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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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.
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
3 For Hilary Putnam's own rejection of functionalism, see his Representation and Reality (Boston, 1988). By true identity theories I mean, roughly, eliminative materialisms, and thus not such theories as Davidson's Anomalous Monism, which appears to call for the label Property-Dualism.
4 For my Mental Realism, see Honderich, , op. cit., 76–89.Google Scholar
5 Ayer, , CQ, 70–71, 58ff.Google Scholar, Davidson, , 1986.Google Scholar
6 In The Origins of Pragmatism, 305Google Scholar, Ayer adds some secondary characteristics of such physical objects. They have parts not visible to the perceiver, etc.
7 CQ, Chs. 4, 5; OP, 298–336Google Scholar. With respect to the matter of the subjectivity of qualia, see CQ, 93ff.Google Scholar, and OP, 311ff.Google Scholar, 298. Cf. FEK, 243–263.Google Scholar
8 For a brief and excellent account of simplicity in this connection, see Mackie, , 1976, 66–67.Google Scholar
9 OP, 303Google Scholar. See Hookway, , 1988Google Scholar, for a survey of the development of Quine's views in this connection. James's view is expounded by Ayer in OP. Quine's ‘On What There Is’ is in Quine, 1953.
10 OP, 329–336Google Scholar; CQ, 107–108, 110Google Scholar. The passages are perhaps not wholly consistent, some being realist rather than pragmatist in tenor.
11 CQ, 66, 108. Cf. 72–3Google Scholar, where Ayer writes of the qualia philosophers with whom he associates himself that they suggest ‘that when I look, or at any rate believe myself to be looking, at the table in front of me, what I primarily see is not the table at all but something else, which has the impermanence and also the subjectivity of a mental image.
12 Peacocke, , 1983, Ch. 1, 52–53Google Scholar. I am reassured that while he takes qualia or sense-data theories to have a core of correctness, he does not suppose that there are subjective entities which we perceive. (Letter).
13 Tye, Michael, ‘Visual Qualia and Visual Content’, forthcoming.Google Scholar
14 At any rate it did for a while take me aback. (See Honderich, and Burnyeat, , 1979, 312).Google Scholar
15 Here and elsewhere in this paper, I do not disagree, as may seem possible, with pp. 42–44 of Strawson's admirable essay, ‘Perception and Its Objects’ (1979), where it is allowed that we can give a certain restricted description of our perceptual experience. Strawson does not in fact allow the existence of private objects of perception.
16 There is at least a suggestion of this error in Mackie, , 1976, 48–49.Google Scholar
17 I see that this supposition is at least implicit in Foster, John, A. J. Ayer (London, 1985), 161–177.Google Scholar
18 On the point of whether a Mental Realist theory of mind and brain more arguable than interactionism is rightly called dualist, see Honderich, , op. cit., 110–111.Google Scholar
19 Davidson, , 1986, 1989, 1990Google Scholar. Davidson is also opposed to what was mentioned above, but not considered, the common discovery of an object of awareness along with an attitude within what I call a representative content.
20 Crane, , 1988Google Scholar; ‘The Non-Conceptual Content of Perception’, forthcoming.
21 Cf. Fred Dretske's distinction between analogue and digital coding of information in Dretske, , 1981, Ch. 6.Google Scholar
22 OP, 303. For an admirable examination of the related views of Carnap and Reichenbach, see Hilary Putnam's paper in this volume.Google Scholar
23 As remarked above, they are well surveyed in Hookway, (1988).Google Scholar
24 CQ, 65Google Scholar; PK, 85–90Google Scholar. On scepticism about scepticism, cf. the last section of Putnam's paper in this volume.