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Seeing Qualia and Positing the World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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It is the business of philosophy to deal without presupposition with the question of the general nature of the world and with the question of how or indeed whether we can know that nature. These are questions to which answers are given in the realism of ordinary belief, as it can be called, the phenomenalism of Berkeley, the pragmatism and the scientism of Quine, and the varieties of scepticism. The ontological and the epistemological questions are bound up with another, that of the nature of perception—the question of what it is, in general, that happens when we perceive. What is called naive realism is an answer, as are representation theories, and phenomenalism again. If the question might be better defined, so as to distinguish it from the related scientific question, it is no matter of mere conceptual analysis. Let us start with this question of the nature of perception.
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References
1 I am most grateful for good comments on an earlier draft of this paper to Tim Crane, MarcusGiaquinto, Griff Phillips Griffiths, Bill Hart, Robert Heinaman, Goran Hermeren, Christopher Hookway, Paul Noordhof, Jane O'Grady, Christopher Peacocke, Ingmar Persson, Gabriel Segal, Barry Smith, Timothy Sprigge, Peter Strawson, Jerry Valberg, and Arnold Zuboff. With respect to the three questions in my first paragraph, it seems to me that Donald Davidson's suggestion, despite the reasons he gives, that the epistemological question can be treated quite independently of the question of the nature of perception, is optimistic (Davidson, 1989, 165–166).
2 See my A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes (Honderich, 1988)Google Scholar, Ch. 2, or Mind and Brain (Honderich, 1990), Ch. 2.Google Scholar
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