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The Human Skin: Philosophy's Last Line of Defense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Arthur F. Bentley
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Human skin is the one authentic criterion of the universe which philosophers recognize when they appraise knowledge under their professional rubric, epistemology. By and large—except for a few of the great Critics and Sceptics—they view knowledge as a capacity, attribute, possession, or other mysterious inner quality of a “knower”; they view this knower as residing in or at a “body”; they view the body as cut off from the rest of the universe by a “skin”; all of which holds for philosophizing physicists and physiologists even as for the professionals of the arcanum itself. If this assertion seems crude, one may recall that there are times when a bit of crudity is a fair physic for an inflamed subtlety. In the case before us the factual crudity lies in the use of “skin” for a criterion, not in our calling attention to the fact. The “skin” that is so used is, indeed, that of ancient anatomical schematism, unaffected by the transformation of understanding which modern physiological research has brought about. Yet if philosophers cease thus crudely to employ it, all their issues of epistemology will vanish, and the very type of attack they make on cognition will be discredited; whereupon the task of determining the status of knowledge itself will pass from their hands to those of the scientists who have taken over so many regions of philosophical arrogation in the past. This is what I propose here to show.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 1941 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1941

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References

1 H. S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms (1906) pp. 296 ff.

2 Citations from some of my recent papers will be made in the text by the use of the letter “J” for the Journal of Philosophy, and “P” for the Psychological Review. These papers are:

Sights-Seen as Materials of Knowledge, J. Phil., 36, 1939, pp. 169-181.

Situational Treatments of Behavior, Ibid., pp. 309-323.

Postulation for Behavioral Inquiry, Ibid., pp. 405-413.

Observable Behaviors, Psychol. Rev., 47, 1940, pp. 230-253.

The Behavioral Superfice, Ibid., 48, No. 1, 1941.

3 “What is a Monad?” Phil. Sci., 7, 1940, pp. 1-6.

4 The generalization of the “inner” into a comprehensive or “absolute” form is a more recent program of philosophical escape. Trailing its initial “innerness” with it to the end, it remains a program rather than an achievement, critically of high importance, constructively of none. Its justification has rested in its importance as complement to the Newtonian absolutes, space and time. When these last disintegrated in modern physics this justification disappeared. When science ceases to have a base that is all “outer” then a complementary “pure inner” is no longer needed; then scientific techniques become available for direct application to cognitions, once we discover how to develop and use them.

5 The view of science here taken is substantially that of the “levels of description” used by Malisoff in his presentation of “Emergence without Mystery” (Phil. Sci., 6, 1939, pp. 17-18). Such a view introduces a new dimension of freedom for scientific advance. The older science accepted as “reals” what were little more than remnants of primitive guesswork. The newer science becomes able to express itself frankly on the level of its own skills. In slight illustration, a generation ago physics and chemistry were differentiated in terms of “fact”; today in terms of objective and technique. In the case of physiology and psychology the current differentiation is still in terms of “reals,” mitigated only by a credal consolidation. The view advocated in the text makes technical achievement the test. The sciences then appear not as reflections of “realms of reality,” but as “realms of inquiry” in their own right. See also my Behavior, Knowledge, Fact (1935) pp. 275 ff.

6 Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, New York, Holt, 1938.

7 “The Reflex-Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychol. Rev., 5 (1896), pp. 357-370.

8 If any one is surprised at seeing Dewey, “the philosopher,” listed on the side of science in the matter of cognition, his late address “Nature in Experience,” (Phil. Rev., 49, 1940, pp. 244-258), may be consulted. He has asserted again and again his naturalistic approach. Thus in 1908 (J. Phil., Psychol., & Sci. Meth., V, 375) he wrote that the uncritical psychology which regards “intellectual operations ... as having an existence per se ... and ... as distinct from the things which figure in inference-drawing” makes “the theory of knowledge, not logic ... but epistemology.” He has, of course, used the “personal” phrasing in much of his writing. This is convenient, and often necessary when addressing certain large groups of hearers. Not his mere use of a word, however, but his own statement of his intent in using it, must be taken as governing his theoretical approach.

9 Thus J. R. Kantor, Principles of Psychology, 2 vol., 1924, 1926; A Survey of the Science of Psychology, 1933. K. Lewin, Principles of Topological Psychology, 1936. J. F. Brown, Psychology and the Social Order, 1937. Frequent phrasings in the earlier writings of Wertheimer and Koffka remind one of Dewey; and the most successful work of the Gestalt psychologists—that with colors—permits a very complete statement in this manner, even though the habitual Gestalt dualisms of sense and form, of outer and inner, and of physiological and psychological, cause serious deterioration in most other branches of their inquiries.

10 Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, 1927. Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, 1928.

11 One may perhaps say that the psychologist follows psyche, the physiological psychologist follows flesh-bound psyche, and the physiologist in Pavlov's sense expands inquiry to full organic activity. The difference between the last two, so far as behaviors are concerned, is like that between duplication of phrase and straight research, or between rubber stamp and test tube.

12 “A Brief Outline of the Higher Nervous Activity,” Psychologies of 1930, chap. 11, p. 107.

13 At times he treated the sub-cortical centers as the animal proper, with cerebrum environmental to it; again the cerebrum was connection between inner-sub-cortical and outer-environmental; other expressions seem to make “the rest” of the body environment to the cerebrum. His hemispheres “analyze” for internal as well as for external: “Some of the most delicate elements and moments of skeleto-muscular activity become stimuli.” Excitation may “originate” in cortex and be “initial stimulus.” Pavlov's manner of handling difficulties of this kind scientifically may profitably be compared with works in which similar difficulties appear, but in which essential existential statement is sought. Burrow's The Biology of Human Conflict, 1937, developed out of Freudian antecedents, will well serve for this purpose.

14 From the biological point of view, and in terms of the organism as a whole, this functional status of stimulus with respect to organism is well brought out by Kurt Goldstein, The Organism, (1934; Eng. trans. 1939). He does not, however, expand his statement in terms of the full situation of organism-environment.

15 I think I shall not be violating any confidence if I say that Professor Bridgman once checked a portion of his own unpublished manuscript in which the word “concept” appeared fifty-three times, and found that without any sense of loss he could omit it in all but four cases; in two of these four, the casual word “notion” did service, leaving only two resistant cases out of the fifty-three. Professor Dewey has written me that he has made sufficient examination to convince him that “the word is useless at least four-fifths of the time—my own writings included.”

16 Dewey retains the word “relation” for symbol-organization, matching it against “connection” for non-language organization, and against “reference” to designate word-to-thing behaviors (Logic, p. 55). His is the only intelligible use of the word “relation” with which I am acquainted, once the old spiritist scheme is superseded. Just as the word “relation” can be rehabilitated, so also can the word “concept.” On Dewey's basis “concept” may appear as a forward-looking, possibility-realizing “idea,” or “rule,” or “habit” of behavior; or alternatively it may show itself as a name for certain intricate language behaviors.

17 The word “situational,” in much the sense that I use it (J, v. 47, p. 311), was suggested thirty years ago as an improvement on “social” by Addison W. Moore in his book Pragmatism and Its Critics (p. viii, p. 230). He saw pragmatism as evolutionary and non-solipsistic, and by illustrating upon the work of Royce and Baldwin he drove home the point (p. 221) that no mere special pleading in the name of “evolution” or of the “social” would suffice, but that thorough basic development was needed. He thus forecast the main characteristics of the present paper, though his early death left his work without further development.

18 Any citations I might make to the work of the psychologists mentioned would require so much in the way of qualification and interpretation as to be impracticable here. The best guide I know of to the impending development, although it barely mentions the word “sign,” and ends at the problem-setting with which the present examination begins, is the paper by Professor Fritz Heider, “Environmental Determinants in Psychological Theories” (Psychol. Rev., 46, 1939, pp. 383-410). If the reader will take Heider's terms “proximal” and “distal” for variations in the focus of inquiry as he establishes them, without pigeon-holing them in terms of conventional analogues, he will, I believe, find the discussion extremely profitable.

19 For Peirce's non-mentalism, see E. Nagel, “Charles S. Peirce, Pioneer of Modern Empiricism,” Phil. Sci., 7, 1940, esp. pp. 73, 76, 79.