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Perception and Primary Qualities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Nancy L. Maull
Nancy L. Maull*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Early modern science, according to a misleading and now widely accepted thesis, introduced a split or schism between a world of colorless, imperceptible particles, on the one hand, and the familiar world of perception, on the other. One of the most important dilemmas of modern philosophy, of course, seems to follow directly from this alleged rupture: For how are the two seemingly incongruous worlds to be “reconciled”? This way of formulating the problem, however, seems to be based on a misunderstanding of early modern science, on an interpretation that underestimates the very real difficulties that scientists faced in putting forward hypotheses about unseen minute bodies. If we start to pay attention to the way in which knowledge claims about the properties of atoms or corpuscles were advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in fact, it becomes increasingly obvious that such fundamental properties were first attributed to minute bodies on grounds of strict analogy, that is, on the grounds that all perceptible bodies exhibited precisely the properties of size, shape, motion, and so forth.

Type
Part I. History of Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1978 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1978 , 1978 , pp. 2 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Lindley Darden, Charles Larmore, and Dudley Shapere for their suggestions and criticisms.

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