DeleteduserrcJanuary 08, 2017 at 03:2017550 views175 comments
Anyone interested in reading it? Been hearing so much hype, from so many different quarters, for so long, that I want to just do the damn thing. Anyone else?
Comments (175)
Terrapin StationJanuary 08, 2017 at 14:01#452210 likes
I'd participate. I was hoping we'd do more "let's read a book together" threads.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 09, 2017 at 03:02#454030 likes
Cool, I'm glad there's interest. I've read about half of the paper and it's pretty dense, so I think reading maybe 2 sections a week would be a good pace.There's a lot to digest. I'd say three sections a week, but, in the first half of the paper at least, the sections are kind of organized into couplets. Reading three a week would throw off the rhythm of the paper.. I'd also prefer to do this as a free-form reading group without any leader (I'm also too lazy/busy to commit to holding that position.) So what do you all think, read the first two sections (An ambiguity in Sense Datum Theories & Another Language?) by next sunday?
DeleteduserrcJanuary 09, 2017 at 03:03#454040 likes
Reply to Cavacava Yeah, that's the paper! Thanks for the link. It can also be found here, handily formatted section by section: http://www.ditext.com/sellars/epm.html
Terrapin StationJanuary 09, 2017 at 16:52#455520 likes
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is the most famous article written by Wilfrid Sellars. Harvard Edition includes Robert Brandom's study guide. Robert Brandom's Articulating Reasons will help you understand Sellars' thoughts.
Student2381601January 15, 2017 at 16:07#470010 likes
Hey everyone, fairly new to philosophy.
I have been reading through quite a few of the empiricists over the past few weeks: Russel, Hanson, Maxwell and van Fraassen. So I'm pretty interested in reading some Sellers, I got a few points down.
Can someone tell me what the heck a "carrier of slabs" is???????? (VII. in the beginning)
DeleteduserrcJanuary 15, 2017 at 17:09#470460 likes
Can someone tell me what the heck a "carrier of slabs" is????????
It's a reference to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. If you're not familiar with the Big Themes of that work, one central idea is that 'the meaning of a word is its use' and that 'to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.' To illustrate this idea, Wittgenstein imagines a very simple form of life - builders using 'slabs' to construct something - and a correspondingly simple language - 'slab' is used to request a slab from another worker etc. Here's the text. Sections 1 & 2 are the relevant ones.
Terrapin StationJanuary 15, 2017 at 19:37#470830 likes
Re the beginning of Sellars paper, the first big problem I have with it is his distinction between particulars and facts.
Facts are particulars. Re his examples of facts: (i) something's being thus-and-so, and (ii) something's standing in a certain relation to something else, those are both examples of particulars on my view.
So sensing particulars isn't mutually exclusive with knowing facts. Not that I buy sense data theory, but this is a major problem with his analysis of a putative dilemma with sense data theory.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 15, 2017 at 20:09#470880 likes
Facts are particulars. Re his examples of facts: (i) something's being thus-and-so, and (ii) something's standing in a certain relation to something else, those are both examples of particulars on my view.
Not sure I understand what you are referring to in regard to what he says. Seller's thinks that particulars are sensed. The problem he has, as I understand it, is that in that the sensation of sense datum can't act as epistemic knowledge of what is being sensed, sense datum itself is non-cognitive.
How do you conceive of sense datum?
My concern has to do with what is Given. Suppose I'm walking though a park and I say "that tree is green" did what I experienced (the green tree) demonstrate its presence to me as part of my experience of the park or does the statement "that tree is green" represent my experience, which in itself has no content.
The difference is that on the representational approach, I am to some extent responsible for what I experience and on the presentational approach I am somewhat passive in regards to the tree I experience.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 00:34#471400 likes
In the standard way, or at least per the core of the standard way. For example, per Wikipedia: "In metaphysics, particulars are defined as concrete, spatiotemporal entities as opposed to abstract entities."
However, I do not agree that properties--or anything, for that matter, aren't particulars.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 16, 2017 at 00:43#471410 likes
Not sure I understand what you are referring to in regard to what he says.
He says the following:
Wilfrid Sellars:. . . according to sense-datum theorists, it is particulars that are sensed. For what is known even in non-inferential knowledge, is facts rather than particulars, items of the form something's being thus-and-so or something's standing in a certain relation to something else . . . The sense-datum theorist, it would seem, must choose between saying . . . Sensing is a form of knowing. It is facts rather than particulars which are sensed.
As with "particulars," I just use "sense data" in the usual way. Per SEP for example:
SEP:Sense data are the alleged mind-dependent objects that we are directly aware of in perception, and that have we are directly aware of in perception, and that have exactly the properties they appear to have. For instance, sense data theorists say that, upon viewing a tomato in normal conditions, one forms an image of the tomato in one's mind. This image is red and round. The mental image is an example of a 'sense datum.' Many philosophers have rejected the notion of sense data, either because they believe that perception gives us direct awareness of physical phenomena, rather than mere mental images . . .
That last sentence describes me.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 00:49#471430 likes
DeleteduserrcJanuary 16, 2017 at 01:14#471510 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Are you asking what the difference is between understanding that someone is wrong and understanding why they believe that wrong thing?
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 04:17#471920 likes
No, I'm not asking that. What I said above was not that I understand that they're wrong. I said that I understand what they believe, and that what they believe is wrong. So I'm asking you what the difference is on your view between understanding what they believe and understanding why they believe it.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 16, 2017 at 04:34#471950 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Ok, sure, if you want to split absolutely inconsequential semantic hairs, I'll grant you that. This kind of thing doesn't further conversation whatsoever, but it seems important to you, and I want you to feel comfortable.
Not believing that facts are particulars doesn't entail believing any other one thing. All it means is believing 'facts are not particulars.' I'm sure you do understand 'facts are not particulars.' What I'm asking is: Do you understand why people would think that? [let me be entirely forthright: I don't you think you actually do understand the thought behind it. I think you're stalling. I think you have a very simple idea: 'All that there is is material things' & instead of engaging philosophically with anything, you just see how a sentence stands up against this pre-established idea. Basically, terrapin, I think you're very bad at philosophy and I think you're paticipating in this group in bad faith. But I'm willing to be proven wrong. Show me!)
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 04:57#471960 likes
I don't you think you actually do understand the thought behind it.
Yeah, no shit, as if there was some doubt about you being unjustifiably arrogant and patronizing. You'd probably find conversations furthered better without that attitude.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 16, 2017 at 05:02#472000 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Sorry man. Understanding what someone believes is not understanding why they believe it. If you don't already understand this, no one can explain it to you. I've had lots of good conversations with people on this board. If you don't like the patronizing, arrogant responses*, then step up your game, and I'll gladly meet you.
* is there anything more patronizing and arrogant then saying something like 'well in my view,this is false, so I disagree'? Without arguing for that view? You do this constantly.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 05:15#472010 likes
Here's another problem with the Sellars paper: he says, "It would seem, then, that the sensing of sense contents cannot constitute knowledge, inferential or non-inferential; and if so, we may well ask, what light does the concept of a sense datum throw on the 'foundations of empirical knowledge?'"
He's assuming that for the concept of sense data to throw light on the foundations of empirical knowledge, sense data must itself be knowledge. But that assumption is completely unsupported in Sellars' paper. He just proceeds as if it goes without saying.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 05:16#472020 likes
So do you have anything to say about the first couple sections of Sellars' paper, or are you just never going to get around to that?
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 05:27#472030 likes
The "unfortunate, familiar" line of thought that "scarcely anyone" would accept sounds pretty good. And the response:
Rather they would take the contrapositive of the argument, and reason that since the foundation of empirical knowledge is the non-inferential knowledge of such facts, it does consist of members of a class which contains non-veridical members.
While in some sense logically unassailable, has the flavor of an appeal to consequence. That is, I can't understand the motivation for taking this line, except from deciding a priori that a certain conclusion is unacceptable and so rejecting any argument that reaches it.
though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical.
Hmm. Why does Sellars think this?
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 05:40#472040 likes
He's assuming that for the concept of sense data to throw light on the foundations of empirical knowledge, sense data must itself be knowledge
No, he's saying that if sensation itself does not constitute knowledge, then it's appropriate to ask in what sense sensation grounds knowledge. He acknowledges a couple times that having a sensation might be a logically necessary condition to coming to empirical knowledge, and thus serve as a 'foundation' in some sense other than being a 'cognitive fact' (i.e. sensation constituting knowledge in of itself).
Yet it would be hasty to conclude that this alternative precludes any logical connection between the sensing of sense contents and the possession of non-inferential knowledge. For even if the sensing of sense contents did not logically imply the existence of non-inferential knowledge, the converse might well be true. Thus, the non-inferential knowledge of particular matter of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data (for example, seeing that a certain physical object is red might logically imply sensing a red sense content) even though the sensing of a red sense content were not itself a cognitive fact and did not imply the possession of non-inferential knowledge.
Although I do think it's odd for him to equate the notions of 'being a cognitive fact' and 'constituting knowledge.'
Here, I'll take a swing at it. I think Sellars means something like this:
"I had experience x."
"I had experience x, and it was veridical."
If the former is the same as the latter, then the second clause in the second statement is vacuous and veridicality adds nothing to the discussion. If, on the other hand, the second clause in the second statement is not vacuous, then these are two different statements. It follows that "Having a veridical experience of P" is something over and above "Having an experience of P." But this implies that veridicality is "optional" - it makes sense to speak of the experience as lacking veridicality.
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:03#472060 likes
Reply to Pneumenon That can't be right, though, because the sense datum theorist doesn't claim that all things of the form 'I had experience X' have no duality between veridicality and non-veridicality, only that there's a certain class of experiences that it makes no sense of to call non-veridical.
The question is why Sellars thinks, of that class, why this must be sensical. One might think (quite reasonably – this seems to be a recurring trend in philosophy for thousands of years) that claims grounded in experience that are about that experience itself self-verify, and so it makes sense to speak of them as veridical but not as non-veridical. The whole point of non-veridicality, if you like, is that there was a seeming that led you to believe something that wasn't so. But if what 'was so' was merely the seeming, this possibility seems to become incoherent. Sellars seems to want to say that this makes veridicality incoherent too, but I'm not sure what leads him to think this.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:09#472080 likes
He explains this in this passage:
Wilfrid Sellars:Now it is, of course, possible to delimit subclasses of ostensible seeings, hearings, etc., which are progressively less precarious, i.e. more reliable, by specifying the circumstances in which they occur, and the vigilance of the perceiver. But the possibility that any given ostensible seeing, hearing, etc., is non-veridical can never be entirely eliminated. Therefore, given that the foundation of empirical knowledge cannot consist of the veridical members of a class not all the members of which are veridical, and from which the non-veridical members cannot be weeded out by 'inspection,' this foundation cannot consist of such items as seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular.
I don't at all buy his "therefore" in that passage, though. It seems like a non-sequitur to me.
Reply to The Great Whatever Right, it occurred to me after typing that that I may have fallen into the exact same error as Sellars. Let me look a little further into this...
You are saying that the claim, "I saw a red triangle," is self-verifying if it's grounded in the experience of seeing a red triangle. My first instinct is to assert that we can be wrong about our experiences, but I sense that this would miss your point. You're saying that, if claim A is solely about experience B, and claim A is solely grounded in experience B, then A can't be non-veridical. That is to say, if I have experience B, I can't infer a falsehood about experience B solely from that experience. Do I have you right, or at least, mostly right?
EDIT: d'oh, seems like you edited your post! Lemme read it again real quick and re-assess.
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:14#472100 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station As I read this passage Sellars is speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist, and has not yet reached the sense data punch line, viz. that the foundations of empirical knowledge must depend upon a class of things that don't have veridical and non-veridical members that are in principle indistinguishable, and that sense data or appearings are such an appropriate class. It's only afterward that he makes the objection, that the possibility of veridicality implies the possibility of non-veridicality, and this, so far as I can see, he does not explain or justify, but merely says. I don't expect to find an answer for why he believes it in the paper, because I don't think he gives one. I'm just speculating on why he might think that.
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:17#472110 likes
Reply to Pneumenon Yeah, that sounds about right. I think you could make a case for delusion, linguistic incompetence, etc. creeping in even at this level, to get non-veridicality back in the door, but this seems to rely on people not being within their wits, which is not usually what epistemologists have in mind in these sorts of scenarios. The point is supposed to be that with claims about objects, there's no way to tell the difference between veridicality and non-veridicality in any particular case, not that one might slip up and miss the difference, misunderstand their own language, etc. In other words, even a perfectly alert and rational person could never tell the difference in principle between a veridical and non-veridical experience of an object in at least some cases, whereas it seems absent such lack of faculties, that kind of mistake isn't possible in the experience-oriented case.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:21#472130 likes
Well, but the objection just turns out to be the old "we can't be 100% certain that any given sense datum is veridical," as if 100% certainty should be the goal, should be required, or is even possible.
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:25#472140 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Again, I don't think Sellars thinks that; I think he's speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist.
And in fairness to the sense datum theorist or skeptic generally, the point is not 'you can't be 100% sure,' but 'your epistemological commitments force you to say you can't even be 1% sure.' So it goes if you open the door to nonveridical perceptions that can't be distinguished from veridical ones, but believe experience is foundational to knowledge. The sense datum theorist sees a way to rescue knowledge via experience.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:28#472160 likes
I don't at all agree with your interpretation, and I don't think the passage makes sense on your interpretation. He's specifying that sense datum theorists point out that they can achieve progressively more reliable claims, but the problem in his view is that they can't rule out the possibility of non-veridicalness.
The whole point of non-veridicality, if you like, is that there was a seeming that led you to believe something that wasn't so. But if what 'was so' was merely the seeming, this possibility seems to become incoherent. Sellars seems to want to say that this makes veridicality incoherent too, but I'm not sure what leads him to think this.
Okay, I'm gonna conjecture a little hypothetical that might illustrate Sellars' intuition on this matter. I'm gonna ramble a little, but I'm still in the "clear the area" phase here. Let me see what I can do here...
Suppose I make this claim: "I experienced a red triangle." Where is the self-verifying experience here? The experience of the red triangle is not self-verifying, since I very well could have seemed to see a red triangle even if there wasn't one (bad lighting or whatever, to use one of Sellars' examples). You could say that it's not the experience, but the claim, "I experienced a red triangle," that is self-verifying, but that claim is grounded on my experience of remembering a former a experience.
But that isn't being completely charitable to what you've put forth (also with deference to your point about delusion/dream/linguistic skepticism not being relevant here). Let's try and push it a little further: while having the experience of seeing a red triangle, I say, "I seem to see a red triangle right now." You're saying I can't be wrong with that, yeah? Provided that the claim I'm making is totally grounded in just that experience, and nothing else, then I can't be wrong.
I can't think of a problem with this offhand, so let me fiddle with it a little. What would it take for me to be wrong here? I would need to have experience B, and infer something false about B, with only B as grounds for my claim. Obviously, I can lie about it, but I take it as implicit here that it's self-verifying for me only. I guess the only way out for Sellars here is to ask for an account of what it means for a claim to be grounded in an experience. Perhaps he could say that there is something a little fishy about saying, "For any experience I have, it is self-evident for me that I am having that experience." Does one have an experience of self-evidence here? Or is this more of a logical thing, inferred from what it means to have an experience?
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:32#472180 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Again, in that section he's speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist, and hasn't reached the conclusion (of the sense datum theorist) yet, which is that sense data constitute precisely such an empirical domain that rule out the possibility of non-veridicality.
His objection is then in one sentence, implying that the possibility of veridicality implies the possibility of non-veridicality.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:36#472200 likes
Again, in that section he's speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist,
I don't agree with this. He's explaining how a sense datum theorist might approach the problem, but he's critiquing the approach in that same paragraph. The comment about not being able to remove the possibility of non-veridicalness is part of Sellars' critique. It's not what a sense datum theorist would say.
That objection of not being able to remove the possibility of non-veridicalness is the old cliche of focusing on not being able to achieve certainty. Despite the fact that the sense-datum theorist is saying that increased reliability etc. is possible, Sellars is focusing the fact that it's still possible to be wrong.
I didn't agree with your earlier contrary interpretation about Sellars assuming that sense data being knowledge is necessary for it to throw light on sense data as a foundation for empirical knowledge, either, but I don't want to argue about every single interpretation, because probably that's all we'd be doing in this thread in that case.
"That seeming led me to believe that I had that same seeming." I could question this claim, but, if it's true, then the belief (that I had that seeming) can't be false.
How's this: "It makes sense to talk of that belief as being unveridical because it makes sense to talk of the claim, "This belief was grounded in that seeming" being false."?
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:49#472250 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Alright, man, but I think this is less an issue of interpretation and more of reading comprehension. That is, I think you're misreading the paper on a very surface level.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 06:55#472260 likes
That is, I think you're misreading the paper on a very surface level.
Well, and you should be able to guess that the thought is mutual.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 07:03#472280 likes
With the second section, "Another Language," I don't have any major objections yet, at least barring a few comments in the last few paragraphs that I'm not sure I understand. The point of most of the second section is completely lost on me at the moment, though. . . it seems like a very laborious way to not say much beyond the (maybe kind of sarcastic/spoofy) idea that we could read sense data sentences as being akin to logical variables (with quantification). But Sellars promises that it's leading up to something, so we'll see as we go on.
According to Sellars, sense-data are not epistemic elements. Empiricists thought that sense-data are directly 'given' to epistemic subjects. Sellars thought that sense-data should be constituted by linguistic ways to be epistemic. This is called Sellars' psychological nominalism. According to psychological nominalism, language is prior to sense-data.
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 10:43#472390 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Well, regarding the first point of disagreement, I've provided what I think is pretty damning textual evidence against you. To repeat, this:
He's assuming that for the concept of sense data to throw light on the foundations of empirical knowledge, sense data must itself be knowledge
Cannot be right, given that he says this:
Yet it would be hasty to conclude that this alternative [that is, alternative (a), that sensing is not itself knowing] precludes any logical connection between the sensing of sense contents and the possession of non-inferential knowledge. For even if the sensing of sense contents did not logically imply the existence of non-inferential knowledge, the converse might well be true. Thus, the non-inferential knowledge of particular matter of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data (for example, seeing that a certain physical object is red might logically imply sensing a red sense content) even though the sensing of a red sense content were not itself a cognitive fact and did not imply the possession of non-inferential knowledge.
That gets as close to a straight denial of your claim from the text itself as I can think of. He also says this:
He can abandon A, in which case the sensing of sense contents becomes a noncognitive fact -- a noncognitive fact, to be sure which may be a necessary condition, even a logically necessary condition, of non-inferential knowledge, but a fact, nevertheless, which cannot constitute this knowledge.
Now being a logically necessary condition of non-inferential knowledge clearly is a way in which something 'throws light' on the foundations of empirical knowledge. But this is something that he allows of sense data, even if sense data is not itself knowledge.
So your claim that he thinks the only way something can 'throw light' on the foundations of empirical knowledge is for that thing to actually constitute knowledge, is wrong.
---
Regarding the second disagreement, you seem to be implying that Sellars is critiquing the sense datum theorist for allowing uncertainty in their empirical foundations, which is just not the point of this first section. The point is rather that sense datum theorists have according to him been confused about whether or not sensing something is an inherently epistemic or cognitive fact.
Furthermore, the two paragraphs in which he talks about 'progressively less precarious' subclasses of sensations are in quotations, followed by these words:
This unfortunate, but familiar, line of thought runs as follows:
This signals that Sellars is taking the viewpoint of the sense datum theorist in order to criticize it, not expressing his own view as you imply above. He then concludes by saying that the sense datum theorist is subject to confusions, not that he fails to secure some sort of apodicticity in his position. The latter is simply not what this section of the paper is about.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 12:37#472560 likes
Okay, if you want to endlessly argue with me about interpretation, let's do that. That will be fun.
(1) you'd need to argue that the non-inferential knowledge of particular matter of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data is sufficient to amount to noncogntive sense data throwing light on the foundations of empirical knowledge, especially in light of the fact that he says, "It would seem, then, that the sensing of sense contents cannot constitute knowledge, inferential or non-inferential; and if so, we may well ask, what light does the concept of a sense datum throw on the 'foundations of empirical knowledge?"
So your argument that Sellars counts non-inferential knowledge of particular matters of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data is sufficient for noncognitive sense data throwing light on the foundations of empirical knowledge is ________?
Re this:
Wilfrid Sellars:He can abandon A, in which case the sensing of sense contents becomes a noncognitive fact -- a noncognitive fact, to be sure which may be a necessary condition, even a logically necessary condition, of non-inferential knowledge, but a fact, nevertheless, which cannot constitute this knowledge.
The "a logically necessary condition" is simply a reference/restatement of what you'd just quoted. Again, that reason that makes it sufficient to throw a light on the foundations of empirical knowledge in Sellars opinion, in your view, is _______?
you seem to be implying that Sellars is critiquing the sense datum theorist for allowing uncertainty in their empirical foundations,
I didn't say that. I said that he's critiquing the approach arguing for increased reliability, etc. on the grounds that it's still (merely) possible for sense data to be wrong about "sense content" (a horrible term for what he's talking about there on my view).
I'm also not saying that my comments about this are in the context of the "point" of the first section.
Regarding the second disagreement,
Actually rereading that section, I'd agree that Sellars is not speaking for himself in the comment about the possibility of being wrong about sense content, but I still don't agree that he's presenting the view of sense data theorists either. In fact, I'm not sure whose view he's presenting--he might not be accurately presenting anyone's view in a way that anyone would agree with. He says right before that:
Wilfrid Sellars:Unfortunately, the idea that there are such things as sensations of red triangles . . . seems to fit the requirements of another . . . line of thought so well that it has almost invariably been distorted to give the latter a reinforcement without which it would long ago have collapsed.
Right after which he says:
Wilfried Sellars:Thus baldly put, scarcely anyone would accept this conclusion.
So who is he supposedly paraphrasing "baldly" anyway?
though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical.
Hmm. Why does Sellars think this?
He wants to formally separate sense datum from our conception of sense datum, the former non-cognitive and non-intelligible and the latter both cognitive and intelligible.
So:
"I had experience x."
"I had experience x, and it was veridical."
Where "I had experience x", is a report. The actual experience, at its own level of immediacy has no valuation, no intelligible content. We may be unable to be wrong about having an experience, but that does not give it any value, only its report can be judged true or false. To claim that immediate sense experience has any true or false value is to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 19:36#473420 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Again, I think this is a matter of reading comprehension, not interpretation, which is important to a reading group.
So your argument that Sellars counts non-inferential knowledge of particular matters of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data is sufficient for noncognitive sense data throwing light on the foundations of empirical knowledge is ________?
There's no argument to be had: Sellars outright admits that even if sensation of sense data doesn't constitute knowledge, it might nonetheless shed light on the foundations of empirical knowledge (i.e. by being a logically necessary condition for empirical knowledge), contrary to your claim. You essentially are saying the opposite of what Sellars says in the paper.
So who is he supposedly paraphrasing "baldly" anyway?
The sense datum theorist. Hence why the very paragraphs end with conclusions about sense data, and right after he says that not all sense datum theorists have been subject to certain confusions, but that they have formed an integral part of the tradition.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 19:53#473480 likes
Sellars outright admits that even if sensation of sense data doesn't constitute knowledge, it might nonetheless shed light on the foundations of empirical knowledge (i.e. by being a logically necessary condition for empirical knowledge),
Hahaha--just reword your interpretation as if that's what he said, and then have the balls to lecture someone else on reading comprehension. Nice.
Also, reading comprehension is interpretation.
The Great WhateverJanuary 16, 2017 at 20:31#473500 likes
Interpretation can't happen until reading comprehension is complete. A 'criticism' that misreads a paper on the most basic level is not even a criticism; it hasn't yet understood well enough to be in a position to criticize.
Such is, for example, the 'criticism' that Sellars' 'therefore' in his quoted paragraphs is a non sequitur; it misreads the text in such a fundamental way, in thinking that Sellars is there making an argument, and not speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist, that it is not a cogent criticism. To think that Sellars is here criticizing the sense datum theorist for not being rigorous enough in excluding the possibility of non-veridicality is not yet to engage with this paper, because that is not what's going on.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 20:32#473510 likes
I don't know when we're moving on to part III, "The Logic of 'Looks'" . . . one big problem with that section is that Sellars explains the difference between "x looks green to S" and "S sees that x is green" so that "sees" is referring to inferential knowledge and an endorsement of the claim "x is green," in the manner that one would say "S has come to believe that x is green," while "looks" is being used in the phenomenal sense.
However, he then goes on to say:
Wilfrid Sellars:Thus, when I say "X looks green to me now" I am reporting the fact that my experience is, so to speak, intrinsically, as an experience, indistinguishable from a veridical one of seeing that x is green.
But given the difference he just established between "looks" and "sees," it's not at all the case that as an experience, "looks" is indistinguishable from "sees." In fact, in most cases, for most individuals that is, that's surely wrong.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 20:33#473520 likes
You always tease with that promise, but so far haven't followed through.
Terrapin StationJanuary 16, 2017 at 20:53#473590 likes
Also re part III, this is not at all a necessary truth:
"x is red .<--> . x looks red to standard observers in standard conditions"
The left-hand side is about the objective properties of the object in question. The right-hand side is about the subjective experience of the object in question, or that is, the perception, of the object in question. It could easily be the case that x has a property that, given the metaphysics of a possible world, always appears differently to observers than it is, and this could be the case so that the property in question, for some existents, is perceived accurately. In other words, it could merely be a quirk of that particular (type of) object.
Of course, we could say that we're going to use "red" on the left-hand side stipulatively so that whatever it looks like to us under standard conditions is the property that we're going to assume it veridically has, but there's nothing necessary about that.
Wilfrid Sellars:As our friend John becomes more and more sophisticated about his own and other people's visual experiences, he learns under what conditions it is as though one were seeing a necktie to be of one color when in fact it is of another. Suppose someone asks him "Why does this tie look green to me?" John may very well reply "Because it is blue, and blue objects look green in this kind of light." And if someone asks this question when looking at the necktie in plain daylight, John may very well reply "Because the tie is green" -- to which he may add "We are in plain daylight, and in daylight things look what they are."
The same thing would go just as well in both cases.
"Why does this look green to me?" "Because it is blue, and blue objects look green in this kind of light."
"Why does this look blue to me?" "Because it is green, and green objects look blue in this kind of light."
Neither sort of light is ontologically privileged. What would actually be the case with the object is that in light 1, it looks green, and in light 2, it looks blue. Both would be accurate.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 17, 2017 at 03:13#474380 likes
[quote=Pneumenon]Here, I'll take a swing at it. I think Sellars means something like this:
"I had experience x."
"I had experience x, and it was veridical."
If the former is the same as the latter, then the second clause in the second statement is vacuous and veridicality adds nothing to the discussion. If, on the other hand, the second clause in the second statement is not vacuous, then these are two different statements. It follows that "Having a veridical experience of P" is something over and above "Having an experience of P." But this implies that veridicality is "optional" - it makes sense to speak of the experience as lacking veridicality.[/quote]
[quote=tgw]]That can't be right, though, because the sense datum theorist doesn't claim that all things of the form 'I had experience X' have no duality between veridicality and non-veridicality, only that there's a certain class of experiences that it makes no sense of to call non-veridical.[/quote]
I think the key is to focus on why Sellars' sense theorist is honing in on this special class. For these theorists, its meant as an solution to a problem: If there is no way to determine whether an experience is veridical or non-veridical, then how can knowledge get off the ground? So a class is identified where it is possible to make such a determination. And so we have a foundation on which we can build.
But how can we can move from knowledge gained from necessarily veridical experience to knowledge involving potentially non-veridical experiences? That's the rub.
The experience of non-veridicality precedes the idea of veridicality. The very idea of veridicality would be meaningless if we hadn't already experienced being wrong. (it's an anstoss type of logic.)
The necessarily veridical class of experiences operates on a pre-having-experienced-being-wrong level. It doesn't leave that level because it can't leave that level. But, by that same token, it can't shed any light on anything outside its own class. The veridicality of experiencing e.g. a red triangle is a closed loop.
I think Pneumenon's analysis is more or less right. The sense datum-theorist does indeed hold on to the veridical/non-veridical distinction - but the logic of the class to which that distinction applies, simply does not apply to the class of the 'necessarily veridical.' Apples and oranges.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 17, 2017 at 03:18#474390 likes
Another way to put this is that the very idea of a necessarily veridical class can only be a backwards projection by someone who has experienced non-veridicality. If they had always remained within the purely veridical, they could never do this. It would be like the fish who doesn't know what water is.
Or, to use Hegelian language: the class of necessarily veridical experiences is only veridical for someone steeped in non-veridicality. In-itself (and it's precisely this in-itself the sense data theorist is trying to leverage) it's neither nor.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 17, 2017 at 03:31#474400 likes
Also, by the by, I don't know how much everyone's read ahead, but Sellars is super clever (I think the dude's actually internalized his Hegel. Was anyone else doing that in his milieu?) This essay straight up blossoms and it blossoms just where you want it to (so, for instance, the illustration of the clerk in the neck-tie shop, or whatever, touches on exactly the issues we're all discussing now.)
The Great WhateverJanuary 17, 2017 at 03:40#474420 likes
The experience of non-veridicality precedes the idea of veridicality. The very idea of veridicality would be meaningless if we hadn't already experienced being wrong. (it's an anstoss type of logic.)
I don't know, why? I think it's a coherent position to say that there are no non-veridical experiences, even if there are veridical ones. We might draw certain inferences or get certain expectations from veridical experiences that are unlicensed, and so have our expectations disappointed, but the issue with non-veridicality seems to be that realist assumptions about perception engender their possibility, not that we learn about non-veridicality from experience and so project veridicality back onto it.
The sense datum theorist seems to me to be seeking a realm in which act and object unite, making realist metaphysics of perception irrelevant, and hence the notion of non-veridicality that accompanies it. It always seemed to me that skeptical arguments about non-veridicality are only coherent, and are meant to be, in response to realist assumptions.
Veridicality doesn't seem to hinge on this – what you see is what you get.
--
Although I will say that the objection as Sellars outlines it -- that empirical knowledge can't rest on a secure foundation if it must come from a class of things that has non-veridical members that can't be distinguished surely by any mark -- presupposes that in order for knowledge to have a secure foundation, there must be a sure way of knowing that one knows in any particular case. But this just doesn't follow if we're interested in knowledge, not knowledge of that knowledge. It might be that we know all sorts of things, even if for any particular case we can't infallibly (or even reliably!) know that we know this.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 17, 2017 at 05:07#474640 likes
I don't know, why? I think it's a coherent position to say that there are no non-veridical experiences, even if there are veridical ones. We might draw certain inferences or get certain expectations from veridical experiences that are unlicensed, and so have our expectations disappointed, but the issue with non-veridicality seems to be that realist assumptions about perception engender their possibility, not that we learn about non-veridicality from experience and so project veridicality back onto it.
That's fair. Then realist assumptions themselves would be a reaction - a theoretical reaction - to disappointment. But, then, veridicality is meaningless without a minimal helping of realism. What does 'veridical' mean if not that the way things seem (or appear to be) coincide, in this case, with how they are.** If seeming and being are one and the same, then the very idea of veridicality is meaningless. (But then, to deal with the fact of disappointment, we would have to substitute a different kind of thinking, where the distinction would not be between seeming and being, but between valid expectations and invalid ones. And then, once again, my indisputably experiencing a red triangle would have no bearing on whether or not any corresponding expectations were valid or not.)
**Sellars, in a later section of this essay, gives an analysis of seeming/being that I find very satisfying.
Veridicality doesn't seem to hinge on this – what you see is what you get.
But the whole thing with veridicality is that what you see might not be what you get (i.e. you might be wrong.) If you can't be wrong, then you'll always get what you see, and you won't even comprehend the idea of that not happening.
Although I will say that the objection as Sellars outlines it -- that empirical knowledge can't rest on a secure foundation if it must come from a class of things that has non-veridical members that can't be distinguished surely by any mark -- presupposes that in order for knowledge to have a secure foundation, there must be a sure way of knowing that one knows in any particular case. But this just doesn't follow if we're interested in knowledge, not knowledge of that knowledge. It might be that we know all sorts of things, even if for any particular case we can't infallibly (or even reliably!) know that we know this.
But the reason we want to know that we know isn't that we're interested in any sort of meta claims. It's not even (at least not at first) a cartesian defense against an evil demon. It's that we thought we knew, but we turned out to be wrong. We thought we knew, but we didn't. So then: how do we know whether we really know? Of course, we'll never be wrong about having seen a red triangle, or experiencing an emotional or spiritual movement while listening to song x. But we may be wrong such that e.g. the rocket we engineered to get to the moon can't even get out of earth's atmosphere. In any case, Sellars is subtle (or at least cautious here.) As you've mentioned he's talking from the sense-datum theorist's point of view, and it's the sense-datum theorist who is hunting for something that we know that we know, and therefore honing in on this class. But even if we disagree with the conclusions of the sense-data theorist, I think one can see where they're coming from.
Terrapin StationJanuary 17, 2017 at 13:30#475260 likes
Also, by the by, I don't know how much everyone's read ahead, but Sellars is super clever (I think the dude's actually internalized his Hegel. Was anyone else doing that in his milieu?) This essay straight up blossoms and it blossoms just where you want it to (so, for instance, the illustration of the clerk in the neck-tie shop, or whatever, touches on exactly the issues we're all discussing now.)
My opinion of the essay so far is that it's horribly written, but then I again, I hate Hegel. He's not quite as garbage as Heidegger, but he's not far from it.
Terrapin StationJanuary 17, 2017 at 13:34#475290 likes
The experience of non-veridicality precedes the idea of veridicality. The very idea of veridicality would be meaningless if we hadn't already experienced being wrong. (it's an anstoss type of logic.)
I don't buy that. I think that would only work if one thought that veridicality were necessarily the case. One could believe that veridicality is contingent instead, and that one's sense data haven't happened to be wrong yet, while one could still imagine the possibility.
Another way to put this is that the very idea of a necessarily veridical class can only be a backwards projection by someone who has experienced non-veridicality.
Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical.
But, then, veridicality is meaningless without a minimal helping of realism.
That was my immediate thought in response to that, too, but then this struck me: why couldn't it be the case for an idealist (an idealist who adheres to a sense data view in this case) to believe that their sense data could fail to correspond with ideal existents? The only thing that a veridicality/non-veridicality dichotomy requires, logically, is that one's sense data (or one's phenomenal experiences on a view like mine) (a) don't exhaust the world ontologically, and (b) ostensibly have some sort of correlation to things that aren't one's sense data or phenomenal experiences.
As you've mentioned he's talking from the sense-datum theorist's point of view, and it's the sense-datum theorist who is hunting for something that we know that we know, and therefore honing in on this class. But even if we disagree with the conclusions of the sense-data theorist, I think one can see where they're coming from.
It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say both that (i) there are both veridical and non-veridical sense data, and at best we have methods of knowing that some sense data are more reliable than others, and (ii) they're forwarding sense-data theory in a bid for epistemic certainty.
You're saying that, if claim A is solely about experience B, and claim A is solely grounded in experience B, then A can't be non-veridical. That is to say, if I have experience B, I can't infer a falsehood about experience B solely from that experience. Do I have you right, or at least, mostly right?
I see a red triangle. Upon seeing it, I form the belief, "I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle." What is necessarily veridical here? Following the above quote, the necessarily veridical thing must be my belief that I'm having that experience. Which means that there's no room for error in the process of my forming a belief about an experience that I'm having, provided that that belief is solely derived from that experience.
Now, we want to say this: "For this class of beliefs, it makes no sense to say that they are non-veridical." We're not just saying that all such beliefs are veridical, but that it it is senseless to talk about them any other way. If this is true, then it must be logically necessary for those beliefs to be veridical, which is to say that "A belief of this class is non-veridical" must imply a contradiction. (You can substitute "claim" for belief here, if you like - I think TGW used that word a few pages back)
It seems to me that the most obvious way to get this result is to say that the experience in question is identical to the belief. My belief that I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle must be that experience. If you didn't want to say that, I guess you could appeal to an infallible belief-forming faculty.
Thoughts, anyone?
Terrapin StationJanuary 18, 2017 at 12:52#478010 likes
I see a red triangle. Upon seeing it, I form the belief, "I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle." What is necessarily veridical here? Following the above quote, the necessarily veridical thing must be my belief that I'm having that experience. Which means that there's no room for error in the process of my forming a belief about an experience that I'm having, provided that that belief is solely derived from that experience.
We just had a big discussion about this in the thread about whether we can be mistaken about any experiences . . . let me find it to give you a link:
You could get a belief about an experience (a phenomenal experience that is) wrong if the belief and the phenomenal experience aren't both presently occurring--you could remember it incorrectly, for example.
However, Sellars' comments about veridical and non-veridical sense data aren't about this to my understanding. The idea is that sense data are getting something else--whatever is causing them, where we're not directly aware of what's causing them--right or wrong. Of course, talking about sense data in that way, it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical.
The Great WhateverJanuary 18, 2017 at 17:27#478580 likes
We don't; but then, epistemologists usually don't frame the question this way, but rather in terms of 'Do we know?' or 'how do we know?' Some sort of sliding happens between knowledge and knowledge of knowledge (some people even think the so-called 'KK' principle is valid).
DeleteduserrcJanuary 18, 2017 at 18:28#478630 likes
Reply to The Great Whatever Any way you slice it, the 'figure' of the sense-datum theorist, in Sellars' essay, is seeking foundational experiences - experiences which, unlike other experiences, can be determined to be veridical (whereas the others have no 'inspectable hallmark'). The point of this 'figure' is represent a way of thinking which Sellars is going to go on to criticize. (And, without saying I agree with it, I think 'knowing that we know' is an understandable approach, tho I'm not familiar with the literature on the 'kk' principle.)
But maybe we're on the same page here, and I misread your intent in raising the point about knowledge of knowledge.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 18, 2017 at 18:54#478670 likes
It seems to me that the most obvious way to get this result is to say that the experience in question is identical to the belief. My belief that I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle must be that experience.
Yes, I think Sellars says something similar.
[quote=Sellars] Now it might seem that when confronted by this choice, the sense-datum theorist seeks to have his cake and eat it. For he characteristically insists both that sensing is a knowing and that it is particulars which are sensed. Yet his position is by no means as hopeless as this formulation suggests. For the 'having' and the 'eating' can be combined without logical nonsense provided that he uses the word know and, correspondingly, the word given in two senses. He must say something like the following:
The non-inferential knowing on which our world picture rests is the knowing that certain items, e.g. red sense contents, are of a certain character, e.g. red. When such a fact is non-inferentially known about a sense content, I will say that the sense content is sensed as being, e.g. red. I will then say that a sense content is sensed (full stop) if it is sensed as being of a certain character, e.g. red. Finally, I will say of a sense content that it is known if it is sensed (full stop), to emphasize that sensing is a cognitive or epistemic fact. [/quote]
To sense a red triangle is to know that triangle as red.
[quote=Sellars]This stipulated use of know would, however, receive aid and comfort from the fact there is, in ordinary usage, a sense of know in which it is followed by a noun or descriptive phrase which refers to a particular, thus
Do you know John?
Do you know the President?
Because these questions are equivalent to "Are you acquainted with John?" and "Are you acquainted with the President?" the phrase "knowledge by acquaintance" recommends itself as a useful metaphor for this stipulated sense of know and, like other useful metaphors, has congealed into a technical term.[/quote]
DeleteduserrcJanuary 18, 2017 at 19:02#478680 likes
Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical.
I think the answer to this is pretty straightforward. They've experienced something that seemed to be one way, but was actually another. Non-veridicality is coherent precisely because we understand the difference between seeming and being. A sense datum, on the other hand, would be necessarily veridical because its seeming is its being (but, again, this would seem to make the veridical/non-veridical distinction itself inappropriate to it.)
That was my immediate thought in response to that, too, but then this struck me: why couldn't it be the case for an idealist (an idealist who adheres to a sense data view in this case) to believe that their sense data could fail to correspond with ideal existents? The only thing that a veridicality/non-veridicality dichotomy requires, logically, is that one's sense data (or one's phenomenal experiences on a view like mine) (a) don't exhaust the world ontologically, and (b) ostensibly have some sort of correlation to things that aren't one's sense data or phenomenal experiences.
Sure, but, with that kind of idealism, we'd have to posit a bigger mind (like God's) that grounds the objects we, finite minds, only see through a glass darkly. This kind of idealism isn't ultimately all that different from realism - both deal with objects 'out there' we have limited access to.
It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say both that (i) there are both veridical and non-veridical sense data, and at best we have methods of knowing that some sense data are more reliable than others, and (ii) they're forwarding sense-data theory in a bid for epistemic certainty.
But it's not veridical and non-veridical sense data - it's veridical and non-veridical seeings. Or seeings and ostensible seeings. (this is the same point you made above, to Pneumenon "The idea is that sense data are getting something else--whatever is causing them, where we're not directly aware of what's causing them--right or wrong."
So, then, the story goes, the Sense data theorist moves on to this:
[quote=Sellars, outlining the sense data theorist's course of thought]The idea springs to mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues which ostensible seeings of red triangular physical surfaces lack.[/quote]
---------------
[quote=Terrapin]Of course, talking about sense data in that way, it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical.[/quote]
Right, that's Sellars point!
[quote=Sellars] they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical[/quote]
Terrapin StationJanuary 18, 2017 at 20:18#478810 likes
I think the answer to this is pretty straightforward. They've experienced something that seemed to be one way, but was actually another.
That would explain why someone who thought that experience was (necessarily) veridical could come to think otherwise.
That's not what I'm addressing here by this though: "Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical."
What I'm saying is that it's a logical possibility that Joe, say, believes that sense data are necessarily veridical, where Joe is saying something about sense data correlating with existents that are not themselves sense data, and where Joe has a view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent. That's a logically possible stance for someone to have.
A sense datum, on the other hand, would be necessarily veridical because its seeming is its being (but, again, this would seem to make the veridical/non-veridical distinction itself inappropriate to it.)
I agree with that--that it wouldn't make sense to even talk about the distinction if we're simply talking about sense data with respect to itself. For that reason, I don't believe that Sellars is talking about sense data in that sense when he discusses veridicality versus non-veridicality, because the distinction wouldn't make sense in that case.
Sure, but, with that kind of idealism, we'd have to posit a bigger mind (like God's) that grounds the objects we, finite minds, only see through a glass darkly. This kind of idealism isn't ultimately all that different from realism - both deal with objects 'out there' we have limited access to.
Yeah, they're similar in that respect, but still one is idealism and the other realism, because one posits that only mental things exist (or can be known if it's just epistemic idealism), whereas the other posits that non-mental things exist (and perhaps can be known).
But it's not veridical and non-veridical sense data - it's veridical and non-veridical seeings.
But wait though. Sellars says for example, "The first idea clearly arises in the attempt to explain the facts of sense perception in scientific style. How does it happen that people can have the experience which they describe by saying "It is as though I were seeing a red and triangular physical object" when either there is no physical object there at all, or, if there is, it is neither red nor triangular? The explanation, roughly, posits that in every case in which a person has an experience of this kind, whether veridical or not, he has what is called a 'sensation' or 'impression' 'of a red triangle.'"
The part I emphasized is a description of sense data. "Whether veridical or not," then, is about sense data in this passage (per the explanation of sense data theorists which he's going to be addressing). It's not an issue of veridical versus non-veridical seeings in the sense that Sellars is using that (namely, where a "seeing" is "S has come to believe that x is green").
Sellars, outlining the sense data theorist's course of thought:The idea springs to mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues which ostensible seeings of red triangular physical surfaces lack.
It's not clear to me how you're using "seeing" there so that it's different than "sensations of red triangles" by the way. Again, Sellars' distinction between "looks" and "seeings" seems to be that "looks" is another term for sense data (a la "x looks F to S") and that "seeings" are inferential statements of the sort "S has come to believe that x is F"). But you don't seem to be using "seeings" the same way as that above.
Of course, talking about sense data in that way, it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical. — Terrapin
Right, that's Sellars point!
Then why would we be talking about it as if anyone is saying that?
The Great WhateverJanuary 18, 2017 at 21:04#478990 likes
Reply to csalisbury Can't an experience be foundational without being able to be known that they are in every (or even most) instances? But yeah, I think this is orthogonal.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 18, 2017 at 23:00#479550 likes
That's not what I'm addressing here by this though: "Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical."
What I'm saying is that it's a logical possibility that Joe, say, believes that sense data are necessarily veridical, where Joe is saying something about sense data correlating with existents that are not themselves sense data, and where Joe has a view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent. That's a logically possible stance for someone to have.
Sure, so long as he has a different explanation of what seems like non-veridical experience (e.g. perhaps he'll have an explanation like the one TGW mentioned earlier: unlicensed inferences/invalid expectations.) Unless you're asking to imagine someone who has literally never had the experience of being in error?
But wait though. Sellars says for example, "The first idea clearly arises in the attempt to explain the facts of sense perception in scientific style. How does it happen that people can have the experience which they describe by saying "It is as though I were seeing a red and triangular physical object" when either there is no physical object there at all, or, if there is, it is neither red nor triangular? The explanation, roughly, posits that in every case in which a person has an experience of this kind, whether veridical or not, he has what is called a 'sensation' or 'impression' 'of a red triangle.'"
The part I emphasized is a description of sense data. "Whether veridical or not," then, is about sense data in this passage (per the explanation of sense data theorists which he's going to be addressing). It's not an issue of veridical versus non-veridical seeings in the sense that Sellars is using that (namely, where a "seeing" is "S has come to believe that x is green").
But the part you emphasized isn't a description of sense data. It's saying (in the voice of the sese data theorist) that sense data is a necessary condition for both any experience of an object and any experience that seems as though its of an object. Note that 'whether veridical or not' refers not to 'a sensation or impression' but to ' an experience of this kind.' And 'experience of this kind' refers to those experiences where it's 'as though [one] were seeing a red and triangular object.'
The end of that paragraph of you quoted the beginning of makes all this very explicit:
The core idea is that the proximate cause of such a sensation is only for the most part brought about by the presence in the neighborhood of the perceiver of a red and triangular physical object; and that while a baby, say, can have the 'sensation of a red triangle' without either seeing or seeming to see that the facing side of a physical object is red and triangular, there usually looks, to adults, to be a physical object with a red and triangular facing surface, when they are caused to have a 'sensation of a red triangle'; while without such a sensation, no such experience can be had.
It's not clear to me how you're using "seeing" there so that it's different than "sensations of red triangles" by the way.
You mean how Sellars is using 'seeing' there? That's a quote from Sellars, not me.
Then why would we be talking about it as if anyone is saying that?
It's claimed by Sellars that sense data theorists do say that, or at least make implicit use of the idea.
Terrapin StationJanuary 18, 2017 at 23:34#479780 likes
Sure, so long as he has a different explanation of what seems like non-veridical experience (e.g. perhaps he'll have an explanation like the one TGW mentioned earlier: unlicensed inferences/invalid expectations.) Unless you're asking to imagine someone who has literally never had the experience of being in error?
The latter. If someone believes that the very idea of non-veridicality is incoherent, they're not going to have the experience of being in error.
And 'experience of this kind' refers to those experiences where it's 'as though [one] were seeing a red and triangular object.'
How is it as though one is seeing a red and triangular object to a sense data theorist if one is not having a sense or impression of a red and triangular object?
It's claimed by Sellars that sense data theorists do say that,
Okay, but I said that it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical. Hence that isn't Sellars point if he's making that dubious claim.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 19, 2017 at 01:40#480510 likes
The latter. If someone believes that the very idea of non-veridicality is incoherent, they're not going to have the experience of being in error
right, but then the idea of veridicality is going to be incoherent as well - if you can't understand the one, you can't understand the other.
How is it as though one is seeing a red and triangular object to a sense data theorist if one is not having a sense or impression of a red and triangular object?
You wouldn't be able to, for the sense daa theorist. That's why the latter is claimed to be a necessary condition for the former.
Okay, but I said that it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical. Hence that isn't Sellars point if he's making that dubious claim.
I don't know if I understand. It isn't Sellars' claim. It's what he claims the archetypal sense data theorist claims (or at least implicitly believes)
DeleteduserrcJanuary 19, 2017 at 02:06#480560 likes
Can't an experience be foundational without being able to be known that they are in every (or even most) instances?
Yes, I think so, but then (if you're of a certain bent) it becomes a question of whether its a sturdy foundation. I think ultimately it actually is a cartesian question of certainty, I think terrapin might be right on that score (he just seems to confuse Sellars' view with the view of (Sellars understanding of) the sense data theorist.)
'Science and Metaphysics' is a good starting point to examine Sellars' philosophy of perception. It would be helpful to understand 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'.
numberjohnny5January 19, 2017 at 11:06#481270 likes
Neither sort of light is ontologically privileged. What would actually be the case with the object is that in light 1, it looks green, and in light 2, it looks blue. Both would be accurate.
I'd also go further and add that not only does the object look a particular colour in a particular light, but that that object IS that particular colour in that particular light (from a particular perspective, of course). The object's properties are being directly affected by the properties of the light source, which is affecting the properties of our perception of the object. So the object is "blue" in one kind of light, and "green" in another kind of light, and so on.
I'd also go further and add that not only does the object look a particular colour in a particular light, but that that object IS that particular colour in that particular light (from a particular perspective, of course). The object's properties are being directly affected by the properties of the light source, which is affecting the properties of our perception of the object. So the object is "blue" in one kind of light, and "green" in another kind of light, and so on.
I don't think this works, because the physics will not agree with that (it's the same wavelength in all cases, and nothing has changed on the object's surface), and you have optical illusions where we see color that isn't there at all.
It's clear that we're seeing the object as different colors in different lighting conditions, because that's how our color vision works, not because the object has different colorings.
If anyone wants to reject the above on idealistic grounds, you still have to account for optics and illusions. In idealist terminology, our experiences are in disagreement with one another as to whether the object's color changes.
Terrapin StationJanuary 19, 2017 at 12:43#481420 likes
right, but then the idea of veridicality is going to be incoherent as well - if you can't understand the one, you can't understand the other.
I don't at all buy that idea in general--that one can only understand (or think etc.) some x if one can understand (or think etc.) not-x or x's "opposite."
Someone could easily think that sense data necessarily get non sense data right a fortiori because it isn't even coherent to suppose that they could not get sense data right. For a hypothetical justification of this, imagine if someone were to think that sense data determines, in a causal way, what the non-sense data world is like, and that the non sense-data world couldn't even be otherwise. The idea of non-veridical sense data could thus be incoherent to them--it wouldn't even make any sense to them to try to imagine that the world could be otherwise, because it's so obvious to them that that's how the world works. Thus they take talk of non-veridicality to be completely vague nonsense that other people engage in.
You wouldn't be able to, for the sense daa theorist.
Right. Hence when we talk about veridical and non-veridical "seeing a red and triangular object" we're talking about veridical and non-veridical sense data when we're talking about sense data theorists.
It's what he claims the archetypal sense data theorist claims (or at least implicitly believes)
Right--that's Sellars' claim. But I don't know why we'd be claiming that any sense data theorist believes that, as there doesn't seem to be any reason to claim that. In other words, it's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist actually believes that.
Terrapin StationJanuary 19, 2017 at 12:44#481430 likes
I don't think this works, because the physics will not agree with that (it's the same wavelength in all cases, and nothing has changed on the object's surface), and you have optical illusions where we see color that isn't there at all.
It's not just the object's surface that's pertinent. It's the whole "system" in question--the object's surface, the light traveling from it, the way the light interacts with the atmosphere, the wavelengths at a particular point in space (the surface of your eye for example). Hence his "from a particular perspective."
It's important to remember that EVERYTHING we say is from a particular perspective, and there are no objectively privileged perspectives.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 20, 2017 at 19:20#483390 likes
Right. Hence when we talk about veridical and non-veridical "seeing a red and triangular object" we're talking about veridical and non-veridical sense data when we're talking about sense data theorists.
Before going further, I want to back up to the beginning of this thread of argumentation:
[quote=Terrapin] It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say both that (i) there are both veridical and non-veridical sense data, and at best we have methods of knowing that some sense data are more reliable than others, and (ii) they're forwarding sense-data theory in a bid for epistemic certainty[/quote]
I want to make sure I understand what you were saying here. I took you to mean that that it doesn't make sense to turn to sense-data for epistemic certainty, if one believes that it is characteristic of all sense data that we can only know to a limited extent whether they are 'veridical.' To hold such a position would be to contradict oneself. Is that what you meant?
Terrapin StationJanuary 20, 2017 at 19:46#483410 likes
The key is the first phrase: "It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say . . ."
I'm talking about what sense data theorists would say about their views. Comments and claims are being made about what their views are/what they would say. I'm skeptical of those comments and claims.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 20, 2017 at 19:55#483440 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station That's fine - I too could do with some citations or examples early on - but I think he provides ample historical evidence to support his claims (about the claims of others) as the essay progresses.
In any case, I just want to make sure I understand how you understand the claims Sellars imputes to the 'sense-data-theorist.' Was I reading you right?
[quote=csalisbury] I took you to mean that that it doesn't make sense to turn to sense-data for epistemic certainty, if one believes that it is characteristic of all sense data that we can only know to a limited extent whether they are 'veridical.' To hold such a position would be to contradict oneself. Is that what you meant?[/quote]
Terrapin StationJanuary 20, 2017 at 20:07#483450 likes
csalisbury:I took you to mean that that it doesn't make sense to turn to sense-data for epistemic certainty, if one believes that it is characteristic of all sense data that we can only know to a limited extent whether they are 'veridical.' To hold such a position would be to contradict oneself. Is that what you meant?
That's not what I was saying, but sure, if one were making a claim about epistemic certainty yet at the same time saying that one can only know to a limited extent whether the method in question entails veridicality, then yes, I'd agree that that wouldn't make sense.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 20, 2017 at 20:16#483460 likes
Could you point to where I'm misreading you, or possibly re-phrase what you were saying? I'm just trying to pinpoint the exact source of our disagreement.
Terrapin StationJanuary 20, 2017 at 20:25#483470 likes
Again, I'm saying that I'm extremely skeptical that any sense data theorists say both (a) that sense data provide anything like a foundation for epistemic certainty, and (b) that sense data can get things wrong and we can only achieve some degree of reliability for veridical claims.
I'd have to be shown a sense data theorist saying both of those things to believe that any actually say both of them.
In other words, the idea that anyone actually says both of those things seems like bullshit.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 20, 2017 at 20:33#483480 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Yeah, I understand that you're skeptical, but I'm trying to understand why you're skeptical. I provided my interepretation of why, based on what you'd written, you'd think that claim is bullshit. But you said that's not what you meant. So I'm trying to understand what you meant.
Terrapin StationJanuary 20, 2017 at 20:41#483500 likes
The difference is that I wasn't critiquing a putative sense data theorist view. I was critiquing the idea that that is any sense data theorists' view in the first place.
If you'd simply asked "Why do you believe that's not any sense data theorists' view?" to start, I would have said what I said above.
But what I meant by the sentence you quoted was that I'm not buying that that's any sense data theorists' view. So when you said, "Did you mean ____," I took it that you were asking about the entire sentence you quoted.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 20, 2017 at 23:01#484000 likes
This is why I think it's not a contradiction (while bracketing the legitimate questions of whether there are other problems with the account or whether there even really are theorists who hold these views)
So the view of Sellars' purported sense theorist is not both that there are no experiences which we can be certain are veridical and also that there are some which necessarily are. I agree that this would be absurd, and it's very difficult to imagine someone holding this position. What he's saying instead is that the sense data theorist begins with the idea that no experiences ('ostensible seeings") can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical, but then, upon discovering the idea of a class of necessarily veridical experiences (sensations, sense-data) realizes he was wrong. There are some experiences which are necessarily veridical.
Terrapin StationJanuary 20, 2017 at 23:44#484110 likes
What he's saying instead is that, the sense data theorists begins with the idea that no experiences ('ostensible seeings") can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical, but then, upon discovering the idea of necessarily veridical sense data, he realizes he was wrong. There are some experiences which are necessarily veridical.
I'm not sure where he says this, but to start, why would a sense data theorist begin with the idea that no experiences can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical?
DeleteduserrcJanuary 20, 2017 at 23:48#484130 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station He says it at the end of the first section (An Ambiguity in Sense Data Theories.) It's the 'unfortunate, but familiar, line of thought' + the paragraph after it.
[quote=Terrapin]why would a sense data theorist begin with the idea that no experiences can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical?[/quote]
Answer:
[quote=Sellars, speaking as the sense data theorist]The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -- let us call them 'ostensible seeings' -- some of the members of which are non-veridical; and there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical. [/quote]
Terrapin StationJanuary 21, 2017 at 00:00#484150 likes
But that doesn't have anything to do with what you just said.
Where in that is something about a sense data theorist starting with the idea that they can't determine whether an experience is veridical or not?
And you're not equating "determine" with "guaranteeing" are you? Those are two different terms, two different ideas.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 21, 2017 at 00:13#484170 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Not equation but seeing guarantee as a necessary condition of determining - but I'm glad to drop determine and replace it with guarantee.
Terrapin StationJanuary 21, 2017 at 00:19#484210 likes
Well, thats a huge difference though. Re guarantees we're talking about certainty. That's not the case with "determine."
If we're talking about guarantees instead, leaving aside for a moment the idea of where any sense data theorist begins with the idea that they can't guarantee veridicality (since it would be unusual for anyone to start with the opposite idea), how are we getting to the idea that some sense data theorists "realize that they were wrong" and say that they can guarantee veridicality? What the quote that you pasted says is that "there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical."
DeleteduserrcJanuary 21, 2017 at 01:05#484290 likes
Well, thats a huge difference though. Re guarantees we're talking about certainty. That's not the case with "determine."
I disagree. Determine is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus: "Ascertain or establish exactly by research or calculation" & Ascertain is defined by the OED thus: "Find (something) out for certain; make sure of:"
[quote=Terrapin]how are we getting to the idea that some sense data theorists "realize that they were wrong" and say that they can guarantee veridicality? What the quote that you pasted says is that "there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical."[/quote]
This is just a matter of reading the first section.
So: After the section I'd already quoted, Sellars continues, describing how the sense-data theorists come to the conclusion "Therefore, given that the foundation of empirical knowledge cannot consist of the veridical members of a class not all the members of which are veridical, and from which the non-veridical members cannot be weeded out by 'inspection,' this foundation cannot consist of such items as seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular."
In other words, this is the sense data theorist following his conclusion about 'there being no inspectible [sic] hallmark' to the bitter end (one which Sellars claims he cannot but be dissatisfied with.) But Then!
[quote=Sellars]The idea springs to mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues which ostensible seeings of red triangular physical surfaces lack. To begin with, the grammatical similarity of 'sensation of a red triangle' to "thought of a celestial city" is interpreted to mean, or, better, gives rise to the presupposition, that sensations belong to the same general pigeonhole as thoughts -- in short, are cognitive facts. Then, it is noticed that sensations are ex hypothesi far more intimately related to mental processes than external physical objects. It would seem easier to "get at" a red triangle of which we are having a sensation, than to "get at" a red and triangular physical surface. But, above all, it is the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations which strikes these philosophers, though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical. [/quote]
The phrase "The idea springs to mind" with which this passage opens signals that a new thought, has occurred, one which appears to offer a way out of the deadlock: Sensations cannot be unveridical.
Reply to csalisbury I have come to have a very high regard for Sellars as a philosopher, and for Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind in particular. It's great to see people digging into his work on the forum. I've read most of the thread and have to say that you seem to have Sellars pegged, which is pretty impressive considering that you just started reading him a couple of weeks ago. So kudos for that. The only thing more impressive than your grasp of Sellars is your patience with Terrapin. 8-)
DeleteduserrcJanuary 21, 2017 at 02:07#484410 likes
Reply to Aaron R I did not expect to like him this much at all. tbh, when I started this thread, before I started reading (beyond the first section) I saw him more as an irksome figure I wanted to know from inside, so I could dismiss him free from any charge of ignorance. But nah, he's great. And I think talking him out with others aids comprehension a lot - Very few philosophers have so much packed into so little space. And you don't necessarily realize how much is packed in until you talk it out. (And then you realize his precise phrasing indexes his own thoroughly dialectical thought. He's speaking so precisely, because he's done the back-and-forth himself. Or it seems like that.) Any one of these sections could be a stand-alone essay.
Terrapin StationJanuary 21, 2017 at 02:49#484520 likes
I disagree. Determine is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus: "Ascertain or establish exactly by research or calculation" & Ascertain is defined by the OED thus: "Find (something) out for certain; make sure of:"
And that's it? Or are you cherry-picking a definition? It doesn't have definitions such as "firmly decide" or simply "decide," "make up one's mind," "choose" etc.? That would make the OED kind of suck if it doesn't have those other definitions. Use a dictionary that better captures all of the common nuances of a term.
No part of what you quoted from Sellars after this amounts to "realizing that they were wrong and saying that they can guarantee veridicality," does it?
DeleteduserrcJanuary 21, 2017 at 02:55#484550 likes
And that's it? Or are you cherry-picking a definition? It doesn't have definitions such as "firmly decide" or simply "decide," "make up one's mind," "choose" etc.? That would make the OED kind of suck if it doesn't have those other definitions. Use a dictionary that better captures all of the common nuances of a term.
OED is kind of the gold standard, isn't it? I didn't cherry-pick, that was literally the first definition I looked up. I appreciate that you don't like the definition, but then, I guess the burden is on you to show that your non-standard definition is the right one.
No part of what you quoted from Sellars after this amounts to "realizing that they were wrong and saying that they can guarantee veridicality," does it?
No? It seems clear to me.
Terrapin StationJanuary 21, 2017 at 03:02#484580 likes
I have come to have a very high regard for Sellars as a philosopher
Whereas I hadn't read him in a long time and had a relatively favorable opinion of him from my student days, but rereading this essay now, I've decided that he can't write for shit. For one, I can't imagine that he possibly revised anything in this paper, it had to be a stream-of-consciousness first draft. And he seems to be a completely disorganized, chaotic thinker.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 21, 2017 at 03:05#484590 likes
[quote=terrapin]Whereas I hadn't read him in a long time and had a relatively favorable opinion of him from my student days, but rereading this essay now, I've decided that he can't write for shit. For one, I can't imagine that he possibly revised anything in this paper, it had to be a stream-of-consciousness first draft. And he seems to be a completely disorganized, chaotic thinker.[/quote]
[quote=terrapin]Yeah, no shit, as if there was some doubt about you being unjustifiably arrogant and patronizing. You'd probably find conversations furthered better without that attitude.[/quote]
Terrapin StationJanuary 21, 2017 at 19:28#485460 likes
I guess the burden is on you to show that your non-standard definition is the right one.
There are no such things as right definitions. Using "determine" in those other ways is common, and those definitions are found in other dictionaries. If the OED doesn't include those definitions, they're not doing their job very well in my opinion.
You're not unfamiliar with normal English usage, by the way, are you, so that you need to look up terms like "determine" and "guarantee" to have some idea of their conventional connotations?
[quote=Terrapin]What part clearly says anything about guaranteeing veridicality?[/quote]
[quote=Sellars]But, above all, it is the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations which strikes these philosophers, though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical.[/quote]
Terrapin StationJanuary 21, 2017 at 19:33#485490 likes
Sellars:it is the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations which strikes these philosophers,
--I have no idea why Sellars thinks that that doesn't make sense. Also his "It is the fact" is grammatically ambiguous to me contextually, especially re what the pronoun "it" is standing for, if anything but that's maybe not a big deal.
The last part is just the old "If it makes sense to talk about x, it must make sense to talk about not-x" thing that we went over a bit earlier in this thread.
The linking part doesn't make sense, though, either. You have the phrase "speaking of (or about) unveridical sensations", and with respect to that, he makes the claim that for it to strike someone as if it makes sense to speak of unveridical sensations, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to talk about veridicality, then it makes sense to talk about non-veridicality. That seems ridiculously contradictory though.
And none of that has anything to do with claiming that one is guaranteeing veridicality for anything.
The Great WhateverJanuary 21, 2017 at 20:36#485600 likes
Also his "It is the fact" is grammatically ambiguous to me contextually, especially re what the pronoun "it" is standing for, if anything but that's maybe not a big deal.
That's a pleonastic 'it,' it doesn't refer. It's like saying 'It was the rain that worried me,' which is the same as 'the rain worried me.' 'It' isn't referring to anything.
Ah, then he's not saying "Unveridical sensations which strike these philosophers (I took "strikes" rather than "strike" to be a typo/oversight) do not make sense to speak of" but "These philosophers believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations." I read it the first way, hence I took "to strike them as it does" to refer to the unveridical sensations which strike these philosophers.
However, if he's saying "These philosophers believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations," then what was he doing in the passage right before that, when supposedly giving the view of the philosophers in question, when he said, "The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -- let us call them 'ostensible seeings' -- some of the members of which are non-veridical" and "Rather they would . . . reason that . . . it does consist of members of a class which contains non-veridical members"?
If the philosophers in question believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations, then we can't say that their view includes that "some of the members of 'seeing that x if F' are non-veridical." They don't believe that it makes sense to speak of unverdical sensations. (And this is why I read "unveridical sensations which strike these philosophers" as I did.)
Is it that he's using the odd distinction he later seems to use between "seeing" and "sense data"? If so, though, "ostensible seeings, hearings, etc" in that passage doesn't seem to fit the quirky distinction he makes later. "Seeings, hearing, etc." in that context should be referring to sense data, no?
If the philosophers in question believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations, then when we can't say that their view includes that "some of the members of 'seeing that x if F' are non-veridical."
Because as he says, there he's talking about ostensible seeings, not sensations.
"seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular" isn't a sensation?
The former necessarily involves an object external to me. (An "ostensible seeing" involves a belief in an object external to me, whether that belief is correct or not.) Thus 'seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular', while it may require a sensation, is not simply a sensation.
Terrapin StationJanuary 22, 2017 at 12:32#487940 likes
Seeing is sensation unless Sellars is using the quirky apparent distinction he tried to make that I detailed above (quite a few posts ago, in comments about section three) but that he seems to be using inconsistently.
And also if we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality, we're talking about how sensations link up with something that's not the sensation, which is the same, functionally, at least, as objects external to you. (Technically it wouldn't have to be something literally external to your body, but it would have to be something external to your present phenomenal awareness.)
DeleteduserrcJanuary 22, 2017 at 16:19#488730 likes
Contextually, I think it's clear that Sellars is discussing seeing qua perception (and perception is not the same thing as sensation.)
[quote=Terrapin]And also if we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality, we're talking about how sensations link up with something that's not the sensation, which is the same, functionally, at least, as objects external to you. [/quote]
Yep.
Terrapin StationJanuary 22, 2017 at 18:23#488970 likes
What's the difference when we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality?
The difference is that sensations are not the kinds of things that can be veridical or non-veridical. Unlike beliefs (of which perceptions are a species), they have no normative import.
One of the main points of EPM is to show that sense-datum theorists fail to adequately distinguish between the causal and normative senses of "immediacy". They either simply assume that the one implies the other, or equivocate the two senses entirely. According to Sellars, once the distinction is properly understood it becomes clear that causal immediacy can't underwrite the kind of epistemic immediacy that sense-datum theorist would like it to - it simply isn't up to the task - and any brand of foundationalist epistemology that depends on that presumption is invalidated as a consequence.
That's my take, anyway.
Terrapin StationJanuary 23, 2017 at 15:37#492410 likes
(1) "These philosophers believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations" (paraphrased, according to the interpretation folks stressed above)
and
(2) "The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -- let us call them 'ostensible seeings' -- some of the members of which are non-veridical."
With respect to (1), you're then saying that Sellars is agreeing with them that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations?
And then with (2), you're saying that "seeing" isn't being used to refer to the sensation of seeing? (Re the above comment from csalisbury, I'd agree that perception isn't identical to sensation, but because I'd say that perception is a subset of sensation--so perceptions are still sensations, but sensations are not necessarily perceptions.) Perhaps you're saying that he's using "seeing" in the quirky apparent distinction I noted above?--however, how would that make sense with how he's using the word "hearing" in the same passage?
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 23, 2017 at 16:27#492590 likes
Happy to stumble into this reading group today. It sounds like the group kicked off with something like a plan to close-read two sections per week? What are we up to?
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 23, 2017 at 16:59#492650 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station For Sellars, raw sensory content is epistemologically inert – it has no propositional content and it has no inferential consequences. Sensory content consists of particular “things” – colors, shapes, etc. By contrast, perceptions add propositional content – they make claims about sensory contents.
So when Sellars talks about “seeing that X”, he is talking about perception insofar as X is a claim or proposition (e.g. "the table is green", etc.). The modality (hearing, tasting, etc.) is irrelevant.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 23, 2017 at 17:57#492680 likes
Hume:EVERY one will readily allow, that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and when he afterwards recalls to his memory this sensation, or anticipates it by his imagination.
Sellars:I PRESUME that no philosopher who has attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the Hegelian term, immediacy has intended to deny that there is a difference between inferring that something is the case and, for example, seeing it to be the case.
Each begins by locating a bit of common ground in the conversation, by characterizing a particular claim as indicative of a consensus view, and taking the allegedly noncontroversial claim for granted as a starting point in discussion. Hume beings with a point he supposes "everyone will allow", while Sellars begins with a point he presumes no critic of the concept of givenness "has intended to deny."
Each employs a distinction between perception and another sort of activity. Hume draws a distinction between perception on the one hand, and memory and imagination on the other. Sellars begins with a distinction between perception and inference -- or at least between "seeing that p" (presumably a species of "perceiving that p") and "inferring that p".
Take the section-heads into account: Hume stakes out common ground in speaking about perception, memory, and imagination, to orient his discussion "of the origin of ideas". Sellars stakes out common ground in speaking about perception and inference to orient his discussion of "an ambiguity in sense-datum theories".
Perhaps it's reading too much into the texts, but I'm amused that Hume mentions perception first, while Sellars mentions inference first -- as if, I'd want to say, in each case the first-mentioned term is the one held to be less mysterious by the contemporaries addressed by the author, those interlocutors invited to begin speaking together on this common ground.
Another reach on audience: Hume seems to position himself, at least rhetorically and in principle, to be speaking with "everyone". Sellars seems to think he's speaking primarily to philosophers, or professional philosophers, or professional epistemologists concerned with the concept of givenness... or most narrowly, to professional epistemologists who are, like Sellars and Hegel, critical of the concept of givenness.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 23, 2017 at 17:59#492690 likes
Would anyone like to give us a bit of background on the history of the "sense-datum theories", and theorists, that Sellars takes aim at here?
Perhaps it's reading too much into the texts, but I'm amused that Hume mentions perception first, while Sellars mentions inference first -- as if, I'd want to say, in each case the first-mentioned term is the one held to be less mysterious by the contemporaries addressed by the author, those interlocutors invited to begin speaking together on this common ground.
Gold! It's true, Hume was using skepticism to push the British Empiricist project as far as it could go. Sellars seems to be dialing the clock back on that, in some sense. There does seem to be an implicit dialectic here.
Terrapin StationJanuary 23, 2017 at 19:03#492750 likes
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 23, 2017 at 19:12#492770 likes
Sellars:I PRESUME that no philosopher who has attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the Hegelian term, immediacy has intended to deny that there is a difference between inferring that something is the case and, for example, seeing it to be the case.
Do any of us here deny that there is a difference between inferring and seeing that something is the case? Or more generally, between inferential knowledge and noninferential knowledge, or likewise between judgments based on inference and judgments based on perception?
Or short of denying the difference, do we find anything objectionable or confusing about the distinction drawn that way?
Sellars:If the term "given" referred merely to what is observed as being observed, or, perhaps, to a proper subset of the things we are said to determine by observation,...
"what is observed qua being observed": What do we suppose this phrase means? Perhaps a weak sense of "observation", as in, S observes that p, though it's possible that not-p? (In other words, "S observes that p" is consistent with not-p; in this respect "observes" would resemble "believes" rather than "knows"...)
similarly, "a proper subset...": as in, the subset of "true observations"?
Sellars:...the existence of "data" would be as noncontroversial as the existence of philosophical perplexities. But, of course, this just is not so.
I presume this is the "data" of the "sense-data theorists".
Sellars coordinates the terms "given" and "sense data", and associates them with the term "observation". If philosophers used the term "given" merely to refer to the observed qua observed, or perhaps to a proper subset of what may be determined by observation, then the existence of "sense data" would be as noncontroversial as the existence of philosophical perplexities.
Dense rhetoric! It's the very existence of sense-data that Sellars puts into question here. Do sense-data exist, or are they mere creatures of fiction, misinterpreted marks in a logician's notebook? In what sense are philosophical perplexities said -- by epistemologists -- to "exist"? Which perplexities? Shop-talk about nonexistent objects? Shop-talk about justified true belief? About riddles of "believe"-talk and "know"-talk in the first person? Perhaps all that "exists" in such cases is talk and perplexity, sound and fury -- perhaps shop-talk about "sense-data given in observation" is another such case....
Sellars suggests there is an ordinary-language, common sense, use of this family of terms -- "given", "(sense-)data", and "observe" -- that is philosophically unobjectionable, but also philosophically unproductive: The unobjectionable uses only give us ways of stating (or restating) traditional epistemological problems, but don't entail solutions to those problems.
Sellars:The phrase "the given" as a piece of professional -- epistemological -- shoptalk carries a substantial theoretical commitment, and one can deny that there are "data" or that anything is, in this sense, "given" without flying in the face of reason.
Sellars alludes to arguments made by defenders of the epistemologist's "given", who argued that to deny there is a "given" in the relevant sense is to "fly in the face of reason". Not so, says Sellars: The defender's argument relies on a conflation of the ordinary, common sense, unobjectionable and uninformative sense of "givenness", and the highly contentious sense of "givenness" that figures prominently in epistemological shop-talk.
I wonder what prominent defender had suggested that some critic's denials would entail that there is no difference between "inferring" and "seeing".
Of course there is a difference between "inferring" and "seeing", replies Sellars; none of us has intended to deny such a claim. Nor would we deny that there is an ordinary, noncontroversial sense in which "data" is "given" in "seeing" and in "observation". That much we have in common, Sellars insists, planting himself firmly on the common ground of human experience and ordinary language, and taking aim at a brand of epistemological shop-talk associated with a particular way of speaking about the given.
[quote=Terrapin]
With respect to (1), you're then saying that Sellars is agreeing with them that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations?[/quote]
Yes, Sellars will ultimately agree that claim, though in the context of the quote that you’ve been discussing he’s not mentioning it in order to agree or disagree with it.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 23, 2017 at 20:23#492920 likes
In the first paragraph Sellars positions himself in the conversation of contemporary epistemologists, and seems perhaps to align himself with Hegel. He stakes out a common ground, characterizes a contentious theory he intends to critique, and rebuts one sort of objection to his proposed line of criticism. In the second paragraph, he provides more context while giving us an idea just how much he intends to bite off and chew:
Sellars:Many things have been said to be "given": sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself. And there is, indeed, a certain way of construing the situations which philosophers analyze in these terms which can be said to be the framework of givenness.
What is it, in this sentence, that "can be said to be the framework of givenness": "a certain way of construing", or "these terms"?
Suppose he means the former: The framework of givenness is or consists in a certain way of construing situations that philosophers have analyzed in terms such as "sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself."
Sellars:This framework has been a common feature of most of the major systems of philosophy, including, to use a Kantian turn of phrase, both "dogmatic rationalism" and "skeptical empiricism".
Would anyone please provide a characterization of "dogmatic rationalism" and "skeptical empiricism" as these terms are intended here?
Why are these two "philosophical systems" given special mention here?
We might even ask: What is a "philosophical system" in the sense intended here?
Sellars:It has, indeed, been so pervasive that few, if any, philosophers have been altogether free of it; certainly not Kant, and, I would argue, not even Hegel, that great foe of "immediacy".
The framework, the custom of construing situations and analyzing them in terms of certain bits of traditional epistemological shop-talk, has influenced every epistemologist in the tradition Sellars is concerned with here, or perhaps every epistemologist simpliciter.
Again there's mention of Hegel's special historical role as a critic of the epistemological concept of immediacy or givenness. Again we anticipate that Sellars is aligning himself here with Hegel, though in this case it seems he's set to tackle a job he believes Hegel's left unfinished. It also seems that, at least with respect to the question of givenness, Sellars considers himself to be more closely aligned with Hegel than with Kant.
Sellars:Often what is attacked under its name are only specific varieties of "given." Intuited first principles and synthetic necessary connections were the first to come under attack.
These first attacks on intuited first principles and on synthetic necessary connections: When and where were they located? Who were the attackers, and who the defenders?
He's talking about pre-Kantian modern-Western philosophy? Was it Hume who first attacked synthetic necessary connections? Was it an empiricist or rationalist who first attacked intuited first principles? Or are we going back behind the West and before Christianity, to ancient philosophical traditions?
Sellars:And many who today attack "the whole idea of givenness" -- and they are an increasing number -- are really only attacking sense data. For they transfer to other items, say physical objects or relations of appearing, the characteristic features of the "given." If, however, I begin my argument with an attack on sense-datum theories, it is only as a first step in a general critique of the entire framework of givenness.
Sellars criticizes his contemporary allies: Many of them miss the deeper point, and "transfer... the characteristic features of the 'given'" to their way of construing situations they analyze in terms of physical objects, relations of appearing, or other bits of shop-talk.
What are the "characteristic features" of "the given"? How are they related to characteristic "ways of construing" situations analyzable in terms of the items of shop-talk historically associated with the "framework of givenness"? Something I'd look for as the essay proceeds.
At the end of section I.1, Sellars gives an idea how the essay will proceed: He'll begin his argument with an attack on sense-datum theories, and move on to a general critique of the whole framework of givenness.
Terrapin StationJanuary 24, 2017 at 00:43#495280 likes
He’s saying that perception takes the form of a proposition.
Does he ever say why he believes that or give an argument for it?
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 24, 2017 at 20:23#496800 likes
Sellars:2. Sense-datum theories characteristically distinguish between an act of awareness and, for example, the color patch which is its object.
This must be the "act-object conception" that Shoemaker loves to wrestle with. I always got the feeling he never quite shakes himself free of it.
An "act of awareness" and an "object" of the act. What object? Not an apple or a chair or a man, but a "color patch". Perhaps something like the smudgy strokes in an impressionist painting?
I take it Shoemaker's line of criticism is still in fashion nowadays: The analyst wants to analyze perception so that the perceptual object is the thing we ordinarily say we "perceive" ("see", e.g.): The apple, the chair, the man -- not some color patches.
Sellars:The act is usually called sensing.
Is there a difference, for the sense-data theorist, or for his critic, between sensing and perceiving?
Sellars:Classical exponents of the theory have often characterized these acts as "phenomenologically simple" and "not further analyzable." But other sense-datum theorists -- some of them with an equal claim to be considered "classical exponents" -- have held that sensing is analyzable.
Who are the more or less classical exponents mentioned, on either side of this divide?
On one side, they say particular acts of sensing are "phenomenologically simple". On the other side, they say particular acts of sensing are "further analyzable" -- phenomenologically, or in some other way?
Is it the act, or the object, the analyzability of which is here contested? Is the object counted as "part" of the act; i.e., we identify an individual act of sensing-awareness, analyze it into two parts, act and object, and then either find that we can go no further, or find that we can continue analyzing (act, or object, or both) into component parts?
Sellars:And if some philosophers seem to have thought that if sensing is analyzable, then it cannot be an act, this has by no means been the general opinion.
Who seems to have thought this, and why wasn't it a popular view?
Why should anyone think that an act -- an act of awareness, an act of sensing -- must be unanalyzable, phenomenologically simple, etc. Do these thinkers object even to the analysis into act and object?
Sellars:There are, indeed, deeper roots for the doubt that sensing (if there is such a thing) is an act, roots which can be traced to one of two lines of thought tangled together in classical sense-datum theory.
"if there is such a thing": i.e., if traditional shop-talk in terms of "sensing" holds up under scrutiny.
What deep tangled roots?
Who doubts that sensing is an act?
Well, sensing in what sense, and act in what sense? I might doubt that "sensing unanalyzable color patches" or "sensing phenomenologically simple sense-data" is ordinarily (or ever) an act of awareness. For instance, it may be that whatever the simplest elements of sensation happen to be, they are processed at a preconscious, prephenomenal, stage of cognition, and that from a phenomenological point of view, it makes more sense to say that we see things and places in the world around us, than that we see color patches.
Sellars:For the moment, however, I shall simply assume that however complex (or simple) the fact that x is sensed may be, it has the form, whatever exactly it may be, by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act.
According to sense-data models, the form of "the fact that x is sensed", whatever exactly that form may be, entails at least that if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing].
What is the purport of this clunky way of speaking? I suspect there is some scribble in a logician's notebook at issue here behind the scenes, when philosophers like Sellars begin to speak of the "form" of a "fact", and begin to lay down implications this way. I suppose the scribble might include marks that stand for acts of sensing, marks that stand for objects of those acts, marks for variables like x, and some way of packaging such marks to express "facts" about states of affairs in which objects are sensed.
According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: there are facts with the form "x is sensed", and if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing].
According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex.
One bit of complexity seems missing from the account so far: Whose act? What senses x? What mark in the model for this?
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 24, 2017 at 20:49#496850 likes
Sellars:Being a sense datum, or sensum, is a relational property of the item that is sensed.
I suppose "being a sense datum" is the same as "being the object of an act of sensing". It's a relational property, according to which an object is associated with an act of sensing in a specific way and in a particular "fact".
Sellars:To refer to an item which is sensed in a way which does not entail that it is sensed, it is necessary to use some other locution.
Much as, to refer to an item which was thrown by Jim at noon today, in a way that does not entail that the item was thrown by Jim at noon today, it is necessary to use some other locution.
Sellars:Sensibile has the disadvantage that it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed, and this is a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists.
Of course it's controversial, if the sensum is something like a "color patch".
Sellars:Sense content is, perhaps, as neutral a term as any.
Oh my, are we going to start speaking about "content"? Was the term in use already in this connection by the time Sellars composed this essay?
What does Sellars introduce the term "sense content" for here? As a substitute for "sense datum" or "object of sense-act", a substitute that doesn't imply that the object could exist without being sensed; and that doesn't entail that the object is (has been, will be) in fact sensed
What kind of possibly nonexistent and possibly not-sensed object is a particular "sense content" supposed to be?
I suppose it's something like an "object of possible experience" -- or how do the Kantians and phenomenologists put it? We use a term like "sense content" to talk about the sense data that would be sensed -- in hypothetical cases, for the purpose of analysis, for the sake of this strange conversation -- if things were in fact the way we have characterized them in our notebooks.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 24, 2017 at 21:36#496910 likes
Sellars:There appear to be varieties of sensing, referred to by some as visual sensing, tactual sensing, etc., and by others as directly seeing, directly hearing, etc.
Who are those who speak in each way indicated?
Sellars:But it is not clear whether these are species of sensing in any full-blooded sense, or whether "x is visually sensed" amounts to no more than "x is a color patch which is sensed," "x is directly heard" than "x is a sound which is sensed" and so on.
Good point. Notice how the point is developed in terms of the act-object conception: do the varieties of sensing sort out into different sorts of act, or into different sorts of object for the same sort of act.
I presume this is an important difference in the logician's notebook. It might also lead us to inquire into the bases of the distinctions between sorts of sensing-acts (seeing, hearing, etc), or the bases of the distinctions between sorts of sense-contents (color patches, sounds).
Either way it begins to seem there may be room for analysis beyond the form of a fact "x is sensed", if every such fact entails that x is some sort of sense content, or that the sensing of x is some sort of sensing, or both. Or is this not the sort of "analysis" at issue?
Sellars:In the latter case, being a visual sensing or a direct hearing would be a relational property of an act of sensing,...
In the latter case -- the case in which the varieties of sensing are not "species of sensing in any full-blooded sense", but only various sorts of sensing distinguished in terms of their different sorts of object -- being a visual or auditory sensing would be merely a relational property of an act of sensing. In that case, a place for this relation is built into the form of a fact that x is sensed, but is (I presume) determined in each case by some property of the object of the act: it is a color patch, or a sound patch, one or another sort of sense-content.
I suppose to approach the matter with less bias, we might leave it an open question whether this relation is determined by some feature of the sense-content, or instead by some mediating factor, some other term in the analysis.
Sellars:...just as being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content.
"just as": i.e., the first is a relational property, no less than the second. Is the analogy much stronger than this?
Being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content. In other words, it is a property of a sense content when the sense content is related to an act of sensing in the right way. But this seems strange: What is a sense content, when it is not a sense datum? Perhaps merely a figure of speech....
Earlier I read Sellars as peeling off the "existence" and the facticity of "being sensed" that belong to the sense datum (in the model), in order to produce a highly abstract theoretical construct of "sense content", which I tentatively glossed as something like a hypothetical "object of possible experience" characterized somewhere in a logician's notebook for the purpose of analysis and conversation. Is this line of interpretation still open?
Are there "color patches" floating around somewhere, sometimes taken up in acts of sensing, other times slipping by unsensed? Are these sense contents, sensed and unsensed, inside heads, or outside heads, or mere possible-sensums marked down in philosophical narratives assembled according to a certain cumbersome framework?
Sellars:Being a sense datum, or sensum, is a relational property of the item that is sensed.
Like a living organism may have a disposition to sense items in a certain way, also items may have a disposition to be sensed in a certain way. Perhaps this is what Sellars means by relational property?
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 25, 2017 at 19:21#498860 likes
Some reflections on sections 1-2.
Cabbage Farmer:Is it the act, or the object, the analyzability of which is here contested? Is the object counted as "part" of the act; i.e., we identify an individual act of sensing-awareness, analyze it into two parts, act and object, and then either find that we can go no further, or find that we can continue analyzing (act, or object, or both) into component parts?
By the end of section I.2, it seems the object is not counted as "part” of the act, at least in the logician's notebook. One way to draw up the account: Two terms, act and object, figure in a predicate relation of "sensing" that can be used to express "facts" involving acts and objects in that relation. So it’s both acts-of-objects and objects-of-acts that figure as logical objects of sensing-relations used to express facts. Some marvel along these lines:
There is some a and some o such that: SENSE (a, o).
I take it this would have implications for what logicians and model-builders call the "ontology" of the model. There are two sorts of entity implicated here, two sorts of entity-in-the-model: i) acts of sensing-relations and ii) objects of sensing-relations. You might call it a "hard" sort (or what's a more convenient phrase): We might expect that what counts as an object in one sensing relation cannot figure as an act in another sensing relation; and that what counts as an act in one sensing relation cannot figure as an object in another sensing relation; and that act and object in the same sensing-relation cannot be identical to each other. (Though these rules may be contested, depending on what kind of “sensing” it turns out we’re discussing here.)
Along these lines, it would seem I strayed from the mark earlier by using the language of entailment to paraphrase Sellars remark that "the fact that x is sensed... has the form... by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act." For once we start packaging acts and objects in the sort of formal predicate language I've indicated today, it seems there just is no way to say "x is sensed", or to express a fact that x is sensed, without calling up something like the relation SENSE (a, x). This is an example of a "form by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act" -- which seems now a far more binding condition than the implication I used to paraphrase in my reading notes: "if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing]." Given the ordinary conventions of predicate modeling, and the terms I've drawn up today, I'm not sure how one could express that conditional statement without the most blatantly redundant tautology.
Cabbage Farmer:According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: there are facts with the form "x is sensed", and if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing].
In light of today’s shift in interpretation, I might want instead to say:
According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: There are facts with the form “x is sensed”, and by virtue of this form, x is the object of an act.
Cabbage Farmer:According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex.
Could this mean that for some of the model-builders, the fact that x is sensed is not analyzable as a fact involving both an act and an object? Sellars seems to rule this out. For instance:
Sellars:[...]however complex (or simple) the fact that x is sensed may be, it has the form, whatever exactly it may be, by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act.
So for clarity’s sake I might want to say:
According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex; but no matter how simple or complex a fact of this form is said to be, the model-builders agree that the form is such that, for x to be sensed is for x to be the object of an act.
I wonder if Sellars’s way of carving up the fact of sensing is supposed to shed light on “characteristic features of the given” and on “the framework of givenness”. Or does this carving pertain only or primarily to the special case of sense-data theory, while the implications for the more general framework are not yet in view in the narrative?
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 25, 2017 at 19:43#498910 likes
Continued reflections on sections 1-2.
The most arcane thing in the essay so far is the introduction of the term “sense content” in the last two paragraphs of section 2. I’m not clear on the motive or the justification for this move. And I’m not sure there’s parity in the treatment of act and object along these lines.
Sellars wants two names for the sort of item that enters into sensing-relations as the object of an act of sensing: When the item figures in a sensing-relation, call it a sense-datum. When the item does not figure in a sensing-relation, call it a sense-content.
Sellars notes it's “a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists” whether “sensed items could exist without being sensed” -- i.e., whether a sense-content could exist without being identical to a sense-datum, without existing as a matter of fact in a sensing-relation as the object of a sensing-act.
Perhaps this is the only motive for the distinction: He wants a language that’s neutral with respect to this particular controversy. This interpretation is reinforced when he settles on the term “sense-content” as perhaps “as neutral a term as any”.
Fair enough. So long as the controversy’s undecided, we use a language unprejudiced with respect to the outcome, with resources sufficient to accommodate advocates on either side. Though I'll want to remember to look for alternative motives for this abstraction as the essay proceeds.
Is there an analogous controversy about the act-side of the sensing relation? Does anyone in this story claim or wonder whether the sort of item that enters into sensing-relations as the act of an object-sensed could also exist independent of any such relation? Perhaps there’s no analogous controversy on this point. That would account for the disparity in Sellars’s account, if it turns out there is a disparity: Either everyone’s agreed, the act in the sensing relation can exist outside that relation; or everyone’s agreed, it cannot. If everyone’s agreed that it can, or if it rather is a controversial matter, we should expect Sellars to offer us two names to refer to the thing called the act, just as he took pains to provide two names for the thing called the object of the act of sensing: One name for the item when it exists in sensing-relations; and one name when, if ever, it exists without involvement in any sensing-relation.
In any case, it may be that by giving two “locutions” to refer to the item that stands as object in sensing-relations, Sellars has defined two distinct predicates. One seems, thus far, a two-place relation, like SENSE (a, x). The other is perhaps a one-place predicate, as for instance, S-CONTENT (x).
If SENSE (a, x) then S-CONTENT (x).
Perhaps Sellars spins the analogy -- between act and object, with respect to independent existence of the item -- in another direction?
He says: “In the latter case” -- the case in which “varieties” of sensing-relations and sensing-facts are sorted according to the varieties of sensed-object, and not by distinguishing “full-blooded species” of sensing --
[quote=”Sellars”]being a visual sensing or a direct hearing would be a relational property of an act of sensing, just as being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content.[/quote]
But this seems to jump ahead of the question, can the item that enters into a sensing-relation as an act, also exist independent of any such relation, and do we want our language to have the resources to refer to such items by way of “another locution” that is prima facie logically independent of any such relation? For instance, a one-place predicate, S-ACT (a), perhaps determined in part by the condition
If SENSE (a, x) then S-ACT (a).
Hasn’t he jumped ahead, isn’t there a disparity? Having distinguished in principle, and in the language of the model, sense-data from sense-contents, Sellars neglects the question of whether there is an analogous distinction for sense-acts, and moves on to discuss varieties of sensing-relation.
Just as, he says, being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content, so being a “visual sensing” would be a relational property of an act of sensing. This does not seem to address the question of existence independent from the sensing-relation; it only tells us what sort of sensing-relation, on the basis of the sort of object in the relation -- “x is a color patch which is sensed”. So not quite “just as”: For there’s no mention of a “locution” by which we might refer to the item that enters as act into the sensing-relation apart from any such relation. A “visual sensing-relation” would be a relation of a sensing-act and a visual sense-content; but what, if anything, are we to call a sensing-act that has no object, or at least a sensing-act as an item logically distinguishable from any sensing-relation?
One way we might characterize the “former” case -- the case of various full-blooded “species” of sensing-relation: Define distinct predicate-relations for each species of sensing, each correlated in the same way with the generic sensing-relation. Say for visual-sensing:
If V-SENSE (a, x) then (VS-ACT (a) and VS-CONTENT (x) and SENSE (a, x)); and
If VS-ACT (a) then S-ACT (a); and
If VS-CONTENT (x) then S-CONTENT (x).
And the same song and dance for each sensory mode assimilable to this form.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 26, 2017 at 23:05#502150 likes
Boiled down my notes on sections 1-2.
1. Two tasks in the essay
attack sense-datum theories as a special case
criticize the whole framework of givenness
2. Framework of givenness (framework of immediacy)
“a way of construing” situations analyzable in terms of characteristic bits of shop-talk, with characteristic theoretical commitments, common to most “major philosophical systems”
some of the terms: given, (sense-)data, observation
some things that have been said to be given: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real (aka synthetic necessary?) connections, first principles
“characteristic features of the given”: tbd
inference vs. "givenness"[list]
e.g., inferring vs. seeing that something is the case
inferential vs. noninferential knowledge acquisition
analysis of observational judgments
[/list]
3. Sense-datum theories (SDTs)
act-object model [list]
an act of awareness called “sensing”
an object sensed (e.g., a “color patch”)
[*]the fact that x is sensed, however complex or simple that fact may be, has a form by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for x to be the object of an act.
[*]“relational properties” of sensing-acts and objects-sensed
[*]sense-datum distinguished from sense-content
being a sense-datum is a relational property
sense-content is “another locution” to refer to the same item as logically distinct from any sensing-relation or sensing-act
two-place predicate-relation vs. one-place predicate?
introduced for the sake of neutrality with respect to controversy #3; any other motives?
no analogous distinction yet considered for the sense-act. (Does Sellars, or SDT, tend to conflate (or identify) the sensing-act with the sensing-relation?)
[*]SDT controversies
Controversy #1: are sensing-acts “phenomenologically simple” or “further analyzable”?
Controversy #2: If sensing is analyzable, can it be an act? [list]
“deep roots for the doubt that sensing (if there is such a thing) is an act”, roots traced to one of two lines of thought tangled together in classical SDT
[*]Controversy #3: Can sensed items exist without being sensed?
[*]Controversy #4: are varieties of sensing distinguished by sort of object-sensed, or in terms of “full-blooded species” of sensing-act or sensing-relation?
no mention of “both” as an option?
Is this a controversy within SDT, or is it a bit of analysis from Sellars?
[/list]
4. Look for
an ambiguity in sense-datum theories: What’s the ambiguity?
inferring, seeing, “sensing”: How will the distinction be drawn?
play between professional epistemological shop-talk and the common ground of ordinary language and experience
hints about motives for sensum/sense-content distinction
the third term: Where is the subject of the sensing-act in this story?
further definition of SDT
further definition of the framework of givenness, its “characteristic features” and theoretical commitments
5. References or allusions to trace through the literature
[list]
[*]Kant and Hegel
[*]“dogmatic rationalism” and “skeptical empiricism” (major philosophical systems)
[*]What philosophers have attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or immediacy?
[*]What defenders have claimed that critics of givenness “fly in the face of reason”, perhaps charging they imply there’s no difference between inferring and seeing (sensing, perceiving)?
[*]Who has called each “given”: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, givenness itself
[*]first attackers of “intuited first principles”?
[*]first attackers of “synthetic necessary connections”? (Hume)
[*]contemporaries who claim to attack “the whole idea of givenness”, but who “are really only attacking sense data”
[*]“classical exponents” pro and contra “phenomenologically simple”, “not further analyzable” (controversy 1)
[*]pro and contra: if sensing is analyzable, it cannot be an act (controversy 2)
[*]deeper roots for the doubt that sensing is an act
[*]pro and contra: items sensed can exist independently of being sensed (controversy 3)
[*]Who uses each idiom to distinguish varieties of sensing: i) visual, tactual sensing; ii) directly seeing, directly hearing.
[*]Is there prior discussion of the bases for distinguishing varieties of sensing (“controversy 4”), or is this Sellars’ analysis?
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 27, 2017 at 15:39#503850 likes
Sellars:3. Now if we bear in mind that the point of the epistemological category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the idea that empirical knowledge rests on a 'foundation' of non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact, we may well experience a feeling of surprise on noting that according to sense-datum theorists, it is particulars that are sensed.
Need Sellars presume that the category's purpose is to explicate the idea of such an epistemological "foundation"? Perhaps it is presumptuous: The ordinary, unobjectionable sense of "givenness" is arguably prior to the Gothic quest for that foundation. It may be only in tying ordinary intuitions about "what is immediately given" to anxious thoughts about foundation, that the epistemologist constructs the "epistemological category of the given".
What's put in this category: matters of fact grasped without inference, paradigmatically on the basis of "being sensed".
Why does the presumption, or the point presumed, occasion surprise that, for the sense-datum theorist, "it is particulars that are sensed"? Is there some further prejudice by which "objects of knowledge" are characterized as general rules, as opposed to particulars? Does the arguably generic character of our grasp on sensed particulars militate against the claim that it's in fact particulars we thus grasp? Who claims it is not particulars that we sense?
Sellars:For what is known even in non-inferential knowledge, is facts rather than particulars, items of the form something's being thus-and-so or something's standing in a certain relation to something else.
What sort of wedge is this? If a fact involving particulars is counted as known: when, and in what sense, and on what grounds are the corresponding particulars counted as not known? Perhaps this very point is at issue in the controversy over whether "the fact that x is sensed" is analyzable?
Or is the point that, if sensing is merely the sensing of particulars, then it's insufficient for knowledge, for it's facts that are known, and particulars are not in themselves sufficient to constitute facts. This seems reasonable. Though it would be a strange sort of "sensing" by which particulars were grasped -- or indeed not grasped, but "barely sensed" -- bereft of all facticity. Even the fact of being sensed, or being sensed by S, or being sensed at time t, or being visually sensed -- surely some whiff of fact would accompany any such "bare sensing" of particulars?
Does anyone raise the objection, that we may call each fact a particular; and then say, the particulars that are sensed are facts involving non-fact particulars?
A fine bit of shop-talk, "it's facts rather than particulars, that are known". When did this way of construing situations analyzable in terms of "facts" and "particulars" turn up in the tradition? Does Sellars really stand by the slogan, as he seems to here?
I presume the sense-datum theorist, at least, will not object to it.
Sellars:It would seem, then, that the sensing of sense contents cannot constitute knowledge, inferential or non-inferential; and if so, we may well ask, what light does the concept of a sense datum throw on the 'foundations of empirical knowledge?'
If the "sensing" of sense-datum theory is mere sensing of particulars, it is insufficient to constitute knowledge. But "sensing" in this theory is associated with the role of providing what's "given", and the purpose of the category of givenness is to provide a foundation for empirical knowledge in noninferentially grasped matters of fact. The theorist must show how his "sensing" can yield knowledge of facts.
Sellars:The sense-datum theorist, it would seem, must choose between saying:
a. It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing. The existence of sense data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge.
or
b. Sensing is a form of knowing. It is facts rather than particulars which are sensed.
I'll reiterate my reservations about (conscious, phenomenologically available) "sensing" of particulars without any whiff of fact. It seems a legacy of strange shop-talk that one should feel compelled to make (or feel justified in proposing) this hard choice, either facts or particulars, as if we don't get them both together in perception.
Sellars:On alternative (a) the fact that a sense content was sensed would be a non-epistemic fact about the sense content.
Alternative (a): It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing.
The fact that a sense content is sensed -- and perhaps (analytically) related facts pertaining to the architecture of the fact of sensing, that it was sensed by S at t, and so on -- would be nonepistemic facts about the sense content. I suppose they'd be epistemic facts about the sensing-act? But nonepsitemic about the sense content. Of course the fact of sensing gives the sense content as related to the act of sensing, but facts involving relational properties of this sort are "nonepistemic facts about the sense content".
Given as, taken as. It seems we must take things as they're given, however else we may take them.
What is "nonepistemic fact" supposed to mean? Does it mean: to grasp facts nonepistemic about a sense content is not to have knowledge about the sense content -- but only knowledge about a fact of sensing, in which a sense content figures as sort of placeholder, an empty term, until further notice? Do we, in effect, grasp a sense-datum as such, without reaching here the corresponding sense content?
Or do we have perhaps beliefs, but no knowledge, about the sense content, given the existence of sense data?
Sellars:Yet it would be hasty to conclude that this alternative precludes any logical connection between the sensing of sense contents and the possession of non-inferential knowledge. For even if the sensing of sense contents did not logically imply the existence of non-inferential knowledge, the converse might well be true. Thus, the non-inferential knowledge of particular matter of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data (for example, seeing that a certain physical object is red might logically imply sensing a red sense content) even though the sensing of a red sense content were not itself a cognitive fact and did not imply the possession of non-inferential knowledge.
Even if "the existence of sense data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge", there may be another logical connection between them. The denial of that particular implication doesn't rule out the alternative that the existence of sense data is necessary but insufficient for the existence of (at least some sorts of) noninferential knowledge -- another way of putting the "converse" case.
"not itself a cognitive fact": is "cognitive fact" here synonymous with "epistemic fact", or does it have, in addition, some phenomenological implication or connotation? Is the thought perhaps that the fact of sensing is not (ever) directly available to consciousness, to the thinker, to the knower.... That the fact of sensing, its act and its sense-datum, are theoretical constructs, perhaps in principle verifiable by empirical research, but not ordinarily available from the first-person perspective?
What sort of constructs? Theoretical conditions of noninferential knowledge acquisition.
Sellars:On the second alternative, (b), the sensing of sense contents would logically imply the existence of non-inferential knowledge for the simple reason that it would be this knowledge. But, once again, it would be facts rather than particulars which are sensed.
Alternative (b): Sensing is a form of knowing. It is facts rather than particulars which are sensed.
On this alternative, the fact of sensing is sufficient for the existence of noninferential knowledge. Presumably this is knowledge of the sense content. The fact that is sensed is a fact "epistemic" about the sense content. The fact that is sensed is a cognitive fact.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 27, 2017 at 15:52#503910 likes
Whenever I hear philosophers go on for long about properties, I get a little dizzy and recall Duns Scotus.
Better to let the world teach us how to speak, than to pretend we understand heaven and earth by practicing grammar.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 28, 2017 at 02:06#506030 likes
Reply to Cabbage Farmer Glad to have you on board. I envisioned this thread as a kind of free-form reading group, but unfortunately I've since become too busy to participate regularly. As it stands, I suppose this thread could either become simply a 'place' to discuss Sellars' essay, or, if someone else wants to take the reins, could still remain a week-by-week, section-by-section discussion.
You've brought up plenty of good points/avenues of exploration, but, for now, I want to respond to just one. I, too, am a little confused by Sellars' distinction between sense content and sense data - or at least confused by the importance of making such a distinction. The possibility that he draws this distinction simply to remain neutral within a larger controversy makes sense, tho, if that is the case, I wish I understood that controversy and what was at stake (or believed to be at stake) in it.
That said, the distinction between data and content is put into action in section 2 ('Another Language?'):
[quote=Sellars] No one, of course, who thinks -- as, for example, does Ayer -- of the existence of sense data as entailing the existence of "direct knowledge," would wish to say that sense data are theoretical entities. It could scarcely be a theoretical fact that I am directly knowing that a certain sense content is red. On the other hand, the idea that sense contents are theoretical entities is not obviously absurd -- so absurd as to preclude the above interpretation of the plausibility of the "another-language" approach. For even those who introduce the expression "sense content" by means of the context ". . . is directly known to be . . ." may fail to keep this fact in mind when putting this expression to use -- for example, by developing the idea that physical objects and persons alike are patterns of sense contents. In such a specific context, it is possible to forget that sense contents, thus introduced, are essentially sense data and not merely items which exemplify sense qualities. Indeed, one may even lapse into thinking of the sensing of sense contents, the givenness of sense data, as non-epistemic facts.[/quote]
This analysis leads me to think that the importance of the distinction is that sense contents are something like qualities, something universal, while sense data are something fundamentally immediate (keeping in mind the Hegelian point that to deal with 'qualities' is already to deal with universals and mediation.) (Perhaps too, the sense of 'content' in 'propositional content' is analogous? We might say that a proposition expresses some propositional content (we can understand why one wouldn't want to reduce the propositional content of some proposition to that particular proposition, or the particular relation whereby a particular proposition expresses some propositional content)
What do you think? I'm still shaky on this, but that's the best way I've found to understand it so far.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 28, 2017 at 03:45#506280 likes
[quote=CabbageFarmer]What is "nonepistemic fact" supposed to mean? [/quote]
I have a pet theory, but I don't know how good it is. So:
[quote=Sellars](a) It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing. The existence of sense data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge.[/quote]
&
[quote=Sellars]On alternative (a) the fact that a sense content was sensed would be a non-epistemic fact about the sense content.[/quote]
I take this to mean that while it is a factthat the sense-content was sensed (in sensing act x and/or by senser y), this does not imply that the senser gained any knowledge about the sense content. If you like, it's a fact in-itself, but not (necessarily) a fact for anyone (any knower.)
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]"not itself a cognitive fact": is "cognitive fact" here synonymous with "epistemic fact", or does it have, in addition, some phenomenological implication or connotation? [/quote]
I think they're synonymous; Sellars himself appears to equate the two.
[quote=Sellars] Finally, I will say of a sense content that it is known if it is sensed (full stop), to emphasize that sensing is a cognitive or epistemic fact.[/quote]
Reply to Cabbage Farmer
You've really analyzed the hell out of this paper. Nice work, man! Like Calisbury, I'm short on time otherwise I'd participate a little more.
I take this to mean that while it is a fact that the sense-content was sensed (in sensing act x and/or by senser y), this does not imply that the senser gained any knowledge about the sense content. If you like, it's a fact in-itself, but not (necessarily) a fact for anyone (any knower.)
I think this is spot on. My take is that he's ultimately pressing a distinction between two senses of "immediacy": the immediacy of the act of sensing from the immediacy of the content of what is sensed. Or, if you like, between the non-inferential nature of the act of sensing and the non-conceptuality of the content of what is sensed (ugh, there's got to be a better way of saying this).
Sellars' dialectic crescendos in the realization that immediacy of act does not imply immediacy of content, contra what the proponents of "giveness" would have us believe. Just because I know some content via a non-inferential act does not imply that the content thereby known is not inferentially related to other contents, espeially in the sense of being open to challenge for justification.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 28, 2017 at 17:28#508420 likes
Glad to have you on board. I envisioned this thread as a kind of free-form reading group, but unfortunately I've since become too busy to participate regularly. As it stands, I suppose this thread could either become simply a 'place' to discuss Sellars' essay, or, if someone else wants to take the reins, could still remain a week-by-week, section-by-section discussion.
Glad to have stumbled in. I've been meaning to work through this text for years, and the group's given me a nudge. I'll chime in when I can. Time's short and you see how slowly I trudge through it.
I, too, am a little confused by Sellars' distinction between sense content and sense data - or at least confused by the importance of making such a distinction. The possibility that he draws this distinction simply to remain neutral within a larger controversy makes sense, tho, if that is the case, I wish I understood that controversy and what was at stake (or believed to be at stake) in it.
Sellars mentions the controversy in (I.2) during his search for "another locution" by which to refer to sense-data. He rejects the term "sensible" for the role, as having "the disadvantage that it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed", adding that this is "a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists". So Sellars settles on the term "sense content" as a neutral choice.
It's a strange passage. He seems to want a term that
i) refers "to an item which is sensed in a way which does not entail that it is sensed"; and
ii) does not imply "that sensed items could exist without being sensed" (for this is a matter of controversy)
At this point I don't see what motive Sellars has for criterion (i). Perhaps in his circles, it's a commonplace that one needs something more than a relational predicate to refer to an item in good faith?
Sellars:Being a sense datum, or sensum, is a relational property of the item that is sensed. To refer to an item which is sensed in a way which does not entail that it is sensed, it is necessary to use some other locution. Sensibile has the disadvantage that it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed, and this is a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists. Sense content is, perhaps, as neutral a term as any.
I can only guess, and hope the motive's cleared up in the course of the reading.
On the other hand, in light of a controversy about whether sensed items can exist without being sensed, it may be that Sellars is aiming at neutrality, preparing his terms so as to be able to range the discussion over both sides of this particular dispute. Or perhaps he's biased in favor of the claim that sensed items can exist without being sensed.
What's at stake in the controversy, for the sense-data theorist? I suppose it depends in part on what sort of things sense-data and sense contents turn out to be. Another point that's quite unclear.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 28, 2017 at 17:29#508430 likes
This analysis leads me to think that the importance of the distinction is that sense contents are something like qualities, something universal, while sense data are something fundamentally immediate
You're way ahead of me in the reading but I'll try a tentative reply.
So far as I can see, a sense-datum just is (for the sense-data theorist) a sense content in an appropriate relation to an act of sensing. Though this is an awkward way of speaking if one denies that sense content can exist without being sensed.
Oddly enough, it seems the "immediacy" of sense-data has something to do with their place in a relation. To be a sense-datum is to be a sense content given in an act of sensing.
If a sense content can exist without being sensed, is there some other way for it to be the object of an "act of awareness"? For instance, can sense contents be imagined, remembered, or thought when they are not sensed? I don't know whether sense-data theorists speak this way. Does this show the lines of the controversy Sellars mentions?
Perhaps one way to avoid speaking that way would be to say: Any act of awareness that has a sense content as an object is or involves an act of "sensing", including the acts we call imagining, remembering, and thinking sense contents.
Do any sense-data theorists want to say: If noninferential knowledge is given in an act of awareness, then that act is an act of "sensing"? Suppose the same sense content can figure both in an ordinary act of sensory perception, and in a "vivid and forceful" imagining that closely resembles perception, like a dream or hallucination. Arguably, in being aware of the imagining, I acquire noninferential knowledge about a matter of fact, that a particular imaginer is imagining a particular sense content. Analogously, in being aware of the ordinary perceiving, I acquire noninferential knowledge about a matter of fact, that a particular perceiver is perceiving a particular sense content. The analogy only goes so far; but that doesn't make it unreasonable to call the acquisition of noninferential knowledge in each case a sort of "sensing".
I hope that's not too far afield. In any case, talk of "immediacy" and "givenness" of sense-data seems closely connected to the idea of noninferential knowledge acquisition, noninferential knowledge of "facts." If sense contents are said to exist without "being sensed", we’ll need to hear more about how else they can "exist", whether they're involved in other acts of awareness that are not called "sensing", and whether they can exist without any involvement in an act of awareness. That should help us figure out whether they differ from sense-data with respect to "immediacy" and "givenness".
(keeping in mind the Hegelian point that to deal with 'qualities' is already to deal with universals and mediation.)
Can you develop the Hegelian point?
I'm never sure what's meant by "qualities" and "universals." I recall Kant speaks of "sensible qualities" -- is that the right ballpark?
I can think of two sorts of "mediation" to watch out for: mediation by inference and mediation by concepts. I expect the given to play the role of foil in this narrative, while Sellars develops an argument supporting a view in which nothing is given in noninferential knowledge acquisition without some contribution from concepts -- or however he puts his version of the Hegelian theme developed in our time by Sellarsians like Brandom and McDowell.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 28, 2017 at 17:30#508440 likes
(Perhaps too, the sense of 'content' in 'propositional content' is analogous? We might say that a proposition expresses some propositional content (we can understand why one wouldn't want to reduce the propositional content of some proposition to that particular proposition, or a relation whereby a proposition expresses some propositional content)
The analogy is appealing.
We say various subjects on various occasions undergo various “propositional attitudes” with respect to the same “propositional content.” On each such occasion there’s a relation of the content and the attitude; in at least some cases the attitude is or involves an “act” like doubting, affirming, hoping, and so on. Do we also say that the propositional content is supposed, or by many supposed, to have the form of a fact?
Likewise, we might expect that various subjects on various occasions undergo various “intuitions” (acts of awareness with “sensible character”) with respect to the same “sense content”. On each such occasion there’s a relation of the content and an act like sensing or imagining. Does the sense-datum theorist say (or does Sellars’ argument drive the sense-datum theorist to say) that the sense content has the form of a fact?
How are sense contents related to propositional contents? If a sense content occurs in “an act of intuition with sensible character”, can it also occur as a propositional content in a thought without (the relevant sort of) “sensible character” -- i.e., when if ever is the propositional content in such a thought also a sense content? On the other hand, is a sense content always a propositional content -- all sense contents are propositional contents, but not all propositional contents are sense contents?
Are Sellars and the sense-data theorists at all concerned with what I’ve called “sensible character” here, what I might call qualia or phenomenal characteristics paradigmatically associated with perceptual experience? I’ve got the idea that those influenced by Sellars tend to differ along these lines. McDowell seems more interested in phenomenology, while Brandom and Rorty seem, like Davidson, wary of subjectivity.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 28, 2017 at 17:58#508480 likes
Thanks. I'm afraid it's a clumsy, discursive way of working through a text. But it's my favorite way of traversing the hermeneutic circle.
Nothing wrong with that. I imagine this is the way most people work through a difficult text, whether they realize or not.
You asked about historical context back on page 7 (I think), and so I wanted to add some historical notes that might be of interest:
EPM is probably best be understood as a response to theories put forward by the likes of William James, Bertrand Russell, C.D. Broad, C.I. Lewis, G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, H.H. Price, and Hans Reichenbach (among others) in the early part of the 20th century. He probably also had philosophers as diverse as Rudolph Carnap and Edmund Husserl in view as well.
There are obviously substantial theoretical differences in the positions of each of the aforementioned thinkers (insofar as it even makes sense to say that a philosopher ever has a stable position throughout the course of their careers). Riechenbach, for instance, argued that physical objects, not sense-impressions, are directly given in experience. According to Riechenbach, sense-impressions are mere abstracta that are never "seen" by anyone, much less seen directly (see Experience and Prediction, 1938). C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price, by contrast, tended to argue that it is colors, shapes, textures, etc. that are directly given in experience, and that beliefs about physical objects (and even physical objects themselves) are inferentially constructed out of these (See Lewis' Mind and World Order, and Price's Perception). Consider the following quotation from Price's Perception:
[quote=Price]
When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. [...] One thing however that I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape [...] directly present to my consciousness. [...] And when I say that it is directly present to my consciousness, I mean that my consciousness of it is not reached by inference [...]. This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given and that which is thus present is called a datum.
[/quote]
Russel and Moore also tended to analyze physical objects as reducible to directly apprehended sense-data (e.g. secondary qualities).
William James was somewhat unique in maintaining that pretty much everything except the "entirety" or "totality" of experience is directly apprehended. In his view, sense-data (or "percepts") are no more or no less "given" than the relations (both causal and inferential) that bind them together (see A World of Pure Experience, 1904).
The common thread running through the diverse positions of all of these thinkers is this notion of a directly apprehended datum, or "given". EPM does not take issue with the concept of direct apprehension per se, but rather with that the way that the concept of direct apprehension is used to justify foundationalist epistemologies in which the objects or contents of direct apprehension are taken to be incorrigibly or indubitably known purely on the basis of their being directly apprehended.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 28, 2017 at 21:20#508940 likes
Here’s an extended summary regarding Sellars's analysis of "Looks" talk. I don't spend much time justifying my interpretation or explicitly engaging with the text (and I gloss some things), but I'd be happy to dig deeper if anyone wants to.
I think it was @Calisbury who somewhere said that Sellars employs a kind-of "anstoss" logic in regards to the concept of veridicality, and that this under-girds his analysis of the “is/looks” distinction. I think that’s basically correct. In the “Looks” sections Sellars is responding to the Pricean line of argument that goes something like this (very roughly):
1. When I (ostensibly) see an apple, there are many things I can doubt about my experience, like that the object is really an apple, or that there is a material object present at all.
2. However, there are some things I can't doubt, such as that there is a round red patch present to my awareness.
3. The fact that I can't doubt these beliefs implies that they need not be justified on the basis of any other beliefs (e.g. they are not inferentially mediated).
4. Therefore, it is things like round red patches that are the direct objects of apprehension, and it is only my beliefs about such things (i.e. beliefs about how things "appear") that could (and should) serve as the indubitable foundational (non-inferential) basis of all empirical knowledge.
Sellars basically thinks that this gets things ass-backwards. He doesn’t exactly deny that beliefs about the appearance of round red patches in a person’s visual field can serve as evidence for the existence of, say, an apple on a desk, but he will claim that they provide (at most) very weak evidence when taken on their own, but that this is not their primary function anyway.
Sellars’s alternative analysis is basically this: the primary function of claims about the way things “appear” or “look” or “seem” is to provide a mechanism for withdrawing from claims about the way things really are. So to say “the object over there looks red”, or “It looks like there is a red object over there” is to withdraw further and further away from a claim about how things really are, namely, that “there is a red object over there”. The notion of “looking” or “appearing” (e.g. looks red) is conceptually dependent on the more fundamental notion of “being” (e.g. is red).
If we are inclined to agree with this analysis, then it becomes hard to deny that claims about appearances can't really provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are. That’s because each and every claim about how things appear is nothing more than the withdrawal from some companion claim about how things really are. As such, it’s a mistake to think that we do or ought to start from claims about how things appear and then inferentially move to claims about how things really are. Instead, we start from claims about how things really are, and then inferentially move to claims about how things merely “appear” only upon being confronted by evidence that suggests we were mistaken about how things really are.
So, if claims about appearances can’t serve as an adequate evidential basis for empirical knowledge of how things really are, then what can? For Sellars, the only adequate justification for such claims is to be found in other empirical claims about how things really are. In particular, claims about the context of observation ought to (and do) serve as the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims. To justify a claim like “this necktie is green” we ought to appeal to facts about the situation in which we find ourselves – that is, to claims about our historical reliability at distinguishing colors, about the lighting conditions, about whether we are afflicted with color-blindness, about whether we are wearing green-tinted contact lenses, about whether we are currently on drugs that effect our ability to distinguish colors, about whether someone is likely to be playing a practical joke on us, etc. Again, the ultimate appeal to empirical claims as opposed to claims about appearances is hardly surprising given Sellars’s analysis of the looks/is distinction. For Sellars, to vacate all claims about what is the case is equivalent with vacating all claims to knowledge itself, and so a substratum consisting purely of beliefs about appearances is therefore simply not a viable starting point for empirical knowledge.
As an aside, it’s interesting to consider how Sellars ultimately deals with the charge of begging the question against skepticism (this is only cursorily covered in EPM. See the articles “More on Giveness and Explanatory Coherence” and “Kant’s Theory of Experience” for details). If empirical claims about what is the case are to be justified by other empirical claims about what is the case then it appears that we’re caught in a vicious circle. Sellars will make a Kantian-style transcendental argument to the effect that the linguistic practices that are the pre-condition for the formulation of the skeptic’s challenge (or any challenge) are only intelligible against the backdrop of the very empirical knowledge that the skeptic is challenging the legitimacy of. Not that this approach is original to Sellars (though he puts an interesting “linguistic” twist on it), but it is note-worthy in that he is one of the only philosophers in his milieu (outside of Strawson) to explicitly employ the machinery of transcendental argumentation in his work.
DeleteduserrcJanuary 29, 2017 at 04:26#509920 likes
I'm never sure what's meant by "qualities" and "universals." I recall Kant speaks of "sensible qualities" -- is that the right ballpark?
I can think of two sorts of "mediation" to watch out for: mediation by inference and mediation by concepts. I expect the given to play the role of foil in this narrative, while Sellars develops an argument supporting a view in which nothing is given in noninferential knowledge acquisition without some contribution from concepts -- or however he puts his version of the Hegelian theme developed in our time by Sellarsians like Brandom and McDowell.
I'm thinking of Hegel's analysis of perception in Section 2 of Phenomenology of Spirit. I just took a look back at the text and I guess he actually uses the word 'property' (or, more exactly, Eigenschaft, which can be also be translated as quality.)
In any case, (my interpretation of) Hegel's point is that, in speaking of a 'quality' or 'property,' we're speaking about something repeatable, something that could (at least in principle) also be a quality or property of something else. For Hegel, this means that we're dealing with universals and I think he's right. But 'universal' is a loaded term, and I don't want to drag things too far afield. In any case, the 'mediation' I mentioned is exactly the second sort of mediation you mention, a mediation by concepts. To understand a quality or property as a quality or property, we must have recourse to the conceptual.
I hope that makes sense. A lot of these terms (concept, universal, property, quality) kind of bleed into one another.
Cabbage FarmerJanuary 31, 2017 at 17:54#516800 likes
Nothing wrong with that. I imagine this is the way most people work through a difficult text, whether they realize or not.
It does seem to belong to the process of interpretation whether we notice it or not. I enjoy building it into my method, and I like to pretend this improves my results. For instance, by breaking the text into small parts and working through them in a format that resembles conversation.
The practice is in keeping with a characterization of interpretation as a conversation with the text, and also in keeping with ancient customs of philosophical dialogue and philosophical commentaries, with ordinary human conversation, and with our behavior in forums like this one here.
EPM is probably best be understood as a response to theories put forward by the likes of William James, Bertrand Russell, C.D. Broad, C.I. Lewis, G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, H.H. Price, and Hans Reichenbach (among others) in the early part of the 20th century. He probably also had philosophers as diverse as Rudolph Carnap and Edmund Husserl in view as well
Quite a cast of characters. Which would you say figure most prominently in, or had most influence in the field in the decades preceding, EPM? Or, which if any are closest to the typical sense-datum theory Sellars takes aim at in the essay?
Riechenbach, for instance, argued that physical objects, not sense-impressions, are directly given in experience. According to Riechenbach, sense-impressions are mere abstracta that are never "seen" by anyone, much less seen directly (see Experience and Prediction, 1938).
I'm not sure I've heard of Riechenbach. The view that it's physical objects, not sense-impressions, which are "seen" sounds remarkably fresh.
So he buries sense-impressions behind experience.... Are the impressions mere theoretical constructs for him, or do these constructs perhaps refer to terms that play some causal or functional role in the organization of experience, or does he reject all such theories....
C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price, by contrast, tended to argue that it is colors, shapes, textures, etc. that are directly given in experience, and that beliefs about physical objects (and even physical objects themselves) are inferentially constructed out of these (See Lewis' Mind and World Order, and Price's Perception).
This sounds perhaps more problematic. Does it mean that some "beliefs" about "given" colors are also "given"? I recall Sellars' distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.
How and where does "inference" occur in their models? Surely not in experience: We don't run around the world ceaselessly making conscious inferential judgments about physical objects on the basis of given colors and shapes; but arguably we have (or many of us have) countlessly many "beliefs" about local physical objects on the basis of current perception.
If there's something like "inferential judgment" at play in all our perceptually grounded beliefs about physical objects in the environment, it must be a sort of "inference" that occurs behind the scenes of conscious awareness.
Perhaps this is one way to interpret, or to correct, strange old views in our tradition concerning "judgments of sensation": The synthesis of "objects" from the most basic elements of sensation is achieved primarily by nonconscious cognitive processes that inform conscious perceptual experience. The application of the language of "inference" and "judgment" to such nonconscious spontaneous processes, excusable in days gone by, is merely a sort of analogy. However, when nonconscious processes of sensory cognition result in perceptual experience, we may begin to speak of perceptual content, and this content is not only open to inferential judgment, but also arguably charged with meaning, with conceptual content, and thus full of implications.
Of course the conceptual content, the "beliefs", and the "implications" of perceptual content, would depend in part on the conceptual stance and character of the perceiver, as well as on what's "given" to perception by sensation. Particular conscious acts of inference on the basis of perception occur within this constant shifting context.
I suppose the hard problem of perceptual content, along these lines, is to clearly distinguish what's "given" to perception by sensation.
Consider the following quotation from Price's Perception:
When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. [...] One thing however that I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape [...] directly present to my consciousness. [...] And when I say that it is directly present to my consciousness, I mean that my consciousness of it is not reached by inference [...]. This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given and that which is thus present is called a datum. — Price
A beautiful passage. What's Price's spin on the phrase "reached by inference"? It could mean i) "achieved by a process of inference", or far more weakly, ii) "open to revision by a process of inference". A huge difference. As I suggested earlier, I think (i) is just wrong. If we run with (ii), then we have a conception of "presence to consciousness" or "givenness" according to which the datum that is given in perceptual experience is indubitable. It's not merely that the datum is indubitable; it seems Price has here carved out the sense-datum as whatever's indubitable in perception. An admirable exercise in skepticism. Good show.
Perhaps we can call this "datum" the sense-content component of perceptual content, and say that perceptual content includes both sense-content and conceptual content?
Is Price the source among analytic philosophers of talk about "direct presence" and "presence to consciousness", or did the usage precede him? I believe the first time I encountered the term, or the first time it stuck, I was reading Anscombe's "First Person".
William James was somewhat unique in maintaining that pretty much everything except the "entirety" or "totality" of experience is directly apprehended. In his view, sense-data (or "percepts") are no more or no less "given" than the relations (both causal and inferential) that bind them together (see A World of Pure Experience, 1904).
It makes sense to say some relations are ordinarily given in perception: I don't perceive two objects and then infer that one is to the left of the other; I see that it's so. Likewise, I don't feel the pot and and feel some heat and infer that the pot is hot, I feel that it's hot. I don't see the glass fall to the floor and infer that falling to the floor caused the glass to shatter... I believe falling was the cause of shattering when I see it, without making any inference....
But each of those claims is "open to doubt", and hence not "directly present to consciousness" or "given" in the sense carved out by Price. Or at most the first one, about relative spatial position, is given in Price's sense. (on my reading of that little passage)
The common thread running through the diverse positions of all of these thinkers is this notion of a directly apprehended datum, or "given".
So the family of terms includes "direct apprehension", "direct presence (to consciousness)", "direct givenness", "givenness", and "immediacy". And on the object side, "percept", "datum", "sense-impression", "sense-datum", "sense content", and I don't know what.
EPM does not take issue with the concept of direct apprehension per se, but rather with that the way that the concept of direct apprehension is used to justify foundationalist epistemologies in which the objects or contents of direct apprehension are taken to be incorrigibly or indubitably known purely on the basis of their being directly apprehended.
I'm inclined to say there is something indubitable in experience, along the lines I just drew out from Price, and to characterize what's there indubitable as "appearance". I'd say, further, that this indubitable appearance does provide a sort of anchor or foundation for the beliefs and knowledge of each rational sentient agent, from one moment to the next. But not the sort of foundation that could possibly ground anything like certain knowledge beyond the appearance of the present moment.
Of course knowledge is not the same thing as certain and indubitable knowledge.
I suppose the "foundationalist epistemologies" in question are in search of something more impressive than mere knowledge?
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 06, 2017 at 16:19#533320 likes
In any case, (my interpretation of) Hegel's point is that, in speaking of a 'quality' or 'property,' we're speaking about something repeatable, something that could (at least in principle) also be a quality or property of something else. For Hegel, this means that we're dealing with universals and I think he's right.
It often occurs to me that repeatability is essential somehow to the conceptual, but I've never managed to satisfy myself unpacking that "somehow".
Frege and Russell instruct us in formulating concepts of particulars. These are repeatable across various occasions, in different propositional contexts, in utterances by various speakers. The object corresponding to a concept of a particular may be varied in thought (e.g. in ignorance of the relevant facts or in counterfactual exercises), and thus the concept is "repeated" in application to a range of possible objects. Accordingly, it seems there is a generic character even to concepts of particulars. But I'm wary of conflating this generic and repeatable character of concepts with a presumption that concepts always correspond to something like "general terms" in the ordinary sense, man in general as opposed to this or that man.
But 'universal' is a loaded term, and I don't want to drag things too far afield. In any case, the 'mediation' I mentioned is exactly the second sort of mediation you mention, a mediation by concepts. To understand a quality or property as a quality or property, we must have recourse to the conceptual.
We who speak here aim to understand the quality as a quality, and to account for the sense in which a perceiver who says "This apple is red" says so in virtue of his own grasp of the "qualities" that appear to him. But to speak of "qualities" this way is to have already conceptualized the "content" of perception.
I'm inclined to say, on the basis of introspection, that ordinary perceptual experience is always already conceptualized. That doesn't entail that there is no determination of perceptual content by the "receptive" powers of sense perception; and it rather seems there is such a determining contribution from sensation in perceptual experience.
Accordingly, to characterize "sense qualities" as something like general concepts is arguably to jump ahead of a tricky discourse about the receptive character of a perceptual experience strongly determined by sensation. A discourse Rorty, for instance, seems eager to evade at any price.
Consider the quality as in the first place, not a conceptualized appearance, but an activity of the organism or mind involving an appearance of a particular type.
I move my arm to wave; I move it again to make "the same" gesture on a second occasion. I call it "the same". Perhaps you're observing me and agree it's "the same". Perhaps we turn to details, fleshing out criteria of similarity, declaring when to count a gesture as a wave, when to count a wave as this type of wave, and how to handle borderline cases.... However that exercise turns out, it's two different events in the world that we're considering, in terms of a similarity that we assign, on the basis of objective characteristics that we deem relevant and assess from a certain point of view, with a certain purpose, with a certain degree of accuracy and precision....
Likewise, we might say two visual appearings of or involving a quality of red are the same with respect to this quality on the basis of objective characteristics that we deem relevant and assess from a certain point of view, with a certain purpose, with a certain degree of accuracy and precision....
Along these lines, one trick would be to distinguish the "objective characteristics" occurring in two events from the conceptualization of characteristics by virtue of which two instances are called alike, the same type, two of a kind, for instance, "red".
It's not that the concept red appears to me; but rather what appears to me I immediately recognize as red.
I hope that makes sense. A lot of these terms (concept, universal, property, quality) kind of bleed into one another.
So much philosophical activity must be spent sorting out such terms as they occur in the speech of others and in one's own usage. The difficulty of that task, the brevity of life, and the growth of the record of discourse over time, give a strong motive for plain speaking.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 06, 2017 at 21:35#533610 likes
Here’s an extended summary regarding Sellars's analysis of "Looks" talk. I don't spend much time justifying my interpretation or explicitly engaging with the text (and I gloss some things), but I'd be happy to dig deeper if anyone wants to.
I think it was Calisbury who somewhere said that Sellars employs a kind-of "anstoss" logic in regards to the concept of veridicality, and that this under-girds his analysis of the “is/looks” distinction.
Would anyone care to say something about “anstoss logic”? What does this phrase mean?
I think that’s basically correct. In the “Looks” sections Sellars is responding to the Pricean line of argument that goes something like this (very roughly):
1. When I (ostensibly) see an apple, there are many things I can doubt about my experience, like that the object is really an apple, or that there is a material object present at all.
2. However, there are some things I can't doubt, such as that there is a round red patch present to my awareness.
Or perhaps less boldly:
2’: … such as that there seems to be a round red patch present to my awareness.
Or even less:
2’’: … such as that there seems to be a seeming-round seeming-red seeming-patch present to my awareness.
Are such revisions in keeping with Price? Or would he deem the “seemings” redundant or inappropriate here, perhaps in keeping with a view that “the presence of a round red patch” is not the sort of thing that “seems”, and is instead in every respect immune to doubt?
3. The fact that I can't doubt these beliefs implies that they need not be justified on the basis of any other beliefs (e.g. they are not inferentially mediated).
There’s something intuitively plausible about this, once we massage it the right way. I don’t ordinarily justify my belief that I am seemingly seeing a seemingly red seeming object on any other grounds than that it appears so to me in the ordinary first-person point of view; ordinarily there are no other grounds available for such claims.
However, putting it the way Price has here, one might ask him, what justifies your belief that there are such things as “patches”? And it may turn out that this is only a loose manner of speaking.
4. Therefore, it is things like round red patches that are the direct objects of apprehension, and it is only my beliefs about such things (i.e. beliefs about how things "appear") that could (and should) serve as the indubitable foundational (non-inferential) basis of all empirical knowledge.
See my concerns about “seeming” and “patches” above. And my previous and subsequent mutterings about epistemological “certainty” and “foundations”.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 06, 2017 at 21:38#533620 likes
Sellars basically thinks that this gets things ass-backwards. He doesn’t exactly deny that beliefs about the appearance of round red patches in a person’s visual field can serve as evidence for the existence of, say, an apple on a desk, but he will claim that they provide (at most) very weak evidence when taken on their own, but that this is not their primary function anyway.
I hope to find myself aligned with Sellars in criticizing the strength of the warrant provided by claims like “I seem to see a seeming-red seeming-apple” for claims like “There is a red apple there”. We might say the first claim provides a prima facie reason for belief in the second claim, but nothing close to a foundation for “certain knowledge” that the second claim is true.
Likewise, however, the dubitability that burdens the more objective claim does not seem to transfer to the more subjective claim. If Price is one of those epistemologists with anxieties about “certainty”, who hopes to derive perfectly certain empirically grounded beliefs about apples and tables from the beliefs about seemings we may carve out as an epistemic layer entailed by experience, of course he’s barking up the wrong tree.
That doesn’t make it nonsense to speak about the epistemic role of that deep layer of belief based on appearances, which serves as a safety net for us to fall back on gracefully, precisely because it persists while we ignore it.
Sellars’s alternative analysis is basically this: the primary function of claims about the way things “appear” or “look” or “seem” is to provide a mechanism for withdrawing from claims about the way things really are.
Like Wittgenstein in On Certainty: One always forgets the expression “I thought I knew”.
Who forgets such an expression? Only a befuddled epistemologist like Moore, who seems to play the role of buffoon in Wittgenstein’s opera.
So to say “the object over there looks red”, or “It looks like there is a red object over there” is to withdraw further and further away from a claim about how things really are, namely, that “there is a red object over there”. The notion of “looking” or “appearing” (e.g. looks red) is conceptually dependent on the more fundamental notion of “being” (e.g. is red).
It’s a withdrawal from claims about how things really are over there, where there seems to be a red apple. But this doesn’t entail another withdrawal, from all claims about how things really are in the world: For this appearance, and this seeming, may be said to be part of the world. And it’s not clear that it may be coherently denied that the appearance and seeming are part of the world.
Accordingly, the appearance and the seeming are among the “facts” we may aim to piece together in each case. For instance by asking: How is it the case, how does it happen, that things appear thus and so (to me, now)?
In ordinary, happy cases, one fair answer is: Because there’s an apple there, and your eyes are open and aimed that way. The frequency with which seeming-seeings of seeming-apples turn out to be, to all appearances and “to a practical certainty”, genuine seeings of genuine apples, also serves as justification for the belief that “There is an apple there”, and lets the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple stand as a noninferentially acquired defeasible warrant for the latter belief.
A more developed variation on this theme could haul into the account an empirically grounded story about light and the light-relative properties of physical objects; about retinas and cones and optic nerves; about perceptual processes in cognition.
None of this amounts to absolute “theoretical certainty” that there really is a real apple there -- a certainty we never attain, even as we bite and chew and swallow.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 06, 2017 at 21:50#533640 likes
If we are inclined to agree with this analysis, then it becomes hard to deny that claims about appearances can't really provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are. That’s because each and every claim about how things appear is nothing more than the withdrawal from some companion claim about how things really are.
What shall we count as “adequate” evidential basis for claims about how things really are? I would argue along lines just indicated above, that the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple does provide adequate evidential basis for claims about real apples, though not for claims that such claims are certain claims. In cases in which new evidence comes to light, that the seeming-apple was not in fact an apple, or that the seeming-seeing was not a seeing, we amend the record of discourse by adding new alleged facts (including claims about the seeming course of seemings) and revise or withdraw from our previous claim about what’s over there in the world where (it seems) it had seemed there was a seeming-apple.
Let’s not forget the role of expressions like “I thought I knew”. I thought there was an apple there, but it turned out to be a lump of wax. That doesn’t mean the initial claim was unjustified, unwarranted, and groundless -- only that it turned out to be incorrect; or rather that the speaker turned out to have reason to correct it. This new reason, or new judgment, is as fallible in principle as the first which it amends. But it seems such claims are correct when they happen to be so, and stand uncorrected until there’s reason for correction.
As such, it’s a mistake to think that we do or ought to start from claims about how things appear and then inferentially move to claims about how things really are. Instead, we start from claims about how things really are, and then inferentially move to claims about how things merely “appear” only upon being confronted by evidence that suggests we were mistaken about how things really are.
Who’s doing the “moving” here, and for what purpose? Arguably neither route will get us more “certainty” in the claims we make about what’s “over there”. It’s true that ordinary speech for ordinary purposes tends to follow the more direct route, speaking about “what’s over there” without wasting time on appearance-talk except in special cases, as when one is prompted by events to revise his own considered view about “what he thought he knew.”
The efficiency of that fine custom of, as it were, directly addressing things in the world as they appear to us, and revising only when it matters -- instead of constantly referring to the mediations of experience and conceivable doubts of reason -- gives us no reason to suppose those mediations vanish whenever there’s harmony between the seeming and the fact. It seems rather that when they appear in agreement, ordinarily we focus on the main track, according to our purpose, only falling back on the other, and to the task of realignment, when they fall out of whack.
I don’t mean to imply, by speaking this way, that the “appearance” is something like a color patch in my head, ontologically isolable from the “causal chain” that is -- I want to say -- identical to that appearance.
We may analyze a causal chain into parts, or happen upon one link at a time, and then in ignorant conjecture or counterfactual hypothesis, characterize that one link as part of indefinitely many conceivable causal chains. Some such stories seem to line up with the facts better than others. Yet others seem entirely off base.
So, if claims about appearances can’t serve as an adequate evidential basis for empirical knowledge of how things really are, then what can? For Sellars, the only adequate justification for such claims is to be found in other empirical claims about how things really are. In particular, claims about the context of observation ought to (and do) serve as the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims. To justify a claim like “this necktie is green” we ought to appeal to facts about the situation in which we find ourselves – that is, to claims about our historical reliability at distinguishing colors, about the lighting conditions, about whether we are afflicted with color-blindness, about whether we are wearing green-tinted contact lenses, about whether we are currently on drugs that effect our ability to distinguish colors, about whether someone is likely to be playing a practical joke on us, etc.
I strongly agree, objective claims about how things really are make good justifications for other objective claims about how things really are, and should be perhaps required in order to count such claims as “justified”. So far as I can make out, sophisticated theories about light and vision add little in this regard to a common-sense grasp of how seeing works.
Moreover, general knowledge about light and the historical reliability of judgments of color does not inform me of my present circumstances at all, unless experience informs me of my present circumstances in such a way as to warrant the application of thoughts about light and color discrimination to my thoughts about present circumstances. There’s no theory that tells me whether my eyes are open or closed right now, for instance, or whether it’s dark or light in here, or where the proximate light sources are in my vicinity of the world and what color of light they seem in my estimation to emit. Ordinarily I acquire such information noninferentially by using my eyes to see. It seems that any general theory of vision I may have acquired secondhand over the years, has accrued through centuries determined in part by processes involving the same sort of basis for judgment in others, who used their eyes in about the same way that I do on each particular occasion.
Again, the ultimate appeal to empirical claims as opposed to claims about appearances is hardly surprising given Sellars’s analysis of the looks/is distinction. For Sellars, to vacate all claims about what is the case is equivalent with vacating all claims to knowledge itself, and so a substratum consisting purely of beliefs about appearances is therefore simply not a viable starting point for empirical knowledge.
The main thrust of this point seems reasonable, but there’s arguably an unwarranted and undesirable implication, that “appearances” are not part of the empirical world, and that our accounts of appearances are not accounts of the empirical world.
I suggest, to the contrary, that “having an appearance” or “being appeared to” is a sort of knowledge of the empirical world -- a most fundamental sort -- that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of appearance-talk that coincides with matters of fact, whether or not the subject understands that or how the appearance coincides with other matters of fact.
The appearance is part of reality, that’s how it coincides. It is itself a matter of fact related to other matters of fact in the world. That’s how perceptual experience binds our thoughts to nature and opens the world to each perceiver.
As an aside, it’s interesting to consider how Sellars ultimately deals with the charge of begging the question against skepticism (this is only cursorily covered in EPM. See the articles “More on Giveness and Explanatory Coherence” and “Kant’s Theory of Experience” for details). If empirical claims about what is the case are to be justified by other empirical claims about what is the case then it appears that we’re caught in a vicious circle. Sellars will make a Kantian-style transcendental argument to the effect that the linguistic practices that are the pre-condition for the formulation of the skeptic’s challenge (or any challenge) are only intelligible against the backdrop of the very empirical knowledge that the skeptic is challenging the legitimacy of. Not that this approach is original to Sellars (though he puts an interesting “linguistic” twist on it), but it is note-worthy in that he is one of the only philosophers in his milieu (outside of Strawson) to explicitly employ the machinery of transcendental argumentation in his work.
I’m wary of transcendental arguments. For one thing, it seems they’re always missing the point in conversation with a skeptic who’s inclined to gesture at an infinite horizon of conceivable possibilities when we ask a question like “How possible?” On what grounds, in whose terms, for what purpose, do we limit the frame?
I consider myself a sort of skeptic, but I don’t worry much about circles. Language is prior to sophisticated epistemological arguments. Perceptual experience is prior to sophisticated empirical theories. Where do such self-evident, practically tautological, claims leave our conversation about the logic of appearances and its role in observational judgments?
One concern I have with the view you’ve attributed to Sellars, is that it may leave a gap between general empirical beliefs and particular perceptual occasions. I mean specifically, with respect to handling claims about whether and how appearances can “provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are”; and about “the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims”. To unpack such baggage the wrong way, may be to fall into some version of the “frictionless spinning in a void” associated with coherentism.
By my way of reckoning, it makes more sense to emphasize the cooperation on each occasion of general beliefs and beliefs based on current perception. The essential role of the more general beliefs, and the ordinary tendency to gloss over appearance-talk in happy cases, doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep layer of belief that’s analyzable or even best described in terms of appearance-talk, playing an equally essential role in our acquisition of noninferential knowledge of present circumstances.
There’s no way I can keep up with you @Cabbage Farmer, but here’s a start at some answers to your questions:
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]Quite a cast of characters. Which would you say figure most prominently in, or had most influence in the field in the decades preceding, EPM? Or, which if any are closest to the typical sense-datum theory Sellars takes aim at in the essay?[/quote]
I’d say that C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price figured very prominently, though the others mentioned are not far behind. As an aside, it’s interesting to consider that Sellars studied under C.I. Lewis while completing graduate studies Harvard.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I'm not sure I've heard of Riechenbach. The view that it's physical objects, not sense-impressions, which are "seen" sounds remarkably fresh.
So he buries sense-impressions behind experience.... Are the impressions mere theoretical constructs for him, or do these constructs perhaps refer to terms that play some causal or functional role in the organization of experience, or does he reject all such theories....
[/quote]
In Chapter 2 of Experience and Prediction Reichenbach writes:
[quote=Reichenbach]
I cannot admit that impressions have the character of observable facts. What I observe are things, not impressions. I see tables, and houses, and thermometers, and trees, and men, and the sun, and many other things in the sphere of crude physical objects; but I have never seen my impression of these things […] I do not say I doubt the existence of my impressions. I believe that there are impressions, but I have never sensed them. When I consider the question in an unprejudiced manner I find that I infer the existence of my impressions.[/quote]
How are they inferred? He claims that they are inferred in order to explain the difference between appearance and reality:
[quote=Reichenbach]
To explain this difference, I introduce the distinction between the physical thing and my impression of that thing. I say that usually there are both physical things and impressions within me but that sometimes there are impressions only […] we need this assumption to explain that in the case of the confused world one of the two worlds, the external world, is dropped. The distinction between the world of things and the world of impressions or representation is therefore the result of epistemological reflection.[/quote]
He goes on to talk about “the abstract character of impressions” as part and parcel of a “duplicity theory” of perception. And this is where, as seen through the lens of EPM, Reichenbach’s account starts to go off the rails. We can already see in the quotes above the seeds of an ambiguity between impressions qua objects and impressions qua facts. Reichenbach says that he doesn’t “see” his impressions and also says that impressions are “not observable facts”. And yet he’s invoking impressions in order to explain discrepancies in what is seen.
Things get really bad in chapter 3 where Reichenbach seems to firmly place impressions into the category of “immediate existence”:
[quote=Reichenbach]Imagine we are taking a walk at dusk through a lonely moor; we see before us at some distance a man in the road […] we do not doubt the man’s reality. We walk farther and discover it is not a man but a juniper bush. […] We shall say that both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them.[/quote]
So here we seem to have the paradigm case of an impression. We think we see a man, but it’s really just juniper bush so we invoke the concept of an impression to explain the mistake. The man is inferred to be an impression, but here we are told that the “man” also has immediate existence. So what’s immediate existence?
[quote=Reichenbach]We may regard immediate existence as a concept known to everybody. If somebody does not understand us, we put him into a certain situation and pronounce the term, thus accustoming him to the term and the situation seen by him. […] If a child asks “what is a knife” we take a knife and show it to the child.[/quote]
In other words, immediate existence is the existence of whatever is directly apprehended or, if you will, known by acquaintance. But wait…this directly contradicts Reichenbach’s earlier claim that impressions are indirect, theoretical entities. These are exactly the kinds of confusions that Sellars was responding to in EPM.
...
Well, I didn't make much progress here, but (as usual) I'm out of time. I'll try to respond with more later.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
This sounds perhaps more problematic. Does it mean that some "beliefs" about "given" colors are also "given"? I recall Sellars' distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.[/quote]
Right. Both Lewis and Price (like Reichenbach) tend to elide the distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
How and where does "inference" occur in their models? Surely not in experience: We don't run around the world ceaselessly making conscious inferential judgments about physical objects on the basis of given colors and shapes; but arguably we have (or many of us have) countlessly many "beliefs" about local physical objects on the basis of current perception.
If there's something like "inferential judgment" at play in all our perceptually grounded beliefs about physical objects in the environment, it must be a sort of "inference" that occurs behind the scenes of conscious awareness.
Perhaps this is one way to interpret, or to correct, strange old views in our tradition concerning "judgments of sensation": The synthesis of "objects" from the most basic elements of sensation is achieved primarily by nonconscious cognitive processes that inform conscious perceptual experience. The application of the language of "inference" and "judgment" to such nonconscious spontaneous processes, excusable in days gone by, is merely a sort of analogy. However, when nonconscious processes of sensory cognition result in perceptual experience, we may begin to speak of perceptual content, and this content is not only open to inferential judgment, but also arguably charged with meaning, with conceptual content, and thus full of implications.
Of course the conceptual content, the "beliefs", and the "implications" of perceptual content, would depend in part on the conceptual stance and character of the perceiver, as well as on what's "given" to perception by sensation. Particular conscious acts of inference on the basis of perception occur within this constant shifting context.
I suppose the hard problem of perceptual content, along these lines, is to clearly distinguish what's "given" to perception by sensation.[/quote]
These are exactly the kinds of questions that Lewis and Price were wrestling with. For Lewis, the “given” was opposed primarily to the “concept”, and the hallmark of conceptuality was logical form. By implication, the given qua given has no logical form, it has no inferential implications and it does not constitute empirical knowledge. So Lewis’s epistemology is quite Kantian in nature. The mind applies concepts to the sensory given and it is the application of concepts that license inferences.
And yet, Lewis seems to recognize the tension that results from taking this kind of position. For what is the epistemic status of the given before concepts are applied, and what is the nature of the cognitive process by which concepts are applied to it? Is the given completely formless and ineffable, or does it exhibit some form of structure. If the latter, then how are we to understand the structure of the given if not in conceptual terms?
Here’s Lewis writing on the given in Chapter 2 of Mind and World Order
[quote=Lewis]
There is, in all experience, that element which we are aware that we do not create by thinking and cannot, in general, displace or alter. As a first approximation, we may designate it as "the sensuous."
[…]
At the moment, I have a fountain pen in my hand. When I so describe this item of my present experience, I make use of terms whose meaning I have learned. Correlatively I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness and relate it to what is not just now present in ways which I have learned and which reflect modes of action which I have acquired. […] what I refer to as "the given" in this experience is, in broad terms, qualitatively no different than it would be if I were an infant or an ignorant savage.
[…]
The distinction between this element of interpretation and the given is emphasized by the fact that the latter is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter how we think or conceive.
[…]
While we can thus isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such , because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways.
[/quote]
The given is essentially being defined here as an “invariant” in experience – its structure does not change despite being emenable to multiple classifications dependent on the interests and background knowledge of the agent. The process by which concepts are applied is described as a process of “abstraction” and that’s where things start to get murky insofar as Lewis wants to claim that the structure of the given itself determines what classifications are or are not applicable in a given context:
[quote=Lewis]
I can apprehend this thing (given) as pen or rubber or cylinder, but I cannot, by taking thought, discover it as paper or soft or cubical.[/quote]
The underlying tension is becoming more apparent now. If the given is not conceptually structured, and if the application of concepts is solely the province of the agent, then how is it the case that the given can nonetheless constrain conceptual classification? How is the case that this non-conceptual given simply cannot be conceptually classified as "paper" or "soft" or "cubical"? How is that possible?
Reading through the chapter it becomes clear that Lewis wants the given to pull double-duty. He wants it to be non-conceptual and yet he wants it to have enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on thought. He wants it to be the concrete basis of all experience, and yet also abstract enough to exhibit a repeatable structure.
And this is where (per Csalisbury) the Hegel connection comes into play. Sellars leverages aspects of Hegel’s dialectic in the Sense Certainty chapter to expose an ambiguity between the non-conceptuality of the act of sensation vs. the non-conceptuality of the content of sensation. Lewis elides the distinction by treating the given as the concrete correlate of direct apprehension while yet investing it with enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on conceptual thought.
Sellars, like Hegel, essentially argues that insofar as the structure of the sensory “given” is determinate enough to warrant some classifications (“pen”, “cylinder”, etc.) but not others (“paper”, “soft”, etc.), it must be considered to be conceptual in nature for the simple reason that classifications have inferential implications. For instance, to say that some aspect of the given simply cannot be classified as “soft” implies that claims like “this object is soft” cannot be true and, by extension, that various other claims implied by that claim cannot be true (and so on).
So returning to your original question, inference plays an ambiguous role in Lewis’s epistemology insofar as the epistemic status of given is ambiguous. Does the “abstraction” process count as a form of inference? It almost seems like it has to insofar as it is a process by which certain classifications are determined to be applicable and others are not. But how can inference occur in the absence of concepts? It can’t, which seems to imply that the “given” is conceptually structured after all (or that there is no such thing as the given after all)
As a side note, some of the details of Price’s epistemology differ from Lewis’s, but many of the same of questions arise with regard to it.
Would anyone care to say something about “anstoss logic”? What does this phrase mean?
The anstoss concept goes back to Fichte. The self posits the "not-self" in order to posit the "self". The anstoss is the spontaneous impulse that moves the self toward such a posit. The underlying logic is a variation on transcendental reasoning in general, where something is demonstrated to be a pre-condition for something else.
Similar reasoning undergirds Sellars's analysis of the looks/is distinction in EPM:
[quote=Sellars]
The point I wish to stress at this time, however, is that the concept of
looking green, the ability to recognize that something looks green,
presupposes the concept of being green, and that the latter concept involves
the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them -- which, in
turn, involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object if one
wishes to ascertain its color by looking at it.
[/quote]
Understanding what it means to say that something merely looks green requires as a pre-condition understanding what it is to say that something really is green, or so Sellars argues.
Are such revisions in keeping with Price? Or would he deem the “seemings” redundant or inappropriate here, perhaps in keeping with a view that “the presence of a round red patch” is not the sort of thing that “seems”, and is instead in every respect immune to doubt?
I don't know that he addresses this specific question. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to Price's book and my notes don't mention anything about this.
There’s something intuitively plausible about this, once we massage it the right way. I don’t ordinarily justify my belief that I am seemingly seeing a seemingly red seeming object on any other grounds than that it appears so to me in the ordinary first-person point of view; ordinarily there are no other grounds available for such claims.
However, putting it the way Price has here, one might ask him, what justifies your belief that there are such things as “patches”? And it may turn out that this is only a loose manner of speaking.
Right, and that's essentially what Sellars is asking: what justifies your belief that there are such things as round red patches? Sellars doesn't believe that such patches exist, and EPM is essentially a critical examination of the notion that such things do exist, or perhaps more accurately, that such things are seen.
At the end of EPM he rehearses the myth of genius Jones, a fictional ancestor who explains perceptual mistakes on the model of "inner replicas" of physical objects. The main difference from sense-datum theory is that these replicas are understood to be "states" that are had by the observer rather than as particulars that are observed by the observer. In other words, there is nothing that is literally red and round in the world that is the object of observation when someone has an hallucination of an apple, but rather the observer comes to have an internal state that is "somehow analogous" to a red round patch.
The "somehow" is never explained in EPM, and Sellars actually ends up backing away from the notion that sense-impressions are internal states of the observer when he explicates his theory of absolute processes in the much later Carrus Lectures.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 15, 2017 at 21:38#550880 likes
There’s no way I can keep up with you Cabbage Farmer, but here’s a start at some answers to your questions:
I can't keep up with my own ramblings, or with anyone else's for that matter. If we keep putting one foot in front of the other, the conversation takes care of itself.
I’d say that C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price figured very prominently, though the others mentioned are not far behind. As an aside, it’s interesting to consider that Sellars studied under C.I. Lewis while completing graduate studies Harvard.
That's good to know, I might have gone straight to Ayer.
Reichenbach:I cannot admit that impressions have the character of observable facts. What I observe are things, not impressions. I see tables, and houses, and thermometers, and trees, and men, and the sun, and many other things in the sphere of crude physical objects; but I have never seen my impression of these things […] I do not say I doubt the existence of my impressions. I believe that there are impressions, but I have never sensed them. When I consider the question in an unprejudiced manner I find that I infer the existence of my impressions.
Perhaps an important distinction lies hidden here. Recalling Sellars' distinction between "sensing particulars" and "sensing facts", I might deny the claim that I can see my own impressions, but affirm the claim that I observe (the fact) that I have current impressions. Accordingly, we might say I observe the impressions, or say at least that I make observational judgments about the impressions, without "sensing" them.
When I look up at the sky, is it the sun I see, or only a bit of its light? I like Brandom along these lines, on the observation of mu mesons, or muons, along with their traces.
Reichenbach's general belief that there are such things as impressions is part of a theory, or model, or discourse about perceptual experience -- a logos he picked up at second hand before kicking the tires himself. Say he confirms the theory to his own satisfaction, and thus acquires the general belief, by way of some inference, and thus ceases to "doubt the existence" of impressions in general, wherever there is perception like ours. It's the theory that positions him to make the inference, on any particular occasion:
If I am sensing right now, then there are impressions in me; and
I am sensing right now;
Therefore, there are impressions in me.
In fact, he doesn't have to bother making this inference on each separate occasion, once he's acquired the relevant general belief; much as I don't have to infer that gravity draws a glass to the floor when I drop it, or that the bright spot in the sky is a massive ball of gas. Inference may play a role in the initial formation of such beliefs, and in the formation of the concepts associated with the beliefs; but once the story is told, most of us who take it on, do so without bothering over what inferences and evidence informed the story in the beginning.
So long as the general belief is correct enough in the relevant ways, and so long as I have applied it correctly enough on a particular occasion, the observational judgment I make in terms of or in keeping with the belief "inherits" the correctness of the general belief -- of the story, and of whatever chain of inferences and observations may have produced the story, whether they were inferences and observations in my head or in heads before mine.
Reichenbach:To explain this difference, I introduce the distinction between the physical thing and my impression of that thing.
We shouldn't suppose this mere distinction informs us about what sort of thing the "impression" is. For instance, we needn't suppose that, whenever there is an impression, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the impression and a physical thing of which it is an impression.
Reichenbach:I say that usually there are both physical things and impressions within me but that sometimes there are impressions only […]
I suppose he doesn't mean: Usually there are physical things within me and impressions within me, but sometimes impressions only.
So I suppose he means something like: Usually the impressions within me correspond (in some relevant way) to physical things (that are not or need not be within me), but sometimes the impressions within me do not correspond to any physical thing (in the relevant way).
In the latter case, this might be a formulation of a distinction similar to the distinction I draw between perception and imagination: the difference between hearing a melody and repeating the same melody in your head; between hearing a sentence uttered and repeating the same sentence in your head; between seeing an apple and hallucinating or dreaming an apple.
One might argue that such imaginings, even at their most "vivid and forceful", hardly deserve the name "impressions". On the other hand, the name seems as suitable for perceptual illusions and other misperceptions as it does for ordinary perceptions.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 15, 2017 at 21:44#550920 likes
Reichenbach:we need this assumption to explain that in the case of the confused world one of the two worlds, the external world, is dropped. The distinction between the world of things and the world of impressions or representation is therefore the result of epistemological reflection.
It seems to me we need something like a distinction between sense-perception and imagination just to make sense of the fact that we dream, hallucinate, and imagine -- though how we conceptualize such phenomena, and what judgments we make in light of them, seems to vary from one person and one cultural context to another.
I have the impression that 20th-century analytic philosophers, especially in the shadow of the spooky behaviorist tendency we might trace through Ryle and Quine, tended to neglect such phenomena, and to perhaps quietly lump false judgments made on the basis of imaginings into the same account as false judgments made on the basis of misperceptions. In any case, it's often hard to tell how to map a term like Reichenbach's "impression" here onto a distinction like the one I draw between perceiving and imagining.
Perhaps the neatest way is to say that imaginings are among our impressions. If I mistake my hallucination for perception, and judge that there's an apple on the table on the basis of that hallucination, the source of the confusion is that I have mistaken hallucinating for perceiving, or in other words, I have incorrectly taken an instance of hallucinating as an instance of perceiving. I may correct my own error when I move to the table and aim to fetch the apple; discover that nothing's there, though it still looks like there's an apple; and now correctly judge that I am and have been hallucinating, despite the persistent vision-like appearance of an apple on the table.
The hallucinating is part of the world, just like dreams and less vivid and forceful imaginings are part of the world. Until we have adequate understanding of these phenomena, we might be confused by them and led to make false judgments in light of them; but as we develop adequate understanding, we're more likely to avoid error. In this respect, our concept of hallucination is just like other empirical concepts.
If we're willing to say that each perceiving and each imagining grasped in introspection is correlated in a relevant way with a bit of neural activity in the world; then we should be willing to say that, once we're equipped with the right sort of concepts and general beliefs, we make more or less reliable observational judgments on the basis of introspection about those bits of neural activity, and that these, too, are things in the world of which we have "impressions" whenever we're aware of our own perceiving or imagining, no matter how otherwise ignorant or confused we may be about the relevant facts; much as we make reliable observational judgments about the sun on the basis of visual perception, no matter whether we think it's a god in a chariot or a massive ball of gas.
Along those lines, we might say "the confused world" is the one in which I judge incorrectly, on the basis of current hallucination, that I am perceiving an apple and that this apple is on the table. And we might say the harmoniously conceived, or well sorted, world is the one in which I judge correctly, on the basis of current hallucination, that I am hallucinating and that there is no apple on the table.
Reichenbach, however, seems perhaps to speak as though the confusion is somehow or other contained in the impression, and now he slides from "impression" to "representation". But what sort of thing is the impression supposed to be, if the error in judgment is already contained in it? I can stare at a mirage for hours, and change my mind a thousand times while it remains the same mirage. It looks the same, the world appears to me in the same way, while I cycle through various judgments on the basis of that one appearance. The appearance doesn't tell me how to judge, and I don't tell it how to appear. The judging is up to me, and the appearing is up to the appearance, though I can turn my head and get past it.
Along these lines, I make a three-part epistemological distinction: In the first place there is the fact of the matter, the way things are in the world in fact. In the second place there is the appearance, the fact of how things appear to me (e.g., how things "look to me"). In the third place there is the seeming, the fact of how I take things in fact to be, in part on the basis of appearances. In making active judgments about how things seem, in part on the basis of appearances, I change the seeming, but not the appearances. Normally I don't need to make such judgments in order for things to seem to me one way or another; ordinarily I resort to such judging only when salient features of my experience seem uncertain, confused, or otherwise inadequate to form the basis of a reasonable judgment I have some interest in making. The judgment amends or completes or suspends the seeming.
If I'm going to use the word "impression" in telling that story, the impression belongs with the appearance, not with the seeming.
Note that both the appearance and the seeming are parts of the world, are matters of fact.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 15, 2017 at 21:50#550940 likes
He goes on to talk about “the abstract character of impressions” as part and parcel of a “duplicity theory” of perception. And this is where, as seen through the lens of EPM, Reichenbach’s account starts to go off the rails. We can already see in the quotes above the seeds of an ambiguity between impressions qua objects and impressions qua facts. Reichenbach says that he doesn’t “see” his impressions and also says that impressions are “not observable facts”. And yet he’s invoking impressions in order to explain discrepancies in what is seen.
Based on your discussion and the passages you've cited, his discourse strikes me as rather confused, and it's perhaps exceptionally hard to tell what sort of thing he supposes an impression to be.
Things get really bad in chapter 3 where Reichenbach seems to firmly place impressions into the category of “immediate existence”:
[quote="Reichenbach]Imagine we are taking a walk at dusk through a lonely moor; we see before us at some distance a man in the road […] we do not doubt the man’s reality. We walk farther and discover it is not a man but a juniper bush. […] We shall say that both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them.[/quote]
So here we seem to have the paradigm case of an impression. We think we see a man, but it’s really just juniper bush so we invoke the concept of an impression to explain the mistake. The man is inferred to be an impression, but here we are told that the “man” also has immediate existence. So what’s immediate existence?
That's the most pressing question here, for sure.
On the side: Doesn't Reichenbach call the juniper bush an "impression", as well as the man? I've interpreted the passages you've cited this way: It's not that, having fallen short of the mark, Reichenbach infers that the man was an impression, while persisting in the belief that the bush is a physical object but not an impression. Rather, in seeking to understand such cases, to analyze the ways in which we fall short of the mark and wind up in confusion, Reichenbach infers that he has impressions within him, both when he sees correctly and when he sees confusedly. In happy cases there is both physical thing and impression; in unhappy cases, impression alone; and in this one case he judges that his first impression was an impression without a corresponding physical thing.
Of course, in the case at hand, it’s not accurate to say there’s no physical object corresponding in a relevant way to the confused perception of a man. It’s the same physical thing, the bush, corresponding to perception and judgment in the happy case and in the breakdown case. (It’s not clear in the example whether the breakdown is a misperception or a mistaken judgment on the basis of perception, or somehow both).
I’m not sure how Reichenbach intends to sort it all out.
[quote="Reichenbach]We may regard immediate existence as a concept known to everybody. If somebody does not understand us, we put him into a certain situation and pronounce the term, thus accustoming him to the term and the situation seen by him. […] If a child asks “what is a knife” we take a knife and show it to the child.[/quote]
This strikes me as perhaps the most uninformative sort of definition conceivable. I don't mean the definition of the knife in the example, which is an ordinary ostensive definition. Rather, this attempt to characterize "immediate existence".
Is there any other clue from Reichenbach? Is there supposed to be an analogous situation into which one may be put, where he will observe the meaning of "immediate existence"? Are we supposed to grasp the sense of this term in the context of misperceptions and mistaken judgments on the basis of perception, like the mistaking of bush for man?
It might seem less strange if he'd said "immediate experience", as in: At first I see what appears to be a man, but soon I see that it's a bush.
But what could it mean to say "both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them"?
Maybe something like this: At the moment we mistake the bush for a man, we have an idea of a man there whom we're seeing, and the idea of existence belongs to that idea of a man.
Even so, it seems tortured use, to call this "immediate existence", instead of an immediate idea of existence -- i.e., an idea of existence (and an idea of an existing man) that has not yet been mediated and overruled by a sound view of the facts. Perhaps this strained usage is another symptom of the same confusion we've noted in Reichenbach, who seems to smear altogether the seeming, the appearing, and the facts and objects that seem and appear.
In other words, immediate existence is the existence of whatever is directly apprehended or, if you will, known by acquaintance. But wait…this directly contradicts Reichenbach’s earlier claim that impressions are indirect, theoretical entities. These are exactly the kinds of confusions that Sellars was responding to in EPM.
The view seems entirely confused, at least as we've reviewed it here. I hope the sense-datum theorists turn out to have a better champion. For it would seem shameful for a whole generation of experts to be taken in by such a jumble.
My turn to take a break. I look forward to working through the rest of your recent comments.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 21, 2017 at 16:38#565940 likes
These are exactly the kinds of questions that Lewis and Price were wrestling with. For Lewis, the "given" was opposed primarily to the "concept", and the hallmark of conceptuality was logical form. By implication, the given qua given has no logical form, it has no inferential implications and it does not constitute empirical knowledge.
Does Lewis locate the given within experience, or prior to experience? How should we coordinate the terms "given", "sense-datum", and "direct apprehension" with respect to his account?
I'd say nothing is given without a perceiver. A perceiver already has a stock of conceptual capacities, expectations, general beliefs... with inferential structure and "logical form". The given qua sensation-dervied constraint has no fixed logical form, but in each particular context of perceptual experience, it does have conceptual and inferential implications, and it does open the way to empirical knowledge.
So Lewis’s epistemology is quite Kantian in nature. The mind applies concepts to the sensory given and it is the application of concepts that license inferences.
If it makes sense to say "the mind applies concepts to the sensory given", it makes sense to say "the mind applies the sensory given to concepts". The standing repertoire of conceptual capacities and the current intake of sensation are applied together in perceptual experience on each occasion.
Without that cooperation of sensation and conceptualization, there would be no license for the inferences we draw on the basis of experience. We would make no such inferences.
And yet, Lewis seems to recognize the tension that results from taking this kind of position. For what is the epistemic status of the given before concepts are applied, and what is the nature of the cognitive process by which concepts are applied to it?
"Before" concepts are applied, there is no experience, and no appearance, but only, we say, sensory and perceptual processes in preconscious cognition. It seems that the contribution from sensation is determined prior to its manifestation in experience, for instance to reflect impingements of the world on sense receptors; and that sensory and perceptual processes in preconscious cognition are normally more or less insulated from direct interference by conceptually driven processes, so that what appears in experience is radically determined by sensation.
The contribution of sensation to experience seems organized, in the first place, according to a "deep structure" in keeping with principles we associate with our concepts of space and time, light and dark, hot and cold, loud and quiet, and so on, across a range of sensory modalities, which provide a fundamental framework for perceptual experience on each occasion and for empirical knowledge over time. On each occasion, the "synthesis of the manifold of sensation" according to these fixed basic principles provides an integrated perceptual context within which individual phenomena are spontaneously differentiated. That differentiation is in the first place the result of automatic and involuntary cognitive processes, not of any conscious act of judgment. In being thus differentiated within the organized perceptual field, phenomena are conceptualized, and this conceptualization is likewise, in the first place, automatic and involuntary.
Perceptual experience thus constituted -- as spontaneous and involuntary conceptualization of a predetermined contribution from sensation -- provides the context in which spontaneous and voluntary thoughts and judgments may review appearances, to consider, for instance, whether things will continue to appear, upon further inspection, as they now appear, or whether things are in fact as they seem, to all appearances, to be.
To all appearances, it seems neither sort of spontaneous conceptual activity has the power to reconstitute the predetermined contribution of sensation. The fundamental epistemic role of that contribution is characterizable in terms of appearance-talk: I know it's a juniper bush, but in the shadows, from here, it looks just like a man.
Appearances persist -- the look and sound of things persist -- despite shifts in our conceptual attitudes toward particular appearances, despite exercises of our capacity to conceptually reframe a whole perceptual occasion, despite wholesale reorganization of our thoughts about appearances in general.
Is the given completely formless and ineffable, or does it exhibit some form of structure. If the latter, then how are we to understand the structure of the given if not in conceptual terms?
Empirical science continues to develop its account of sensation and sensory perception, and of all cognition, in light of ongoing empirical investigation. That account is one way for us to characterize the contribution of sensation to perceptual experience, or the "structure of the given" -- perhaps already the most informative way, despite the primitive status of the science.
All empirical science is a rigorous extension of ordinary empirical knowledge, and has an essentially phenomenological character. The most sophisticated scientific accounts of perception are continuations of investigations each of us makes by noticing differences in the way things appear when we squint, or close our eyes, or turn out the lights.
A phenomenological account that relies on the unaided introspection of each interlocutor is said to run into deep trouble, for it’s impossible to describe anything -- including preconceptually determined features of one’s own experience -- without employing concepts.
I want to say we blow this difficulty out of proportion in such discourses, by taking for granted an unwarranted and incoherent separation of empirical investigation and phenomenology, and by conflating speculative "metaphysical" questions about the whole world as it appears to us, with phenomenological and empirical questions about animal perception.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 21, 2017 at 16:44#565950 likes
Here’s Lewis writing on the given in Chapter 2 of Mind and World Order
These passages from Lewis make a good impression, and seem less overburdened than those you’ve supplied from Reichenbach and Price.
Lewis:There is, in all experience, that element which we are aware that we do not create by thinking and cannot, in general, displace or alter. As a first approximation, we may designate it as "the sensuous."
We don’t say we "create" our limbs when we use them. Do we ordinarily say we "create" the voluntary motions of our limbs? We produce, perform, discharge… voluntary motions of our limbs by moving them, and only some "elements of experience" by thinking. Likewise, we produce sounds by moving around. When "create" is appropriate here, it’s as another way to characterize such production.
The crucial difference Lewis gestures at aligns with the old Stoic discourse about what is and what is not "up to us" or "in our power". Epictetus speaks as if we have as much responsibility for our emotions and desires as for our thoughts, but less for our bodies, which can be altered or restrained without our consent. Lewis speaks here as if we "create" our thoughts and their content from whole cloth without any hindrance, but are constrained in our encounters with "the sensuous". We might refine the truth in such views by distinguishing various classes of perceptual modality (or basis for noninferential judgment)
and accounting for the various constraints on spontaneous activity associated with each of the "modes" or "bases" thus distinguished.
Lewis:At the moment, I have a fountain pen in my hand. When I so describe this item of my present experience, I make use of terms whose meaning I have learned. Correlatively I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness and relate it to what is not just now present in ways which I have learned and which reflect modes of action which I have acquired. […] what I refer to as "the given" in this experience is, in broad terms, qualitatively no different than it would be if I were an infant or an ignorant savage.
I suppose we might substitute "I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness..." for "I bring a whole field of conceptual relations to bear on this one item in my present field of perceptual experience." The latter seems more apt for many cases; the former perhaps for cases in which we stop paying attention to the perceptual field, and become lost in thoughts about fountain pens, or about this fountain pen, or about what in this vision of a fountain pen is "given".
The passage leans heavily on the phrase "in broad terms". The trouble is to make those terms explicit and perhaps to narrow them down. There’s also an implication, perhaps along pragmatic lines, that the whole conceptual field should be analyzed primarily as reflecting "modes of action I have acquired".
Lewis:The distinction between this element of interpretation and the given is emphasized by the fact that the latter is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter how we think or conceive.
The crucial difference.
Lewis:While we can thus isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such , because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways.
The given is essentially being defined here as an "invariant" in experience – its structure does not change despite being emenable to multiple classifications dependent on the interests and background knowledge of the agent. The process by which concepts are applied is described as a process of "abstraction" and that’s where things start to get murky insofar as Lewis wants to claim that the structure of the given itself determines what classifications are or are not applicable in a given context:
Lewis:I can apprehend this thing (given) as pen or rubber or cylinder, but I cannot, by taking thought, discover it as paper or soft or cubical.
The thought must be that what's "abstracted" -- the product of the abstraction, not the material it's abstracted from -- has a conceptual structure determined in part by the sensuous given. At each moment, there is a fixed structure to the given, and a fixed structure to my concepts, and merely by focusing on any element in the perceptual field, I spontaneously "abstract", draw off, a conceptual structure determined by the given in the context of my conceptual frame. The mind applies the sensuous given to its concepts, as it applies its concepts to the sensuous given.
I suppose my account of "involuntary conceptualization of the predetermined contribution from sensation" is designed to perform a theoretical role similar to that of Lewis' "abstraction".
The underlying tension is becoming more apparent now. If the given is not conceptually structured, and if the application of concepts is solely the province of the agent, then how is it the case that the given can nonetheless constrain conceptual classification? How is the case that this non-conceptual given simply cannot be conceptually classified as "paper" or "soft" or "cubical"? How is that possible?
I assume "cannot" here has practical limits, and does not entail logical impossibility. Looking at this stone, and feeling it with my hands, I find that I cannot sincerely apply the predicate of softness to this stone. I acknowledge that my judgment may be flawed in principle, that my senses may be deceiving me, etc.; but to all appearances, the stone is not soft.
It seems no more puzzling to me that an experience of a stone should constrain the concepts we sincerely apply to the stone, than that the stone should constrain the concepts we sincerely apply to it.
Here is a stone, here is a haptic appearance of the stone, here is a concept associated with the English word "soft" that is ordinarily inapplicable in such contexts.
Concepts like these are naturally coordinated with experiences like these because they are produced and refined and applied in the context of experiences like these. There is something it's like to feel a hard thing; having an experience of that sort is what rules out the application of the concept "soft" to the thing that feels hard. Not as an eternal truth or an incorrigible assertion, not on the basis of certain knowledge about a stone, but in the ordinary way, provisionally and corrigibly, on the basis of current experience.
Reading through the chapter it becomes clear that Lewis wants the given to pull double-duty. He wants it to be non-conceptual and yet he wants it to have enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on thought. He wants it to be the concrete basis of all experience, and yet also abstract enough to exhibit a repeatable structure.
To all appearances, there's repeating structure in i) the things themselves as they appear to us, the stones and pens that we perceive and otherwise use; ii) the physical contexts of sensation, including for instance light and air; iii) the body of the perceiver, including physiological processes of sensation and perception; and iv) the conceptual frame of each perceiver, which tends to be fairly stable over time, especially with respect to ordinary empirical concepts that compel us to recognize appearances of, for instance, stones and pens whether we want to or not.
To rule out an objective account of sensation -- a phenomenologically grounded empirical account of the physical and physiological context of perception -- is to lose touch with the preconceptual structure of the contribution of sensation to experience.
Approaching the problem this way, as a pseudoproblem, it seems an error to suppose that the preconceptualized contribution of sensation can be isolated or "directly apprehended" in experience, from an artificially circumscribed first-person point of view, in abstraction from correlate empirical accounts of the objects and context and processes of sensation, as if experience were a groundless picture-show instead of one part of a whole world. We understand sensation by understanding ourselves as natural beings, as perceiving animals in a physical world; or we don't understand sensation.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 21, 2017 at 16:50#565960 likes
And this is where (per Csalisbury) the Hegel connection comes into play. Sellars leverages aspects of Hegel’s dialectic in the Sense Certainty chapter to expose an ambiguity between the non-conceptuality of the act of sensation vs. the non-conceptuality of the content of sensation.
What is this distinction between "act" and "content"?
Lewis elides the distinction by treating the given as the concrete correlate of direct apprehension while yet investing it with enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on conceptual thought.
What does "concrete correlate of direct apprehension" mean?
Sellars, like Hegel, essentially argues that insofar as the structure of the sensory "given" is determinate enough to warrant some classifications ("pen", "cylinder", etc.) but not others ("paper", "soft", etc.), it must be considered to be conceptual in nature for the simple reason that classifications have inferential implications.
To me this seems like bending over backward. Where do the classifications come from? They develop in individuals and in culture on the basis of experience. It's the regularity of the world as it appears to us that produces concepts and that warrants the application of concepts in and on the basis of perception.
There's no reason to insist that the structure of a stone "must be conceptual in nature" in order to account for the fact that we apply concepts to stones or that the predicate "being a stone" has conceptual implications.
Likewise, there's no reason to insist that the structure of the given qua given -- the structure of the contribution to experience from sensation -- is "conceptual" or has "logical form", merely in order to account for the fact that we apply concepts to stones on the basis of perceptual experience of stones.
All we need is the notion that the relevant concepts are coordinated with the structure of sensation and with features of the objective world that appears to us through the mediation of sensation. The world has structure, sensation has structure, concepts have a "logical form" that tends to be more or less coordinated with that structure.
For instance, to say that some aspect of the given simply cannot be classified as "soft" implies that claims like "this object is soft" cannot be true and, by extension, that various other claims implied by that claim cannot be true (and so on).
I assume in this context "cannot" has practical limits, and doesn't entail logical impossibility. Looking at this stone, and feeling it with my hands, I find that I cannot sincerely apply the predicate of softness to this stone, though I acknowledge that this judgment may be flawed in principle, that my senses may be deceiving me, etc. To all appearances, the stone is not soft.
This does not imply that the stone is conceptual, or that the stone's hardness is conceptual. It only implies that I am correct to apply the concepts "stone" and "hard" to this thing.
The reason I am correct to call this thing a hard stone, is that it is a hard stone, a fact that I grasp one way or another in perceptual experience, like other intelligent animals, thanks to the faithful contribution of sensation; and that I grasp in one specific way when I call this thing a hard stone.
So returning to your original question, inference plays an ambiguous role in Lewis’s epistemology insofar as the epistemic status of given is ambiguous. Does the "abstraction" process count as a form of inference? It almost seems like it has to insofar as it is a process by which certain classifications are determined to be applicable and others are not. But how can inference occur in the absence of concepts? It can’t, which seems to imply that the "given" is conceptually structured after all (or that there is no such thing as the given after all)
I say it can't be an inference, on phenomenological grounds.
The thought may be that the contribution of sensation "triggers" automatic conceptualization in perceptual experience. In special cases, such provisional conceptualization seems inadequate for judgment or other action, leading us to take a closer look, to check whether things seem to be as they have appeared, to wonder whether things are as they seem to be. Until the automatic, tentative conceptualization is suspended or overruled by such conceptual activity, it has conceptual implications for the perceiver. The initial conceptualization and its implications, like the considered view achieved by careful judgment, are determined by the conceptual stance of the perceiver as well as by the contribution of sensation.
How does the automatic and provisional conceptualization take place? What are the rules by which it proceeds? It seems to me this is an empirical question that cannot be adequately answered on the basis of ordinary introspection, because this front line of conceptualization is not constituted by conscious activity, but rather constitutes the perceptual experience that is central to conscious awareness. Introspection reveals to us that perceptual experience is always already conceptualized, and that sense-perception is radically determined by a contribution from sensation; but introspection is insufficient to inform a fine-grained view of the individual mechanisms that produce such experience.
As a side note, some of the details of Price’s epistemology differ from Lewis’s, but many of the same of questions arise with regard to it.
Any remarkable differences between Price and Lewis?
So far I like Lewis best. I don't find the same muddle in these passages that we noted in Price and Reichenbach. Perhaps there are other passages that bring out similar problems in Lewis more clearly?
I'd say the "tension" you attribute to his account seems largely dissipated, at least with respect to these passages, if we're allowed to shift the frame of the conversation along the lines I've suggested: i) by rejecting an arbitrary and arguably incoherent separation of phenomenology and empirical investigation; ii) by developing an empirical account of perception (especially the contribution of sensation) that coordinates first-person introspective reports with third-person observations; and iii) by outsourcing conversations about "what really is", aside from the world as it appears to us, to a more abstract and general region of discourse.
So far as I can tell, that shift in frame is enough to open the way for us to speak of concepts as naturally coordinated with perceptual experiences and perceptual objects, as produced and applied on the basis of experience.
To all appearances, that natural cooperation is the original context of conceptual activity, which is constrained to reflect the objective environment of an animal perceiver through the mediation of sensation, and thus to coordinate the activity of an organism with salient features of its environment. Human language and culture render us more sophisticated conceptualizers, and open for us an infinitely greater range of action, knowledge, fantasy, and confusion. There's no end to the variety of conceptual stances we may take on the basis of perceptual experience. But that experience, and any coherent conceptualization of it, remains radically constrained by the preconceptual structure of the contribution from sensation, no less for us than for nonhuman animal perceivers.
Short of a full-fledged empirical account of the preconceptual structure of sensation for each animal perceiver, we may locate the fundamental constraint, the essential epistemic role, of perceptual experience by tracing the limits of appearance-talk.
Cabbage FarmerFebruary 23, 2017 at 19:16#571090 likes
The anstoss concept goes back to Fichte. The self posits the "not-self" in order to posit the "self". The anstoss is the spontaneous impulse that moves the self toward such a posit. The underlying logic is a variation on transcendental reasoning in general, where something is demonstrated to be a pre-condition for something else.
Does transcendental reasoning demonstrate that it must be an "impulse" that posits not-self and self? And how do the relevant transcendental arguments define "impulse"?
It seems there's a basic self-awareness that emerges in nature along with sentient animals. We might expect, along the lines of the Kantian's "unity of apperception", that there is a reflexive aspect to all consciousness, that animal consciousness involves reflexive awareness, awareness of oneself.
I see no reason to suppose there is a special impulse for such awareness, or that some special act of positing is required. It seems rather part of the form of consciousness, of minds like ours, to distinguish between ourselves and things outside ourselves. Our minds are organized in keeping with the natural organization of our bodies. Every impulse we have arises in the context of this organization, but I'm not sure what theoretical need there is to posit a special impulse of not-self positing.
Similar reasoning undergirds Sellars's analysis of the looks/is distinction in EPM:
I've been wondering when we'd get back to Sellars. I've been enjoying the preliminary survey of sense-datum theorists in the meantime. I'd say it's a precondition for understanding Sellars' essay.
Sellars:The point I wish to stress at this time, however, is that the concept of looking green, the ability to recognize that something looks green, presupposes the concept of being green, and that the latter concept involves the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them -- which, in turn, involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object if one wishes to ascertain its color by looking at it.
There's a fine circle.
Does Sellars mean to suggest that the concept of looking green is identical with the ability to recognize that something looks green, while the concept of being green merely involves the ability to tell what color objects have by looking?
"The concept of looking green, [which is to say,] the ability to recognize that something looks green, presupposes the concept of being green, and that latter concept involves the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them...."
In any case, it's an interesting alignment of the terms "ability" and "concept".
Understanding what it means to say that something merely looks green requires as a pre-condition understanding what it is to say that something really is green, or so Sellars argues.
I'd like to hear more of this argument.
For starters, I'd want to clear up the various sorts of "concept" we might distinguish in this connection. I might have a more or less refined ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them, without having thought about it much, without having any sophisticated theories about color and light, without having acquired a relevant repertoire of "looks" talk. I'm happy to equate that ability with a "concept", but this simple recognitional capacity leaves plenty of room for variation in one's other concepts associated with judgments of color.
Does Sellars say that this "ability" -- the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them -- is the precondition of the concept of "being green" (and I suppose of "having color"), and that the concept of "being green" is the precondition of the concept of merely "looking green"?
The ability at the beginning of this chain is not the same as either concept. For in the original ability, there is no distinction between "looking green" and "being green". We might say that "looking green" and "being green" are the same concept in the early stages of color-concept acquisition, or perhaps that to begin with there is no concept of "[merely] looking green", and no correlate concept of "being [truly] green."
These concepts are distinguished from each other as we learn, on the basis of experience, that there's more at play in making correct judgments of color than seemed to be at play at first glance. One way of refining usage and judgment to reflect this new insight into the nature of things is to distinguish between the color things "[truly] have" (in ordinary circumstances) and the color things merely "appear to have" (in extraordinary circumstances); though I'm not sure this is the best way to sort out the facts about color.
It's only after one loses innocence about color judgments that the concept of "being [truly] green" is associated with sophisticated techniques like those Sellars mentions: techniques that apply hard-earned knowledge of "what circumstances to place an object if one wishes to ascertain its [true] color by looking at it."
The concept of "being [truly] green" that's associated with such sophisticated knowledge and techniques is not the original concept of "being green" that is a precondition for the distinction between "[merely] looking green" and "being [truly] green". The precondition is the simple concept of "being green", prior to the loss of innocence that motivates the distinction between "[merely] looking green" and "being [truly] green".
That simple concept does not depend on the ability to tell what color things "truly have" by looking at them -- for that's a more sophisticated concept that requires knowledge of the way that apparent color varies along with circumstances. The original, unrefined concept depends merely on the ability to innocently tell the (apparent) color of things by looking at them.
Having sorted out some of the relevant concepts along these lines, I'll agree that the ability to innocently report the colors things (appear to) have is the precondition for an unrefined concept of things "having color" or "being colored"; and that both this ability and the corresponding concept are refined when we lose innocence and begin to acquire knowledge about the ways that the apparent colors of things vary along with circumstances.
Perhaps enduring philosophical confusion about color judgments makes this example ill-suited to an epistemological discussion about appearances. Why muddy such murky waters?
Right, and that's essentially what Sellars is asking: what justifies your belief that there are such things as round red patches? Sellars doesn't believe that such patches exist, and EPM is essentially a critical examination of the notion that such things do exist, or perhaps more accurately, that such things are seen.
What could justify a belief in such "patches"?
Does he leave room for the sense-datum theorist to posit such things as "patches" as theoretical constructs that are not "seen" or otherwise "sensed"? In that case, we might expect that some ways of talking about "patches" or other "sense-data" would be harmless enough, or even consistent with other useful ways of speaking about the contribution of sensation to perceptual experience -- for instance, perhaps along the lines of the cognitive scientist's "information" or "representation".
At the end of EPM he rehearses the myth of genius Jones, a fictional ancestor who explains perceptual mistakes on the model of "inner replicas" of physical objects. The main difference from sense-datum theory is that these replicas are understood to be "states" that are had by the observer rather than as particulars that are observed by the observer.
This seems like the sort of modelling I had in mind just now.
In other words, there is nothing that is literally red and round in the world that is the object of observation when someone has an hallucination of an apple, but rather the observer comes to have an internal state that is "somehow analogous" to a red round patch.
I think the analogy is best made between the visual perception of an apple and the vision-like hallucination of an apple. The similarity is between the two "states", not between the real apple and its imaginary correlate.
The "somehow" is never explained in EPM, and Sellars actually ends up backing away from the notion that sense-impressions are internal states of the observer when he explicates his theory of absolute processes in the much later Carrus Lectures
Is his view in EPM that it makes sense to talk about sense-impressions as internal states of the observer? What concept of "sense-impression" does he employ in this connection?
And what's the change of direction with "absolute processes" in the Carrus Lectures?
Hi @Cabbage Farmer. You're putting me to shame here with the sheer volume of your replies. Sorry I'm not keeping up, but I'll go ahead pick up where I left off:
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
That doesn’t make it nonsense to speak about the epistemic role of that deep layer of belief based on appearances, which serves as a safety net for us to fall back on gracefully, precisely because it persists while we ignore it.[/quote]
Sure, and I don’t think Sellars would say that it’s nonsense to talk about the epistemic role of such claims - in fact, that is exactly what he is interested in talking about!
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
It’s a withdrawal from claims about how things really are over there, where there seems to be a red apple. But this doesn’t entail another withdrawal, from all claims about how things really are in the world: For this appearance, and this seeming, may be said to be part of the world. And it’s not clear that it may be coherently denied that the appearance and seeming are part of the world.[/quote]
Yes, and Sellars acknowledges that in making such claims we are still stating facts about the world – namely, facts of the form “x looks F to S”, etc. Sellars doesn’t deny that “appearances” exist per se, but he doesn’t think that sense-data exist. That is, he doesn’t think that appearances are little colored-and-shaped particulars nor that reality is fundamentally constructed out of such things.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Accordingly, the appearance and the seeming are among the “facts” we may aim to piece together in each case. For instance by asking: How is it the case, how does it happen, that things appear thus and so (to me, now)?[/quote]
Sure, but we have to be careful in referring to appearances as “facts”, because the term is ambiguous.
By “fact”, we can mean something that has propositional form (e.g. “x is F”) or we can mean some kind of particular process or object in the world (e.g. trees, rocks, etc.). For Sellars, propositions are essentially functional roles in linguistic practice. In other words, whenever someone utters a claim, the abstract meaning of that claim is determined by the functional role that the claim plays within the “game of giving and asking for reasons”. In contrast, particulars such as trees and rocks are not essentially functional roles within our language games. Particular trees and rocks can certainly have roles within our language games, but neither their essence nor existence is dependent on those roles.
And that’s why Sellars harps on properly making a distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts. Sellars maintains that we sense particulars, but perceive facts, and he thinks that sense-datum theories run into difficulties in part because they don’t properly distinguish between the two. Falling into the myth of the given is thinking that there is something that is sensed directly that is both an essentially extra-linguistic particular and an essentially linguistic entity such as a proposition. In Sellars book, this is illegitimate insofar as it posits something that is an instance of two incompatible types.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
In ordinary, happy cases, one fair answer is: Because there’s an apple there, and your eyes are open and aimed that way. The frequency with which seeming-seeings of seeming-apples turn out to be, to all appearances and “to a practical certainty”, genuine seeings of genuine apples, also serves as justification for the belief that “There is an apple there”, and lets the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple stand as a noninferentially acquired defeasible warrant for the latter belief.
A more developed variation on this theme could haul into the account an empirically grounded story about light and the light-relative properties of physical objects; about retinas and cones and optic nerves; about perceptual processes in cognition.
None of this amounts to absolute “theoretical certainty” that there really is a real apple there -- a certainty we never attain, even as we bite and chew and swallow.[/quote]
So, my take on this is that Sellars wouldn’t deny that “looks” claims can provide evidence for “is” claims under the right circumstances. If 99.99% of the time that Jones utters claims of the form “x looks F” it turns out that the corresponding “x is F” claim is also true, then there’s a sense is which Jones's uttering “x looks F” can be considered as evidence for the claim “x is F”, ceteris paribus. But even in this case, the evidence provided by Jones’s “looks” claims is parasitic on the evidence provided by other more fundamental “is” claims. They only provide evidence insofar as Jones really is 99.99% accurate. And that’s really the point that I take Sellars to be making here - there’s no layer of “looks” claims that can serve as an independent evidential foundation (whether certain or probable) for all of our “is” claims.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
What shall we count as “adequate” evidential basis for claims about how things really are? I would argue along lines just indicated above, that the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple does provide adequate evidential basis for claims about real apples, though not for claims that such claims are certain claims. In cases in which new evidence comes to light, that the seeming-apple was not in fact an apple, or that the seeming-seeing was not a seeing, we amend the record of discourse by adding new alleged facts (including claims about the seeming course of seemings) and revise or withdraw from our previous claim about what’s over there in the world where (it seems) it had seemed there was a seeming-apple.[/quote]
Again, the evidence provided by “looks” claims seems to be parasitic upon more fundamental “is” claims. Jones’s “looks” claim is counted as evidence only because Jones’s reliability has already been established. You couldn’t establish that reliability on the basis of other “looks” claims alone because "reliable" in this case just means "an agreement between how things look and how things are".
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Let’s not forget the role of expressions like “I thought I knew”. I thought there was an apple there, but it turned out to be a lump of wax. That doesn’t mean the initial claim was unjustified, unwarranted, and groundless -- only that it turned out to be incorrect; or rather that the speaker turned out to have reason to correct it. This new reason, or new judgment, is as fallible in principle as the first which it amends. But it seems such claims are correct when they happen to be so, and stand uncorrected until there’s reason for correction.[/quote]
Yep, agreed.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Who’s doing the “moving” here, and for what purpose? Arguably neither route will get us more “certainty” in the claims we make about what’s “over there”. It’s true that ordinary speech for ordinary purposes tends to follow the more direct route, speaking about “what’s over there” without wasting time on appearance-talk except in special cases, as when one is prompted by events to revise his own considered view about “what he thought he knew.”[/quote]
The rational agent is doing the “moving”, and for the purpose of avoiding full accountability for the “is” claim.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
The efficiency of that fine custom of, as it were, directly addressing things in the world as they appear to us, and revising only when it matters -- instead of constantly referring to the mediations of experience and conceivable doubts of reason -- gives us no reason to suppose those mediations vanish whenever there’s harmony between the seeming and the fact. It seems rather that when they appear in agreement, ordinarily we focus on the main track, according to our purpose, only falling back on the other, and to the task of realignment, when they fall out of whack.
I don’t mean to imply, by speaking this way, that the “appearance” is something like a color patch in my head, ontologically isolable from the “causal chain” that is -- I want to say -- identical to that appearance.
We may analyze a causal chain into parts, or happen upon one link at a time, and then in ignorant conjecture or counterfactual hypothesis, characterize that one link as part of indefinitely many conceivable causal chains. Some such stories seem to line up with the facts better than others. Yet others seem entirely off base.
And the facts keep coming in, or so it seems.[/quote]
I don’t think that Sellars would say that the mediations of experience and reason vanish when there is a harmony between seeming and fact. Sellars actually defended a version of the correspondence theory of truth based on something that he called a “picturing” relation, which he understood to be something like a homomorphism between physical events within the agent and other physical events not originating within the agent.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I strongly agree, objective claims about how things really are make good justifications for other objective claims about how things really are, and should be perhaps required in order to count such claims as “justified”. So far as I can make out, sophisticated theories about light and vision add little in this regard to a common-sense grasp of how seeing works.
Moreover, general knowledge about light and the historical reliability of judgments of color does not inform me of my present circumstances at all, unless experience informs me of my present circumstances in such a way as to warrant the application of thoughts about light and color discrimination to my thoughts about present circumstances. There’s no theory that tells me whether my eyes are open or closed right now, for instance, or whether it’s dark or light in here, or where the proximate light sources are in my vicinity of the world and what color of light they seem in my estimation to emit. Ordinarily I acquire such information noninferentially by using my eyes to see. It seems that any general theory of vision I may have acquired secondhand over the years, has accrued through centuries determined in part by processes involving the same sort of basis for judgment in others, who used their eyes in about the same way that I do on each particular occasion.[/quote]
Right, theoretical knowledge is generally not a replacement for the deliverances of perception, but in cases where I suspect my perceptions to be in error my background knowledge about my current circumstances could inferentially justify a belief that directly contradicts my non-inferentially elicited observational beliefs. For instance, if I take myself to know that the room in which I am standing is currently drenched in blue light, I might come to suspect that my non-inferentially elicited judgment “this tie is purple” to be in error. I may come - on the basis of my theoretical knowledge of light, color and vision - to conclude “this tie is red” instead.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
The main thrust of this point seems reasonable, but there’s arguably an unwarranted and undesirable implication, that “appearances” are not part of the empirical world, and that our accounts of appearances are not accounts of the empirical world.[/quote]
Sellars believes in the existence of what he calls “sensa”, but he thinks that sensa are epistemically inert events that occur in the objective world. So there is a sense in which Sellars would allow that claims about sensa are indeed legitimate empirical claims. That said, sensa are conceived by Sellars to be the direct cause of our non-inferentially elicited beliefs, but not direct evidence for those beliefs. Again, this is Sellars’s attempt to avoid what he takes to be an illicit equivocation between the ontological and epistemological dimensions of perception.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I suggest, to the contrary, that “having an appearance” or “being appeared to” is a sort of knowledge of the empirical world -- a most fundamental sort -- that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of appearance-talk that coincides with matters of fact, whether or not the subject understands that or how the appearance coincides with other matters of fact.
The appearance is part of reality, that’s how it coincides. It is itself a matter of fact related to other matters of fact in the world. That’s how perceptual experience binds our thoughts to nature and opens the world to each perceiver.[/quote]
Again, Sellars does not deny that we can have knowledge of appearances, or that appearances are part of the objective world. He only denies that such knowledge is epistemically “fundamental” for reasons already rehearsed above.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
One concern I have with the view you’ve attributed to Sellars, is that it may leave a gap between general empirical beliefs and particular perceptual occasions. I mean specifically, with respect to handling claims about whether and how appearances can “provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are”; and about “the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims”. To unpack such baggage the wrong way, may be to fall into some version of the “frictionless spinning in a void” associated with coherentism.
By my way of reckoning, it makes more sense to emphasize the cooperation on each occasion of general beliefs and beliefs based on current perception. The essential role of the more general beliefs, and the ordinary tendency to gloss over appearance-talk in happy cases, doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep layer of belief that’s analyzable or even best described in terms of appearance-talk, playing an equally essential role in our acquisition of noninferential knowledge of present circumstances.[/quote]
Sellars maintains that non-inferentially elicited observation claims provide the foundation for empirical knowledge. However, he thinks that these are “is” claims (“x is F”), not “looks” claims (“x looks F to S”). Furthermore, he doesn’t think that these are indubitable. For Sellars, the non-inferentially elicited observation claims that make up the foundation of empirical knowledge can be overturned by inferentially elicited claims (see the example of the purple tie from above). He maintains that, in some cases, it is this very fact that makes the recognition of perceptual error possible.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]Perhaps an important distinction lies hidden here. Recalling Sellars' distinction between "sensing particulars" and "sensing facts", I might deny the claim that I can see my own impressions, but affirm the claim that I observe (the fact) that I have current impressions. Accordingly, we might say I observe the impressions, or say at least that I make observational judgments about the impressions, without "sensing" them.[/quote]
In my opinion Reichenbach does not make clear what he means when he says he doesn’t “sense” his impressions. On the one hand he says that he never “sees” an impression, but on the other hand he seems to say that all seeing is mediated by impressions such that impressions provide the “sense- content” of all of our seeings. So there is clearly a sense in which it is correct to say that he sees his impressions since they literally provide the raw data out of which all of his perceptions are constructed.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Reichenbach's general belief that there are such things as impressions is part of a theory, or model, or discourse about perceptual experience -- a logos he picked up at second hand before kicking the tires himself. Say he confirms the theory to his own satisfaction, and thus acquires the general belief, by way of some inference, and thus ceases to "doubt the existence" of impressions in general, wherever there is perception like ours. It's the theory that positions him to make the inference, on any particular occasion:
If I am sensing right now, then there are impressions in me; and
I am sensing right now;
Therefore, there are impressions in me.[/quote]
He posits impressions as part of a theory, but he posits them as the sensual basis of all experience. So there’s a bit of a tension here, in my opinion, because he wants to say that impressions are theoretical, inferentially mediated entities and yet the role that they play within his theory of perception makes them the direct object of sense perception, which then seems to imply that they are not inferentially mediated entities after all.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
In fact, he doesn't have to bother making this inference on each separate occasion, once he's acquired the relevant general belief; much as I don't have to infer that gravity draws a glass to the floor when I drop it, or that the bright spot in the sky is a massive ball of gas. Inference may play a role in the initial formation of such beliefs, and in the formation of the concepts associated with the beliefs; but once the story is told, most of us who take it on, do so without bothering over what inferences and evidence informed the story in the beginning.[/quote]
Sure. Once the inference becomes “automatic”, the entities postulated via that inference can become the object of direct observation claims. Sellars makes pretty much the same argument in a couple of his own papers (Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism and Is Scientific Realism Tenable).
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
We shouldn't suppose this mere distinction informs us about what sort of thing the "impression" is. For instance, we needn't suppose that, whenever there is an impression, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the impression and a physical thing of which it is an impression.[/quote]
Right.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I suppose he doesn't mean: Usually there are physical things within me and impressions within me, but sometimes impressions only.[/quote]
That’s my take as well.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
It seems to me we need something like a distinction between sense-perception and imagination just to make sense of the fact that we dream, hallucinate, and imagine -- though how we conceptualize such phenomena, and what judgments we make in light of them, seems to vary from one person and one cultural context to another.
I have the impression that 20th-century analytic philosophers, especially in the shadow of the spooky behaviorist tendency we might trace through Ryle and Quine, tended to neglect such phenomena, and to perhaps quietly lump false judgments made on the basis of imaginings into the same account as false judgments made on the basis of misperceptions. In any case, it's often hard to tell how to map a term like Reichenbach's "impression" here onto a distinction like the one I draw between perceiving and imagining.[/quote]
My sense is that Reichenbach would lump imaginings in with impressions.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Perhaps the neatest way is to say that imaginings are among our impressions. If I mistake my hallucination for perception, and judge that there's an apple on the table on the basis of that hallucination, the source of the confusion is that I have mistaken hallucinating for perceiving, or in other words, I have incorrectly taken an instance of hallucinating as an instance of perceiving. I may correct my own error when I move to the table and aim to fetch the apple; discover that nothing's there, though it still looks like there's an apple; and now correctly judge that I am and have been hallucinating, despite the persistent vision-like appearance of an apple on the table.[/quote]
Well, this is where we run into that whole “sensing facts” vs. “sensing particulars” conundrum again. Are impressions the direct cause of our observation claims or the direct justification for those claims? According to Sellars, claiming that they’re both is to fall prey to the Myth.
Also, for Sellars, as we have seen, perceptions can be true or false. So my impression is that he would say that hallucinations are just false perceptions. Of course, he’s talking about hallucinations qua propositional content. Hallucinations qua sensual contents are sensa – that is, objective events occurring “in” the perceiver. A similar story could be told about imagination, although the structure of imagination qua propositional contents is different. The claim “this unicorn is white” is true enough while I imagine a white unicorn, though the fact that I wouldn’t put forward that claim as a claim in earnest about an actually existing animal in my immediate environment is what distinguishes the two.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Reichenbach, however, seems perhaps to speak as though the confusion is somehow or other contained in the impression, and now he slides from "impression" to "representation".[/quote]
Right. Again, apparently eliding the distinction between the causal and epistemological dimensions sensory-perception.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
But what sort of thing is the impression supposed to be, if the error in judgment is already contained in it? I can stare at a mirage for hours, and change my mind a thousand times while it remains the same mirage. It looks the same, the world appears to me in the same way, while I cycle through various judgments on the basis of that one appearance. The appearance doesn't tell me how to judge, and I don't tell it how to appear. The judging is up to me, and the appearing is up to the appearance, though I can turn my head and get past it.[/quote]
Yep.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Along these lines, I make a three-part epistemological distinction: In the first place there is the fact of the matter, the way things are in the world in fact. In the second place there is the appearance, the fact of how things appear to me (e.g., how things "look to me"). In the third place there is the seeming, the fact of how I take things in fact to be, in part on the basis of appearances. In making active judgments about how things seem, in part on the basis of appearances, I change the seeming, but not the appearances. Normally I don't need to make such judgments in order for things to seem to me one way or another; ordinarily I resort to such judging only when salient features of my experience seem uncertain, confused, or otherwise inadequate to form the basis of a reasonable judgment I have some interest in making. The judgment amends or completes or suspends the seeming.[/quote]
I’m turning into a broken record here, but again we seem to confront this ambiguity in the word “fact”. When we use the word “fact” are we referring to something that is propositionally structured? Or to ask the same question in a different way, are we referring to something that could serve as justification for our beliefs? Or are we referring to non-propositionally structured states of the world – that is, things that could cause our beliefs but not justify them?
Comments (175)
http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/SellarsEmpPhilMind.pdf
Yeah, no problem.
I have been reading through quite a few of the empiricists over the past few weeks: Russel, Hanson, Maxwell and van Fraassen. So I'm pretty interested in reading some Sellers, I got a few points down.
Can someone tell me what the heck a "carrier of slabs" is???????? (VII. in the beginning)
It's a reference to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. If you're not familiar with the Big Themes of that work, one central idea is that 'the meaning of a word is its use' and that 'to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.' To illustrate this idea, Wittgenstein imagines a very simple form of life - builders using 'slabs' to construct something - and a correspondingly simple language - 'slab' is used to request a slab from another worker etc.
Here's the text. Sections 1 & 2 are the relevant ones.
Facts are particulars. Re his examples of facts: (i) something's being thus-and-so, and (ii) something's standing in a certain relation to something else, those are both examples of particulars on my view.
So sensing particulars isn't mutually exclusive with knowing facts. Not that I buy sense data theory, but this is a major problem with his analysis of a putative dilemma with sense data theory.
Huh, how would you define 'particular' (noun)?
Not sure I understand what you are referring to in regard to what he says. Seller's thinks that particulars are sensed. The problem he has, as I understand it, is that in that the sensation of sense datum can't act as epistemic knowledge of what is being sensed, sense datum itself is non-cognitive.
How do you conceive of sense datum?
My concern has to do with what is Given. Suppose I'm walking though a park and I say "that tree is green" did what I experienced (the green tree) demonstrate its presence to me as part of my experience of the park or does the statement "that tree is green" represent my experience, which in itself has no content.
The difference is that on the representational approach, I am to some extent responsible for what I experience and on the presentational approach I am somewhat passive in regards to the tree I experience.
In the standard way, or at least per the core of the standard way. For example, per Wikipedia: "In metaphysics, particulars are defined as concrete, spatiotemporal entities as opposed to abstract entities."
However, I do not agree that properties--or anything, for that matter, aren't particulars.
But so you consider facts to be concrete, spatiotemporal entities?
He says the following:
Quoting Cavacava
As with "particulars," I just use "sense data" in the usual way. Per SEP for example:
That last sentence describes me.
Yes, and on my view, nothing exists that isn't a spatiotemporal entity. In fact, the idea of a non-spatiotemporal existent is incoherent on my view.
Well, I'll get the opportunity to note some of the many ways Sellars goes wrong, for one. :-)
Sure, I understand what they believe that's wrong.
What's the difference in your view?
No, I'm not asking that. What I said above was not that I understand that they're wrong. I said that I understand what they believe, and that what they believe is wrong. So I'm asking you what the difference is on your view between understanding what they believe and understanding why they believe it.
Not believing that facts are particulars doesn't entail believing any other one thing. All it means is believing 'facts are not particulars.' I'm sure you do understand 'facts are not particulars.' What I'm asking is: Do you understand why people would think that? [let me be entirely forthright: I don't you think you actually do understand the thought behind it. I think you're stalling. I think you have a very simple idea: 'All that there is is material things' & instead of engaging philosophically with anything, you just see how a sentence stands up against this pre-established idea. Basically, terrapin, I think you're very bad at philosophy and I think you're paticipating in this group in bad faith. But I'm willing to be proven wrong. Show me!)
And that's what I answered. Yes, I understand what they believe, meaning the same thing as I understand why they believe this.
Quoting csalisbury
Yeah, no shit, as if there was some doubt about you being unjustifiably arrogant and patronizing. You'd probably find conversations furthered better without that attitude.
* is there anything more patronizing and arrogant then saying something like 'well in my view,this is false, so I disagree'? Without arguing for that view? You do this constantly.
He's assuming that for the concept of sense data to throw light on the foundations of empirical knowledge, sense data must itself be knowledge. But that assumption is completely unsupported in Sellars' paper. He just proceeds as if it goes without saying.
So do you have anything to say about the first couple sections of Sellars' paper, or are you just never going to get around to that?
While in some sense logically unassailable, has the flavor of an appeal to consequence. That is, I can't understand the motivation for taking this line, except from deciding a priori that a certain conclusion is unacceptable and so rejecting any argument that reaches it.
Hmm. Why does Sellars think this?
No, he's saying that if sensation itself does not constitute knowledge, then it's appropriate to ask in what sense sensation grounds knowledge. He acknowledges a couple times that having a sensation might be a logically necessary condition to coming to empirical knowledge, and thus serve as a 'foundation' in some sense other than being a 'cognitive fact' (i.e. sensation constituting knowledge in of itself).
Although I do think it's odd for him to equate the notions of 'being a cognitive fact' and 'constituting knowledge.'
Here, I'll take a swing at it. I think Sellars means something like this:
"I had experience x."
"I had experience x, and it was veridical."
If the former is the same as the latter, then the second clause in the second statement is vacuous and veridicality adds nothing to the discussion. If, on the other hand, the second clause in the second statement is not vacuous, then these are two different statements. It follows that "Having a veridical experience of P" is something over and above "Having an experience of P." But this implies that veridicality is "optional" - it makes sense to speak of the experience as lacking veridicality.
The question is why Sellars thinks, of that class, why this must be sensical. One might think (quite reasonably – this seems to be a recurring trend in philosophy for thousands of years) that claims grounded in experience that are about that experience itself self-verify, and so it makes sense to speak of them as veridical but not as non-veridical. The whole point of non-veridicality, if you like, is that there was a seeming that led you to believe something that wasn't so. But if what 'was so' was merely the seeming, this possibility seems to become incoherent. Sellars seems to want to say that this makes veridicality incoherent too, but I'm not sure what leads him to think this.
I don't at all buy his "therefore" in that passage, though. It seems like a non-sequitur to me.
You are saying that the claim, "I saw a red triangle," is self-verifying if it's grounded in the experience of seeing a red triangle. My first instinct is to assert that we can be wrong about our experiences, but I sense that this would miss your point. You're saying that, if claim A is solely about experience B, and claim A is solely grounded in experience B, then A can't be non-veridical. That is to say, if I have experience B, I can't infer a falsehood about experience B solely from that experience. Do I have you right, or at least, mostly right?
EDIT: d'oh, seems like you edited your post! Lemme read it again real quick and re-assess.
Well, but the objection just turns out to be the old "we can't be 100% certain that any given sense datum is veridical," as if 100% certainty should be the goal, should be required, or is even possible.
And in fairness to the sense datum theorist or skeptic generally, the point is not 'you can't be 100% sure,' but 'your epistemological commitments force you to say you can't even be 1% sure.' So it goes if you open the door to nonveridical perceptions that can't be distinguished from veridical ones, but believe experience is foundational to knowledge. The sense datum theorist sees a way to rescue knowledge via experience.
I don't at all agree with your interpretation, and I don't think the passage makes sense on your interpretation. He's specifying that sense datum theorists point out that they can achieve progressively more reliable claims, but the problem in his view is that they can't rule out the possibility of non-veridicalness.
Okay, I'm gonna conjecture a little hypothetical that might illustrate Sellars' intuition on this matter. I'm gonna ramble a little, but I'm still in the "clear the area" phase here. Let me see what I can do here...
Suppose I make this claim: "I experienced a red triangle." Where is the self-verifying experience here? The experience of the red triangle is not self-verifying, since I very well could have seemed to see a red triangle even if there wasn't one (bad lighting or whatever, to use one of Sellars' examples). You could say that it's not the experience, but the claim, "I experienced a red triangle," that is self-verifying, but that claim is grounded on my experience of remembering a former a experience.
But that isn't being completely charitable to what you've put forth (also with deference to your point about delusion/dream/linguistic skepticism not being relevant here). Let's try and push it a little further: while having the experience of seeing a red triangle, I say, "I seem to see a red triangle right now." You're saying I can't be wrong with that, yeah? Provided that the claim I'm making is totally grounded in just that experience, and nothing else, then I can't be wrong.
I can't think of a problem with this offhand, so let me fiddle with it a little. What would it take for me to be wrong here? I would need to have experience B, and infer something false about B, with only B as grounds for my claim. Obviously, I can lie about it, but I take it as implicit here that it's self-verifying for me only. I guess the only way out for Sellars here is to ask for an account of what it means for a claim to be grounded in an experience. Perhaps he could say that there is something a little fishy about saying, "For any experience I have, it is self-evident for me that I am having that experience." Does one have an experience of self-evidence here? Or is this more of a logical thing, inferred from what it means to have an experience?
His objection is then in one sentence, implying that the possibility of veridicality implies the possibility of non-veridicality.
I don't agree with this. He's explaining how a sense datum theorist might approach the problem, but he's critiquing the approach in that same paragraph. The comment about not being able to remove the possibility of non-veridicalness is part of Sellars' critique. It's not what a sense datum theorist would say.
That objection of not being able to remove the possibility of non-veridicalness is the old cliche of focusing on not being able to achieve certainty. Despite the fact that the sense-datum theorist is saying that increased reliability etc. is possible, Sellars is focusing the fact that it's still possible to be wrong.
I didn't agree with your earlier contrary interpretation about Sellars assuming that sense data being knowledge is necessary for it to throw light on sense data as a foundation for empirical knowledge, either, but I don't want to argue about every single interpretation, because probably that's all we'd be doing in this thread in that case.
How's this: "It makes sense to talk of that belief as being unveridical because it makes sense to talk of the claim, "This belief was grounded in that seeming" being false."?
Well, and you should be able to guess that the thought is mutual.
Cannot be right, given that he says this:
That gets as close to a straight denial of your claim from the text itself as I can think of. He also says this:
Now being a logically necessary condition of non-inferential knowledge clearly is a way in which something 'throws light' on the foundations of empirical knowledge. But this is something that he allows of sense data, even if sense data is not itself knowledge.
So your claim that he thinks the only way something can 'throw light' on the foundations of empirical knowledge is for that thing to actually constitute knowledge, is wrong.
---
Regarding the second disagreement, you seem to be implying that Sellars is critiquing the sense datum theorist for allowing uncertainty in their empirical foundations, which is just not the point of this first section. The point is rather that sense datum theorists have according to him been confused about whether or not sensing something is an inherently epistemic or cognitive fact.
Furthermore, the two paragraphs in which he talks about 'progressively less precarious' subclasses of sensations are in quotations, followed by these words:
This signals that Sellars is taking the viewpoint of the sense datum theorist in order to criticize it, not expressing his own view as you imply above. He then concludes by saying that the sense datum theorist is subject to confusions, not that he fails to secure some sort of apodicticity in his position. The latter is simply not what this section of the paper is about.
Okay, if you want to endlessly argue with me about interpretation, let's do that. That will be fun.
(1) you'd need to argue that the non-inferential knowledge of particular matter of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data is sufficient to amount to noncogntive sense data throwing light on the foundations of empirical knowledge, especially in light of the fact that he says, "It would seem, then, that the sensing of sense contents cannot constitute knowledge, inferential or non-inferential; and if so, we may well ask, what light does the concept of a sense datum throw on the 'foundations of empirical knowledge?"
So your argument that Sellars counts non-inferential knowledge of particular matters of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data is sufficient for noncognitive sense data throwing light on the foundations of empirical knowledge is ________?
Re this:
The "a logically necessary condition" is simply a reference/restatement of what you'd just quoted. Again, that reason that makes it sufficient to throw a light on the foundations of empirical knowledge in Sellars opinion, in your view, is _______?
Quoting The Great Whatever
I didn't say that. I said that he's critiquing the approach arguing for increased reliability, etc. on the grounds that it's still (merely) possible for sense data to be wrong about "sense content" (a horrible term for what he's talking about there on my view).
I'm also not saying that my comments about this are in the context of the "point" of the first section.
Actually rereading that section, I'd agree that Sellars is not speaking for himself in the comment about the possibility of being wrong about sense content, but I still don't agree that he's presenting the view of sense data theorists either. In fact, I'm not sure whose view he's presenting--he might not be accurately presenting anyone's view in a way that anyone would agree with. He says right before that:
Right after which he says:
So who is he supposedly paraphrasing "baldly" anyway?
He wants to formally separate sense datum from our conception of sense datum, the former non-cognitive and non-intelligible and the latter both cognitive and intelligible.
So:
Where "I had experience x", is a report. The actual experience, at its own level of immediacy has no valuation, no intelligible content. We may be unable to be wrong about having an experience, but that does not give it any value, only its report can be judged true or false. To claim that immediate sense experience has any true or false value is to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
Quoting Terrapin Station
There's no argument to be had: Sellars outright admits that even if sensation of sense data doesn't constitute knowledge, it might nonetheless shed light on the foundations of empirical knowledge (i.e. by being a logically necessary condition for empirical knowledge), contrary to your claim. You essentially are saying the opposite of what Sellars says in the paper.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Are you asking me how it is that isolating a necessary condition for the existence of something sheds light on its foundations?
Quoting Terrapin Station
The sense datum theorist. Hence why the very paragraphs end with conclusions about sense data, and right after he says that not all sense datum theorists have been subject to certain confusions, but that they have formed an integral part of the tradition.
Hahaha--just reword your interpretation as if that's what he said, and then have the balls to lecture someone else on reading comprehension. Nice.
Also, reading comprehension is interpretation.
Interpretation can't happen until reading comprehension is complete. A 'criticism' that misreads a paper on the most basic level is not even a criticism; it hasn't yet understood well enough to be in a position to criticize.
Such is, for example, the 'criticism' that Sellars' 'therefore' in his quoted paragraphs is a non sequitur; it misreads the text in such a fundamental way, in thinking that Sellars is there making an argument, and not speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist, that it is not a cogent criticism. To think that Sellars is here criticizing the sense datum theorist for not being rigorous enough in excluding the possibility of non-veridicality is not yet to engage with this paper, because that is not what's going on.
However, he then goes on to say:
But given the difference he just established between "looks" and "sees," it's not at all the case that as an experience, "looks" is indistinguishable from "sees." In fact, in most cases, for most individuals that is, that's surely wrong.
Reading comprehension can't happen without interpretation.
You always tease with that promise, but so far haven't followed through.
"x is red .<--> . x looks red to standard observers in standard conditions"
The left-hand side is about the objective properties of the object in question. The right-hand side is about the subjective experience of the object in question, or that is, the perception, of the object in question. It could easily be the case that x has a property that, given the metaphysics of a possible world, always appears differently to observers than it is, and this could be the case so that the property in question, for some existents, is perceived accurately. In other words, it could merely be a quirk of that particular (type of) object.
Of course, we could say that we're going to use "red" on the left-hand side stipulatively so that whatever it looks like to us under standard conditions is the property that we're going to assume it veridically has, but there's nothing necessary about that.
The same thing would go just as well in both cases.
"Why does this look green to me?" "Because it is blue, and blue objects look green in this kind of light."
"Why does this look blue to me?" "Because it is green, and green objects look blue in this kind of light."
Neither sort of light is ontologically privileged. What would actually be the case with the object is that in light 1, it looks green, and in light 2, it looks blue. Both would be accurate.
[quote=Pneumenon]Here, I'll take a swing at it. I think Sellars means something like this:
"I had experience x."
"I had experience x, and it was veridical."
If the former is the same as the latter, then the second clause in the second statement is vacuous and veridicality adds nothing to the discussion. If, on the other hand, the second clause in the second statement is not vacuous, then these are two different statements. It follows that "Having a veridical experience of P" is something over and above "Having an experience of P." But this implies that veridicality is "optional" - it makes sense to speak of the experience as lacking veridicality.[/quote]
[quote=tgw]]That can't be right, though, because the sense datum theorist doesn't claim that all things of the form 'I had experience X' have no duality between veridicality and non-veridicality, only that there's a certain class of experiences that it makes no sense of to call non-veridical.[/quote]
I think the key is to focus on why Sellars' sense theorist is honing in on this special class. For these theorists, its meant as an solution to a problem: If there is no way to determine whether an experience is veridical or non-veridical, then how can knowledge get off the ground? So a class is identified where it is possible to make such a determination. And so we have a foundation on which we can build.
But how can we can move from knowledge gained from necessarily veridical experience to knowledge involving potentially non-veridical experiences? That's the rub.
The experience of non-veridicality precedes the idea of veridicality. The very idea of veridicality would be meaningless if we hadn't already experienced being wrong. (it's an anstoss type of logic.)
The necessarily veridical class of experiences operates on a pre-having-experienced-being-wrong level. It doesn't leave that level because it can't leave that level. But, by that same token, it can't shed any light on anything outside its own class. The veridicality of experiencing e.g. a red triangle is a closed loop.
I think Pneumenon's analysis is more or less right. The sense datum-theorist does indeed hold on to the veridical/non-veridical distinction - but the logic of the class to which that distinction applies, simply does not apply to the class of the 'necessarily veridical.' Apples and oranges.
Or, to use Hegelian language: the class of necessarily veridical experiences is only veridical for someone steeped in non-veridicality. In-itself (and it's precisely this in-itself the sense data theorist is trying to leverage) it's neither nor.
I don't know, why? I think it's a coherent position to say that there are no non-veridical experiences, even if there are veridical ones. We might draw certain inferences or get certain expectations from veridical experiences that are unlicensed, and so have our expectations disappointed, but the issue with non-veridicality seems to be that realist assumptions about perception engender their possibility, not that we learn about non-veridicality from experience and so project veridicality back onto it.
The sense datum theorist seems to me to be seeking a realm in which act and object unite, making realist metaphysics of perception irrelevant, and hence the notion of non-veridicality that accompanies it. It always seemed to me that skeptical arguments about non-veridicality are only coherent, and are meant to be, in response to realist assumptions.
Veridicality doesn't seem to hinge on this – what you see is what you get.
--
Although I will say that the objection as Sellars outlines it -- that empirical knowledge can't rest on a secure foundation if it must come from a class of things that has non-veridical members that can't be distinguished surely by any mark -- presupposes that in order for knowledge to have a secure foundation, there must be a sure way of knowing that one knows in any particular case. But this just doesn't follow if we're interested in knowledge, not knowledge of that knowledge. It might be that we know all sorts of things, even if for any particular case we can't infallibly (or even reliably!) know that we know this.
That's fair. Then realist assumptions themselves would be a reaction - a theoretical reaction - to disappointment. But, then, veridicality is meaningless without a minimal helping of realism. What does 'veridical' mean if not that the way things seem (or appear to be) coincide, in this case, with how they are.** If seeming and being are one and the same, then the very idea of veridicality is meaningless. (But then, to deal with the fact of disappointment, we would have to substitute a different kind of thinking, where the distinction would not be between seeming and being, but between valid expectations and invalid ones. And then, once again, my indisputably experiencing a red triangle would have no bearing on whether or not any corresponding expectations were valid or not.)
**Sellars, in a later section of this essay, gives an analysis of seeming/being that I find very satisfying.
But the whole thing with veridicality is that what you see might not be what you get (i.e. you might be wrong.) If you can't be wrong, then you'll always get what you see, and you won't even comprehend the idea of that not happening.
But the reason we want to know that we know isn't that we're interested in any sort of meta claims. It's not even (at least not at first) a cartesian defense against an evil demon. It's that we thought we knew, but we turned out to be wrong. We thought we knew, but we didn't. So then: how do we know whether we really know? Of course, we'll never be wrong about having seen a red triangle, or experiencing an emotional or spiritual movement while listening to song x. But we may be wrong such that e.g. the rocket we engineered to get to the moon can't even get out of earth's atmosphere. In any case, Sellars is subtle (or at least cautious here.) As you've mentioned he's talking from the sense-datum theorist's point of view, and it's the sense-datum theorist who is hunting for something that we know that we know, and therefore honing in on this class. But even if we disagree with the conclusions of the sense-data theorist, I think one can see where they're coming from.
My opinion of the essay so far is that it's horribly written, but then I again, I hate Hegel. He's not quite as garbage as Heidegger, but he's not far from it.
I don't buy that. I think that would only work if one thought that veridicality were necessarily the case. One could believe that veridicality is contingent instead, and that one's sense data haven't happened to be wrong yet, while one could still imagine the possibility.
Quoting csalisbury
Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical.
Quoting csalisbury
That was my immediate thought in response to that, too, but then this struck me: why couldn't it be the case for an idealist (an idealist who adheres to a sense data view in this case) to believe that their sense data could fail to correspond with ideal existents? The only thing that a veridicality/non-veridicality dichotomy requires, logically, is that one's sense data (or one's phenomenal experiences on a view like mine) (a) don't exhaust the world ontologically, and (b) ostensibly have some sort of correlation to things that aren't one's sense data or phenomenal experiences.
Quoting csalisbury
It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say both that (i) there are both veridical and non-veridical sense data, and at best we have methods of knowing that some sense data are more reliable than others, and (ii) they're forwarding sense-data theory in a bid for epistemic certainty.
I see a red triangle. Upon seeing it, I form the belief, "I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle." What is necessarily veridical here? Following the above quote, the necessarily veridical thing must be my belief that I'm having that experience. Which means that there's no room for error in the process of my forming a belief about an experience that I'm having, provided that that belief is solely derived from that experience.
Now, we want to say this: "For this class of beliefs, it makes no sense to say that they are non-veridical." We're not just saying that all such beliefs are veridical, but that it it is senseless to talk about them any other way. If this is true, then it must be logically necessary for those beliefs to be veridical, which is to say that "A belief of this class is non-veridical" must imply a contradiction. (You can substitute "claim" for belief here, if you like - I think TGW used that word a few pages back)
It seems to me that the most obvious way to get this result is to say that the experience in question is identical to the belief. My belief that I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle must be that experience. If you didn't want to say that, I guess you could appeal to an infallible belief-forming faculty.
Thoughts, anyone?
We just had a big discussion about this in the thread about whether we can be mistaken about any experiences . . . let me find it to give you a link:
http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/917/can-we-be-mistaken-about-our-own-experiences#Item_254
You could get a belief about an experience (a phenomenal experience that is) wrong if the belief and the phenomenal experience aren't both presently occurring--you could remember it incorrectly, for example.
However, Sellars' comments about veridical and non-veridical sense data aren't about this to my understanding. The idea is that sense data are getting something else--whatever is causing them, where we're not directly aware of what's causing them--right or wrong. Of course, talking about sense data in that way, it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical.
We don't; but then, epistemologists usually don't frame the question this way, but rather in terms of 'Do we know?' or 'how do we know?' Some sort of sliding happens between knowledge and knowledge of knowledge (some people even think the so-called 'KK' principle is valid).
But maybe we're on the same page here, and I misread your intent in raising the point about knowledge of knowledge.
Yes, I think Sellars says something similar.
[quote=Sellars] Now it might seem that when confronted by this choice, the sense-datum theorist seeks to have his cake and eat it. For he characteristically insists both that sensing is a knowing and that it is particulars which are sensed. Yet his position is by no means as hopeless as this formulation suggests. For the 'having' and the 'eating' can be combined without logical nonsense provided that he uses the word know and, correspondingly, the word given in two senses. He must say something like the following:
The non-inferential knowing on which our world picture rests is the knowing that certain items, e.g. red sense contents, are of a certain character, e.g. red. When such a fact is non-inferentially known about a sense content, I will say that the sense content is sensed as being, e.g. red. I will then say that a sense content is sensed (full stop) if it is sensed as being of a certain character, e.g. red. Finally, I will say of a sense content that it is known if it is sensed (full stop), to emphasize that sensing is a cognitive or epistemic fact. [/quote]
To sense a red triangle is to know that triangle as red.
[quote=Sellars]This stipulated use of know would, however, receive aid and comfort from the fact there is, in ordinary usage, a sense of know in which it is followed by a noun or descriptive phrase which refers to a particular, thus
Do you know John?
Do you know the President?
Because these questions are equivalent to "Are you acquainted with John?" and "Are you acquainted with the President?" the phrase "knowledge by acquaintance" recommends itself as a useful metaphor for this stipulated sense of know and, like other useful metaphors, has congealed into a technical term.[/quote]
I think the answer to this is pretty straightforward. They've experienced something that seemed to be one way, but was actually another. Non-veridicality is coherent precisely because we understand the difference between seeming and being. A sense datum, on the other hand, would be necessarily veridical because its seeming is its being (but, again, this would seem to make the veridical/non-veridical distinction itself inappropriate to it.)
Sure, but, with that kind of idealism, we'd have to posit a bigger mind (like God's) that grounds the objects we, finite minds, only see through a glass darkly. This kind of idealism isn't ultimately all that different from realism - both deal with objects 'out there' we have limited access to.
But it's not veridical and non-veridical sense data - it's veridical and non-veridical seeings. Or seeings and ostensible seeings. (this is the same point you made above, to Pneumenon "The idea is that sense data are getting something else--whatever is causing them, where we're not directly aware of what's causing them--right or wrong."
So, then, the story goes, the Sense data theorist moves on to this:
[quote=Sellars, outlining the sense data theorist's course of thought]The idea springs to mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues which ostensible seeings of red triangular physical surfaces lack.[/quote]
---------------
[quote=Terrapin]Of course, talking about sense data in that way, it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical.[/quote]
Right, that's Sellars point!
[quote=Sellars] they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical[/quote]
That would explain why someone who thought that experience was (necessarily) veridical could come to think otherwise.
That's not what I'm addressing here by this though: "Why couldn't someone who believes that sense data are necessarily veridical have the view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent, for example? In that case, it would be dubious to say that they've experienced something non-veridical."
What I'm saying is that it's a logical possibility that Joe, say, believes that sense data are necessarily veridical, where Joe is saying something about sense data correlating with existents that are not themselves sense data, and where Joe has a view that non-veridicality isn't even coherent. That's a logically possible stance for someone to have.
Quoting csalisbury
I agree with that--that it wouldn't make sense to even talk about the distinction if we're simply talking about sense data with respect to itself. For that reason, I don't believe that Sellars is talking about sense data in that sense when he discusses veridicality versus non-veridicality, because the distinction wouldn't make sense in that case.
Quoting csalisbury
Yeah, they're similar in that respect, but still one is idealism and the other realism, because one posits that only mental things exist (or can be known if it's just epistemic idealism), whereas the other posits that non-mental things exist (and perhaps can be known).
Quoting csalisbury
But wait though. Sellars says for example, "The first idea clearly arises in the attempt to explain the facts of sense perception in scientific style. How does it happen that people can have the experience which they describe by saying "It is as though I were seeing a red and triangular physical object" when either there is no physical object there at all, or, if there is, it is neither red nor triangular? The explanation, roughly, posits that in every case in which a person has an experience of this kind, whether veridical or not, he has what is called a 'sensation' or 'impression' 'of a red triangle.'"
The part I emphasized is a description of sense data. "Whether veridical or not," then, is about sense data in this passage (per the explanation of sense data theorists which he's going to be addressing). It's not an issue of veridical versus non-veridical seeings in the sense that Sellars is using that (namely, where a "seeing" is "S has come to believe that x is green").
It's not clear to me how you're using "seeing" there so that it's different than "sensations of red triangles" by the way. Again, Sellars' distinction between "looks" and "seeings" seems to be that "looks" is another term for sense data (a la "x looks F to S") and that "seeings" are inferential statements of the sort "S has come to believe that x is F"). But you don't seem to be using "seeings" the same way as that above.
Quoting csalisbury
Then why would we be talking about it as if anyone is saying that?
Sure, so long as he has a different explanation of what seems like non-veridical experience (e.g. perhaps he'll have an explanation like the one TGW mentioned earlier: unlicensed inferences/invalid expectations.) Unless you're asking to imagine someone who has literally never had the experience of being in error?
But the part you emphasized isn't a description of sense data. It's saying (in the voice of the sese data theorist) that sense data is a necessary condition for both any experience of an object and any experience that seems as though its of an object. Note that 'whether veridical or not' refers not to 'a sensation or impression' but to ' an experience of this kind.' And 'experience of this kind' refers to those experiences where it's 'as though [one] were seeing a red and triangular object.'
The end of that paragraph of you quoted the beginning of makes all this very explicit:
You mean how Sellars is using 'seeing' there? That's a quote from Sellars, not me.
It's claimed by Sellars that sense data theorists do say that, or at least make implicit use of the idea.
The latter. If someone believes that the very idea of non-veridicality is incoherent, they're not going to have the experience of being in error.
Quoting csalisbury
How is it as though one is seeing a red and triangular object to a sense data theorist if one is not having a sense or impression of a red and triangular object?
Quoting csalisbury
Okay, but I said that it's unclear why we'd be supposing that any(one is saying that any) sense data are or can be necessarily veridical. Hence that isn't Sellars point if he's making that dubious claim.
right, but then the idea of veridicality is going to be incoherent as well - if you can't understand the one, you can't understand the other.
You wouldn't be able to, for the sense daa theorist. That's why the latter is claimed to be a necessary condition for the former.
I don't know if I understand. It isn't Sellars' claim. It's what he claims the archetypal sense data theorist claims (or at least implicitly believes)
Yes, I think so, but then (if you're of a certain bent) it becomes a question of whether its a sturdy foundation. I think ultimately it actually is a cartesian question of certainty, I think terrapin might be right on that score (he just seems to confuse Sellars' view with the view of (Sellars understanding of) the sense data theorist.)
I'd also go further and add that not only does the object look a particular colour in a particular light, but that that object IS that particular colour in that particular light (from a particular perspective, of course). The object's properties are being directly affected by the properties of the light source, which is affecting the properties of our perception of the object. So the object is "blue" in one kind of light, and "green" in another kind of light, and so on.
I don't think this works, because the physics will not agree with that (it's the same wavelength in all cases, and nothing has changed on the object's surface), and you have optical illusions where we see color that isn't there at all.
It's clear that we're seeing the object as different colors in different lighting conditions, because that's how our color vision works, not because the object has different colorings.
If anyone wants to reject the above on idealistic grounds, you still have to account for optics and illusions. In idealist terminology, our experiences are in disagreement with one another as to whether the object's color changes.
I don't at all buy that idea in general--that one can only understand (or think etc.) some x if one can understand (or think etc.) not-x or x's "opposite."
Someone could easily think that sense data necessarily get non sense data right a fortiori because it isn't even coherent to suppose that they could not get sense data right. For a hypothetical justification of this, imagine if someone were to think that sense data determines, in a causal way, what the non-sense data world is like, and that the non sense-data world couldn't even be otherwise. The idea of non-veridical sense data could thus be incoherent to them--it wouldn't even make any sense to them to try to imagine that the world could be otherwise, because it's so obvious to them that that's how the world works. Thus they take talk of non-veridicality to be completely vague nonsense that other people engage in.
Quoting csalisbury
Right. Hence when we talk about veridical and non-veridical "seeing a red and triangular object" we're talking about veridical and non-veridical sense data when we're talking about sense data theorists.
Quoting csalisbury
Right--that's Sellars' claim. But I don't know why we'd be claiming that any sense data theorist believes that, as there doesn't seem to be any reason to claim that. In other words, it's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist actually believes that.
Yeah, I agree with that.
It's not just the object's surface that's pertinent. It's the whole "system" in question--the object's surface, the light traveling from it, the way the light interacts with the atmosphere, the wavelengths at a particular point in space (the surface of your eye for example). Hence his "from a particular perspective."
It's important to remember that EVERYTHING we say is from a particular perspective, and there are no objectively privileged perspectives.
Before going further, I want to back up to the beginning of this thread of argumentation:
[quote=Terrapin] It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say both that (i) there are both veridical and non-veridical sense data, and at best we have methods of knowing that some sense data are more reliable than others, and (ii) they're forwarding sense-data theory in a bid for epistemic certainty[/quote]
I want to make sure I understand what you were saying here. I took you to mean that that it doesn't make sense to turn to sense-data for epistemic certainty, if one believes that it is characteristic of all sense data that we can only know to a limited extent whether they are 'veridical.' To hold such a position would be to contradict oneself. Is that what you meant?
The key is the first phrase: "It's extremely dubious that any sense data theorist would say . . ."
I'm talking about what sense data theorists would say about their views. Comments and claims are being made about what their views are/what they would say. I'm skeptical of those comments and claims.
In any case, I just want to make sure I understand how you understand the claims Sellars imputes to the 'sense-data-theorist.' Was I reading you right?
[quote=csalisbury] I took you to mean that that it doesn't make sense to turn to sense-data for epistemic certainty, if one believes that it is characteristic of all sense data that we can only know to a limited extent whether they are 'veridical.' To hold such a position would be to contradict oneself. Is that what you meant?[/quote]
That's not what I was saying, but sure, if one were making a claim about epistemic certainty yet at the same time saying that one can only know to a limited extent whether the method in question entails veridicality, then yes, I'd agree that that wouldn't make sense.
Could you point to where I'm misreading you, or possibly re-phrase what you were saying? I'm just trying to pinpoint the exact source of our disagreement.
Again, I'm saying that I'm extremely skeptical that any sense data theorists say both (a) that sense data provide anything like a foundation for epistemic certainty, and (b) that sense data can get things wrong and we can only achieve some degree of reliability for veridical claims.
I'd have to be shown a sense data theorist saying both of those things to believe that any actually say both of them.
In other words, the idea that anyone actually says both of those things seems like bullshit.
Simply because the two ideas are contradictory.
The difference is that I wasn't critiquing a putative sense data theorist view. I was critiquing the idea that that is any sense data theorists' view in the first place.
If you'd simply asked "Why do you believe that's not any sense data theorists' view?" to start, I would have said what I said above.
But what I meant by the sentence you quoted was that I'm not buying that that's any sense data theorists' view. So when you said, "Did you mean ____," I took it that you were asking about the entire sentence you quoted.
This is why I think it's not a contradiction (while bracketing the legitimate questions of whether there are other problems with the account or whether there even really are theorists who hold these views)
So the view of Sellars' purported sense theorist is not both that there are no experiences which we can be certain are veridical and also that there are some which necessarily are. I agree that this would be absurd, and it's very difficult to imagine someone holding this position. What he's saying instead is that the sense data theorist begins with the idea that no experiences ('ostensible seeings") can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical, but then, upon discovering the idea of a class of necessarily veridical experiences (sensations, sense-data) realizes he was wrong. There are some experiences which are necessarily veridical.
I'm not sure where he says this, but to start, why would a sense data theorist begin with the idea that no experiences can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical?
[quote=Terrapin]why would a sense data theorist begin with the idea that no experiences can be determined to be veridical or non-veridical?[/quote]
Answer:
[quote=Sellars, speaking as the sense data theorist]The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -- let us call them 'ostensible seeings' -- some of the members of which are non-veridical; and there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical. [/quote]
But that doesn't have anything to do with what you just said.
Where in that is something about a sense data theorist starting with the idea that they can't determine whether an experience is veridical or not?
And you're not equating "determine" with "guaranteeing" are you? Those are two different terms, two different ideas.
Well, thats a huge difference though. Re guarantees we're talking about certainty. That's not the case with "determine."
If we're talking about guarantees instead, leaving aside for a moment the idea of where any sense data theorist begins with the idea that they can't guarantee veridicality (since it would be unusual for anyone to start with the opposite idea), how are we getting to the idea that some sense data theorists "realize that they were wrong" and say that they can guarantee veridicality? What the quote that you pasted says is that "there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical."
I disagree. Determine is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus: "Ascertain or establish exactly by research or calculation" & Ascertain is defined by the OED thus: "Find (something) out for certain; make sure of:"
[quote=Terrapin]how are we getting to the idea that some sense data theorists "realize that they were wrong" and say that they can guarantee veridicality? What the quote that you pasted says is that "there is no inspectible hallmark which guarantees that any such experience is veridical."[/quote]
This is just a matter of reading the first section.
So: After the section I'd already quoted, Sellars continues, describing how the sense-data theorists come to the conclusion "Therefore, given that the foundation of empirical knowledge cannot consist of the veridical members of a class not all the members of which are veridical, and from which the non-veridical members cannot be weeded out by 'inspection,' this foundation cannot consist of such items as seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular."
In other words, this is the sense data theorist following his conclusion about 'there being no inspectible [sic] hallmark' to the bitter end (one which Sellars claims he cannot but be dissatisfied with.) But Then!
[quote=Sellars]The idea springs to mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues which ostensible seeings of red triangular physical surfaces lack. To begin with, the grammatical similarity of 'sensation of a red triangle' to "thought of a celestial city" is interpreted to mean, or, better, gives rise to the presupposition, that sensations belong to the same general pigeonhole as thoughts -- in short, are cognitive facts. Then, it is noticed that sensations are ex hypothesi far more intimately related to mental processes than external physical objects. It would seem easier to "get at" a red triangle of which we are having a sensation, than to "get at" a red and triangular physical surface. But, above all, it is the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations which strikes these philosophers, though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical. [/quote]
The phrase "The idea springs to mind" with which this passage opens signals that a new thought, has occurred, one which appears to offer a way out of the deadlock: Sensations cannot be unveridical.
And that's it? Or are you cherry-picking a definition? It doesn't have definitions such as "firmly decide" or simply "decide," "make up one's mind," "choose" etc.? That would make the OED kind of suck if it doesn't have those other definitions. Use a dictionary that better captures all of the common nuances of a term.
No part of what you quoted from Sellars after this amounts to "realizing that they were wrong and saying that they can guarantee veridicality," does it?
OED is kind of the gold standard, isn't it? I didn't cherry-pick, that was literally the first definition I looked up. I appreciate that you don't like the definition, but then, I guess the burden is on you to show that your non-standard definition is the right one.
No? It seems clear to me.
Whereas I hadn't read him in a long time and had a relatively favorable opinion of him from my student days, but rereading this essay now, I've decided that he can't write for shit. For one, I can't imagine that he possibly revised anything in this paper, it had to be a stream-of-consciousness first draft. And he seems to be a completely disorganized, chaotic thinker.
[quote=terrapin]Yeah, no shit, as if there was some doubt about you being unjustifiably arrogant and patronizing. You'd probably find conversations furthered better without that attitude.[/quote]
Not if it doesn't include definitions such as "firmly decide" or simply "decide," "make up one's mind," "choose" etc.
Quoting csalisbury
There are no such things as right definitions. Using "determine" in those other ways is common, and those definitions are found in other dictionaries. If the OED doesn't include those definitions, they're not doing their job very well in my opinion.
You're not unfamiliar with normal English usage, by the way, are you, so that you need to look up terms like "determine" and "guarantee" to have some idea of their conventional connotations?
Quoting csalisbury
What part clearly says anything about guaranteeing veridicality?
I'm not going to argue about the definition anymore.
[quote=Terrapin]What part clearly says anything about guaranteeing veridicality?[/quote]
[quote=Sellars]But, above all, it is the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations which strikes these philosophers, though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it as unveridical.[/quote]
Obviously he doesn't say the word "guarantee" for example, so you must be translating something as that. What phrase there amounts to "guarantee"?
Well, the first part isn't at all clear to me: --I have no idea why Sellars thinks that that doesn't make sense. Also his "It is the fact" is grammatically ambiguous to me contextually, especially re what the pronoun "it" is standing for, if anything but that's maybe not a big deal.
The last part is just the old "If it makes sense to talk about x, it must make sense to talk about not-x" thing that we went over a bit earlier in this thread.
The linking part doesn't make sense, though, either. You have the phrase "speaking of (or about) unveridical sensations", and with respect to that, he makes the claim that for it to strike someone as if it makes sense to speak of unveridical sensations, they must overlook the fact that if it makes sense to talk about veridicality, then it makes sense to talk about non-veridicality. That seems ridiculously contradictory though.
And none of that has anything to do with claiming that one is guaranteeing veridicality for anything.
That's a pleonastic 'it,' it doesn't refer. It's like saying 'It was the rain that worried me,' which is the same as 'the rain worried me.' 'It' isn't referring to anything.
Quoting Terrapin Station
...for it to strike someone (i.e., impress them) that it does not make sense...
Since this is an English lesson now, I guess the philosophical discussion is over.
Ah, then he's not saying "Unveridical sensations which strike these philosophers (I took "strikes" rather than "strike" to be a typo/oversight) do not make sense to speak of" but "These philosophers believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations." I read it the first way, hence I took "to strike them as it does" to refer to the unveridical sensations which strike these philosophers.
However, if he's saying "These philosophers believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations," then what was he doing in the passage right before that, when supposedly giving the view of the philosophers in question, when he said, "The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -- let us call them 'ostensible seeings' -- some of the members of which are non-veridical" and "Rather they would . . . reason that . . . it does consist of members of a class which contains non-veridical members"?
If the philosophers in question believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations, then we can't say that their view includes that "some of the members of 'seeing that x if F' are non-veridical." They don't believe that it makes sense to speak of unverdical sensations. (And this is why I read "unveridical sensations which strike these philosophers" as I did.)
Is it that he's using the odd distinction he later seems to use between "seeing" and "sense data"? If so, though, "ostensible seeings, hearings, etc" in that passage doesn't seem to fit the quirky distinction he makes later. "Seeings, hearing, etc." in that context should be referring to sense data, no?
Quoting The Great Whatever
It's going to be difficult to avoid these sorts of issues given the sloppy manner in which Sellars writes.
Given that you're now literally reinterpreting what Sellars writes on the assumption he is making typos...
Quoting Terrapin Station
Because as he says, there he's talking about ostensible seeings, not sensations.
The word "strikes" in there refers back to the word "fact" earlier in the sentence, which means that "strikes" is correct because "fact" is singular.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think it's difficult to avoid these issues because you're attempting to process a text that is, apparently, above your reading level.
"seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular" isn't a sensation?
The former necessarily involves an object external to me. (An "ostensible seeing" involves a belief in an object external to me, whether that belief is correct or not.) Thus 'seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular', while it may require a sensation, is not simply a sensation.
Seeing is sensation unless Sellars is using the quirky apparent distinction he tried to make that I detailed above (quite a few posts ago, in comments about section three) but that he seems to be using inconsistently.
And also if we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality, we're talking about how sensations link up with something that's not the sensation, which is the same, functionally, at least, as objects external to you. (Technically it wouldn't have to be something literally external to your body, but it would have to be something external to your present phenomenal awareness.)
[quote=Terrapin]Seeing is sensation[/quote]
Contextually, I think it's clear that Sellars is discussing seeing qua perception (and perception is not the same thing as sensation.)
[quote=Terrapin]And also if we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality, we're talking about how sensations link up with something that's not the sensation, which is the same, functionally, at least, as objects external to you. [/quote]
Yep.
What's the difference when we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality?
Re your "yep," hence we're talking about sensation.
The difference is that sensations are not the kinds of things that can be veridical or non-veridical. Unlike beliefs (of which perceptions are a species), they have no normative import.
One of the main points of EPM is to show that sense-datum theorists fail to adequately distinguish between the causal and normative senses of "immediacy". They either simply assume that the one implies the other, or equivocate the two senses entirely. According to Sellars, once the distinction is properly understood it becomes clear that causal immediacy can't underwrite the kind of epistemic immediacy that sense-datum theorist would like it to - it simply isn't up to the task - and any brand of foundationalist epistemology that depends on that presumption is invalidated as a consequence.
That's my take, anyway.
Okay, but again, he says both
(1) "These philosophers believe that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations" (paraphrased, according to the interpretation folks stressed above)
and
(2) "The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -- let us call them 'ostensible seeings' -- some of the members of which are non-veridical."
With respect to (1), you're then saying that Sellars is agreeing with them that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations?
And then with (2), you're saying that "seeing" isn't being used to refer to the sensation of seeing? (Re the above comment from csalisbury, I'd agree that perception isn't identical to sensation, but because I'd say that perception is a subset of sensation--so perceptions are still sensations, but sensations are not necessarily perceptions.) Perhaps you're saying that he's using "seeing" in the quirky apparent distinction I noted above?--however, how would that make sense with how he's using the word "hearing" in the same passage?
So when Sellars talks about “seeing that X”, he is talking about perception insofar as X is a claim or proposition (e.g. "the table is green", etc.). The modality (hearing, tasting, etc.) is irrelevant.
Each begins by locating a bit of common ground in the conversation, by characterizing a particular claim as indicative of a consensus view, and taking the allegedly noncontroversial claim for granted as a starting point in discussion. Hume beings with a point he supposes "everyone will allow", while Sellars begins with a point he presumes no critic of the concept of givenness "has intended to deny."
Each employs a distinction between perception and another sort of activity. Hume draws a distinction between perception on the one hand, and memory and imagination on the other. Sellars begins with a distinction between perception and inference -- or at least between "seeing that p" (presumably a species of "perceiving that p") and "inferring that p".
Take the section-heads into account: Hume stakes out common ground in speaking about perception, memory, and imagination, to orient his discussion "of the origin of ideas". Sellars stakes out common ground in speaking about perception and inference to orient his discussion of "an ambiguity in sense-datum theories".
Perhaps it's reading too much into the texts, but I'm amused that Hume mentions perception first, while Sellars mentions inference first -- as if, I'd want to say, in each case the first-mentioned term is the one held to be less mysterious by the contemporaries addressed by the author, those interlocutors invited to begin speaking together on this common ground.
Another reach on audience: Hume seems to position himself, at least rhetorically and in principle, to be speaking with "everyone". Sellars seems to think he's speaking primarily to philosophers, or professional philosophers, or professional epistemologists concerned with the concept of givenness... or most narrowly, to professional epistemologists who are, like Sellars and Hegel, critical of the concept of givenness.
Gold! It's true, Hume was using skepticism to push the British Empiricist project as far as it could go. Sellars seems to be dialing the clock back on that, in some sense. There does seem to be an implicit dialectic here.
With respect to (1), you're then saying that Sellars is agreeing with them that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations?
Also, I'm curious if you'd say that Sellars is claiming that propositions are perceived in some sense. Or would he agree that "seeing " is a very loose, metaphorical way of speaking--that is, we're not literally seeing a proposition?
Do any of us here deny that there is a difference between inferring and seeing that something is the case? Or more generally, between inferential knowledge and noninferential knowledge, or likewise between judgments based on inference and judgments based on perception?
Or short of denying the difference, do we find anything objectionable or confusing about the distinction drawn that way?
"what is observed qua being observed": What do we suppose this phrase means? Perhaps a weak sense of "observation", as in, S observes that p, though it's possible that not-p? (In other words, "S observes that p" is consistent with not-p; in this respect "observes" would resemble "believes" rather than "knows"...)
similarly, "a proper subset...": as in, the subset of "true observations"?
I presume this is the "data" of the "sense-data theorists".
Sellars coordinates the terms "given" and "sense data", and associates them with the term "observation". If philosophers used the term "given" merely to refer to the observed qua observed, or perhaps to a proper subset of what may be determined by observation, then the existence of "sense data" would be as noncontroversial as the existence of philosophical perplexities.
Dense rhetoric! It's the very existence of sense-data that Sellars puts into question here. Do sense-data exist, or are they mere creatures of fiction, misinterpreted marks in a logician's notebook? In what sense are philosophical perplexities said -- by epistemologists -- to "exist"? Which perplexities? Shop-talk about nonexistent objects? Shop-talk about justified true belief? About riddles of "believe"-talk and "know"-talk in the first person? Perhaps all that "exists" in such cases is talk and perplexity, sound and fury -- perhaps shop-talk about "sense-data given in observation" is another such case....
Sellars suggests there is an ordinary-language, common sense, use of this family of terms -- "given", "(sense-)data", and "observe" -- that is philosophically unobjectionable, but also philosophically unproductive: The unobjectionable uses only give us ways of stating (or restating) traditional epistemological problems, but don't entail solutions to those problems.
Sellars alludes to arguments made by defenders of the epistemologist's "given", who argued that to deny there is a "given" in the relevant sense is to "fly in the face of reason". Not so, says Sellars: The defender's argument relies on a conflation of the ordinary, common sense, unobjectionable and uninformative sense of "givenness", and the highly contentious sense of "givenness" that figures prominently in epistemological shop-talk.
I wonder what prominent defender had suggested that some critic's denials would entail that there is no difference between "inferring" and "seeing".
Of course there is a difference between "inferring" and "seeing", replies Sellars; none of us has intended to deny such a claim. Nor would we deny that there is an ordinary, noncontroversial sense in which "data" is "given" in "seeing" and in "observation". That much we have in common, Sellars insists, planting himself firmly on the common ground of human experience and ordinary language, and taking aim at a brand of epistemological shop-talk associated with a particular way of speaking about the given.
With respect to (1), you're then saying that Sellars is agreeing with them that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations?[/quote]
Yes, Sellars will ultimately agree that claim, though in the context of the quote that you’ve been discussing he’s not mentioning it in order to agree or disagree with it.
[quote=Terrapin]
Also, I'm curious if you'd say that Sellars is claiming that propositions are perceived in some sense. Or would he agree that "seeing " is a very loose, metaphorical way of speaking--that is, we're not literally seeing a proposition?[/quote]
He’s saying that perception takes the form of a proposition.
What is it, in this sentence, that "can be said to be the framework of givenness": "a certain way of construing", or "these terms"?
Suppose he means the former: The framework of givenness is or consists in a certain way of construing situations that philosophers have analyzed in terms such as "sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself."
Would anyone please provide a characterization of "dogmatic rationalism" and "skeptical empiricism" as these terms are intended here?
Why are these two "philosophical systems" given special mention here?
We might even ask: What is a "philosophical system" in the sense intended here?
The framework, the custom of construing situations and analyzing them in terms of certain bits of traditional epistemological shop-talk, has influenced every epistemologist in the tradition Sellars is concerned with here, or perhaps every epistemologist simpliciter.
Again there's mention of Hegel's special historical role as a critic of the epistemological concept of immediacy or givenness. Again we anticipate that Sellars is aligning himself here with Hegel, though in this case it seems he's set to tackle a job he believes Hegel's left unfinished. It also seems that, at least with respect to the question of givenness, Sellars considers himself to be more closely aligned with Hegel than with Kant.
These first attacks on intuited first principles and on synthetic necessary connections: When and where were they located? Who were the attackers, and who the defenders?
He's talking about pre-Kantian modern-Western philosophy? Was it Hume who first attacked synthetic necessary connections? Was it an empiricist or rationalist who first attacked intuited first principles? Or are we going back behind the West and before Christianity, to ancient philosophical traditions?
Sellars criticizes his contemporary allies: Many of them miss the deeper point, and "transfer... the characteristic features of the 'given'" to their way of construing situations they analyze in terms of physical objects, relations of appearing, or other bits of shop-talk.
What are the "characteristic features" of "the given"? How are they related to characteristic "ways of construing" situations analyzable in terms of the items of shop-talk historically associated with the "framework of givenness"? Something I'd look for as the essay proceeds.
At the end of section I.1, Sellars gives an idea how the essay will proceed: He'll begin his argument with an attack on sense-datum theories, and move on to a general critique of the whole framework of givenness.
Does he ever say why he believes that or give an argument for it?
This must be the "act-object conception" that Shoemaker loves to wrestle with. I always got the feeling he never quite shakes himself free of it.
An "act of awareness" and an "object" of the act. What object? Not an apple or a chair or a man, but a "color patch". Perhaps something like the smudgy strokes in an impressionist painting?
I take it Shoemaker's line of criticism is still in fashion nowadays: The analyst wants to analyze perception so that the perceptual object is the thing we ordinarily say we "perceive" ("see", e.g.): The apple, the chair, the man -- not some color patches.
Is there a difference, for the sense-data theorist, or for his critic, between sensing and perceiving?
Who are the more or less classical exponents mentioned, on either side of this divide?
On one side, they say particular acts of sensing are "phenomenologically simple". On the other side, they say particular acts of sensing are "further analyzable" -- phenomenologically, or in some other way?
Is it the act, or the object, the analyzability of which is here contested? Is the object counted as "part" of the act; i.e., we identify an individual act of sensing-awareness, analyze it into two parts, act and object, and then either find that we can go no further, or find that we can continue analyzing (act, or object, or both) into component parts?
Who seems to have thought this, and why wasn't it a popular view?
Why should anyone think that an act -- an act of awareness, an act of sensing -- must be unanalyzable, phenomenologically simple, etc. Do these thinkers object even to the analysis into act and object?
"if there is such a thing": i.e., if traditional shop-talk in terms of "sensing" holds up under scrutiny.
What deep tangled roots?
Who doubts that sensing is an act?
Well, sensing in what sense, and act in what sense? I might doubt that "sensing unanalyzable color patches" or "sensing phenomenologically simple sense-data" is ordinarily (or ever) an act of awareness. For instance, it may be that whatever the simplest elements of sensation happen to be, they are processed at a preconscious, prephenomenal, stage of cognition, and that from a phenomenological point of view, it makes more sense to say that we see things and places in the world around us, than that we see color patches.
According to sense-data models, the form of "the fact that x is sensed", whatever exactly that form may be, entails at least that if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing].
What is the purport of this clunky way of speaking? I suspect there is some scribble in a logician's notebook at issue here behind the scenes, when philosophers like Sellars begin to speak of the "form" of a "fact", and begin to lay down implications this way. I suppose the scribble might include marks that stand for acts of sensing, marks that stand for objects of those acts, marks for variables like x, and some way of packaging such marks to express "facts" about states of affairs in which objects are sensed.
According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: there are facts with the form "x is sensed", and if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing].
According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex.
One bit of complexity seems missing from the account so far: Whose act? What senses x? What mark in the model for this?
I suppose "being a sense datum" is the same as "being the object of an act of sensing". It's a relational property, according to which an object is associated with an act of sensing in a specific way and in a particular "fact".
Much as, to refer to an item which was thrown by Jim at noon today, in a way that does not entail that the item was thrown by Jim at noon today, it is necessary to use some other locution.
Of course it's controversial, if the sensum is something like a "color patch".
Oh my, are we going to start speaking about "content"? Was the term in use already in this connection by the time Sellars composed this essay?
What does Sellars introduce the term "sense content" for here? As a substitute for "sense datum" or "object of sense-act", a substitute that doesn't imply that the object could exist without being sensed; and that doesn't entail that the object is (has been, will be) in fact sensed
What kind of possibly nonexistent and possibly not-sensed object is a particular "sense content" supposed to be?
I suppose it's something like an "object of possible experience" -- or how do the Kantians and phenomenologists put it? We use a term like "sense content" to talk about the sense data that would be sensed -- in hypothetical cases, for the purpose of analysis, for the sake of this strange conversation -- if things were in fact the way we have characterized them in our notebooks.
Who are those who speak in each way indicated?
Good point. Notice how the point is developed in terms of the act-object conception: do the varieties of sensing sort out into different sorts of act, or into different sorts of object for the same sort of act.
I presume this is an important difference in the logician's notebook. It might also lead us to inquire into the bases of the distinctions between sorts of sensing-acts (seeing, hearing, etc), or the bases of the distinctions between sorts of sense-contents (color patches, sounds).
Either way it begins to seem there may be room for analysis beyond the form of a fact "x is sensed", if every such fact entails that x is some sort of sense content, or that the sensing of x is some sort of sensing, or both. Or is this not the sort of "analysis" at issue?
In the latter case -- the case in which the varieties of sensing are not "species of sensing in any full-blooded sense", but only various sorts of sensing distinguished in terms of their different sorts of object -- being a visual or auditory sensing would be merely a relational property of an act of sensing. In that case, a place for this relation is built into the form of a fact that x is sensed, but is (I presume) determined in each case by some property of the object of the act: it is a color patch, or a sound patch, one or another sort of sense-content.
I suppose to approach the matter with less bias, we might leave it an open question whether this relation is determined by some feature of the sense-content, or instead by some mediating factor, some other term in the analysis.
"just as": i.e., the first is a relational property, no less than the second. Is the analogy much stronger than this?
Being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content. In other words, it is a property of a sense content when the sense content is related to an act of sensing in the right way. But this seems strange: What is a sense content, when it is not a sense datum? Perhaps merely a figure of speech....
Earlier I read Sellars as peeling off the "existence" and the facticity of "being sensed" that belong to the sense datum (in the model), in order to produce a highly abstract theoretical construct of "sense content", which I tentatively glossed as something like a hypothetical "object of possible experience" characterized somewhere in a logician's notebook for the purpose of analysis and conversation. Is this line of interpretation still open?
Are there "color patches" floating around somewhere, sometimes taken up in acts of sensing, other times slipping by unsensed? Are these sense contents, sensed and unsensed, inside heads, or outside heads, or mere possible-sensums marked down in philosophical narratives assembled according to a certain cumbersome framework?
Like a living organism may have a disposition to sense items in a certain way, also items may have a disposition to be sensed in a certain way. Perhaps this is what Sellars means by relational property?
By the end of section I.2, it seems the object is not counted as "part” of the act, at least in the logician's notebook. One way to draw up the account: Two terms, act and object, figure in a predicate relation of "sensing" that can be used to express "facts" involving acts and objects in that relation. So it’s both acts-of-objects and objects-of-acts that figure as logical objects of sensing-relations used to express facts. Some marvel along these lines:
There is some a and some o such that: SENSE (a, o).
I take it this would have implications for what logicians and model-builders call the "ontology" of the model. There are two sorts of entity implicated here, two sorts of entity-in-the-model: i) acts of sensing-relations and ii) objects of sensing-relations. You might call it a "hard" sort (or what's a more convenient phrase): We might expect that what counts as an object in one sensing relation cannot figure as an act in another sensing relation; and that what counts as an act in one sensing relation cannot figure as an object in another sensing relation; and that act and object in the same sensing-relation cannot be identical to each other. (Though these rules may be contested, depending on what kind of “sensing” it turns out we’re discussing here.)
Along these lines, it would seem I strayed from the mark earlier by using the language of entailment to paraphrase Sellars remark that "the fact that x is sensed... has the form... by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act." For once we start packaging acts and objects in the sort of formal predicate language I've indicated today, it seems there just is no way to say "x is sensed", or to express a fact that x is sensed, without calling up something like the relation SENSE (a, x). This is an example of a "form by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act" -- which seems now a far more binding condition than the implication I used to paraphrase in my reading notes: "if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing]." Given the ordinary conventions of predicate modeling, and the terms I've drawn up today, I'm not sure how one could express that conditional statement without the most blatantly redundant tautology.
In light of today’s shift in interpretation, I might want instead to say:
According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: There are facts with the form “x is sensed”, and by virtue of this form, x is the object of an act.
Could this mean that for some of the model-builders, the fact that x is sensed is not analyzable as a fact involving both an act and an object? Sellars seems to rule this out. For instance:
So for clarity’s sake I might want to say:
According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex; but no matter how simple or complex a fact of this form is said to be, the model-builders agree that the form is such that, for x to be sensed is for x to be the object of an act.
I wonder if Sellars’s way of carving up the fact of sensing is supposed to shed light on “characteristic features of the given” and on “the framework of givenness”. Or does this carving pertain only or primarily to the special case of sense-data theory, while the implications for the more general framework are not yet in view in the narrative?
The most arcane thing in the essay so far is the introduction of the term “sense content” in the last two paragraphs of section 2. I’m not clear on the motive or the justification for this move. And I’m not sure there’s parity in the treatment of act and object along these lines.
Sellars wants two names for the sort of item that enters into sensing-relations as the object of an act of sensing: When the item figures in a sensing-relation, call it a sense-datum. When the item does not figure in a sensing-relation, call it a sense-content.
Sellars notes it's “a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists” whether “sensed items could exist without being sensed” -- i.e., whether a sense-content could exist without being identical to a sense-datum, without existing as a matter of fact in a sensing-relation as the object of a sensing-act.
Perhaps this is the only motive for the distinction: He wants a language that’s neutral with respect to this particular controversy. This interpretation is reinforced when he settles on the term “sense-content” as perhaps “as neutral a term as any”.
Fair enough. So long as the controversy’s undecided, we use a language unprejudiced with respect to the outcome, with resources sufficient to accommodate advocates on either side. Though I'll want to remember to look for alternative motives for this abstraction as the essay proceeds.
Is there an analogous controversy about the act-side of the sensing relation? Does anyone in this story claim or wonder whether the sort of item that enters into sensing-relations as the act of an object-sensed could also exist independent of any such relation? Perhaps there’s no analogous controversy on this point. That would account for the disparity in Sellars’s account, if it turns out there is a disparity: Either everyone’s agreed, the act in the sensing relation can exist outside that relation; or everyone’s agreed, it cannot. If everyone’s agreed that it can, or if it rather is a controversial matter, we should expect Sellars to offer us two names to refer to the thing called the act, just as he took pains to provide two names for the thing called the object of the act of sensing: One name for the item when it exists in sensing-relations; and one name when, if ever, it exists without involvement in any sensing-relation.
In any case, it may be that by giving two “locutions” to refer to the item that stands as object in sensing-relations, Sellars has defined two distinct predicates. One seems, thus far, a two-place relation, like SENSE (a, x). The other is perhaps a one-place predicate, as for instance, S-CONTENT (x).
If SENSE (a, x) then S-CONTENT (x).
Perhaps Sellars spins the analogy -- between act and object, with respect to independent existence of the item -- in another direction?
He says: “In the latter case” -- the case in which “varieties” of sensing-relations and sensing-facts are sorted according to the varieties of sensed-object, and not by distinguishing “full-blooded species” of sensing --
[quote=”Sellars”]being a visual sensing or a direct hearing would be a relational property of an act of sensing, just as being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content.[/quote]
But this seems to jump ahead of the question, can the item that enters into a sensing-relation as an act, also exist independent of any such relation, and do we want our language to have the resources to refer to such items by way of “another locution” that is prima facie logically independent of any such relation? For instance, a one-place predicate, S-ACT (a), perhaps determined in part by the condition
If SENSE (a, x) then S-ACT (a).
Hasn’t he jumped ahead, isn’t there a disparity? Having distinguished in principle, and in the language of the model, sense-data from sense-contents, Sellars neglects the question of whether there is an analogous distinction for sense-acts, and moves on to discuss varieties of sensing-relation.
Just as, he says, being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content, so being a “visual sensing” would be a relational property of an act of sensing. This does not seem to address the question of existence independent from the sensing-relation; it only tells us what sort of sensing-relation, on the basis of the sort of object in the relation -- “x is a color patch which is sensed”. So not quite “just as”: For there’s no mention of a “locution” by which we might refer to the item that enters as act into the sensing-relation apart from any such relation. A “visual sensing-relation” would be a relation of a sensing-act and a visual sense-content; but what, if anything, are we to call a sensing-act that has no object, or at least a sensing-act as an item logically distinguishable from any sensing-relation?
One way we might characterize the “former” case -- the case of various full-blooded “species” of sensing-relation: Define distinct predicate-relations for each species of sensing, each correlated in the same way with the generic sensing-relation. Say for visual-sensing:
If V-SENSE (a, x) then (VS-ACT (a) and VS-CONTENT (x) and SENSE (a, x)); and
If VS-ACT (a) then S-ACT (a); and
If VS-CONTENT (x) then S-CONTENT (x).
And the same song and dance for each sensory mode assimilable to this form.
1. Two tasks in the essay
2. Framework of givenness (framework of immediacy)
[/list]
3. Sense-datum theories (SDTs)
[*]the fact that x is sensed, however complex or simple that fact may be, has a form by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for x to be the object of an act.
[*]“relational properties” of sensing-acts and objects-sensed
[*]sense-datum distinguished from sense-content
[*]SDT controversies
[*]Controversy #3: Can sensed items exist without being sensed?
[*]Controversy #4: are varieties of sensing distinguished by sort of object-sensed, or in terms of “full-blooded species” of sensing-act or sensing-relation?
[/list]
4. Look for
5. References or allusions to trace through the literature
[list]
[*]Kant and Hegel
[*]“dogmatic rationalism” and “skeptical empiricism” (major philosophical systems)
[*]What philosophers have attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or immediacy?
[*]What defenders have claimed that critics of givenness “fly in the face of reason”, perhaps charging they imply there’s no difference between inferring and seeing (sensing, perceiving)?
[*]Who has called each “given”: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, givenness itself
[*]first attackers of “intuited first principles”?
[*]first attackers of “synthetic necessary connections”? (Hume)
[*]contemporaries who claim to attack “the whole idea of givenness”, but who “are really only attacking sense data”
[*]“classical exponents” pro and contra “phenomenologically simple”, “not further analyzable” (controversy 1)
[*]pro and contra: if sensing is analyzable, it cannot be an act (controversy 2)
[*]deeper roots for the doubt that sensing is an act
[*]pro and contra: items sensed can exist independently of being sensed (controversy 3)
[*]Who uses each idiom to distinguish varieties of sensing: i) visual, tactual sensing; ii) directly seeing, directly hearing.
[*]Is there prior discussion of the bases for distinguishing varieties of sensing (“controversy 4”), or is this Sellars’ analysis?
Need Sellars presume that the category's purpose is to explicate the idea of such an epistemological "foundation"? Perhaps it is presumptuous: The ordinary, unobjectionable sense of "givenness" is arguably prior to the Gothic quest for that foundation. It may be only in tying ordinary intuitions about "what is immediately given" to anxious thoughts about foundation, that the epistemologist constructs the "epistemological category of the given".
What's put in this category: matters of fact grasped without inference, paradigmatically on the basis of "being sensed".
Why does the presumption, or the point presumed, occasion surprise that, for the sense-datum theorist, "it is particulars that are sensed"? Is there some further prejudice by which "objects of knowledge" are characterized as general rules, as opposed to particulars? Does the arguably generic character of our grasp on sensed particulars militate against the claim that it's in fact particulars we thus grasp? Who claims it is not particulars that we sense?
What sort of wedge is this? If a fact involving particulars is counted as known: when, and in what sense, and on what grounds are the corresponding particulars counted as not known? Perhaps this very point is at issue in the controversy over whether "the fact that x is sensed" is analyzable?
Or is the point that, if sensing is merely the sensing of particulars, then it's insufficient for knowledge, for it's facts that are known, and particulars are not in themselves sufficient to constitute facts. This seems reasonable. Though it would be a strange sort of "sensing" by which particulars were grasped -- or indeed not grasped, but "barely sensed" -- bereft of all facticity. Even the fact of being sensed, or being sensed by S, or being sensed at time t, or being visually sensed -- surely some whiff of fact would accompany any such "bare sensing" of particulars?
Does anyone raise the objection, that we may call each fact a particular; and then say, the particulars that are sensed are facts involving non-fact particulars?
A fine bit of shop-talk, "it's facts rather than particulars, that are known". When did this way of construing situations analyzable in terms of "facts" and "particulars" turn up in the tradition? Does Sellars really stand by the slogan, as he seems to here?
I presume the sense-datum theorist, at least, will not object to it.
If the "sensing" of sense-datum theory is mere sensing of particulars, it is insufficient to constitute knowledge. But "sensing" in this theory is associated with the role of providing what's "given", and the purpose of the category of givenness is to provide a foundation for empirical knowledge in noninferentially grasped matters of fact. The theorist must show how his "sensing" can yield knowledge of facts.
I'll reiterate my reservations about (conscious, phenomenologically available) "sensing" of particulars without any whiff of fact. It seems a legacy of strange shop-talk that one should feel compelled to make (or feel justified in proposing) this hard choice, either facts or particulars, as if we don't get them both together in perception.
Alternative (a): It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing.
The fact that a sense content is sensed -- and perhaps (analytically) related facts pertaining to the architecture of the fact of sensing, that it was sensed by S at t, and so on -- would be nonepistemic facts about the sense content. I suppose they'd be epistemic facts about the sensing-act? But nonepsitemic about the sense content. Of course the fact of sensing gives the sense content as related to the act of sensing, but facts involving relational properties of this sort are "nonepistemic facts about the sense content".
Given as, taken as. It seems we must take things as they're given, however else we may take them.
What is "nonepistemic fact" supposed to mean? Does it mean: to grasp facts nonepistemic about a sense content is not to have knowledge about the sense content -- but only knowledge about a fact of sensing, in which a sense content figures as sort of placeholder, an empty term, until further notice? Do we, in effect, grasp a sense-datum as such, without reaching here the corresponding sense content?
Or do we have perhaps beliefs, but no knowledge, about the sense content, given the existence of sense data?
Even if "the existence of sense data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge", there may be another logical connection between them. The denial of that particular implication doesn't rule out the alternative that the existence of sense data is necessary but insufficient for the existence of (at least some sorts of) noninferential knowledge -- another way of putting the "converse" case.
"not itself a cognitive fact": is "cognitive fact" here synonymous with "epistemic fact", or does it have, in addition, some phenomenological implication or connotation? Is the thought perhaps that the fact of sensing is not (ever) directly available to consciousness, to the thinker, to the knower.... That the fact of sensing, its act and its sense-datum, are theoretical constructs, perhaps in principle verifiable by empirical research, but not ordinarily available from the first-person perspective?
What sort of constructs? Theoretical conditions of noninferential knowledge acquisition.
Alternative (b): Sensing is a form of knowing. It is facts rather than particulars which are sensed.
On this alternative, the fact of sensing is sufficient for the existence of noninferential knowledge. Presumably this is knowledge of the sense content. The fact that is sensed is a fact "epistemic" about the sense content. The fact that is sensed is a cognitive fact.
See, e.g., SEP on "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties"
Whenever I hear philosophers go on for long about properties, I get a little dizzy and recall Duns Scotus.
Better to let the world teach us how to speak, than to pretend we understand heaven and earth by practicing grammar.
You've brought up plenty of good points/avenues of exploration, but, for now, I want to respond to just one. I, too, am a little confused by Sellars' distinction between sense content and sense data - or at least confused by the importance of making such a distinction. The possibility that he draws this distinction simply to remain neutral within a larger controversy makes sense, tho, if that is the case, I wish I understood that controversy and what was at stake (or believed to be at stake) in it.
That said, the distinction between data and content is put into action in section 2 ('Another Language?'):
[quote=Sellars] No one, of course, who thinks -- as, for example, does Ayer -- of the existence of sense data as entailing the existence of "direct knowledge," would wish to say that sense data are theoretical entities. It could scarcely be a theoretical fact that I am directly knowing that a certain sense content is red. On the other hand, the idea that sense contents are theoretical entities is not obviously absurd -- so absurd as to preclude the above interpretation of the plausibility of the "another-language" approach. For even those who introduce the expression "sense content" by means of the context ". . . is directly known to be . . ." may fail to keep this fact in mind when putting this expression to use -- for example, by developing the idea that physical objects and persons alike are patterns of sense contents. In such a specific context, it is possible to forget that sense contents, thus introduced, are essentially sense data and not merely items which exemplify sense qualities. Indeed, one may even lapse into thinking of the sensing of sense contents, the givenness of sense data, as non-epistemic facts.[/quote]
This analysis leads me to think that the importance of the distinction is that sense contents are something like qualities, something universal, while sense data are something fundamentally immediate (keeping in mind the Hegelian point that to deal with 'qualities' is already to deal with universals and mediation.) (Perhaps too, the sense of 'content' in 'propositional content' is analogous? We might say that a proposition expresses some propositional content (we can understand why one wouldn't want to reduce the propositional content of some proposition to that particular proposition, or the particular relation whereby a particular proposition expresses some propositional content)
What do you think? I'm still shaky on this, but that's the best way I've found to understand it so far.
[quote=CabbageFarmer]What is "nonepistemic fact" supposed to mean? [/quote]
I have a pet theory, but I don't know how good it is. So:
[quote=Sellars](a) It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing. The existence of sense data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge.[/quote]
&
[quote=Sellars]On alternative (a) the fact that a sense content was sensed would be a non-epistemic fact about the sense content.[/quote]
I take this to mean that while it is a fact that the sense-content was sensed (in sensing act x and/or by senser y), this does not imply that the senser gained any knowledge about the sense content. If you like, it's a fact in-itself, but not (necessarily) a fact for anyone (any knower.)
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]"not itself a cognitive fact": is "cognitive fact" here synonymous with "epistemic fact", or does it have, in addition, some phenomenological implication or connotation? [/quote]
I think they're synonymous; Sellars himself appears to equate the two.
[quote=Sellars] Finally, I will say of a sense content that it is known if it is sensed (full stop), to emphasize that sensing is a cognitive or epistemic fact.[/quote]
You've really analyzed the hell out of this paper. Nice work, man! Like Calisbury, I'm short on time otherwise I'd participate a little more.
I think this is spot on. My take is that he's ultimately pressing a distinction between two senses of "immediacy": the immediacy of the act of sensing from the immediacy of the content of what is sensed. Or, if you like, between the non-inferential nature of the act of sensing and the non-conceptuality of the content of what is sensed (ugh, there's got to be a better way of saying this).
Sellars' dialectic crescendos in the realization that immediacy of act does not imply immediacy of content, contra what the proponents of "giveness" would have us believe. Just because I know some content via a non-inferential act does not imply that the content thereby known is not inferentially related to other contents, espeially in the sense of being open to challenge for justification.
Glad to have stumbled in. I've been meaning to work through this text for years, and the group's given me a nudge. I'll chime in when I can. Time's short and you see how slowly I trudge through it.
Quoting csalisbury
Sellars mentions the controversy in (I.2) during his search for "another locution" by which to refer to sense-data. He rejects the term "sensible" for the role, as having "the disadvantage that it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed", adding that this is "a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists". So Sellars settles on the term "sense content" as a neutral choice.
It's a strange passage. He seems to want a term that
i) refers "to an item which is sensed in a way which does not entail that it is sensed"; and
ii) does not imply "that sensed items could exist without being sensed" (for this is a matter of controversy)
At this point I don't see what motive Sellars has for criterion (i). Perhaps in his circles, it's a commonplace that one needs something more than a relational predicate to refer to an item in good faith?
I can only guess, and hope the motive's cleared up in the course of the reading.
On the other hand, in light of a controversy about whether sensed items can exist without being sensed, it may be that Sellars is aiming at neutrality, preparing his terms so as to be able to range the discussion over both sides of this particular dispute. Or perhaps he's biased in favor of the claim that sensed items can exist without being sensed.
What's at stake in the controversy, for the sense-data theorist? I suppose it depends in part on what sort of things sense-data and sense contents turn out to be. Another point that's quite unclear.
You're way ahead of me in the reading but I'll try a tentative reply.
So far as I can see, a sense-datum just is (for the sense-data theorist) a sense content in an appropriate relation to an act of sensing. Though this is an awkward way of speaking if one denies that sense content can exist without being sensed.
Oddly enough, it seems the "immediacy" of sense-data has something to do with their place in a relation. To be a sense-datum is to be a sense content given in an act of sensing.
If a sense content can exist without being sensed, is there some other way for it to be the object of an "act of awareness"? For instance, can sense contents be imagined, remembered, or thought when they are not sensed? I don't know whether sense-data theorists speak this way. Does this show the lines of the controversy Sellars mentions?
Perhaps one way to avoid speaking that way would be to say: Any act of awareness that has a sense content as an object is or involves an act of "sensing", including the acts we call imagining, remembering, and thinking sense contents.
Do any sense-data theorists want to say: If noninferential knowledge is given in an act of awareness, then that act is an act of "sensing"? Suppose the same sense content can figure both in an ordinary act of sensory perception, and in a "vivid and forceful" imagining that closely resembles perception, like a dream or hallucination. Arguably, in being aware of the imagining, I acquire noninferential knowledge about a matter of fact, that a particular imaginer is imagining a particular sense content. Analogously, in being aware of the ordinary perceiving, I acquire noninferential knowledge about a matter of fact, that a particular perceiver is perceiving a particular sense content. The analogy only goes so far; but that doesn't make it unreasonable to call the acquisition of noninferential knowledge in each case a sort of "sensing".
I hope that's not too far afield. In any case, talk of "immediacy" and "givenness" of sense-data seems closely connected to the idea of noninferential knowledge acquisition, noninferential knowledge of "facts." If sense contents are said to exist without "being sensed", we’ll need to hear more about how else they can "exist", whether they're involved in other acts of awareness that are not called "sensing", and whether they can exist without any involvement in an act of awareness. That should help us figure out whether they differ from sense-data with respect to "immediacy" and "givenness".
Quoting csalisbury
Can you develop the Hegelian point?
I'm never sure what's meant by "qualities" and "universals." I recall Kant speaks of "sensible qualities" -- is that the right ballpark?
I can think of two sorts of "mediation" to watch out for: mediation by inference and mediation by concepts. I expect the given to play the role of foil in this narrative, while Sellars develops an argument supporting a view in which nothing is given in noninferential knowledge acquisition without some contribution from concepts -- or however he puts his version of the Hegelian theme developed in our time by Sellarsians like Brandom and McDowell.
The analogy is appealing.
We say various subjects on various occasions undergo various “propositional attitudes” with respect to the same “propositional content.” On each such occasion there’s a relation of the content and the attitude; in at least some cases the attitude is or involves an “act” like doubting, affirming, hoping, and so on. Do we also say that the propositional content is supposed, or by many supposed, to have the form of a fact?
Likewise, we might expect that various subjects on various occasions undergo various “intuitions” (acts of awareness with “sensible character”) with respect to the same “sense content”. On each such occasion there’s a relation of the content and an act like sensing or imagining. Does the sense-datum theorist say (or does Sellars’ argument drive the sense-datum theorist to say) that the sense content has the form of a fact?
How are sense contents related to propositional contents? If a sense content occurs in “an act of intuition with sensible character”, can it also occur as a propositional content in a thought without (the relevant sort of) “sensible character” -- i.e., when if ever is the propositional content in such a thought also a sense content? On the other hand, is a sense content always a propositional content -- all sense contents are propositional contents, but not all propositional contents are sense contents?
Are Sellars and the sense-data theorists at all concerned with what I’ve called “sensible character” here, what I might call qualia or phenomenal characteristics paradigmatically associated with perceptual experience? I’ve got the idea that those influenced by Sellars tend to differ along these lines. McDowell seems more interested in phenomenology, while Brandom and Rorty seem, like Davidson, wary of subjectivity.
Thanks. I'm afraid it's a clumsy, discursive way of working through a text. But it's my favorite way of traversing the hermeneutic circle.
I won't be able to maintain this work rate for long. Hopefully each of us pushes the thing along when he has some time for it.
The essay isn't going anywhere!
Nothing wrong with that. I imagine this is the way most people work through a difficult text, whether they realize or not.
You asked about historical context back on page 7 (I think), and so I wanted to add some historical notes that might be of interest:
EPM is probably best be understood as a response to theories put forward by the likes of William James, Bertrand Russell, C.D. Broad, C.I. Lewis, G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, H.H. Price, and Hans Reichenbach (among others) in the early part of the 20th century. He probably also had philosophers as diverse as Rudolph Carnap and Edmund Husserl in view as well.
There are obviously substantial theoretical differences in the positions of each of the aforementioned thinkers (insofar as it even makes sense to say that a philosopher ever has a stable position throughout the course of their careers). Riechenbach, for instance, argued that physical objects, not sense-impressions, are directly given in experience. According to Riechenbach, sense-impressions are mere abstracta that are never "seen" by anyone, much less seen directly (see Experience and Prediction, 1938). C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price, by contrast, tended to argue that it is colors, shapes, textures, etc. that are directly given in experience, and that beliefs about physical objects (and even physical objects themselves) are inferentially constructed out of these (See Lewis' Mind and World Order, and Price's Perception). Consider the following quotation from Price's Perception:
[quote=Price]
When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. [...] One thing however that I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape [...] directly present to my consciousness. [...] And when I say that it is directly present to my consciousness, I mean that my consciousness of it is not reached by inference [...]. This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given and that which is thus present is called a datum.
[/quote]
Russel and Moore also tended to analyze physical objects as reducible to directly apprehended sense-data (e.g. secondary qualities).
William James was somewhat unique in maintaining that pretty much everything except the "entirety" or "totality" of experience is directly apprehended. In his view, sense-data (or "percepts") are no more or no less "given" than the relations (both causal and inferential) that bind them together (see A World of Pure Experience, 1904).
The common thread running through the diverse positions of all of these thinkers is this notion of a directly apprehended datum, or "given". EPM does not take issue with the concept of direct apprehension per se, but rather with that the way that the concept of direct apprehension is used to justify foundationalist epistemologies in which the objects or contents of direct apprehension are taken to be incorrigibly or indubitably known purely on the basis of their being directly apprehended.
We should have you rewrite EPM, because you write far more clearly than Sellars.
I think it was @Calisbury who somewhere said that Sellars employs a kind-of "anstoss" logic in regards to the concept of veridicality, and that this under-girds his analysis of the “is/looks” distinction. I think that’s basically correct. In the “Looks” sections Sellars is responding to the Pricean line of argument that goes something like this (very roughly):
1. When I (ostensibly) see an apple, there are many things I can doubt about my experience, like that the object is really an apple, or that there is a material object present at all.
2. However, there are some things I can't doubt, such as that there is a round red patch present to my awareness.
3. The fact that I can't doubt these beliefs implies that they need not be justified on the basis of any other beliefs (e.g. they are not inferentially mediated).
4. Therefore, it is things like round red patches that are the direct objects of apprehension, and it is only my beliefs about such things (i.e. beliefs about how things "appear") that could (and should) serve as the indubitable foundational (non-inferential) basis of all empirical knowledge.
Sellars basically thinks that this gets things ass-backwards. He doesn’t exactly deny that beliefs about the appearance of round red patches in a person’s visual field can serve as evidence for the existence of, say, an apple on a desk, but he will claim that they provide (at most) very weak evidence when taken on their own, but that this is not their primary function anyway.
Sellars’s alternative analysis is basically this: the primary function of claims about the way things “appear” or “look” or “seem” is to provide a mechanism for withdrawing from claims about the way things really are. So to say “the object over there looks red”, or “It looks like there is a red object over there” is to withdraw further and further away from a claim about how things really are, namely, that “there is a red object over there”. The notion of “looking” or “appearing” (e.g. looks red) is conceptually dependent on the more fundamental notion of “being” (e.g. is red).
If we are inclined to agree with this analysis, then it becomes hard to deny that claims about appearances can't really provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are. That’s because each and every claim about how things appear is nothing more than the withdrawal from some companion claim about how things really are. As such, it’s a mistake to think that we do or ought to start from claims about how things appear and then inferentially move to claims about how things really are. Instead, we start from claims about how things really are, and then inferentially move to claims about how things merely “appear” only upon being confronted by evidence that suggests we were mistaken about how things really are.
So, if claims about appearances can’t serve as an adequate evidential basis for empirical knowledge of how things really are, then what can? For Sellars, the only adequate justification for such claims is to be found in other empirical claims about how things really are. In particular, claims about the context of observation ought to (and do) serve as the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims. To justify a claim like “this necktie is green” we ought to appeal to facts about the situation in which we find ourselves – that is, to claims about our historical reliability at distinguishing colors, about the lighting conditions, about whether we are afflicted with color-blindness, about whether we are wearing green-tinted contact lenses, about whether we are currently on drugs that effect our ability to distinguish colors, about whether someone is likely to be playing a practical joke on us, etc. Again, the ultimate appeal to empirical claims as opposed to claims about appearances is hardly surprising given Sellars’s analysis of the looks/is distinction. For Sellars, to vacate all claims about what is the case is equivalent with vacating all claims to knowledge itself, and so a substratum consisting purely of beliefs about appearances is therefore simply not a viable starting point for empirical knowledge.
As an aside, it’s interesting to consider how Sellars ultimately deals with the charge of begging the question against skepticism (this is only cursorily covered in EPM. See the articles “More on Giveness and Explanatory Coherence” and “Kant’s Theory of Experience” for details). If empirical claims about what is the case are to be justified by other empirical claims about what is the case then it appears that we’re caught in a vicious circle. Sellars will make a Kantian-style transcendental argument to the effect that the linguistic practices that are the pre-condition for the formulation of the skeptic’s challenge (or any challenge) are only intelligible against the backdrop of the very empirical knowledge that the skeptic is challenging the legitimacy of. Not that this approach is original to Sellars (though he puts an interesting “linguistic” twist on it), but it is note-worthy in that he is one of the only philosophers in his milieu (outside of Strawson) to explicitly employ the machinery of transcendental argumentation in his work.
I'm thinking of Hegel's analysis of perception in Section 2 of Phenomenology of Spirit. I just took a look back at the text and I guess he actually uses the word 'property' (or, more exactly, Eigenschaft, which can be also be translated as quality.)
In any case, (my interpretation of) Hegel's point is that, in speaking of a 'quality' or 'property,' we're speaking about something repeatable, something that could (at least in principle) also be a quality or property of something else. For Hegel, this means that we're dealing with universals and I think he's right. But 'universal' is a loaded term, and I don't want to drag things too far afield. In any case, the 'mediation' I mentioned is exactly the second sort of mediation you mention, a mediation by concepts. To understand a quality or property as a quality or property, we must have recourse to the conceptual.
I hope that makes sense. A lot of these terms (concept, universal, property, quality) kind of bleed into one another.
It does seem to belong to the process of interpretation whether we notice it or not. I enjoy building it into my method, and I like to pretend this improves my results. For instance, by breaking the text into small parts and working through them in a format that resembles conversation.
The practice is in keeping with a characterization of interpretation as a conversation with the text, and also in keeping with ancient customs of philosophical dialogue and philosophical commentaries, with ordinary human conversation, and with our behavior in forums like this one here.
But it takes too damn long.
Quoting Aaron R
Thanks so much! I was hoping someone would fill in that blank.
Quoting Aaron R
Quite a cast of characters. Which would you say figure most prominently in, or had most influence in the field in the decades preceding, EPM? Or, which if any are closest to the typical sense-datum theory Sellars takes aim at in the essay?
Quoting Aaron R
I'm not sure I've heard of Riechenbach. The view that it's physical objects, not sense-impressions, which are "seen" sounds remarkably fresh.
So he buries sense-impressions behind experience.... Are the impressions mere theoretical constructs for him, or do these constructs perhaps refer to terms that play some causal or functional role in the organization of experience, or does he reject all such theories....
Quoting Aaron R
This sounds perhaps more problematic. Does it mean that some "beliefs" about "given" colors are also "given"? I recall Sellars' distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.
How and where does "inference" occur in their models? Surely not in experience: We don't run around the world ceaselessly making conscious inferential judgments about physical objects on the basis of given colors and shapes; but arguably we have (or many of us have) countlessly many "beliefs" about local physical objects on the basis of current perception.
If there's something like "inferential judgment" at play in all our perceptually grounded beliefs about physical objects in the environment, it must be a sort of "inference" that occurs behind the scenes of conscious awareness.
Perhaps this is one way to interpret, or to correct, strange old views in our tradition concerning "judgments of sensation": The synthesis of "objects" from the most basic elements of sensation is achieved primarily by nonconscious cognitive processes that inform conscious perceptual experience. The application of the language of "inference" and "judgment" to such nonconscious spontaneous processes, excusable in days gone by, is merely a sort of analogy. However, when nonconscious processes of sensory cognition result in perceptual experience, we may begin to speak of perceptual content, and this content is not only open to inferential judgment, but also arguably charged with meaning, with conceptual content, and thus full of implications.
Of course the conceptual content, the "beliefs", and the "implications" of perceptual content, would depend in part on the conceptual stance and character of the perceiver, as well as on what's "given" to perception by sensation. Particular conscious acts of inference on the basis of perception occur within this constant shifting context.
I suppose the hard problem of perceptual content, along these lines, is to clearly distinguish what's "given" to perception by sensation.
Quoting Aaron R
A beautiful passage. What's Price's spin on the phrase "reached by inference"? It could mean i) "achieved by a process of inference", or far more weakly, ii) "open to revision by a process of inference". A huge difference. As I suggested earlier, I think (i) is just wrong. If we run with (ii), then we have a conception of "presence to consciousness" or "givenness" according to which the datum that is given in perceptual experience is indubitable. It's not merely that the datum is indubitable; it seems Price has here carved out the sense-datum as whatever's indubitable in perception. An admirable exercise in skepticism. Good show.
Perhaps we can call this "datum" the sense-content component of perceptual content, and say that perceptual content includes both sense-content and conceptual content?
Is Price the source among analytic philosophers of talk about "direct presence" and "presence to consciousness", or did the usage precede him? I believe the first time I encountered the term, or the first time it stuck, I was reading Anscombe's "First Person".
Quoting Aaron R
They say the physical objects themselves, or merely our experience and knowledge of physical objects, are thus reducible?
Quoting Aaron R
It makes sense to say some relations are ordinarily given in perception: I don't perceive two objects and then infer that one is to the left of the other; I see that it's so. Likewise, I don't feel the pot and and feel some heat and infer that the pot is hot, I feel that it's hot. I don't see the glass fall to the floor and infer that falling to the floor caused the glass to shatter... I believe falling was the cause of shattering when I see it, without making any inference....
But each of those claims is "open to doubt", and hence not "directly present to consciousness" or "given" in the sense carved out by Price. Or at most the first one, about relative spatial position, is given in Price's sense. (on my reading of that little passage)
Quoting Aaron R
So the family of terms includes "direct apprehension", "direct presence (to consciousness)", "direct givenness", "givenness", and "immediacy". And on the object side, "percept", "datum", "sense-impression", "sense-datum", "sense content", and I don't know what.
Quoting Aaron R
I'm inclined to say there is something indubitable in experience, along the lines I just drew out from Price, and to characterize what's there indubitable as "appearance". I'd say, further, that this indubitable appearance does provide a sort of anchor or foundation for the beliefs and knowledge of each rational sentient agent, from one moment to the next. But not the sort of foundation that could possibly ground anything like certain knowledge beyond the appearance of the present moment.
Of course knowledge is not the same thing as certain and indubitable knowledge.
I suppose the "foundationalist epistemologies" in question are in search of something more impressive than mere knowledge?
It often occurs to me that repeatability is essential somehow to the conceptual, but I've never managed to satisfy myself unpacking that "somehow".
Frege and Russell instruct us in formulating concepts of particulars. These are repeatable across various occasions, in different propositional contexts, in utterances by various speakers. The object corresponding to a concept of a particular may be varied in thought (e.g. in ignorance of the relevant facts or in counterfactual exercises), and thus the concept is "repeated" in application to a range of possible objects. Accordingly, it seems there is a generic character even to concepts of particulars. But I'm wary of conflating this generic and repeatable character of concepts with a presumption that concepts always correspond to something like "general terms" in the ordinary sense, man in general as opposed to this or that man.
Quoting csalisbury
We who speak here aim to understand the quality as a quality, and to account for the sense in which a perceiver who says "This apple is red" says so in virtue of his own grasp of the "qualities" that appear to him. But to speak of "qualities" this way is to have already conceptualized the "content" of perception.
I'm inclined to say, on the basis of introspection, that ordinary perceptual experience is always already conceptualized. That doesn't entail that there is no determination of perceptual content by the "receptive" powers of sense perception; and it rather seems there is such a determining contribution from sensation in perceptual experience.
Accordingly, to characterize "sense qualities" as something like general concepts is arguably to jump ahead of a tricky discourse about the receptive character of a perceptual experience strongly determined by sensation. A discourse Rorty, for instance, seems eager to evade at any price.
Consider the quality as in the first place, not a conceptualized appearance, but an activity of the organism or mind involving an appearance of a particular type.
I move my arm to wave; I move it again to make "the same" gesture on a second occasion. I call it "the same". Perhaps you're observing me and agree it's "the same". Perhaps we turn to details, fleshing out criteria of similarity, declaring when to count a gesture as a wave, when to count a wave as this type of wave, and how to handle borderline cases.... However that exercise turns out, it's two different events in the world that we're considering, in terms of a similarity that we assign, on the basis of objective characteristics that we deem relevant and assess from a certain point of view, with a certain purpose, with a certain degree of accuracy and precision....
Likewise, we might say two visual appearings of or involving a quality of red are the same with respect to this quality on the basis of objective characteristics that we deem relevant and assess from a certain point of view, with a certain purpose, with a certain degree of accuracy and precision....
Along these lines, one trick would be to distinguish the "objective characteristics" occurring in two events from the conceptualization of characteristics by virtue of which two instances are called alike, the same type, two of a kind, for instance, "red".
It's not that the concept red appears to me; but rather what appears to me I immediately recognize as red.
Quoting csalisbury
So much philosophical activity must be spent sorting out such terms as they occur in the speech of others and in one's own usage. The difficulty of that task, the brevity of life, and the growth of the record of discourse over time, give a strong motive for plain speaking.
Would anyone care to say something about “anstoss logic”? What does this phrase mean?
Quoting Aaron R
Or perhaps less boldly:
2’: … such as that there seems to be a round red patch present to my awareness.
Or even less:
2’’: … such as that there seems to be a seeming-round seeming-red seeming-patch present to my awareness.
Are such revisions in keeping with Price? Or would he deem the “seemings” redundant or inappropriate here, perhaps in keeping with a view that “the presence of a round red patch” is not the sort of thing that “seems”, and is instead in every respect immune to doubt?
Quoting Aaron R
There’s something intuitively plausible about this, once we massage it the right way. I don’t ordinarily justify my belief that I am seemingly seeing a seemingly red seeming object on any other grounds than that it appears so to me in the ordinary first-person point of view; ordinarily there are no other grounds available for such claims.
However, putting it the way Price has here, one might ask him, what justifies your belief that there are such things as “patches”? And it may turn out that this is only a loose manner of speaking.
Quoting Aaron R
See my concerns about “seeming” and “patches” above. And my previous and subsequent mutterings about epistemological “certainty” and “foundations”.
I hope to find myself aligned with Sellars in criticizing the strength of the warrant provided by claims like “I seem to see a seeming-red seeming-apple” for claims like “There is a red apple there”. We might say the first claim provides a prima facie reason for belief in the second claim, but nothing close to a foundation for “certain knowledge” that the second claim is true.
Likewise, however, the dubitability that burdens the more objective claim does not seem to transfer to the more subjective claim. If Price is one of those epistemologists with anxieties about “certainty”, who hopes to derive perfectly certain empirically grounded beliefs about apples and tables from the beliefs about seemings we may carve out as an epistemic layer entailed by experience, of course he’s barking up the wrong tree.
That doesn’t make it nonsense to speak about the epistemic role of that deep layer of belief based on appearances, which serves as a safety net for us to fall back on gracefully, precisely because it persists while we ignore it.
Quoting Aaron R
Like Wittgenstein in On Certainty: One always forgets the expression “I thought I knew”.
Who forgets such an expression? Only a befuddled epistemologist like Moore, who seems to play the role of buffoon in Wittgenstein’s opera.
Quoting Aaron R
It’s a withdrawal from claims about how things really are over there, where there seems to be a red apple. But this doesn’t entail another withdrawal, from all claims about how things really are in the world: For this appearance, and this seeming, may be said to be part of the world. And it’s not clear that it may be coherently denied that the appearance and seeming are part of the world.
Accordingly, the appearance and the seeming are among the “facts” we may aim to piece together in each case. For instance by asking: How is it the case, how does it happen, that things appear thus and so (to me, now)?
In ordinary, happy cases, one fair answer is: Because there’s an apple there, and your eyes are open and aimed that way. The frequency with which seeming-seeings of seeming-apples turn out to be, to all appearances and “to a practical certainty”, genuine seeings of genuine apples, also serves as justification for the belief that “There is an apple there”, and lets the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple stand as a noninferentially acquired defeasible warrant for the latter belief.
A more developed variation on this theme could haul into the account an empirically grounded story about light and the light-relative properties of physical objects; about retinas and cones and optic nerves; about perceptual processes in cognition.
None of this amounts to absolute “theoretical certainty” that there really is a real apple there -- a certainty we never attain, even as we bite and chew and swallow.
What shall we count as “adequate” evidential basis for claims about how things really are? I would argue along lines just indicated above, that the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple does provide adequate evidential basis for claims about real apples, though not for claims that such claims are certain claims. In cases in which new evidence comes to light, that the seeming-apple was not in fact an apple, or that the seeming-seeing was not a seeing, we amend the record of discourse by adding new alleged facts (including claims about the seeming course of seemings) and revise or withdraw from our previous claim about what’s over there in the world where (it seems) it had seemed there was a seeming-apple.
Let’s not forget the role of expressions like “I thought I knew”. I thought there was an apple there, but it turned out to be a lump of wax. That doesn’t mean the initial claim was unjustified, unwarranted, and groundless -- only that it turned out to be incorrect; or rather that the speaker turned out to have reason to correct it. This new reason, or new judgment, is as fallible in principle as the first which it amends. But it seems such claims are correct when they happen to be so, and stand uncorrected until there’s reason for correction.
Quoting Aaron R
Who’s doing the “moving” here, and for what purpose? Arguably neither route will get us more “certainty” in the claims we make about what’s “over there”. It’s true that ordinary speech for ordinary purposes tends to follow the more direct route, speaking about “what’s over there” without wasting time on appearance-talk except in special cases, as when one is prompted by events to revise his own considered view about “what he thought he knew.”
The efficiency of that fine custom of, as it were, directly addressing things in the world as they appear to us, and revising only when it matters -- instead of constantly referring to the mediations of experience and conceivable doubts of reason -- gives us no reason to suppose those mediations vanish whenever there’s harmony between the seeming and the fact. It seems rather that when they appear in agreement, ordinarily we focus on the main track, according to our purpose, only falling back on the other, and to the task of realignment, when they fall out of whack.
I don’t mean to imply, by speaking this way, that the “appearance” is something like a color patch in my head, ontologically isolable from the “causal chain” that is -- I want to say -- identical to that appearance.
We may analyze a causal chain into parts, or happen upon one link at a time, and then in ignorant conjecture or counterfactual hypothesis, characterize that one link as part of indefinitely many conceivable causal chains. Some such stories seem to line up with the facts better than others. Yet others seem entirely off base.
And the facts keep coming in, or so it seems.
Quoting Aaron R
I strongly agree, objective claims about how things really are make good justifications for other objective claims about how things really are, and should be perhaps required in order to count such claims as “justified”. So far as I can make out, sophisticated theories about light and vision add little in this regard to a common-sense grasp of how seeing works.
Moreover, general knowledge about light and the historical reliability of judgments of color does not inform me of my present circumstances at all, unless experience informs me of my present circumstances in such a way as to warrant the application of thoughts about light and color discrimination to my thoughts about present circumstances. There’s no theory that tells me whether my eyes are open or closed right now, for instance, or whether it’s dark or light in here, or where the proximate light sources are in my vicinity of the world and what color of light they seem in my estimation to emit. Ordinarily I acquire such information noninferentially by using my eyes to see. It seems that any general theory of vision I may have acquired secondhand over the years, has accrued through centuries determined in part by processes involving the same sort of basis for judgment in others, who used their eyes in about the same way that I do on each particular occasion.
Quoting Aaron R
The main thrust of this point seems reasonable, but there’s arguably an unwarranted and undesirable implication, that “appearances” are not part of the empirical world, and that our accounts of appearances are not accounts of the empirical world.
I suggest, to the contrary, that “having an appearance” or “being appeared to” is a sort of knowledge of the empirical world -- a most fundamental sort -- that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of appearance-talk that coincides with matters of fact, whether or not the subject understands that or how the appearance coincides with other matters of fact.
The appearance is part of reality, that’s how it coincides. It is itself a matter of fact related to other matters of fact in the world. That’s how perceptual experience binds our thoughts to nature and opens the world to each perceiver.
Quoting Aaron R
I’m wary of transcendental arguments. For one thing, it seems they’re always missing the point in conversation with a skeptic who’s inclined to gesture at an infinite horizon of conceivable possibilities when we ask a question like “How possible?” On what grounds, in whose terms, for what purpose, do we limit the frame?
I consider myself a sort of skeptic, but I don’t worry much about circles. Language is prior to sophisticated epistemological arguments. Perceptual experience is prior to sophisticated empirical theories. Where do such self-evident, practically tautological, claims leave our conversation about the logic of appearances and its role in observational judgments?
One concern I have with the view you’ve attributed to Sellars, is that it may leave a gap between general empirical beliefs and particular perceptual occasions. I mean specifically, with respect to handling claims about whether and how appearances can “provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are”; and about “the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims”. To unpack such baggage the wrong way, may be to fall into some version of the “frictionless spinning in a void” associated with coherentism.
By my way of reckoning, it makes more sense to emphasize the cooperation on each occasion of general beliefs and beliefs based on current perception. The essential role of the more general beliefs, and the ordinary tendency to gloss over appearance-talk in happy cases, doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep layer of belief that’s analyzable or even best described in terms of appearance-talk, playing an equally essential role in our acquisition of noninferential knowledge of present circumstances.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]Quite a cast of characters. Which would you say figure most prominently in, or had most influence in the field in the decades preceding, EPM? Or, which if any are closest to the typical sense-datum theory Sellars takes aim at in the essay?[/quote]
I’d say that C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price figured very prominently, though the others mentioned are not far behind. As an aside, it’s interesting to consider that Sellars studied under C.I. Lewis while completing graduate studies Harvard.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I'm not sure I've heard of Riechenbach. The view that it's physical objects, not sense-impressions, which are "seen" sounds remarkably fresh.
So he buries sense-impressions behind experience.... Are the impressions mere theoretical constructs for him, or do these constructs perhaps refer to terms that play some causal or functional role in the organization of experience, or does he reject all such theories....
[/quote]
In Chapter 2 of Experience and Prediction Reichenbach writes:
[quote=Reichenbach]
I cannot admit that impressions have the character of observable facts. What I observe are things, not impressions. I see tables, and houses, and thermometers, and trees, and men, and the sun, and many other things in the sphere of crude physical objects; but I have never seen my impression of these things […] I do not say I doubt the existence of my impressions. I believe that there are impressions, but I have never sensed them. When I consider the question in an unprejudiced manner I find that I infer the existence of my impressions.[/quote]
How are they inferred? He claims that they are inferred in order to explain the difference between appearance and reality:
[quote=Reichenbach]
To explain this difference, I introduce the distinction between the physical thing and my impression of that thing. I say that usually there are both physical things and impressions within me but that sometimes there are impressions only […] we need this assumption to explain that in the case of the confused world one of the two worlds, the external world, is dropped. The distinction between the world of things and the world of impressions or representation is therefore the result of epistemological reflection.[/quote]
He goes on to talk about “the abstract character of impressions” as part and parcel of a “duplicity theory” of perception. And this is where, as seen through the lens of EPM, Reichenbach’s account starts to go off the rails. We can already see in the quotes above the seeds of an ambiguity between impressions qua objects and impressions qua facts. Reichenbach says that he doesn’t “see” his impressions and also says that impressions are “not observable facts”. And yet he’s invoking impressions in order to explain discrepancies in what is seen.
Things get really bad in chapter 3 where Reichenbach seems to firmly place impressions into the category of “immediate existence”:
[quote=Reichenbach]Imagine we are taking a walk at dusk through a lonely moor; we see before us at some distance a man in the road […] we do not doubt the man’s reality. We walk farther and discover it is not a man but a juniper bush. […] We shall say that both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them.[/quote]
So here we seem to have the paradigm case of an impression. We think we see a man, but it’s really just juniper bush so we invoke the concept of an impression to explain the mistake. The man is inferred to be an impression, but here we are told that the “man” also has immediate existence. So what’s immediate existence?
[quote=Reichenbach]We may regard immediate existence as a concept known to everybody. If somebody does not understand us, we put him into a certain situation and pronounce the term, thus accustoming him to the term and the situation seen by him. […] If a child asks “what is a knife” we take a knife and show it to the child.[/quote]
In other words, immediate existence is the existence of whatever is directly apprehended or, if you will, known by acquaintance. But wait…this directly contradicts Reichenbach’s earlier claim that impressions are indirect, theoretical entities. These are exactly the kinds of confusions that Sellars was responding to in EPM.
...
Well, I didn't make much progress here, but (as usual) I'm out of time. I'll try to respond with more later.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
This sounds perhaps more problematic. Does it mean that some "beliefs" about "given" colors are also "given"? I recall Sellars' distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.[/quote]
Right. Both Lewis and Price (like Reichenbach) tend to elide the distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
How and where does "inference" occur in their models? Surely not in experience: We don't run around the world ceaselessly making conscious inferential judgments about physical objects on the basis of given colors and shapes; but arguably we have (or many of us have) countlessly many "beliefs" about local physical objects on the basis of current perception.
If there's something like "inferential judgment" at play in all our perceptually grounded beliefs about physical objects in the environment, it must be a sort of "inference" that occurs behind the scenes of conscious awareness.
Perhaps this is one way to interpret, or to correct, strange old views in our tradition concerning "judgments of sensation": The synthesis of "objects" from the most basic elements of sensation is achieved primarily by nonconscious cognitive processes that inform conscious perceptual experience. The application of the language of "inference" and "judgment" to such nonconscious spontaneous processes, excusable in days gone by, is merely a sort of analogy. However, when nonconscious processes of sensory cognition result in perceptual experience, we may begin to speak of perceptual content, and this content is not only open to inferential judgment, but also arguably charged with meaning, with conceptual content, and thus full of implications.
Of course the conceptual content, the "beliefs", and the "implications" of perceptual content, would depend in part on the conceptual stance and character of the perceiver, as well as on what's "given" to perception by sensation. Particular conscious acts of inference on the basis of perception occur within this constant shifting context.
I suppose the hard problem of perceptual content, along these lines, is to clearly distinguish what's "given" to perception by sensation.[/quote]
These are exactly the kinds of questions that Lewis and Price were wrestling with. For Lewis, the “given” was opposed primarily to the “concept”, and the hallmark of conceptuality was logical form. By implication, the given qua given has no logical form, it has no inferential implications and it does not constitute empirical knowledge. So Lewis’s epistemology is quite Kantian in nature. The mind applies concepts to the sensory given and it is the application of concepts that license inferences.
And yet, Lewis seems to recognize the tension that results from taking this kind of position. For what is the epistemic status of the given before concepts are applied, and what is the nature of the cognitive process by which concepts are applied to it? Is the given completely formless and ineffable, or does it exhibit some form of structure. If the latter, then how are we to understand the structure of the given if not in conceptual terms?
Here’s Lewis writing on the given in Chapter 2 of Mind and World Order
[quote=Lewis]
There is, in all experience, that element which we are aware that we do not create by thinking and cannot, in general, displace or alter. As a first approximation, we may designate it as "the sensuous."
[…]
At the moment, I have a fountain pen in my hand. When I so describe this item of my present experience, I make use of terms whose meaning I have learned. Correlatively I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness and relate it to what is not just now present in ways which I have learned and which reflect modes of action which I have acquired. […] what I refer to as "the given" in this experience is, in broad terms, qualitatively no different than it would be if I were an infant or an ignorant savage.
[…]
The distinction between this element of interpretation and the given is emphasized by the fact that the latter is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter how we think or conceive.
[…]
While we can thus isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such , because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways.
[/quote]
The given is essentially being defined here as an “invariant” in experience – its structure does not change despite being emenable to multiple classifications dependent on the interests and background knowledge of the agent. The process by which concepts are applied is described as a process of “abstraction” and that’s where things start to get murky insofar as Lewis wants to claim that the structure of the given itself determines what classifications are or are not applicable in a given context:
[quote=Lewis]
I can apprehend this thing (given) as pen or rubber or cylinder, but I cannot, by taking thought, discover it as paper or soft or cubical.[/quote]
The underlying tension is becoming more apparent now. If the given is not conceptually structured, and if the application of concepts is solely the province of the agent, then how is it the case that the given can nonetheless constrain conceptual classification? How is the case that this non-conceptual given simply cannot be conceptually classified as "paper" or "soft" or "cubical"? How is that possible?
Reading through the chapter it becomes clear that Lewis wants the given to pull double-duty. He wants it to be non-conceptual and yet he wants it to have enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on thought. He wants it to be the concrete basis of all experience, and yet also abstract enough to exhibit a repeatable structure.
And this is where (per Csalisbury) the Hegel connection comes into play. Sellars leverages aspects of Hegel’s dialectic in the Sense Certainty chapter to expose an ambiguity between the non-conceptuality of the act of sensation vs. the non-conceptuality of the content of sensation. Lewis elides the distinction by treating the given as the concrete correlate of direct apprehension while yet investing it with enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on conceptual thought.
Sellars, like Hegel, essentially argues that insofar as the structure of the sensory “given” is determinate enough to warrant some classifications (“pen”, “cylinder”, etc.) but not others (“paper”, “soft”, etc.), it must be considered to be conceptual in nature for the simple reason that classifications have inferential implications. For instance, to say that some aspect of the given simply cannot be classified as “soft” implies that claims like “this object is soft” cannot be true and, by extension, that various other claims implied by that claim cannot be true (and so on).
So returning to your original question, inference plays an ambiguous role in Lewis’s epistemology insofar as the epistemic status of given is ambiguous. Does the “abstraction” process count as a form of inference? It almost seems like it has to insofar as it is a process by which certain classifications are determined to be applicable and others are not. But how can inference occur in the absence of concepts? It can’t, which seems to imply that the “given” is conceptually structured after all (or that there is no such thing as the given after all)
As a side note, some of the details of Price’s epistemology differ from Lewis’s, but many of the same of questions arise with regard to it.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
The anstoss concept goes back to Fichte. The self posits the "not-self" in order to posit the "self". The anstoss is the spontaneous impulse that moves the self toward such a posit. The underlying logic is a variation on transcendental reasoning in general, where something is demonstrated to be a pre-condition for something else.
Similar reasoning undergirds Sellars's analysis of the looks/is distinction in EPM:
[quote=Sellars]
The point I wish to stress at this time, however, is that the concept of
looking green, the ability to recognize that something looks green,
presupposes the concept of being green, and that the latter concept involves
the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them -- which, in
turn, involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object if one
wishes to ascertain its color by looking at it.
[/quote]
Understanding what it means to say that something merely looks green requires as a pre-condition understanding what it is to say that something really is green, or so Sellars argues.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
I don't know that he addresses this specific question. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to Price's book and my notes don't mention anything about this.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Right, and that's essentially what Sellars is asking: what justifies your belief that there are such things as round red patches? Sellars doesn't believe that such patches exist, and EPM is essentially a critical examination of the notion that such things do exist, or perhaps more accurately, that such things are seen.
At the end of EPM he rehearses the myth of genius Jones, a fictional ancestor who explains perceptual mistakes on the model of "inner replicas" of physical objects. The main difference from sense-datum theory is that these replicas are understood to be "states" that are had by the observer rather than as particulars that are observed by the observer. In other words, there is nothing that is literally red and round in the world that is the object of observation when someone has an hallucination of an apple, but rather the observer comes to have an internal state that is "somehow analogous" to a red round patch.
The "somehow" is never explained in EPM, and Sellars actually ends up backing away from the notion that sense-impressions are internal states of the observer when he explicates his theory of absolute processes in the much later Carrus Lectures.
I can't keep up with my own ramblings, or with anyone else's for that matter. If we keep putting one foot in front of the other, the conversation takes care of itself.
Quoting Aaron R
That's good to know, I might have gone straight to Ayer.
Perhaps an important distinction lies hidden here. Recalling Sellars' distinction between "sensing particulars" and "sensing facts", I might deny the claim that I can see my own impressions, but affirm the claim that I observe (the fact) that I have current impressions. Accordingly, we might say I observe the impressions, or say at least that I make observational judgments about the impressions, without "sensing" them.
When I look up at the sky, is it the sun I see, or only a bit of its light? I like Brandom along these lines, on the observation of mu mesons, or muons, along with their traces.
Reichenbach's general belief that there are such things as impressions is part of a theory, or model, or discourse about perceptual experience -- a logos he picked up at second hand before kicking the tires himself. Say he confirms the theory to his own satisfaction, and thus acquires the general belief, by way of some inference, and thus ceases to "doubt the existence" of impressions in general, wherever there is perception like ours. It's the theory that positions him to make the inference, on any particular occasion:
If I am sensing right now, then there are impressions in me; and
I am sensing right now;
Therefore, there are impressions in me.
In fact, he doesn't have to bother making this inference on each separate occasion, once he's acquired the relevant general belief; much as I don't have to infer that gravity draws a glass to the floor when I drop it, or that the bright spot in the sky is a massive ball of gas. Inference may play a role in the initial formation of such beliefs, and in the formation of the concepts associated with the beliefs; but once the story is told, most of us who take it on, do so without bothering over what inferences and evidence informed the story in the beginning.
So long as the general belief is correct enough in the relevant ways, and so long as I have applied it correctly enough on a particular occasion, the observational judgment I make in terms of or in keeping with the belief "inherits" the correctness of the general belief -- of the story, and of whatever chain of inferences and observations may have produced the story, whether they were inferences and observations in my head or in heads before mine.
We shouldn't suppose this mere distinction informs us about what sort of thing the "impression" is. For instance, we needn't suppose that, whenever there is an impression, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the impression and a physical thing of which it is an impression.
I suppose he doesn't mean: Usually there are physical things within me and impressions within me, but sometimes impressions only.
So I suppose he means something like: Usually the impressions within me correspond (in some relevant way) to physical things (that are not or need not be within me), but sometimes the impressions within me do not correspond to any physical thing (in the relevant way).
In the latter case, this might be a formulation of a distinction similar to the distinction I draw between perception and imagination: the difference between hearing a melody and repeating the same melody in your head; between hearing a sentence uttered and repeating the same sentence in your head; between seeing an apple and hallucinating or dreaming an apple.
One might argue that such imaginings, even at their most "vivid and forceful", hardly deserve the name "impressions". On the other hand, the name seems as suitable for perceptual illusions and other misperceptions as it does for ordinary perceptions.
It seems to me we need something like a distinction between sense-perception and imagination just to make sense of the fact that we dream, hallucinate, and imagine -- though how we conceptualize such phenomena, and what judgments we make in light of them, seems to vary from one person and one cultural context to another.
I have the impression that 20th-century analytic philosophers, especially in the shadow of the spooky behaviorist tendency we might trace through Ryle and Quine, tended to neglect such phenomena, and to perhaps quietly lump false judgments made on the basis of imaginings into the same account as false judgments made on the basis of misperceptions. In any case, it's often hard to tell how to map a term like Reichenbach's "impression" here onto a distinction like the one I draw between perceiving and imagining.
Perhaps the neatest way is to say that imaginings are among our impressions. If I mistake my hallucination for perception, and judge that there's an apple on the table on the basis of that hallucination, the source of the confusion is that I have mistaken hallucinating for perceiving, or in other words, I have incorrectly taken an instance of hallucinating as an instance of perceiving. I may correct my own error when I move to the table and aim to fetch the apple; discover that nothing's there, though it still looks like there's an apple; and now correctly judge that I am and have been hallucinating, despite the persistent vision-like appearance of an apple on the table.
The hallucinating is part of the world, just like dreams and less vivid and forceful imaginings are part of the world. Until we have adequate understanding of these phenomena, we might be confused by them and led to make false judgments in light of them; but as we develop adequate understanding, we're more likely to avoid error. In this respect, our concept of hallucination is just like other empirical concepts.
If we're willing to say that each perceiving and each imagining grasped in introspection is correlated in a relevant way with a bit of neural activity in the world; then we should be willing to say that, once we're equipped with the right sort of concepts and general beliefs, we make more or less reliable observational judgments on the basis of introspection about those bits of neural activity, and that these, too, are things in the world of which we have "impressions" whenever we're aware of our own perceiving or imagining, no matter how otherwise ignorant or confused we may be about the relevant facts; much as we make reliable observational judgments about the sun on the basis of visual perception, no matter whether we think it's a god in a chariot or a massive ball of gas.
Along those lines, we might say "the confused world" is the one in which I judge incorrectly, on the basis of current hallucination, that I am perceiving an apple and that this apple is on the table. And we might say the harmoniously conceived, or well sorted, world is the one in which I judge correctly, on the basis of current hallucination, that I am hallucinating and that there is no apple on the table.
Reichenbach, however, seems perhaps to speak as though the confusion is somehow or other contained in the impression, and now he slides from "impression" to "representation". But what sort of thing is the impression supposed to be, if the error in judgment is already contained in it? I can stare at a mirage for hours, and change my mind a thousand times while it remains the same mirage. It looks the same, the world appears to me in the same way, while I cycle through various judgments on the basis of that one appearance. The appearance doesn't tell me how to judge, and I don't tell it how to appear. The judging is up to me, and the appearing is up to the appearance, though I can turn my head and get past it.
Along these lines, I make a three-part epistemological distinction: In the first place there is the fact of the matter, the way things are in the world in fact. In the second place there is the appearance, the fact of how things appear to me (e.g., how things "look to me"). In the third place there is the seeming, the fact of how I take things in fact to be, in part on the basis of appearances. In making active judgments about how things seem, in part on the basis of appearances, I change the seeming, but not the appearances. Normally I don't need to make such judgments in order for things to seem to me one way or another; ordinarily I resort to such judging only when salient features of my experience seem uncertain, confused, or otherwise inadequate to form the basis of a reasonable judgment I have some interest in making. The judgment amends or completes or suspends the seeming.
If I'm going to use the word "impression" in telling that story, the impression belongs with the appearance, not with the seeming.
Note that both the appearance and the seeming are parts of the world, are matters of fact.
Based on your discussion and the passages you've cited, his discourse strikes me as rather confused, and it's perhaps exceptionally hard to tell what sort of thing he supposes an impression to be.
Quoting Aaron R
[quote="Reichenbach]Imagine we are taking a walk at dusk through a lonely moor; we see before us at some distance a man in the road […] we do not doubt the man’s reality. We walk farther and discover it is not a man but a juniper bush. […] We shall say that both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them.[/quote]
Quoting Aaron R
That's the most pressing question here, for sure.
On the side: Doesn't Reichenbach call the juniper bush an "impression", as well as the man? I've interpreted the passages you've cited this way: It's not that, having fallen short of the mark, Reichenbach infers that the man was an impression, while persisting in the belief that the bush is a physical object but not an impression. Rather, in seeking to understand such cases, to analyze the ways in which we fall short of the mark and wind up in confusion, Reichenbach infers that he has impressions within him, both when he sees correctly and when he sees confusedly. In happy cases there is both physical thing and impression; in unhappy cases, impression alone; and in this one case he judges that his first impression was an impression without a corresponding physical thing.
Of course, in the case at hand, it’s not accurate to say there’s no physical object corresponding in a relevant way to the confused perception of a man. It’s the same physical thing, the bush, corresponding to perception and judgment in the happy case and in the breakdown case. (It’s not clear in the example whether the breakdown is a misperception or a mistaken judgment on the basis of perception, or somehow both).
I’m not sure how Reichenbach intends to sort it all out.
[quote="Reichenbach]We may regard immediate existence as a concept known to everybody. If somebody does not understand us, we put him into a certain situation and pronounce the term, thus accustoming him to the term and the situation seen by him. […] If a child asks “what is a knife” we take a knife and show it to the child.[/quote]
This strikes me as perhaps the most uninformative sort of definition conceivable. I don't mean the definition of the knife in the example, which is an ordinary ostensive definition. Rather, this attempt to characterize "immediate existence".
Is there any other clue from Reichenbach? Is there supposed to be an analogous situation into which one may be put, where he will observe the meaning of "immediate existence"? Are we supposed to grasp the sense of this term in the context of misperceptions and mistaken judgments on the basis of perception, like the mistaking of bush for man?
It might seem less strange if he'd said "immediate experience", as in: At first I see what appears to be a man, but soon I see that it's a bush.
But what could it mean to say "both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them"?
Maybe something like this: At the moment we mistake the bush for a man, we have an idea of a man there whom we're seeing, and the idea of existence belongs to that idea of a man.
Even so, it seems tortured use, to call this "immediate existence", instead of an immediate idea of existence -- i.e., an idea of existence (and an idea of an existing man) that has not yet been mediated and overruled by a sound view of the facts. Perhaps this strained usage is another symptom of the same confusion we've noted in Reichenbach, who seems to smear altogether the seeming, the appearing, and the facts and objects that seem and appear.
Quoting Aaron R
The view seems entirely confused, at least as we've reviewed it here. I hope the sense-datum theorists turn out to have a better champion. For it would seem shameful for a whole generation of experts to be taken in by such a jumble.
My turn to take a break. I look forward to working through the rest of your recent comments.
This distinction keeps rearing its head in our conversation.
Quoting Aaron R
Does Lewis locate the given within experience, or prior to experience? How should we coordinate the terms "given", "sense-datum", and "direct apprehension" with respect to his account?
I'd say nothing is given without a perceiver. A perceiver already has a stock of conceptual capacities, expectations, general beliefs... with inferential structure and "logical form". The given qua sensation-dervied constraint has no fixed logical form, but in each particular context of perceptual experience, it does have conceptual and inferential implications, and it does open the way to empirical knowledge.
Quoting Aaron R
If it makes sense to say "the mind applies concepts to the sensory given", it makes sense to say "the mind applies the sensory given to concepts". The standing repertoire of conceptual capacities and the current intake of sensation are applied together in perceptual experience on each occasion.
Without that cooperation of sensation and conceptualization, there would be no license for the inferences we draw on the basis of experience. We would make no such inferences.
Quoting Aaron R
"Before" concepts are applied, there is no experience, and no appearance, but only, we say, sensory and perceptual processes in preconscious cognition. It seems that the contribution from sensation is determined prior to its manifestation in experience, for instance to reflect impingements of the world on sense receptors; and that sensory and perceptual processes in preconscious cognition are normally more or less insulated from direct interference by conceptually driven processes, so that what appears in experience is radically determined by sensation.
The contribution of sensation to experience seems organized, in the first place, according to a "deep structure" in keeping with principles we associate with our concepts of space and time, light and dark, hot and cold, loud and quiet, and so on, across a range of sensory modalities, which provide a fundamental framework for perceptual experience on each occasion and for empirical knowledge over time. On each occasion, the "synthesis of the manifold of sensation" according to these fixed basic principles provides an integrated perceptual context within which individual phenomena are spontaneously differentiated. That differentiation is in the first place the result of automatic and involuntary cognitive processes, not of any conscious act of judgment. In being thus differentiated within the organized perceptual field, phenomena are conceptualized, and this conceptualization is likewise, in the first place, automatic and involuntary.
Perceptual experience thus constituted -- as spontaneous and involuntary conceptualization of a predetermined contribution from sensation -- provides the context in which spontaneous and voluntary thoughts and judgments may review appearances, to consider, for instance, whether things will continue to appear, upon further inspection, as they now appear, or whether things are in fact as they seem, to all appearances, to be.
To all appearances, it seems neither sort of spontaneous conceptual activity has the power to reconstitute the predetermined contribution of sensation. The fundamental epistemic role of that contribution is characterizable in terms of appearance-talk: I know it's a juniper bush, but in the shadows, from here, it looks just like a man.
Appearances persist -- the look and sound of things persist -- despite shifts in our conceptual attitudes toward particular appearances, despite exercises of our capacity to conceptually reframe a whole perceptual occasion, despite wholesale reorganization of our thoughts about appearances in general.
Quoting Aaron R
Empirical science continues to develop its account of sensation and sensory perception, and of all cognition, in light of ongoing empirical investigation. That account is one way for us to characterize the contribution of sensation to perceptual experience, or the "structure of the given" -- perhaps already the most informative way, despite the primitive status of the science.
All empirical science is a rigorous extension of ordinary empirical knowledge, and has an essentially phenomenological character. The most sophisticated scientific accounts of perception are continuations of investigations each of us makes by noticing differences in the way things appear when we squint, or close our eyes, or turn out the lights.
A phenomenological account that relies on the unaided introspection of each interlocutor is said to run into deep trouble, for it’s impossible to describe anything -- including preconceptually determined features of one’s own experience -- without employing concepts.
I want to say we blow this difficulty out of proportion in such discourses, by taking for granted an unwarranted and incoherent separation of empirical investigation and phenomenology, and by conflating speculative "metaphysical" questions about the whole world as it appears to us, with phenomenological and empirical questions about animal perception.
These passages from Lewis make a good impression, and seem less overburdened than those you’ve supplied from Reichenbach and Price.
We don’t say we "create" our limbs when we use them. Do we ordinarily say we "create" the voluntary motions of our limbs? We produce, perform, discharge… voluntary motions of our limbs by moving them, and only some "elements of experience" by thinking. Likewise, we produce sounds by moving around. When "create" is appropriate here, it’s as another way to characterize such production.
The crucial difference Lewis gestures at aligns with the old Stoic discourse about what is and what is not "up to us" or "in our power". Epictetus speaks as if we have as much responsibility for our emotions and desires as for our thoughts, but less for our bodies, which can be altered or restrained without our consent. Lewis speaks here as if we "create" our thoughts and their content from whole cloth without any hindrance, but are constrained in our encounters with "the sensuous". We might refine the truth in such views by distinguishing various classes of perceptual modality (or basis for noninferential judgment)
exteroception -- proprioception -- interoception -- affect -- imagination -- thought
and accounting for the various constraints on spontaneous activity associated with each of the "modes" or "bases" thus distinguished.
I suppose we might substitute "I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness..." for "I bring a whole field of conceptual relations to bear on this one item in my present field of perceptual experience." The latter seems more apt for many cases; the former perhaps for cases in which we stop paying attention to the perceptual field, and become lost in thoughts about fountain pens, or about this fountain pen, or about what in this vision of a fountain pen is "given".
The passage leans heavily on the phrase "in broad terms". The trouble is to make those terms explicit and perhaps to narrow them down. There’s also an implication, perhaps along pragmatic lines, that the whole conceptual field should be analyzed primarily as reflecting "modes of action I have acquired".
The crucial difference.
The notorious difficulty.
Quoting Aaron R
The thought must be that what's "abstracted" -- the product of the abstraction, not the material it's abstracted from -- has a conceptual structure determined in part by the sensuous given. At each moment, there is a fixed structure to the given, and a fixed structure to my concepts, and merely by focusing on any element in the perceptual field, I spontaneously "abstract", draw off, a conceptual structure determined by the given in the context of my conceptual frame. The mind applies the sensuous given to its concepts, as it applies its concepts to the sensuous given.
I suppose my account of "involuntary conceptualization of the predetermined contribution from sensation" is designed to perform a theoretical role similar to that of Lewis' "abstraction".
Quoting Aaron R
I assume "cannot" here has practical limits, and does not entail logical impossibility. Looking at this stone, and feeling it with my hands, I find that I cannot sincerely apply the predicate of softness to this stone. I acknowledge that my judgment may be flawed in principle, that my senses may be deceiving me, etc.; but to all appearances, the stone is not soft.
It seems no more puzzling to me that an experience of a stone should constrain the concepts we sincerely apply to the stone, than that the stone should constrain the concepts we sincerely apply to it.
Here is a stone, here is a haptic appearance of the stone, here is a concept associated with the English word "soft" that is ordinarily inapplicable in such contexts.
Concepts like these are naturally coordinated with experiences like these because they are produced and refined and applied in the context of experiences like these. There is something it's like to feel a hard thing; having an experience of that sort is what rules out the application of the concept "soft" to the thing that feels hard. Not as an eternal truth or an incorrigible assertion, not on the basis of certain knowledge about a stone, but in the ordinary way, provisionally and corrigibly, on the basis of current experience.
Quoting Aaron R
To all appearances, there's repeating structure in i) the things themselves as they appear to us, the stones and pens that we perceive and otherwise use; ii) the physical contexts of sensation, including for instance light and air; iii) the body of the perceiver, including physiological processes of sensation and perception; and iv) the conceptual frame of each perceiver, which tends to be fairly stable over time, especially with respect to ordinary empirical concepts that compel us to recognize appearances of, for instance, stones and pens whether we want to or not.
To rule out an objective account of sensation -- a phenomenologically grounded empirical account of the physical and physiological context of perception -- is to lose touch with the preconceptual structure of the contribution of sensation to experience.
Approaching the problem this way, as a pseudoproblem, it seems an error to suppose that the preconceptualized contribution of sensation can be isolated or "directly apprehended" in experience, from an artificially circumscribed first-person point of view, in abstraction from correlate empirical accounts of the objects and context and processes of sensation, as if experience were a groundless picture-show instead of one part of a whole world. We understand sensation by understanding ourselves as natural beings, as perceiving animals in a physical world; or we don't understand sensation.
What is this distinction between "act" and "content"?
Quoting Aaron R
What does "concrete correlate of direct apprehension" mean?
Quoting Aaron R
To me this seems like bending over backward. Where do the classifications come from? They develop in individuals and in culture on the basis of experience. It's the regularity of the world as it appears to us that produces concepts and that warrants the application of concepts in and on the basis of perception.
There's no reason to insist that the structure of a stone "must be conceptual in nature" in order to account for the fact that we apply concepts to stones or that the predicate "being a stone" has conceptual implications.
Likewise, there's no reason to insist that the structure of the given qua given -- the structure of the contribution to experience from sensation -- is "conceptual" or has "logical form", merely in order to account for the fact that we apply concepts to stones on the basis of perceptual experience of stones.
All we need is the notion that the relevant concepts are coordinated with the structure of sensation and with features of the objective world that appears to us through the mediation of sensation. The world has structure, sensation has structure, concepts have a "logical form" that tends to be more or less coordinated with that structure.
Quoting Aaron R
I assume in this context "cannot" has practical limits, and doesn't entail logical impossibility. Looking at this stone, and feeling it with my hands, I find that I cannot sincerely apply the predicate of softness to this stone, though I acknowledge that this judgment may be flawed in principle, that my senses may be deceiving me, etc. To all appearances, the stone is not soft.
This does not imply that the stone is conceptual, or that the stone's hardness is conceptual. It only implies that I am correct to apply the concepts "stone" and "hard" to this thing.
The reason I am correct to call this thing a hard stone, is that it is a hard stone, a fact that I grasp one way or another in perceptual experience, like other intelligent animals, thanks to the faithful contribution of sensation; and that I grasp in one specific way when I call this thing a hard stone.
Quoting Aaron R
I say it can't be an inference, on phenomenological grounds.
The thought may be that the contribution of sensation "triggers" automatic conceptualization in perceptual experience. In special cases, such provisional conceptualization seems inadequate for judgment or other action, leading us to take a closer look, to check whether things seem to be as they have appeared, to wonder whether things are as they seem to be. Until the automatic, tentative conceptualization is suspended or overruled by such conceptual activity, it has conceptual implications for the perceiver. The initial conceptualization and its implications, like the considered view achieved by careful judgment, are determined by the conceptual stance of the perceiver as well as by the contribution of sensation.
How does the automatic and provisional conceptualization take place? What are the rules by which it proceeds? It seems to me this is an empirical question that cannot be adequately answered on the basis of ordinary introspection, because this front line of conceptualization is not constituted by conscious activity, but rather constitutes the perceptual experience that is central to conscious awareness. Introspection reveals to us that perceptual experience is always already conceptualized, and that sense-perception is radically determined by a contribution from sensation; but introspection is insufficient to inform a fine-grained view of the individual mechanisms that produce such experience.
Quoting Aaron R
Any remarkable differences between Price and Lewis?
So far I like Lewis best. I don't find the same muddle in these passages that we noted in Price and Reichenbach. Perhaps there are other passages that bring out similar problems in Lewis more clearly?
I'd say the "tension" you attribute to his account seems largely dissipated, at least with respect to these passages, if we're allowed to shift the frame of the conversation along the lines I've suggested: i) by rejecting an arbitrary and arguably incoherent separation of phenomenology and empirical investigation; ii) by developing an empirical account of perception (especially the contribution of sensation) that coordinates first-person introspective reports with third-person observations; and iii) by outsourcing conversations about "what really is", aside from the world as it appears to us, to a more abstract and general region of discourse.
So far as I can tell, that shift in frame is enough to open the way for us to speak of concepts as naturally coordinated with perceptual experiences and perceptual objects, as produced and applied on the basis of experience.
To all appearances, that natural cooperation is the original context of conceptual activity, which is constrained to reflect the objective environment of an animal perceiver through the mediation of sensation, and thus to coordinate the activity of an organism with salient features of its environment. Human language and culture render us more sophisticated conceptualizers, and open for us an infinitely greater range of action, knowledge, fantasy, and confusion. There's no end to the variety of conceptual stances we may take on the basis of perceptual experience. But that experience, and any coherent conceptualization of it, remains radically constrained by the preconceptual structure of the contribution from sensation, no less for us than for nonhuman animal perceivers.
Short of a full-fledged empirical account of the preconceptual structure of sensation for each animal perceiver, we may locate the fundamental constraint, the essential epistemic role, of perceptual experience by tracing the limits of appearance-talk.
Does transcendental reasoning demonstrate that it must be an "impulse" that posits not-self and self? And how do the relevant transcendental arguments define "impulse"?
It seems there's a basic self-awareness that emerges in nature along with sentient animals. We might expect, along the lines of the Kantian's "unity of apperception", that there is a reflexive aspect to all consciousness, that animal consciousness involves reflexive awareness, awareness of oneself.
I see no reason to suppose there is a special impulse for such awareness, or that some special act of positing is required. It seems rather part of the form of consciousness, of minds like ours, to distinguish between ourselves and things outside ourselves. Our minds are organized in keeping with the natural organization of our bodies. Every impulse we have arises in the context of this organization, but I'm not sure what theoretical need there is to posit a special impulse of not-self positing.
Quoting Aaron R
I've been wondering when we'd get back to Sellars. I've been enjoying the preliminary survey of sense-datum theorists in the meantime. I'd say it's a precondition for understanding Sellars' essay.
There's a fine circle.
Does Sellars mean to suggest that the concept of looking green is identical with the ability to recognize that something looks green, while the concept of being green merely involves the ability to tell what color objects have by looking?
"The concept of looking green, [which is to say,] the ability to recognize that something looks green, presupposes the concept of being green, and that latter concept involves the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them...."
In any case, it's an interesting alignment of the terms "ability" and "concept".
Quoting Aaron R
I'd like to hear more of this argument.
For starters, I'd want to clear up the various sorts of "concept" we might distinguish in this connection. I might have a more or less refined ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them, without having thought about it much, without having any sophisticated theories about color and light, without having acquired a relevant repertoire of "looks" talk. I'm happy to equate that ability with a "concept", but this simple recognitional capacity leaves plenty of room for variation in one's other concepts associated with judgments of color.
Does Sellars say that this "ability" -- the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them -- is the precondition of the concept of "being green" (and I suppose of "having color"), and that the concept of "being green" is the precondition of the concept of merely "looking green"?
The ability at the beginning of this chain is not the same as either concept. For in the original ability, there is no distinction between "looking green" and "being green". We might say that "looking green" and "being green" are the same concept in the early stages of color-concept acquisition, or perhaps that to begin with there is no concept of "[merely] looking green", and no correlate concept of "being [truly] green."
These concepts are distinguished from each other as we learn, on the basis of experience, that there's more at play in making correct judgments of color than seemed to be at play at first glance. One way of refining usage and judgment to reflect this new insight into the nature of things is to distinguish between the color things "[truly] have" (in ordinary circumstances) and the color things merely "appear to have" (in extraordinary circumstances); though I'm not sure this is the best way to sort out the facts about color.
It's only after one loses innocence about color judgments that the concept of "being [truly] green" is associated with sophisticated techniques like those Sellars mentions: techniques that apply hard-earned knowledge of "what circumstances to place an object if one wishes to ascertain its [true] color by looking at it."
The concept of "being [truly] green" that's associated with such sophisticated knowledge and techniques is not the original concept of "being green" that is a precondition for the distinction between "[merely] looking green" and "being [truly] green". The precondition is the simple concept of "being green", prior to the loss of innocence that motivates the distinction between "[merely] looking green" and "being [truly] green".
That simple concept does not depend on the ability to tell what color things "truly have" by looking at them -- for that's a more sophisticated concept that requires knowledge of the way that apparent color varies along with circumstances. The original, unrefined concept depends merely on the ability to innocently tell the (apparent) color of things by looking at them.
Having sorted out some of the relevant concepts along these lines, I'll agree that the ability to innocently report the colors things (appear to) have is the precondition for an unrefined concept of things "having color" or "being colored"; and that both this ability and the corresponding concept are refined when we lose innocence and begin to acquire knowledge about the ways that the apparent colors of things vary along with circumstances.
Perhaps enduring philosophical confusion about color judgments makes this example ill-suited to an epistemological discussion about appearances. Why muddy such murky waters?
Quoting Aaron R
What could justify a belief in such "patches"?
Does he leave room for the sense-datum theorist to posit such things as "patches" as theoretical constructs that are not "seen" or otherwise "sensed"? In that case, we might expect that some ways of talking about "patches" or other "sense-data" would be harmless enough, or even consistent with other useful ways of speaking about the contribution of sensation to perceptual experience -- for instance, perhaps along the lines of the cognitive scientist's "information" or "representation".
Quoting Aaron R
This seems like the sort of modelling I had in mind just now.
Quoting Aaron R
I think the analogy is best made between the visual perception of an apple and the vision-like hallucination of an apple. The similarity is between the two "states", not between the real apple and its imaginary correlate.
Quoting Aaron R
Is his view in EPM that it makes sense to talk about sense-impressions as internal states of the observer? What concept of "sense-impression" does he employ in this connection?
And what's the change of direction with "absolute processes" in the Carrus Lectures?
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
That doesn’t make it nonsense to speak about the epistemic role of that deep layer of belief based on appearances, which serves as a safety net for us to fall back on gracefully, precisely because it persists while we ignore it.[/quote]
Sure, and I don’t think Sellars would say that it’s nonsense to talk about the epistemic role of such claims - in fact, that is exactly what he is interested in talking about!
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
It’s a withdrawal from claims about how things really are over there, where there seems to be a red apple. But this doesn’t entail another withdrawal, from all claims about how things really are in the world: For this appearance, and this seeming, may be said to be part of the world. And it’s not clear that it may be coherently denied that the appearance and seeming are part of the world.[/quote]
Yes, and Sellars acknowledges that in making such claims we are still stating facts about the world – namely, facts of the form “x looks F to S”, etc. Sellars doesn’t deny that “appearances” exist per se, but he doesn’t think that sense-data exist. That is, he doesn’t think that appearances are little colored-and-shaped particulars nor that reality is fundamentally constructed out of such things.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Accordingly, the appearance and the seeming are among the “facts” we may aim to piece together in each case. For instance by asking: How is it the case, how does it happen, that things appear thus and so (to me, now)?[/quote]
Sure, but we have to be careful in referring to appearances as “facts”, because the term is ambiguous.
By “fact”, we can mean something that has propositional form (e.g. “x is F”) or we can mean some kind of particular process or object in the world (e.g. trees, rocks, etc.). For Sellars, propositions are essentially functional roles in linguistic practice. In other words, whenever someone utters a claim, the abstract meaning of that claim is determined by the functional role that the claim plays within the “game of giving and asking for reasons”. In contrast, particulars such as trees and rocks are not essentially functional roles within our language games. Particular trees and rocks can certainly have roles within our language games, but neither their essence nor existence is dependent on those roles.
And that’s why Sellars harps on properly making a distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts. Sellars maintains that we sense particulars, but perceive facts, and he thinks that sense-datum theories run into difficulties in part because they don’t properly distinguish between the two. Falling into the myth of the given is thinking that there is something that is sensed directly that is both an essentially extra-linguistic particular and an essentially linguistic entity such as a proposition. In Sellars book, this is illegitimate insofar as it posits something that is an instance of two incompatible types.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
In ordinary, happy cases, one fair answer is: Because there’s an apple there, and your eyes are open and aimed that way. The frequency with which seeming-seeings of seeming-apples turn out to be, to all appearances and “to a practical certainty”, genuine seeings of genuine apples, also serves as justification for the belief that “There is an apple there”, and lets the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple stand as a noninferentially acquired defeasible warrant for the latter belief.
A more developed variation on this theme could haul into the account an empirically grounded story about light and the light-relative properties of physical objects; about retinas and cones and optic nerves; about perceptual processes in cognition.
None of this amounts to absolute “theoretical certainty” that there really is a real apple there -- a certainty we never attain, even as we bite and chew and swallow.[/quote]
So, my take on this is that Sellars wouldn’t deny that “looks” claims can provide evidence for “is” claims under the right circumstances. If 99.99% of the time that Jones utters claims of the form “x looks F” it turns out that the corresponding “x is F” claim is also true, then there’s a sense is which Jones's uttering “x looks F” can be considered as evidence for the claim “x is F”, ceteris paribus. But even in this case, the evidence provided by Jones’s “looks” claims is parasitic on the evidence provided by other more fundamental “is” claims. They only provide evidence insofar as Jones really is 99.99% accurate. And that’s really the point that I take Sellars to be making here - there’s no layer of “looks” claims that can serve as an independent evidential foundation (whether certain or probable) for all of our “is” claims.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
What shall we count as “adequate” evidential basis for claims about how things really are? I would argue along lines just indicated above, that the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple does provide adequate evidential basis for claims about real apples, though not for claims that such claims are certain claims. In cases in which new evidence comes to light, that the seeming-apple was not in fact an apple, or that the seeming-seeing was not a seeing, we amend the record of discourse by adding new alleged facts (including claims about the seeming course of seemings) and revise or withdraw from our previous claim about what’s over there in the world where (it seems) it had seemed there was a seeming-apple.[/quote]
Again, the evidence provided by “looks” claims seems to be parasitic upon more fundamental “is” claims. Jones’s “looks” claim is counted as evidence only because Jones’s reliability has already been established. You couldn’t establish that reliability on the basis of other “looks” claims alone because "reliable" in this case just means "an agreement between how things look and how things are".
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Let’s not forget the role of expressions like “I thought I knew”. I thought there was an apple there, but it turned out to be a lump of wax. That doesn’t mean the initial claim was unjustified, unwarranted, and groundless -- only that it turned out to be incorrect; or rather that the speaker turned out to have reason to correct it. This new reason, or new judgment, is as fallible in principle as the first which it amends. But it seems such claims are correct when they happen to be so, and stand uncorrected until there’s reason for correction.[/quote]
Yep, agreed.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Who’s doing the “moving” here, and for what purpose? Arguably neither route will get us more “certainty” in the claims we make about what’s “over there”. It’s true that ordinary speech for ordinary purposes tends to follow the more direct route, speaking about “what’s over there” without wasting time on appearance-talk except in special cases, as when one is prompted by events to revise his own considered view about “what he thought he knew.”[/quote]
The rational agent is doing the “moving”, and for the purpose of avoiding full accountability for the “is” claim.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
The efficiency of that fine custom of, as it were, directly addressing things in the world as they appear to us, and revising only when it matters -- instead of constantly referring to the mediations of experience and conceivable doubts of reason -- gives us no reason to suppose those mediations vanish whenever there’s harmony between the seeming and the fact. It seems rather that when they appear in agreement, ordinarily we focus on the main track, according to our purpose, only falling back on the other, and to the task of realignment, when they fall out of whack.
I don’t mean to imply, by speaking this way, that the “appearance” is something like a color patch in my head, ontologically isolable from the “causal chain” that is -- I want to say -- identical to that appearance.
We may analyze a causal chain into parts, or happen upon one link at a time, and then in ignorant conjecture or counterfactual hypothesis, characterize that one link as part of indefinitely many conceivable causal chains. Some such stories seem to line up with the facts better than others. Yet others seem entirely off base.
And the facts keep coming in, or so it seems.[/quote]
I don’t think that Sellars would say that the mediations of experience and reason vanish when there is a harmony between seeming and fact. Sellars actually defended a version of the correspondence theory of truth based on something that he called a “picturing” relation, which he understood to be something like a homomorphism between physical events within the agent and other physical events not originating within the agent.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I strongly agree, objective claims about how things really are make good justifications for other objective claims about how things really are, and should be perhaps required in order to count such claims as “justified”. So far as I can make out, sophisticated theories about light and vision add little in this regard to a common-sense grasp of how seeing works.
Moreover, general knowledge about light and the historical reliability of judgments of color does not inform me of my present circumstances at all, unless experience informs me of my present circumstances in such a way as to warrant the application of thoughts about light and color discrimination to my thoughts about present circumstances. There’s no theory that tells me whether my eyes are open or closed right now, for instance, or whether it’s dark or light in here, or where the proximate light sources are in my vicinity of the world and what color of light they seem in my estimation to emit. Ordinarily I acquire such information noninferentially by using my eyes to see. It seems that any general theory of vision I may have acquired secondhand over the years, has accrued through centuries determined in part by processes involving the same sort of basis for judgment in others, who used their eyes in about the same way that I do on each particular occasion.[/quote]
Right, theoretical knowledge is generally not a replacement for the deliverances of perception, but in cases where I suspect my perceptions to be in error my background knowledge about my current circumstances could inferentially justify a belief that directly contradicts my non-inferentially elicited observational beliefs. For instance, if I take myself to know that the room in which I am standing is currently drenched in blue light, I might come to suspect that my non-inferentially elicited judgment “this tie is purple” to be in error. I may come - on the basis of my theoretical knowledge of light, color and vision - to conclude “this tie is red” instead.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
The main thrust of this point seems reasonable, but there’s arguably an unwarranted and undesirable implication, that “appearances” are not part of the empirical world, and that our accounts of appearances are not accounts of the empirical world.[/quote]
Sellars believes in the existence of what he calls “sensa”, but he thinks that sensa are epistemically inert events that occur in the objective world. So there is a sense in which Sellars would allow that claims about sensa are indeed legitimate empirical claims. That said, sensa are conceived by Sellars to be the direct cause of our non-inferentially elicited beliefs, but not direct evidence for those beliefs. Again, this is Sellars’s attempt to avoid what he takes to be an illicit equivocation between the ontological and epistemological dimensions of perception.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I suggest, to the contrary, that “having an appearance” or “being appeared to” is a sort of knowledge of the empirical world -- a most fundamental sort -- that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of appearance-talk that coincides with matters of fact, whether or not the subject understands that or how the appearance coincides with other matters of fact.
The appearance is part of reality, that’s how it coincides. It is itself a matter of fact related to other matters of fact in the world. That’s how perceptual experience binds our thoughts to nature and opens the world to each perceiver.[/quote]
Again, Sellars does not deny that we can have knowledge of appearances, or that appearances are part of the objective world. He only denies that such knowledge is epistemically “fundamental” for reasons already rehearsed above.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
One concern I have with the view you’ve attributed to Sellars, is that it may leave a gap between general empirical beliefs and particular perceptual occasions. I mean specifically, with respect to handling claims about whether and how appearances can “provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are”; and about “the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims”. To unpack such baggage the wrong way, may be to fall into some version of the “frictionless spinning in a void” associated with coherentism.
By my way of reckoning, it makes more sense to emphasize the cooperation on each occasion of general beliefs and beliefs based on current perception. The essential role of the more general beliefs, and the ordinary tendency to gloss over appearance-talk in happy cases, doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep layer of belief that’s analyzable or even best described in terms of appearance-talk, playing an equally essential role in our acquisition of noninferential knowledge of present circumstances.[/quote]
Sellars maintains that non-inferentially elicited observation claims provide the foundation for empirical knowledge. However, he thinks that these are “is” claims (“x is F”), not “looks” claims (“x looks F to S”). Furthermore, he doesn’t think that these are indubitable. For Sellars, the non-inferentially elicited observation claims that make up the foundation of empirical knowledge can be overturned by inferentially elicited claims (see the example of the purple tie from above). He maintains that, in some cases, it is this very fact that makes the recognition of perceptual error possible.
Ok,stopping for a while.
In my opinion Reichenbach does not make clear what he means when he says he doesn’t “sense” his impressions. On the one hand he says that he never “sees” an impression, but on the other hand he seems to say that all seeing is mediated by impressions such that impressions provide the “sense- content” of all of our seeings. So there is clearly a sense in which it is correct to say that he sees his impressions since they literally provide the raw data out of which all of his perceptions are constructed.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Reichenbach's general belief that there are such things as impressions is part of a theory, or model, or discourse about perceptual experience -- a logos he picked up at second hand before kicking the tires himself. Say he confirms the theory to his own satisfaction, and thus acquires the general belief, by way of some inference, and thus ceases to "doubt the existence" of impressions in general, wherever there is perception like ours. It's the theory that positions him to make the inference, on any particular occasion:
If I am sensing right now, then there are impressions in me; and
I am sensing right now;
Therefore, there are impressions in me.[/quote]
He posits impressions as part of a theory, but he posits them as the sensual basis of all experience. So there’s a bit of a tension here, in my opinion, because he wants to say that impressions are theoretical, inferentially mediated entities and yet the role that they play within his theory of perception makes them the direct object of sense perception, which then seems to imply that they are not inferentially mediated entities after all.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
In fact, he doesn't have to bother making this inference on each separate occasion, once he's acquired the relevant general belief; much as I don't have to infer that gravity draws a glass to the floor when I drop it, or that the bright spot in the sky is a massive ball of gas. Inference may play a role in the initial formation of such beliefs, and in the formation of the concepts associated with the beliefs; but once the story is told, most of us who take it on, do so without bothering over what inferences and evidence informed the story in the beginning.[/quote]
Sure. Once the inference becomes “automatic”, the entities postulated via that inference can become the object of direct observation claims. Sellars makes pretty much the same argument in a couple of his own papers (Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism and Is Scientific Realism Tenable).
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
We shouldn't suppose this mere distinction informs us about what sort of thing the "impression" is. For instance, we needn't suppose that, whenever there is an impression, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the impression and a physical thing of which it is an impression.[/quote]
Right.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
I suppose he doesn't mean: Usually there are physical things within me and impressions within me, but sometimes impressions only.[/quote]
That’s my take as well.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
It seems to me we need something like a distinction between sense-perception and imagination just to make sense of the fact that we dream, hallucinate, and imagine -- though how we conceptualize such phenomena, and what judgments we make in light of them, seems to vary from one person and one cultural context to another.
I have the impression that 20th-century analytic philosophers, especially in the shadow of the spooky behaviorist tendency we might trace through Ryle and Quine, tended to neglect such phenomena, and to perhaps quietly lump false judgments made on the basis of imaginings into the same account as false judgments made on the basis of misperceptions. In any case, it's often hard to tell how to map a term like Reichenbach's "impression" here onto a distinction like the one I draw between perceiving and imagining.[/quote]
My sense is that Reichenbach would lump imaginings in with impressions.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Perhaps the neatest way is to say that imaginings are among our impressions. If I mistake my hallucination for perception, and judge that there's an apple on the table on the basis of that hallucination, the source of the confusion is that I have mistaken hallucinating for perceiving, or in other words, I have incorrectly taken an instance of hallucinating as an instance of perceiving. I may correct my own error when I move to the table and aim to fetch the apple; discover that nothing's there, though it still looks like there's an apple; and now correctly judge that I am and have been hallucinating, despite the persistent vision-like appearance of an apple on the table.[/quote]
Well, this is where we run into that whole “sensing facts” vs. “sensing particulars” conundrum again. Are impressions the direct cause of our observation claims or the direct justification for those claims? According to Sellars, claiming that they’re both is to fall prey to the Myth.
Also, for Sellars, as we have seen, perceptions can be true or false. So my impression is that he would say that hallucinations are just false perceptions. Of course, he’s talking about hallucinations qua propositional content. Hallucinations qua sensual contents are sensa – that is, objective events occurring “in” the perceiver. A similar story could be told about imagination, although the structure of imagination qua propositional contents is different. The claim “this unicorn is white” is true enough while I imagine a white unicorn, though the fact that I wouldn’t put forward that claim as a claim in earnest about an actually existing animal in my immediate environment is what distinguishes the two.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Reichenbach, however, seems perhaps to speak as though the confusion is somehow or other contained in the impression, and now he slides from "impression" to "representation".[/quote]
Right. Again, apparently eliding the distinction between the causal and epistemological dimensions sensory-perception.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
But what sort of thing is the impression supposed to be, if the error in judgment is already contained in it? I can stare at a mirage for hours, and change my mind a thousand times while it remains the same mirage. It looks the same, the world appears to me in the same way, while I cycle through various judgments on the basis of that one appearance. The appearance doesn't tell me how to judge, and I don't tell it how to appear. The judging is up to me, and the appearing is up to the appearance, though I can turn my head and get past it.[/quote]
Yep.
[quote=Cabbage Farmer]
Along these lines, I make a three-part epistemological distinction: In the first place there is the fact of the matter, the way things are in the world in fact. In the second place there is the appearance, the fact of how things appear to me (e.g., how things "look to me"). In the third place there is the seeming, the fact of how I take things in fact to be, in part on the basis of appearances. In making active judgments about how things seem, in part on the basis of appearances, I change the seeming, but not the appearances. Normally I don't need to make such judgments in order for things to seem to me one way or another; ordinarily I resort to such judging only when salient features of my experience seem uncertain, confused, or otherwise inadequate to form the basis of a reasonable judgment I have some interest in making. The judgment amends or completes or suspends the seeming.[/quote]
I’m turning into a broken record here, but again we seem to confront this ambiguity in the word “fact”. When we use the word “fact” are we referring to something that is propositionally structured? Or to ask the same question in a different way, are we referring to something that could serve as justification for our beliefs? Or are we referring to non-propositionally structured states of the world – that is, things that could cause our beliefs but not justify them?