contains both ‘externalist’ and ‘coherentist’ elements. He recognizes that some justification is provided by percepts and beliefs being generated reliably by our interaction with the environment. Hegel contends that full justification additionally requires a self-conscious, reflective comprehension of one’s beliefs and experiences which integrates them into a systematic conceptual scheme which provides an account for them which is both coherent and reflexively self-consistent.
Hegel contends that corrigibly of conceptual categories is a social phenomenon. Our partial ignorance about the world can be revealed and corrected because one and the same claim or principle can be applied, asserted and assessed by different people in the same context or by the same person in different contexts. Hegel’s theory of justification requires that an account be shown to e adequate to its domain and to be superior to its alternatives. In this regard, Hegel is a fallibility according to whom justification is provisional and ineluctably historical, since it occurs against the background of less adequate alternative views.
Meanwhile, one important difference between the sceptical approach and more traditional ones becomes plain when the two are applied to sceptical questions. On the classical view, if we are to explain how knowledge is possible, it is illegitimate to make use of the resources of science, this would simply beg the question against the sceptic by making use of the very knowledge which he calls into question. Thus, Descartes’ attempt to answer the sceptic begins by rejecting all those beliefs about which any doubt is possible. Descartes must respond to the sceptic from a starting place which includes no beliefs at all. Naturalistic epistemologists, however, understand the demand to explain the possibility of knowledge differently. As Quine argues, sceptical question arise from within science. It is precisely our success in understanding the world, and thus, in seeing that appearance nd reality may differ, that raises the sceptical question in the first place. We may thus legitimately use the resources of science to answer the question which science itself has raised. The question about how knowledge is possible should it be construed as an empirical question: It is a question about how creatures such as we (given what our best current scientific theories tell us we are like) may come to have our best current scientific theories tell us the world is like. Quine suggests that the Darwinian account of the origin of species gives a very general explanation of why it is that we should be well adapted to getting true beliefs about our environment, while an examination of human psychology will fill the details of such an account. Although Quine himself does not suggest it, and so, investigations in the sociology of knowledge are obviously relevant as well.
This approach to sceptical questions clearly makes them quite tractable, and its proponents see this, understandably, as an important advantage of the naturalistic approach. It is in part for this reason that current work in psychology and sociology is under such close scrutiny by many epistemologists. By the same token, the detractors of the naturalistic approach argue that this way of dealing with sceptical questions simply bypasses the very questions which philosophers have long dealt with. Far from answering the traditional sceptical question it is argued, the naturalistic approach merely changes the topic. Debates between naturalistic epistemologists and their critics, in that frequently focus on whether this new way of doing epistemology adequately answers, transforms or simply ignores the questions which others see as central to epistemological inquiry. Some see the naturalistic approach as an attempt to abandon the philosophical study of knowledge entirely.
In thinking about the possibilities that we bear on in mind, our conscious states, according to Franz Brentano (1838-1917), are all objects of ‘inner perception’. Every such state is such that, for the person who is in that state, it is evident to that person that he or she is in that state, least of mention, that each of our conscious states is not an object of an act of perception, wherefore the doctrine does not lead to an infinite regress.
Brentano holds that there are two types of conscious state-those that are ‘physical’ and those are ‘intentional’ (a ‘physical’, or sensory, state is a ‘’sensa’’tion or sense-impression-a qualitative individual composed of parts that are spatially related to each other. ‘Intentional’ states, e.g., believing, considering, hoping, desiring which are characterized by the facts that (1) they are ‘directed upon objects’. (2) objects may be ‘directed upon’,e.g., we may fear things that do not exist, and (3) such states are not sensory. There is no ‘’sensa’’tion, no sensory individual, that can be identified with any particular intentional attitude.
Following Leibniz, Brentano distinguishes two types of certainty: The certainty we can have with respect to the existence of our conscious states, and that a priori certainty that may be directed upon necessary truths. These two types of certainty may be combined in a significant way. At a given ,moment I may be certain, on the basis of inner perception, that there is believing, desiring, hoping and fearing, and L may also be certain a priori that there cannot be believing, desiring, hoping, and fearing unless there is a ‘substance’ that believes, desires, hopes and fears. In such a case, it will be certain for me [as I will perceive] that there is a substance that believes, desires, hopes and fears. It is also axiomatic. Brentano says, that, if one is certain that a substance of a certain sort exists, then one is identical with that substance.
Brentano makes use of only two purely epistemic concepts, that of ‘being’ certain, or ‘evident’, and that of ‘being probable’. If a given hypothesis is probable, in the epistemic sense, for a particular person, then that person can be certain that the hypothesis is probable for him. Making use of the principles of probability, one may calculate the probability that a given hypothesis has on one’s evidence base.
Nonetheless, if our evidence-base is composed only of necessary truths and the facts of inner perception, then it is difficult to see how it could provide justification for any contingent truths other than those that pertain to states of consciousness. How could such an evidence-base even lend ‘probability’ to the hypothesis that there is a world of external physical things?
What, then, is the problem of the external world? Certainly it is not whether there is an external world as this is taken for granted. Instead, the problem is an epistemological one which, in rough approximation, can be formulated by asking whether and if so how a person gains knowledge of the external world. However, the problem seems to admit of an easy solution. There is knowledge of the external world which persons acquire primarily by perceiving objects and events which make up the external world.
Once, again, there is a way in which the easy solution, least of mention, has been further articulated is in terms of epistemological ‘direct realism’. This theory is realist insofar as it claims that objects and events in the external world, along with many of their various features, exist independently and acts of perception in which they engage. In addition, this theory is epistemologically directed, since it also claims that in perception people oftentimes acquire immediate non-inferential knowledge of objects and events in the external world.
One object external to and distinct from any given perceiver is any other perceiver. So, relative to one perceiver, every other perceiver is a past of the external world. However, another way of understanding the eternal world results if we think of the objects and events external to and distinct from every perceiver. So conceived the set of all perceiver’s that make up a vast community, with all of the objects and events external to that community making up the external world. We can therefore suppose that perceiver’s are entities which occupy physical space, if only because they are partly composed of items which take up physical space. It seems, however, that the problem of the external world is certainly not of whether there is an external world. But the problem is an epistemological one which, one can formulatively calculate by whether or not if a person gains knowledge of the external world.
An epistemic argument would concede that the main reason for this in that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-inferential. It is claimed that perceptual knowledge that there is a brown and rectangular table before me, because I would not know such a proposition unless I knew that something then appeared brown and rectangular. Hence, knowledge of the table is dependent upon knowledge of how it appears. Alternately expressed, if there is knowledge of the table at all, it is indirect knowledge, secured only if the proposition about the table may be inferred from preposition about appearances. If so, epistemological direct realism is false.
The significance of this emerges when one asks of a particular application that by what evidence or by what consideration is the best answer, clearly, is to question the argument which lead to the problems of the external world and the epistemological direct realism. That is, the crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon perceptual direct realism. The clear implication of the world perceived from the answer is ‘no’, we may point that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the object of appear is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is otherwise an attributing state with content. Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old’ entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old (Chisholm, 1964). And there are countless other examples that are similarly like this one.
Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and he like. Such a move, moreover, requires an argument which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might possibly be.
If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing perceptual direct realism will have been removed. So, that, there will no longer be any real motivation for the problem of the external world, of course, even if a perceptual direct realism is reinstated, this does not solve that the argument from illusion may suffice to refute all forms of perceptual realism. That problem, nonetheless, might arise even for one who accepts the perceptual direct realism, however, there is reason to be suspicious. What is not clear is whether the dependence is ‘epistemic’ or ‘semantic’. It is epistemic if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is for something to look blue. However, this may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependence relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about objects appear, but this fact does not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.
This criticism means that representational states used for the problem of the external world is narrow, in the sense that it focuses only on individual elements within the argument on which the argument seems to be used. Those assumptions, are foundationalist in character: Knowledge and justified belief are divided into the basic, immediate and non-inferential cases, and the non-basic, inferential knowledge and justified belief which is supported by the basic. That is to say, however, though foundationalism was widely assumed when the problem of the external world was given currency in Descartes and the classical empiricists. It has been readily challenged and there are in place well-worked alterative accounts to knowledge and justified belief, some of which seem to be plausible as the most tenable version of foundationalism. So we have some good reason to suspect, quite as one might have initially thought, that the problem of the external world just does not arise, at least not in the forms in which it has usually been presented.
No comments:
Post a Comment