Reading Notes: April 8th, 2022

“Let us remind ourselves how psychologists do set to work to deal with “experience”—with sensations, our feelings, and so on; and what sorts of discoveries they make about them. Consider sensation. What s psychologist does is to take a Mr. X and use him as a subject in a laboratory. He might use Mr. X as a subject by, for example, subjecting him to the important classes of stimuli that are likely to affect X’s sense organs—viz. mechanical, thermal, acoustic, chemical and photic stimuli. In this way he will discover from X’s responses and discriminations whether X’s sensitivity is normal or not—whether, for instance, X is color blind or not, or has abnormally acute acoustic sensitivity, and so on. Or he might vary the stimuli in respect of their quality, intensity, extension or duration in order to discover whether X’s responses show corresponding variations….In experimenting on X as subject, it is not necessary for the psychologist to make X talk to him. In principle, everything he wants to know can be discovered by making X behave like a dog and depress keys or open lids or perform some such motor response that shows the psychologist he has made the discrimination in question. Just as we can discover that a dog can distinguish between red and green colours by successfully training the dog to distinguish that the red light over a door means it is open, whereas the green light means it is shut, so the psychologist can in principle discover that X is or is not colour blind, can or can not react to this or that variation in the stimulus and so on. But of course, it is ever so much more convenient, and indeed very often necessary at present with our limited techniques, to ask X to report what he does see. Provided that these reports are of the very simple Yes-No variety, and the psychologist has good reason to believe that X is cooperating with him, there is no methodological objection whatever for not using X’s verbal reports….Quite often [the psychologist] places himself in the role of the subject. For laboratory purposes it is often convenient for him to play the role of X….What is important to note is that by playing the role of observer-subject, [the psychologist] does not add anything to the discoveries of psychological science that he could not in principle obtain from the observation of X alone; and no new concepts are required to deal with what his own subject-observation reveals which are not also required by what was, or can be, revealed by his observation of X.” (Farrell, Experience, 172-173) 

“This, then, though very roughly, is how contemporary psychologists go to work. They investigate remembering, learning and thinking, feelings, attitudes and traits, temperament and personality in the same sort of way as they investigate sensations. But this seems to psychologists an awkward and ridiculous situation. For it means that the science of psychology does not deal with “experience” either. Thus, in describing how subject X reacted to different types of stimuli, it is clear that we were not dealing with X’s sensations at all, but with his behavior; and the discoveries that psychology claims to have made about “sensation” have not been about “sensation” at all, but about the sensitivity of organisms to physical stimuli. To describe all this work as being about “sensation” is just false. This situation is awkward because it means that we are no nearer dealing with the facts of experience, which brain-physiology leaves out; and so no nearer providing a scientific account of it, which could supplement the account given by physiology, and thereby provide a reasonably complete picture of what happens when we have a sensation, or feel, etc.…What psychologists feel the science should somehow also include is, for example, the sensation-quality that X undoubtedly experiences when, rat-like, he discriminates a red disc; and the mental state he is in when he thinks, and not merely his behaviour; and (to quote Stout) the “unique kind of feeling-attitude towards an object” which we experience when we are in some emotional state, not merely the readiness and dispositions we exhibit towards the object of our emotion. Moreover, psychology should also aim at giving us the laws governing these sensation qualities, emotional states, and so forth. But all this is just what contemporary psychology does not include and do. The fact that the subject X and the psychologist himself both have sensations, and so forth, is simply ignored.” (Farrell, Experience, 173) 

“No doubt all this sounds stale and naïve to puzzle-wise professional philosophers. But to date we cannot flatter ourselves that we have done much to help the psychologists, poor animals, out of their maze. Like the physiologists, the ordinary working psychologist would be quite pleased in a way to get rid of sensations, feelings, etc., as items of experience, and deal solely with reactions, discrimination, behaviour-readiness, and so on. But he cannot bring himself to do so. For he sees himself faced by the old unpalatable alternative. To get rid of “experience” can only be done by denying that we have sensations, etc., or by refusing to bother with them. But to assert that we do not have sensations, or that no experiences occur, is to assert what is palpable false; and to refuse to bother with them is to leave out certain phenomena, or aspects of phenomena, that psychologists are supposed to investigate.” (Farrell, Experience, 174) 

“It is sometimes said that idealism is predicated on a confusion of objects with our knowledge of them and conflates the real with our thought about it. But this charge misses the point. The only reality with which we inquirers can have any cognitive commerce is reality as we conceive it to be. Our only information about reality is via the operations of mind—our only cognitive access to reality is through the mediation of mind-devised models of it. Perhaps the most common objection to idealism turns on the supposed mind-independence of the real. “Surely,” so runs the objection, “things in nature would remain substantially unchanged if there were no minds.” This is perfectly plausible in one sense, namely the causal one…but it is certainly not true conceptually. The objection’s exponent has to face the question of specifying just exactly what it is that would remain the same. “Surely roses would smell just as sweet in a mind-denuded world!” Well…yes and no. Agreed; the absence of minds would not change roses. But roses and rose-fragrance and sweetness—and even the size of roses—are all factors whose determination hinges on such mental operations as smelling, scanning, measuring, and the like. Mind-requiring processes are required for something in the world to be discriminated as being a rose and determined as being the bearer of certain features. Identification, classification, property attribution are all required and by their very nature are all mental operations….But the fact remains that nothing could be discriminated or characterized as a rose in context where the prospect of performing suitable mental operations (measuring, smelling, etc.) is not supposed.” (Rescher, A Companion to Epistemology, 427) 

“Conceptual Idealism: Reality is to be understood in terms of the category of mind: Our knowledge of the real is grasped in not merely mind-supplied but indeed even in to some extend mind-patterned terms of reference. Our knowledge of fact always reflects the circumstances of its being a human artifact. It is always formed through the use of mind-made and indeed mind-invoking conceptions and its contents inevitably bear the traces of its manmade origins. Whatever we have any knowledge of we know in terms of mind-construed terms of reference in whose conceptual content there is some reflection of its origin in operations characteristic of mind.” (Rescher, A Companion to Epistemology, 428) 

“Perhaps the strongest argument favouring idealism is that any characterization of the real that we can devise is bound to be a mind-constructed one: our only access to information about what the real is through the mediation of mind. What seems right about idealism is inherent in the fact that in investigating the real we are clearly constrained to use our own concepts to address our own issues; we can only learn about the real in our own terms of reference.” (Rescher, A Companion to Epistemology, 429) 

“Objection 4. The after-image is not in physical space. The brain-process is. So the after-image is not a brain process. Reply. This is an ignoratio elenchi. I am not arguing that the after-image is a brain-process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain process. It is the experience which is reported in the introspective report. Similarly, if it is objected that the after-image is yellowy-orange but that a surgeon looking into your brain would see nothing yellowy-orange, my reply is that it is the experience of seeing yellowy-orange that is being described, and this experience is not a yellowy-orange something. So to say that a brain-process cannot in fact be the experience of having a yellowy-orange after-image. There is, in a sense, no such thing as an after-image or a sense-datum, though there is such a thing as the experience of having an image, and this experience is described indirectly in material object language. We describe the experience by saying, in effect, that it is like the experience we have when, for example, we really see a yellowy-orange patch on the wall. Trees and wallpaper can be green, but not the experience of seeing or imagining a tree or wallpaper.” (Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes, 150-151) 

“All that I am saying is that “experience” and “brain-process” may in fact refer to the same thing….” (Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes, 151-152)

“If it is asked what is the difference between those brain processes which, in my view, are experiences and those brain processes which are not, I can only reply that this is at present unknown.” (Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes, 154) 

“For there is no conceivable experiment which could decide between materialism and epiphenomenalism.” (Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes, 155)