“All [ecological theories of perception] are subject to a major liability. All of them, following Gibson, draw a distinction between direct and indirect perception, and hold that our perception of the ecological environment in normal cases is direct. This as we shall see is a distinction that rests upon a submerged and implausible theory. As that distinction and its coordinate theory sink so will the ecological views based upon it….At the beginning of Chapter 9 of The Ecological Approach Gibson draws a distinction of a highly theoretical sort, between perceiving directly and perceiving indirectly (or mediately). Here is how he characterizes the difference: “Direct perception is what one gets from seeing Niagara Falls, say, as distinguished from seeing a picture of it. The latter kind of perception is mediated. So, when I assert that perception of the environment is direct, I mean that it is not mediated by retinal pictures, neural pictures, or mental pictures. Direct perception is that activity of getting information from the ambient array of light. I call this a process of information pickup that involves the exploratory activity of looking around, getting around, and looking at things. This is quite different from the supposed activity of getting information from the inputs of the optic nerves, whatever they may prove to be.” What lies behind these remarks, surprisingly, is a classical philosophical theory, a variant of traditional Cartesianism.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 203-205)
“I say [that Gibson’s] remarks are surprising because Gibson presents his theory as anti-Cartesian, as a theory of information extraction or “pickup.” He argues that from different sorts of perceived objects we extract different amounts of information about the world. From Niagara Falls itself we extract more information than from a photograph of it. This is so because the difference in the amount of information picked up is partly a function of the exploratory activities a person normally engages in. One can move his or her location with respect to Niagara Falls, and thus see it from different perspectives; one can wait and watch the flow of water change, and so on. But we cannot see such a change in a photograph. There are still other differences involving color, size, smell, and so forth. To be sure, the photograph will give us some information about the Falls, but less than seeing the object itself. When the information picked up is restricted, Gibson says that we see the object indirectly. And in contrast, when the object itself is seen, and one is maximizing the information flow, in his parlance one is seeing the object “directly.” Yet despite the apparent innocuousness of this account, I will argue that the Cartesian model has its grip here. Descartes drew a distinction between “internal” mental events (so-called “ideas” or “sense-data”) that we apprehended by a person directly, and so-called “external” events (extended physical objects) that were apprehended indirectly though the intermediation of these mental events. The Cartesian thesis thus holds that our ideas (sense-data, impressions, etc.) are the direct sources of whatever information we have about the external world and that the nature of the world or its constituents must be inferred from those directly apprehended sources.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 205-206)
“In the twentieth century, Cartesianism takes a wide range of forms. Most cognitive scientists hold that our perception of the external environment is mediated by mental representations, which are the last events in a causal chain beginning at the external object and terminating in the brain. At this point the Cartesian story takes two different forms. On one version, it is having the representation that constitutes seeing; on the other, it is the mental representation that is seen. On both versions it is the external object that is seen indirectly.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 206)
“According to…Gibson’s information theory, a photography of Niagara Falls is a representation of the Falls, though of course, it is not a mental representation or mental image. Yet, paradoxically enough, his view is in some ways like Moore’s. If all one can see of an opaque, spherical object, say, from a given standpoint at a given moment, is its facing surface, then it follows that at that moment one has to be seeing the object indirectly, since some information about the object will always be lacking (about its reverse surface, interior, etc.). Directness and indirectness thus seem to be matters of degree (degrees of information extraction) on Gibson’s view. A drawing of the Virgin Mary will be less direct than a naturalistic portrait of George Bush, and that will be less direct than seeing George Bush in person. But presumably seeing the facing surface of George Bush will also be less direct than seeing his whole surface, and that will be less direct than seeing Bush himself (whatever this might mean). One can of course see the whole surface of certain objects (say a putting green or a tennis court) in a single act of perception, so the contrasting between seeing all and part of the surface of something is a sensible one. But for Gibson the latter would be less direct than the former since it conveys less information about the object having the surface. But if that is a consequence of Gibson’s theory it is not dissimilar to Moore’s, which is a specimen of Cartesianism.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 207)
“Instead of challenging the whole [Cartesian] model which discriminates between seeing directly and seeing indirectly, Gibson is playing on the Cartesian turf by adopting the direct-indirect distinction, only he has turned it on its head. For him it is the external thing, like Niagara Falls, that is apprehended directly and the representation, the picture, that is apprehended mediately. But the direct-indirect model is clearly playing a fundamental role in his theory….So then what is wrong with any form of Cartesianism? Its defect can be identified when we note that according to the theory we cannot see the same thing directly under some conditions and indirectly under others. We can only see our sense-data or representations directly; we can only see external objects indirectly. But these are different objects. Suppose we try to see a mental representation indirectly or a physical object directly: how are we to proceed? Shall we squint when looking at the mental representation? Shall we look harder when we look at the physical object? But neither activity will allow us to contravene the theory. Clearly, the theory makes it impossible to do so, no matter what we do. In order to see something indirectly, the object will have to be a different sort of object from that which we see directly: not a mental representation or a sense-datum, but a physical object, And, conversely, to see something directly will entail that what is seen cannot be a physical object.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 207-208)
“That Gibson has bought the Cartesian model is evidenced by his saying that we must look at a picture or an image, namely an object that is different from Niagara Falls if we are to see Niagara Falls indirectly. If we are actually looking at Niagara Falls (i.e., standing at a locus on the American-Canadian border) we cannot be seeing Niagara Falls indirectly. But if we look at a photograph of Niagara Falls then we are not (no matter what we do) seeing Niagara Falls directly. But still, one might ask, so what? Isn’t Gibson just correct? Aren’t we seeing Niagara Falls via the picture and hence indirectly? Here again the answer is “no,” and for this reason. In the normal use of contrasting terms, the terms apply to the same object. Thus, I can scratch this table accidentally or intentionally; I can pick up that book willingly or unwillingly. I can see that tree distinctly or indistinctly. In each case it is the same object to which the contrasting predicates apply. But somehow, I cannot do this with “directly” and “indirectly” as Gibson uses those terms. But why can’t I? Why must the terms apply to different objects: to pictures versus the real thing? The answer is that Gibson is committing a logical fallacy—a subtle one to be sure, but this is where his error lies.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 208)
“The fallacy consists in his presupposing that in the cases of looking at a picture of Niagara Falls and looking at Niagara Falls itself we are in both cases seeing Niagara Falls itself and it is only the mode of seeing that differs. That is what is entailed by his remark: “Direct perception is what one gets from seeing Niagara Falls, say, as distinguished from seeing a picture of it.” He thinks these cases are analogous to seeing the same tree distinctly at one time, indistinctly at another. That is, Gibson is presupposing that when we look at a picture of Niagara Falls we are perceiving Niagara Falls all right, but in a special way which he calls “mediately.” But he is wrong. For when we see a picture of Niagara Falls we are not seeing Niagara Falls at all. There is an equivocation in his account that makes it seem as if in both cases we are really seeing Niagara Falls—only, as it were, in different ways: indirectly or directly.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 209)
“This equivocation is papered over by his appeal to the degree of information extracted from the objects we are perceiving. But one is not literally seeing Niagara Falls when one sees a picture of Niagara Falls. For Niagara Falls is composed of water whereas the perceived object in the photograph is composed of paper and ink and hence the two objects are not identical. There is, of course, a sense in which it is true to say when one is looking at a picture of Niagara Falls that one is seeing Niagara Falls. But this use of “see” is elliptical for “seeing a picture of.” So one seeing a television film on the Roosevelt Administration might say in that elliptical sense, “I saw President Roosevelt today.’ Bit that would be short for “I saw President Roosevelt on TV today,” or some such idiom. If one had actually seen President Roosevelt today, i.e. on some date in 1991, that would entail that Roosevelt was alive in 1991, which, of course, is not so. The object on the TV screen is composed of black and white dots, but Roosevelt was not; therefore the object on the screen cannot be identical with Roosevelt. So one who says that I saw Niagara Falls today is implying that he or she was actually standing at a site on the Canadian-American border today. One can look at a picture of Niagara Falls without being at a particular place on the Canadian-American border, and is therefore on that occasion not seeing Niagara Falls in some special way, such as indirectly. Rather, one is not seeing Niagara Falls at all in that case. What one is seeing is a picture of Niagara Falls. One is thus seeing two different objects in the scenarios that Gibson gives us…The upshot is that no form of Cartesianism will accommodate the facts of perception….Hence, any ecological theory [of perception] that incorporates the Cartesian model must be rejected. So far as I know, all of them do.” (Stroll, Reflections on Surfaces, 209-210)
“That every object of knowledge presupposes a self that knows it is almost a truism which is as clear as it is innocent. Yet this apparently innocent position has latent in it one of the most baffling paradoxes with which thought has ever been confronted. What is the self that is presupposed by every object? How is the knower known? If every object presupposes a self that knows it, should not there be another knower for knowing the first self?” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 5)
“A present fact, a past event, an idea, an instinct, the psychological complexes, the physiological glands,—these are all intelligible objects; if any of them had been unintelligible, it would have been as good as nothing for us, and the assertion of its existence would have no meaning. Now, the most universal conditions of intelligibility are just those laws of thought, the validity of which is re-asserted in every attempt to deny their universal application. Though, however, they are primarily laws of thought, insofar as thought cannot rest content with anything that contradicts itself, these laws are at the same time the universal features of things, inasmuch as every conceivable thing must be a self-consistent unity, on pain of reducing itself to nothing….The unity of a thing, however, implies not only self-consistency, but also determinateness; that is, it must be a determinate something. Determination, again, involves in turn, relations to things other than itself, and it is through these inter-objective relations—generally called categories—that all objects of thought receive mutual definiteness and clarification. There is, however, a deeper condition of objectivity than even the relational categories….[N]othing is intelligible which does not exist for a self. Even if it be granted that the world of things exists independently of knowledge, the things must have at least the possibility of entering into the knowledge-relation; and, as within knowledge, they exist as objects for a subject or self. In this sense, nothing on which we can hold intelligible discourse can exist except in relation to the self that is implied in the knowledge-situation.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 7-8)
“Existence-for-self, therefore, is the sine qua non of all things, and there is an important sense in which it is a deeper condition of objectivity than the categories. The [categories], though presupposed by every object of thought, can themselves be made objects of reflection…and insofar as they become objects, the categories themselves presuppose the self as much as the things which they condition. Thus, the self is the deepest of the transcendental conditions of objectivity, and is presupposed by, and consequently overreaches, all distinctions between form and matter, reality and appearance, man and God, spirit and matter, and so on.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 8)
“The conception of knowledge as a property of a particular class of things—in what Alexander has aptly called, the democracy of the universe—is indissolubly connected with the conception of the cognitive relation as a relation between two determinate entities, one being distinguished from the other by its peculiar attribute or quality. When this mechanical notion is uncritically accepted, the result is behaviorism, vitalism, pragmatism, voluntarism, or some other so-far nameless theories which may identify the self with mind, attention, reason or intellect….[This conception of knowledge] has the advantage of effectively disguising the real difficulties of self-consciousness, for then we may be said to know the self in the same way as we know, say, a chair or a table. But the price of the easy victory has always to be paid dearly. For, the mechanical theory has implicit in it the awkward regressus ad infinitum which comes to the surface as soon as the real question is rightly put. When A knows B, each of which has its peculiar property, they must first be distinguished by a self which on that very account cannot be identified with one of the distincts. This latter self, again, being itself a distinct entity, must require another self, for which it exists, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, the birth of an indefinite number of selves or an infinite series of anuvyavasāyas has been rightly considered as one of the unanswerable objections to the mechanical theory of knowledge. It might almost be called the hard rock on which every such theory must ultimately be wrecked.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 11-12)
“The reason, however, why even an accomplished thinker has to succumb to the simplicity of the mechanical theory of knowledge is that while offering an analysis of knowledge he unwittingly drops himself out of sight and so fails to recognize the unique relation in which he himself stands to the entities which, according to him, are present in the knowledge situation as a whole. When, for instance, knowledge is reduced to a peculiar characteristic of the total process from stimulus to reaction, or when the self is described as the causal nexus among a series of events, it is entirely forgotten that the stimulus, the reaction or the events, are intelligible only insofar as his own relation to them is not reducible to any of the relations that may obtain between the stimulus and the reaction, and insofar as he himself is not the causal nexus of events. All these things are intelligible entities for him, because they conform to the general conditions of objectivity, and because his own relation to them is different from any inter-objective relation….Self-consistency is the first condition of conceivability, and every conceivable object, therefore, must a self-consistent unity. But the relation of the object A, for instance, to the law of consistency, is certainly not identical with the relation of A to B. Unity is the basis, the very life-blood, of both A and B, as of every other determinate thing. Consequently, the law which is the common basis of A as well as B is related to them in a way entirely different from that in which A is related to B. The former, in fact, is the unique relation of the universal to the particular, as distinct from any relation between two particulars. Hence, the…reduction of knowledge to the relation of compresence between the mental acts and the objects is bound to be inadequate in the long run…simply because [the universal] is not known in the same way as the particular.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 13-14)
“The self being the deepest of the conditions of objectivity, the surest way of missing it is to look for it in the wrong direction.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 15)
“Existence-for-self, as already urged, is the highest form of objective existence, nothing can exist for me which I cannot conceive as existing. In this sense, idea and image, reflex-arc and libido, tree and table, quite as much as space and time, unity and causality, ends and means, phenomenon and noumenon, must all exist for the self, which on that very account is the center of the universe.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 16)
“Post-Kantian Idealism has, thus, sought to solve the ego-centric paradox in a way entirely different from that of empiricism and realism, and the idealistic solution to the paradox stands to this day as the most satisfactory account of self-knowledge….[A] number of permanent contributions [idealism] has made to the understanding of the place of the self in knowledge…consist mainly in showing that the self is not a substance having knowledge as a property, that knowledge cannot be understood in terms of something other than itself, that all distinctions are within knowledge, that the subject-object relation is unique and is the presupposition of all other relations between objects and objects.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 17)
“The self, according to the transcendentalist, exists as one self only as it opposes itself as object, to itself as subject, and yet transcends that opposition. In this sense, the self is a concrete unity, a dual unity, or a restored unity, or, again, a transparent identity-in-difference. And the puzzle of self-consciousness, it is held, is due to our tendency to separate identity from difference. Now, the question that we venture to raise at this place is whether this is a real solution of the ego-centric paradox. That unity-in-difference is the highest form to which every conceivable object of thought must conform may be true, but this by itself does not show that the subject for which such a form exists is itself a unity-in-difference; in other words, even the distinction between form and matter presupposes the subject which, therefore, cannot be identified with one of the distincts. To do so would be to contradict the principle that the self is the presupposition of all objects of thought or that all distinctions are within knowledge. Again, even supposing that the self is a unity-in-difference, it flatly contradicts the assertion that the subject is not a substance, for, such a self has at least the property of being a dual unity as distinct from an undifferentiated or unrestored unity and so far, it is analogous to the stone, though the latter has another distinguishing attribute, namely, weight. The fact is that nothing which exists by opposing itself to something other than itself can be identified with the central ego for which exist all opposites and all distincts, and which, therefore, is not to be confused with one of them.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 18-19)
“It need not, however, be denied that there is a sense in which self-consciousness is a mediated unity, that is, the consciousness of the self and that of the not-self are correlative with each other, insofar as it is only in relation to the object determined as the not-self that I am conscious of myself. But our contention is that when the self is thus determined in relation to the not-self, it is just one thing among other things and not the central self for which exist all things and all distinctions between things.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 19-20)
“[E]xperience [is not] a relation between two determinate entities, one of which is the subject. Such an assumption must spell disaster to every theory of self.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 59)
“For, the question remains how, if experience always involves a subject-object relation, it is possible to experience the subject without turning it into an object. There can be no experience without a subject—this is the cornerstone of Ward’s analysis of experience, and it follows from this that the subject, to be experienced, must have another subject, and so on ad infinitum. The fact is that these difficulties are insurmountable as long as the subject-object relation is regarded as a relation between two things…” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 65)
“The psychological theories…have been under the influence of a sort of error which may be called, after Kant, a transcendental illusion. This illusion we have seen to have its origin in the difficulty of overcoming our inveterate habit of conceiving the subject-object relation on the analogy of inter-objective relations, and thus forgetting that every relation between one object and another must necessarily imply their relation to a subject, and hence the latter relation is not on the same footing as the former. Under the influence of this habit, the subject has inevitably come to be conceived as a thing and knowledge as an attribute.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 67-68)
“In insisting on the impossibility of subsuming the subject of knowledge under those formal conceptions of which it is the source, in repudiating the notion of knowledge as a quality of a particular substance, in showing the self-refutation of every attempt to represent knowledge in terms of something other than itself—[T.H. Green] has laid the foundation of an epistemological analysis which may truly be called the prolegomena to every system of sound metaphysics….Nature, according to his analysis, presupposes a unity of consciousness which is the source of those conceptions through which the world of facts exists. This consciousness or principle of unity is the ultimate condition which explains the possibility of that mutual relations or determination without which knowledge of objects would be unrealized and unrealizable. For that very reason, however, the ultimate principle of unity cannot be one of the related facts….Now, whether this ego should be called an empty form or not depends upon the extent to which we have succeeded in avoiding the confusion of the principle of unity involved in all knowledge with one of the knowable objects, or, what is the same thing in a different language, the confusion of the subject-object relation with an inter-objective relation.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 71-78)
“[G]ranting that mediated self-consciousness is a restored unity, is a return of the self upon itself, do the conditions of this mediated self-consciousness remove the puzzles as they are seen by those who distinguish between this type of self-consciousness and that self which is the ultimate principle of all knowledge and experience? The answer will clearly depend upon the meaning of self. If the self can be shown to be real only insofar as it returns upon itself, then, of course, there is no room for any serious difficulty in accounting for self-consciousness. The self, in this sense, may well be called a dual-unity, or a unity-in-duality, and it may perhaps also be said with some amount of truth that it is in the return of the self upon itself that “the ego, strictly speaking, comes into existence,” and that “only that being is truly to be called an I which calls itself so.” But can we identify this self with the ultimate unity presupposed in experience? As an account of the development of self-consciousness from the stage of an “undifferentiated unity” to that of a “dual-unity,” this idealistic theory may be true. But can it identify the developing self with the subject without committing itself to a view of the self which is pre-Kantian? Evidently, all talks of development and grown are intelligible only in respect of a thing which is in time, and is subject to the categories through which alone any object exists for us. And it follows from this that the self that develops from consciousness to self-consciousness must be under those very conditions of space, time, and categories which are the conditions of objectivity. This self, therefore, cannot be the subject in the true sense of the term.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 87-88)
“All distinctions are within knowledge, and so A and B as objects on which we can hold intelligible discourses must fall both within knowledge, irrespective of the nature of the relation obtaining between them. A, for instance, may be either the cause or the effect, the antecedent or the consequent, the ends or means, the substance or attribute, in relation to B. But all these multifarious relations which are but the different ways of determining A and B must ultimately fall within the subject-object relation, or, which is the same thing in another language, must fall within knowledge. A subject, therefore, that can be regarded as an object, or a self that is derived from something other than itself, is an entirely inconceivable and self-contradictory notion, whatever may be the ultra-logical grounds on which its claims to a respectful hearing be justified.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 93-94)
“A thing apart from its relations with other things is incomprehensible and unintelligible, and it is through the relations alone that the things get those mutual determinations which are indispensable for the existence of everything on which we can make intelligible assertions….Two objects, such as father and son, husband and wife, are in correlativity with each other, so that there is a sense in which one cannot exist without its relation to the other. More precisely, as every object receives its determination from the relation in which it stands to other objects, it cannot exist in the absence of the latter. A thing, in other words, owes its being to the relations—spatial, temporal, causal, etc.—in which it stands to other things, so that to take away all the relations from a thing is to reduce it to a pure nothing.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 97-100)
“All that is thinkable or knowable…presupposes the thinking ego. So, the world of intelligible reality must presuppose the ego for which it exists, or, in other words, the world is an existence-for-self. But if this be recognized, then the self for which the world has a meaning cannot itself be regarded as forming an element within the world….[F]rom the doctrine that every object must exist for a subject it does not follow that the subject itself must be an object; or, what is the same thing in different words, from the truth that the world of objects has no meaning apart from its relation to the subject, it does not follow that the subject must somewhere be in the world. This would make the presupposition of the world itself a part of the world. And the position remains essentially unaltered, if we were to substitute for the world in space and time the term universe which includes a number of other worlds than the spatio-temporal world. Because, in that case, even the universe must be supposed to exist for the self, on pain of being reduced to nothing.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 111-112)
“The most important and far-reaching of Sankara’s contentions is to be found in what may be called the foundational character of knowledge or consciousness. It ought to be accepted as a universal rule, he insists, that there can be no object of knowledge without knowledge. None can prove something that is not known, and the attempt to prove it would be as absurd as to maintain that there is no eye though the form is apprehended. The objects may change their essence, but consciousness cannot be said to change inasmuch as it witnesses all objects irrespective of the place where they may happen to be; the fact-of-being-known is thus implied by all objects without exception. Even when something is supposed to be non-existent, this very non-existence cannot be proved in the absence of knowledge. The second feature of the Advaita analysis of consciousness lies in its insistence that consciousness is always distinct from the object of consciousness. The things, therefore, should on no account be identified with the consciousness which makes them its objects. From this follow two corollaries, namely that consciousness cannot be its own object, and that every object of consciousness is unconscious or material….In fact, the development of post-Kantian idealism bears eloquent testimony to the vitality of the Advaita position, and the former may in this respect be regarded as an elaborate exposition and ramification of the latter. Consciousness, when regarded in this light, is the ultimate principle of revelation for which alone the world of objects has a meaning, it is not a relation between two elements, on the contrary, it is the light which manifests all objects and all relations between objects.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 118-120)
“To put it in the language of modern idealism, existence-for-self is the highest category to which must conform all objects. Matter, mind, electron, proton, etc., have meaning for us only insofar as they stand in relation to the conscious self whose reality, therefore, has to be presupposed by every intelligible entity. In this sense, consciousness is the prior principle or the foundational fact which cannot be reduced to something other than itself except through a confusion of thought….[E]ven if it could be admitted that matter and motion had an existence in themselves, it would still not be by such matter and motion, but by the matter and motion which is known, that the function of the soul can be explained by materialists. [Footnote: Prof. R.B. Perry does not appear to us to have done full justice to the doctrine of the priority of consciousness…in his admirable book, Present Philosophical Tendencies…To limit things to what can be experienced may be groundless and misleading (Ibid, p. 316), the things may not require any home, yet the independent reality, call it a thing, or a neutral entity, could not be revealed to us and so could not be used in explanation of anything if it had not been known at all.].” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 122-123)
“The only philosopher whose nihilistic perfection approaches the radical skepticism of the Indian Buddhists is F.H. Bradley, who has so far been rightly characterized as “a genuine Madhyamika” by F.TH. Stcherbatsky in his Nirvana, p. 52. But the difference between these positions is at least as great as their similarity. Bradley, in spite of his condemnation of the self and self-consciousness as mere appearances, is anxious to find a home for them in the life of the Absolute, though they have to undergo transformation and transmutation before they can enter it. Moreover, the self, for him, though not a true form of experience, is the highest form of experience which we have (Appearance and Reality, p. 103). For Nagarjuna, on the other hand, the self is as unreal as the son of a barren woman, and, consequently, has no place in Reality.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 124)
“The most fundamental point in the contemporary attempts at denying the reality of consciousness lies in their unanimous rejection of the idealistic procedure of assigning a supreme place to consciousness and knowledge. Things, it is urged, are not only independent of knowledge, but knowledge is nothing more than a specific type of relation into which the things enter under various certain conditions. These things are no doubt variously named in the various theories, but the central contention remains identical in all of them, namely, that there is no consciousness outside or apart from the things and their relation. The internal paradox of the contemporary theories of consciousness may be best exposed by enquiring whether the elements, the neutral events, or the bits of “pure experience” into which consciousness is reduced are themselves unknown or known. The former alternative would evidently render them undistinguishable from pure nothing or mere naught, and, as such, they must repel all predicates. And in that case, they cannot be brought in for explaining anything. The only alternative, therefore, would be to admit that they are objects of knowledge and, as such, presuppose the reality of knowledge or consciousness. The skepticism of Descartes, as it is well known, was arrested by the cogito, and it is this very fact which is denied here. When I doubt, I cannot doubt that I doubt, and as doubting is a mode of consciousness, it would be paradoxical to doubt, and more so to deny, the reality of consciousness. It is this fact which, as we have seen above, is emphasized by the epistemological priority of consciousness. All objects, no matter what they are in detail, are, insofar as they are appealed to in explanation of something, known objects, and must have their prius in “I think,” “I know,” or “I am consciousness.” They are, as put by Suresvara with his characteristic terseness, atmapurvaka.” (Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 126-128)
“Representationalism: The view that phenomenal characters somehow reduce to representational properties….A state has a representational property when…it has a meaning or somehow stands in, in some process, for something else, such as an object, or a “proposition”—a putative fact. Paradigmatic mental representational states are beliefs: one who believes that snow is green is in a state which means that snow is green, and which stands in for the putative fact that snow is green in a subject’s reasoning….Standard philosophical theories consequently take representational states to involve a relation between a subject and a “content”—what is meant—via an attitude or the relation borne to that meaning…A representational property of a representational state may thus be characterized as a pair composed of an attitude and a content. Representational states have correctness, or satisfaction conditions, partly determined by the correctness conditions for their contents. A proposition is correct just in the case it is true….A mental state has a representational property just in case it has a meaning of “content,” or is about something. So for instance, if one considers how things would be were snow green, one’s consideration is about snow’s being green. Mental states with meanings always involve bearing a certain attitude toward the meaning: so for instance, considering how things would be were snow green is different from believing that snow is green, even though what the two state are about is the same. A representational property may thus be viewed as a pair consisting of a content and an attitude.” (Hellie, Consciousness and Representationalism, 1-17)
“In Mental Acts Geach first argues against the view of Ryle that ascriptions of psychological events and activities are equivalent to semi-hypothetical statements about behavior. His objections include the observation that the attempt to distinguish between two individuals’ different mental states exhaustively in terms of different behavioural dispositions gets things back to front. We explain differences in behaviour by reference in part, but ineliminably, to mental acts and not by hypothetical differences in the agents concerned. Furthermore, where two subjects did not differ in behavior it is intelligible to suppose that they may yet have been in different mental states without having any view regarding the truth of different counterfactuals about what each would have done if things that did not happen had occurred. On this basis Geach maintains that at least some psychological ascriptions, those attributing mental acts and events, are categorical and not hypothetical in character.” (Haldane, Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul, 16-17)
“[Anscombe’s] argument against materialism begins with reflections on Wittgenstein’s remarks about the practice of identifying or drawing attention to some object or feature. Imagine someone doing so, and saying “look at this.” Nothing in the physical orientation of the body, even including the direction of the finger, serves to determine the content of the thought, including its formal object (whether substance, shape, colour, texture, location.). What makes it the case that a person had in mind the shape rather than the color, say, is not something passing through consciousness but the context, including what was said and done before and what follows later….[An] intentional action (expressive of, or manifesting, a mental state) cannot be identified with a physical movement, or…with movement plus some brain states…. (Haldane, Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul, 27)
“Physicalism is now almost orthodox in much philosophy…[Physicalism] lacks a clear and credible definition, and…in no non-vacuous interpretation is it true.” (Crane and Mellor, There is No Question of Physicalism, 185)
“We are concerned here only with physicalism as a doctrine about the empirical world….It says that mental entities, properties, relations and facts are all really physical….[P]hysicalism differs significantly from its materialist ancestors. In its seventeenth century form of mechanism, for instance, materialism was a metaphysical doctrine: it attempted to limit physics a priori by requiring matter to be solid, inert, impenetrable and conserved, and to interact deterministically and only on contact. But as it has subsequently developed, physics has shown this conception of matter to be wrong in almost every respect: the “matter” of modern physics is not all solid, or inert, or impenetrable, or conserved; and it interacts indeterministically and arguably sometimes at a distance. Faced with these discoveries, materialism’s modern descendants have—understandably—lost their metaphysical nerve. No longer trying to limit the matter of physics a priori, they now take a more subservient attitude: the empirical world, they claim, contains just what a true complete physical science would say it contains. But this raises two questions. What is physical science: that is, what sciences does it comprise? And what gives it this ontological authority? In other words, what entitles certain sciences to tell us in their own terms what the world contains—thereby entitling them to the physicalist’s honorific title “physical”? “Physical science” so construed certainly includes physics proper. Physics is the paradigm (hence “physical”). And chemistry, molecular biology and neurophysiology are also indisputably physical sciences. But not psychology, sociology, and economics. One may debate the exact boundary of physical science: but unless some human sciences, of which psychology will be our exemplar, lie beyond its pale, physicalism, as a doctrine about the mind, will be vacuous.” (Crane and Mellor, There is No Question of Physicalism, 185-186)
“What we know or seem to know in ordinary self-consciousness…is a concrete whole within which mind and body are only abstractly distinguishable as partial factors.” (Stout, Mind & Matter, 67)
“Externality cannot be an intrinsic property of anything….A definition of spatial magnitude, again, since geometrical space is infinitely divisible, reduces itself to a definition of spatial equality. For, given this last, we can always divide two unequal magnitudes into a number of equal parts, and count the number of such parts in each….Now, two spatial magnitudes, unless they are whole and part, are necessarily external to one another, and cannot, therefore, as they stand, be directly compared. For ” (Russell, The A Priori in Geometry, 99)
“You may name them as you please, if you do not prefer to ignore them altogether; you may call them the ghosts of the delusions of the vulgar, shamelessly walking in the daylight and shrouded in the phrases of a mystical jargon; but you cannot get rid of one simple fact, that they represent what to the unphilosophical mind is reality palpable as the noonday sun, and that your philosophy is impotent to explain them.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 33)
“On this important point it is simply impossible to state the vulgar belief too strongly. If I am not now the same man, the identical self that I was ; if the acts that I did are not the acts of the one and individual I which exists at this moment, then I cannot deserve to be punished for that which myself has not done. For imputation it is required that the acts, which were mine, now also are mine; and this is possible only on the supposition that the will, which is now, is the will which was then, so that the contents of the will, which were then, are the contents of the self-same will which is now existing. On this point again, repetitions are wearisome, and words are wasted; without personal identity responsibility is sheer nonsense ; and to the psychology of our Determinists personal identity (with identity in general) is a word without a vestige of meaning.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 33)
“I am far from denying that the I or the self is no more than “collective,” than a collection of sensations, and ideas, and emotions, and volitions, swept together with one another and after one another by “the laws of association”; though I confess that to a mind, which is but little “inductive,” and which cannot view the world wholly a posteriori, these things are very difficult even to picture, and altogether impossible in any way to understand. We can bring before the mind certain atoms in space; we can call them feelings, or ideas, or what we will; and we can say that we mean by the mind a given collection of these pictured atoms; and so far, we do well enough. But then comes our first trouble. We have imaged to ourselves a collection of points in space, and that means we see the collection itself, as covering a given area, with other spaces and collections outside of it. Are we to say that the mind is in space? “Oh, no!” we shall be told; “for that is to talk about things in themselves: our knowledge is relative, which means that we must confine ourselves to our given collection; the question is unanswerable, because unintelligible.” And so, by talking ourselves about “things in themselves”, we change, so to speak, a subject of conversation which was beginning to be slightly improper, and continue, as before, to picture the mind as a collection in space of material points; or if time be spoken of, we have but, as it were, to give a turn to our kaleidoscope. And so far, still, we are doing pretty well.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 34)
“But still we must not be too confident. We forgot for the moment that the units of the collection are, each one separately, a state of the collection (they are “states of mind,” and the mind is “collective”), and we can see well enough that in a bag of marbles or a bunch of grapes, the states of the marbles affects the state of the bag, and the state of the grapes is the state of the bunch; but it is very hard to see why each marble is to be called a state of the bag of marbles, and each grape a state of the bunch of grapes, unless we suppose an “entity” inside the bag irresolvable into marbles, or an “entity” in the grapes of the bunch irresolvable into grapes. And that, as we know, has been exploded long ago. We feel that there are, and must be, some questions it is useless to ask; and if we use self-control, and abstain from asking them, we still, as before, can see things very well.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 34-35)
“But here, unfortunately, our troubles are not over: this collection is aware of itself; it talks about itself as if it were simple. And this is impossible to picture at all; and we here (I speak for myself, so far as I have tried) are reduced to despair; for we want to keep the collection steadily before us, and yet, as often as we have to imagine it aware of itself, our picture is at once in confusion, and we do not know what we have before us at all: all we are sure of is that it is not a collection, while we know all the time that it really is so; and we must comfort ourselves, I suppose, by saying that, so long as we remain “scientific,” such difficulties as these must not be made too much of. But when we hear collections affirming that they really are not collections, and saying that what is many is really at the same time one, and that what is complex is really at the same time simple, and that what is different is nonetheless identical; and declaring that all this is contained in that which they call themselves, and which they say it is impossible for them to doubt of, because existence, for them, implies the thinking so—then we know with whom we have to do. These collections are trying to be “entities” and “things in themselves” or perhaps even the Absolute; and that is the only reason they have for saying these things, which cannot be true, because, if they were, what we say would be false. This matter Hume—whom we have our reasons for not talking about, but keep, as it were, in reserve—has settled, and settled forever. Such beliefs are nothing but fictions of the mind, and the mind itself is a fiction of the mind.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 34-35)
“Let us take an illustration. We have all seen onions on a rope. Now each of these onions is not any other onion—it may be taken by itself, as a separate individual; and yet each of these onions is a state of the rope of onions. And further, this rope of onions is aware of itself—it talks about itself and generally comports itself as if it were inseparable, and, no doubt, it really is what it calls self-conscious. But here is the beginning of delusion; for, talking about “self,” we (i.e. the onions) falls into the belief that there is something there under the onions and the rope, and one looking we see there is nothing of the kind. But on looking we see even more than this; for the rope of the onions is a rope of straw, and that is, being interpreted, no rope at all, but the fiction of a rope. The onions keep together because of the laws of association of onions; and because of these laws it is, that the mutual juxtaposition of the onions engenders in them the belief in a rope, and that the consequent foolish ideas of a self, which we see in all their foolishness, when we perceive, first, that there is nothing but a rope, and then that the rope is nothing at all. The only thing which after all is hard to see is this, that we ourselves who apprehend the illusion, are ourselves the illusion which is apprehended by us; and perhaps, on the theory of “relativity,” in order to know a fiction you yourself must be the fiction you know; but it all is hard to understand, especially to a mind which is little “analytical” and, I begin to fear, not at all “inductive.” [Footnote: Mr. Bain collects that the mind is a collection. Has he ever thought who collects Mr. Bain?].” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 35-36)
“Reflection shows us that what we call freedom is both positive and negative. There are then two questions—What am I to be free to assert? What am I to be free from? And these are answered by the answer to one question—What is my true self?” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 52)
“[Let] us try to show that what we do do, is, perfectly or imperfectly, to realize ourselves, and that we cannot possibly do anything else; that all we can realize is (accident apart) our ends, or the objects we desire; and that all we can desire is, in a word, self. This, we think, will be readily admitted by our main psychological party. What we wish to avoid is that it should be admitted in a form which makes it unmeaning. We do not want the reader to say, “Oh yes, of course, relativity of knowledge,—everything is a state of consciousness,” and so dismiss the question. If the reader believes that a steam-engine, after it is made, is nothing but a state of the mind of the person or persons who have made it, or who are looking at it, we do not hold what we feel tempted to call such a silly doctrine; and would point out to those who do hold it that, at all events, the engine is a very different state of mind, after it is made, to what it was before. [Footnote: We may remark that the ordinary “philosophical” person, who talks about “relativity,” really does not seem to know what he is saying. He will tell you that “all” (or “all we know and can know,”—there is no practical difference between that and “all”) is relative to consciousness—not giving you to understand that he means thereby any consciousness beside his own, and ready, I should imagine, with his grin at the notion of a mind which is anything more than the mind of this or that man; and then, it may be a few pages further on or further back, will talk to you of the state of the earth before man existed on it. But we wish to know what in the world it all means; and would suggest, as a method of clearing the matter, the two questions—(1) Is my consciousness something that goes and is beyond myself; and if so, in what sense? and (2) Had I a father? What do I mean by that, and how do I reconcile my assertion of it with my answer to question (1)?].” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 60-61)
“Again, we do not want the reader to say, “Certainly, every object or end which I propose to myself is, as such, a mere state of my mind—it is a thought in my head, or a state of me; and so, when it becomes real, I become real”; because though it is very true that my thought, as my thought, cannot exist apart from me thinking it, and therefore my proposed end must, as such, be a state of me [Footnote: Let me remark in passing that it does not follow from this that it is nothing but a state of me, as this or that man]; yet this is not what we are driving at. All my ends are my thoughts, but all my thoughts are not my ends; and if what we meant by self-realization was, that I have in my head the idea of any future external event, then I should realize myself practically when I see that the engine is going to run off the line, and it does so. A desired object (as desired) is a thought, and my thought; but it is something more, and that something more is, in short, that it is desired by me. And we ought by right, before we go further, to exhibit a theory of desire; but, if we could do that, we could not stop to do it. However, we say with confidence that, in desire, what is desired must in call cases be self….For all objects or ends have been associated with our satisfaction, or (more correctly) have been felt in and as ourselves, or we have felt ourselves therein; and the only reason why they move us now is that, when they are presented to our minds as motives, we do now feel ourselves asserted or affirmed in them. The essence of desire for an object would thus be the feeling of our affirmation in the idea of something not ourself, felt against the feeling of ourself as, without the object, void and negated; and it is the tension of this relation which produces motion. If so, then nothing is desired except that which is identified with ourselves, and we can aim at nothing, except so far as we aim at ourselves in it.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 61-62)
“[If] the reader will follow me, I think I can show him that the mere finitude of the mind is a more difficult thesis to support than its infinity….The mind is not finite, just because it knows it is finite. “The knowledge of the limit suppresses the limit.” It is a flagrant self-contradiction that the finite should know its own finitude; and it is not hard to make this plain. Finite means limited form the outside and by the outside. The finite is to know itself as this, or not as finite. If its knowledge ceases to fall wholly within itself, then so far it is not finite. It knows that it is limited from the outside and by the outside, and that means it knows the outside. But if so, then it is so far not finite. If its whole being fell within itself, then, in known itself, it could not know that there was anything outside itself. [Mind] does do the latter; hence, the former supposition is false….To the above simple argument I fear we may not have done justice. However that be, I know of no answer to it; and until we find one, we must say that it is not true that the mind is finite.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 69-70)
“The finite was determined from the outside, so that everywhere to characterize and distinguish it was in fact to divide it. Wherever you defined anything you were at once carried beyond to something else and something else, and this because the negative, required for distinction, was an outside other. In the infinite you can distinguish without dividing; for this is a unity holding within itself subordinated factors which are negative of, and so distinguishable from, each other; while at the same time the whole is present in each, that each has its own being in its opposite, and depends on that relation for its own life. The negative is also its affirmation. Thus, the infinite has a distinction, and so a negation, in itself, but is distinct from and negated by nothing but itself. Far from being one something which is not another something, it is a whole in which both one and the other are mere elements. This whole is hence “relative” utterly and though and through, but the relation does not fall outside it; the relatives are moments in which it is the relation of itself to itself, and so is above the relation, and is absolute reality. The finite is relative to something else; the infinite is self-related. It is this sort of infinite which the mind is. The simplest symbol of it is the circle, the line which returns into itself, not the straight line produced indefinitely; and the readiest way to find it is to consider the satisfaction of desire. There we have myself and its opposite, and the return from the opposite, the finding in the other nothing but self.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 71)
“In his “Refutation of Idealism,” Moore held that the main contention of idealists was “esse est percipi,” and that the plausibility of this contention depended upon a failure to make a certain distinction….In the sensation of green, for example, we may distinguish what it has in common with other sensations, namely its being an act of awareness, from what distinguishes it from others, namely the green that is the object of this awareness. There is no doubt that the sensation, regarded as an act, is mental; but this has no tendency to show that the sensation, regarded as the object of the act, is likewise mental….Mr. Harris believes that Moore’s refutation is invalid. The chief argument he offers against it seems to be that it proves too much, since the same kind of confusion that is involved in taking about the sensation of green is involved in talking about green alone. Moore charged that when the idealist identified “blue exists” with “the sensation of blue exists”, he was contradicting himself, because he was either identifying the part with the whole—the object with object-plus-awareness—or identifying one part of this whole with the other—the object with the awareness of it. Now suppose that, following Moore, you mention that green exists independently. Within this existent green we can also distinguish two features, the existence that it has in common with other qualities, and what sets it off from these, the quality green. And when Moore says, in his own sense, “green exists”, he must be either identifying the part, or quality, with the whole—quality-plus-existence—or identifying one part with the other, quality with existence. In either case he is contradicting himself in the same fashion as he alleged Berkeley to have done.” (Blanshard, Nature, Mind, and Modern Science, 168-169)
“Speech, music, and every other sound one hears can be described by the pattern of amplitude at different frequencies. This pattern, which is called the sound’s spectrum, distinguishes one sound from others. In human speech, for example, the vowel in the word heat sounds different from the vowel in hat because amplitude peaks occur at different frequencies in the spectrum of the first vowel. Frequency analysis, described in this entry, refers to the ability to process different regions of the spectrum separately. This ability allows a person to discriminate two tones of different frequencies, but more importantly, it allows the locations of the amplitude peaks in the spectrum of any sound to be encoded and represented in the brain. Frequency analysis begins in the cochlea, where the spectrum of the acoustic signal is converted to a representation called a place code for frequency. The place code for frequency that is created in the cochlea is preserved as the signal is represented in the responses of neurons and processed in the brain. Throughout the auditory system, the representation of frequency by a neural place code is the predominant organizational principle.” (Sinex, Entry on “Auditory Frequency Selectivity” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, 158)
“Attention is the mechanism that allows us to select relevant information for processing from the vast amount of stimuli we are confronted with, prioritizing some while ignoring others. Attention can affect perception by altering performance—how well we perform on a given task—or by altering appearance—our subjective experience of a stimulus or object….There are two systems of covert attention: endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous attention refers to the voluntary, sustained directing of attention to a location in the visual field….Exogenous attention refers to the automatic, transient orienting of attention to a location in the visual field, brought about by a peripheral cue or a sudden abrupt onset of a stimulus at the location.” (Carrasco, Entry on “Attention’s Effect on Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, 90-91)
“Physiological research suggests that spatial attention is controlled by a network of brain areas that includes the frontal and parietal cortex, as well as subcortical areas. Neurons in most of these areas are organized into maps that represent locations in the environment. The level of neural activity at a given location in the map is thought to represent the physical salience and behavioral relevance of stimuli at the corresponding location in the environment. The cells on the map having the greatest activity correspond to the most important location in the environment, and the greatest amount of attention is directed to this location. The assumption is that these maps influence sensory processing by modulating the activity of sensory neurons….When attention is focused on a stimulus, sensory neurons encoding that stimulus tend to increase their firing rates, resulting in an amplification of the neural response to the attended stimulus….The amplification of neural responses to an attended stimulus can have important implications when multiple stimuli are present in the environment. For example, in the visual system, each sensory neuron responds to visual stimulation within a restricted region of the visual field, called its receptive field….A salience map is a topographical representation of external space that is laid out across the surface of a neural structure, such as the frontal eye field, posterior parietal areas, or superior colliculus. The activity of the neurons composing this map is affected by both the physical salience and the behavioral relevance of stimuli in the environment.” (McPeak, Entry on “Physiological Attention” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, 99-100)
“We experience the world around us, in all its sensory detail and complexity, directly—or at least so we believe. Yet a simple test reveals that our sense of direct experience may be misleading….Attention is the portal though which sensory information is selected for more detailed examination, classification, and registration….Sensory inputs arrive by stimulating sensory systems in the eye (or ear, or skin) that respond to specific patterns of light (or sound, or touch). Different cells in brain areas that process the sensory inputs respond to different patterns, and specific locations or objects often stimulate neurons in different locations in the brain. When you look at the visual world, sensory responses to the many stimuli across the visual field occur simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, in parallel. They constitute a “blooming, buzzing” collection of sensory inputs or representations. Selective attention picks out the relevant from the irrelevant, the focus from the background. Many theorists have argued that attention selects one thing (or perhaps a few things) at a time for processing. So, they felt, this implied the processing of visual inputs serially—one after the next in time in a series.” (Dosher and Lu, Entry on “Selective Attention” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, 101)
“The thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is put forward as a reasonable scientific hypothesis, not to be dismissed on logical grounds alone….It is suggested that we can identify consciousness with a given pattern of brain activity, if we can explain the subject’s introspective observations by reference to the brain processes with which they are correlated….[The] problem of providing a physiological explanation of introspective observations is made to seem more difficult than it really is by…the mistaken idea that descriptions of the appearances of things are descriptions of the actual state of affairs in a mysterious internal environment….The view that there exists a separate class of events, mental events, which cannot be described in terms of the concepts employed by the physical sciences no longer commands the universal and unquestioning acceptance amongst philosophers and psychologists which it once did. Modern physicalism, however, unlike the materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is behavioristic. Consciousness on this view is either a special type of behaviour….or a disposition to behave in a certain way….In the case of cognitive concepts like “knowing,” believing,” “understanding,” “remembering” and volitional concepts like “wanting” and “intending,” there can be little doubt, I think, that an analysis in terms of dispositions to behave is fundamentally sound. On the other hand, there would seem to be an intractable residue of concepts clustering around the notions of consciousness, experience, sensation and mental imagery, where some sort of inner process story is unavoidable.” (Place, Is Consciousness a Brain Process?, 44)
“[In] defending the thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain, I am not trying to argue that when we describe our dreams, fantasies and sensations we are talking about processes in our brains. That is, I am not claiming that statements about sensations and mental images are reducible to or analyzable into statements about brain processes….To say that statements about consciousness are statements about brain processes is manifestly false. This is shown (a) by the fact that you can describe your sensations and mental imagery without knowing anything about your brain processes or even that such things exist, (b) by the fact that statements about one’s consciousness and statements about one’s brain processes are verified in entirely different ways, and (c) by the fact that there is nothing self-contradictory about the statement “X has a pain but there is nothing going on in his brain”. What I do want to assert, however, is that the statement “consciousness is a process in the brain”, on my view is neither self-contradictory nor self-evident; it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis…” (Place, Is Consciousness a Brain Process?, 44-45)
“The “phenomenological fallacy” is the mistake of supposing that when the subject describes his experience, when he describes how things look, sound, smell, taste, or feel to him, he is describing the literal properties of objects and events on a peculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen, usually referred to in the modern psychological literature as the “phenomenal field”. If we assume, for example, that when a subject reports a green after-image he is asserting the occurrence inside himself of an object which is literally green, it is clear that we have on our hands an entity for which there is no place in the world of physics. In the case of the green after-image there is no green object in the subject’s environment corresponding to the description that he gives. Nor is there anything green in his brain….Brain processes are not the sort of things to which color concepts can be properly applied. The phenomenological fallacy on which this argument is based depends on the mistaken assumption that because our ability to describe things in our environment depends on our consciousness of them, our descriptions of things are primarily descriptions of our conscious experience and only secondarily, indirectly and inferentially descriptions of the objects and events in our environments. It is assumed that because we recognize things in our environment by their look, sound, smell, taste and feel, we begin by describing their phenomenal properties, i.e. the properties of the looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels which they produce in us, and infer their real properties from their phenomenal properties. In fact, the reverse is the case. We begin by learning to recognize the real properties of things in our environment….Indeed, it is only after we have learnt to describe the things in our environment that we can learn to describe our consciousness of them.” (Place, Is Consciousness a Brain Process?, 49)
“It is the object of philosophy to interpret experience so as to render it intelligible. A philosophy is successful so far as it enables us to “think” experience, i.e. to take it in as a coherent system, as a whole which is interconnected by an immanent necessity….But the demand for intelligent apprehension, which we have made on philosophy, requires further explanation. A philosophy is not necessarily condemned, if it fail to “think” experience through and thought, to render it “intelligible” in all its details. Such a demand would be preposterous, and would condemn all philosophies in advance. The detail of experience cannot be rendered transparent for human knowledge. Nothing short of infinite or absolute knowledge could completely apprehend the infinite or whole Reality. What we can attempt, and what all philosophies claim to do, is to gain a rational and consistent view of the general nature of Reality—to render experience intelligible in its main outline. And so far as a philosopher fails to do this, he may justly be criticized. But failure does not consist merely in leaving details unexplained and in their special nature unconnected with the general principles. Deficiencies of this kind are inevitable; in a metaphysical theory; and since they detract nothing from its value, it need fear no criticism on their account. No one, e.g., can be expected to show exactly how and why finite existence, error, evil, change, are and consist with the general nature of Reality.” (Joachim, A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza?, 99-100)
“So long as it can be shown that the detail of experience does not positively collide with the general conditions of Reality as established in a theory, but is in principle consistent with an intelligible view of things—so long, the existence of outstanding facts, the failure to resolve them, to render them transparent, does not of itself destroy the value of the general theory. If the general nature of Reality has been consistently and intelligibly thought out, and if it has been shown that the features which are not in detail comprehended in the general theory are yet in principle not hostile—then so far the theory maintains itself against criticism. But a philosopher lays himself open to attack if his general theory is inwardly inconsistent, or—and this is another side of the same fault—is incomplete, inadequate to comprehend the whole outline of Reality. And again, he may justly be criticized if he offers an explanation of the details which conflicts with his general principles. Or, lastly, his theory is untenable if it forces us to conceive the general nature of Reality in such a way that the details of experience—all or some of them—cannot conceivably for any apprehension be intelligible: if, that is, we can see that even the fullest understanding would but render the discrepancies and the conflict between details and general theory more certain. [Footnote: I am indebted to Bradley, Appearance and Reality, more than usual for the view developed in this section. Cf. App. & R. 2nd edition, pp. 562 ff., pp. 184 ff., &c.].” (Joachim, A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza, 100-101)
“We “know” our body, not as being it—not from within—but as having knowledge “about” it; and such knowledge remains always to some extent inadequate and untrue and different from its “object.” In anything short of perfect apprehension, therefore, thought always implies a distinction between itself and its object, and this distinction is never completely overcome. Thought is “one” with its object in a very imperfect and ambiguous sense. The “oneness” is a relation between two distincts; a “oneness” of two, which never by complete coalescence justify the “oneness” which we ascribe to them. And even in the oneness of adequate thought and its object, the oneness is a unity of two, though a unity which overcomes and sustains the differences….But in his conception of “idea ideae,” Spinoza renders it impossible to maintain any difference between thought and its object. The unity of “idea ideae” is not a unity of two, but a blank unity. And, as such, it does not answer to any possible form of self-consciousness or even self-feeling….[The] idea which is the “object” is identical with and indistinguishable from the subject-idea. The identity of subject-idea and object-idea is so absolute, that all possibility of regarding it as a unity of two has vanished. In fact, so absolutely one are they, that they cannot even be conceived as identical: for identity with no difference is a meaningless term.” (Joachim, A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza, 139-140)
“The facts which the philosopher studies are amongst the most concrete of realities. They are spiritual facts—embodiments-of-mind, manifestations-to-mind; below or above the division (between perceiving, thinking, willing, &c., and their objects) which the mathematical and natural sciences presuppose—which they unconsciously assume, and within which they work.” (Joachim, Logical Studies, 3)
“A system is in no way analogous to an exhaustive collection, a sum-total, of unit truths. Speculation is systematic, in proportion as it takes nothing for granted or on faith, neglects nothing relevant and is continuous and coherent. If we speak of logic as a science or system of knowledge, we must not think of it as a completed tale of finally established doctrines, as an aggregation of bits of knowledge. We must think of it rather as a single truth gradually emerging and expanding, as a development, or growth, which in all its stages is self-adjusting, self-correcting, and self-fulfilling, but never self-fulfilled, i.e. frozen into the rigidity of a creed. Or we may think of it perhaps, though the analogy is very far from satisfactory, as an integral whole or unity, which nevertheless is such that it must show itself in our experience as an uncompleted and incompletable sequence of parts or components….The principles of thought, the rules of sound thinking, are at most crystalized deposits of that speculative activity, that reasoned and reasoning account, which is the science; crystals which, to continue the metaphor, continue to grow, and may even change their forms, as the activity proceeds.” (Joachim, Logical Studies, 7-9)
“The facts which constitute the subject-matter of any special science presuppose a division between object and subject of experience. They are abstracted objects of cognizance, objects cut off from the knowing or other experiencing of them. But the facts which constitute the subject-matter of logic (or, for that matter, of any philosophical study) are neither abstracted objects of experience nor abstracted subjects (subjective states, processes, activities). They are concrete or spiritual facts, totalities, so to say, or unities, underlying and overriding the division between, for example, what is known and the knowing of it; what is willed and the willing of it; or generally what is object of experience and the experiencing of it.” (Joachim, Logical Studies, 11)
“The facts of number and figure, and the facts of nature…are assumed by the sciences which study them to be what they are in independence of any experiencing…of them, and to involve no thought, no spiritual activity of any kind, in their constitution. As subjects of mathematical and physical study, they are taken to be cut off from all activities of mind. They are taken by the men of science to form self-contained systems or domains, which thought may be said to posit or recognize, but only to posit or recognize as closed to, as excluding and excluded by, thought itself. [They] have their being and reality, their existence or subsistence and their nature or character, in themselves. Thought plays no part whatever in their constitution, neither the thought which posits and studies them….They stand there, so to speak, fixed and self-established, confronting the man of science. It is irrelevant to their being, that its independence has been posited by thought; a mere accident to it that, as the science progresses, it gets more fully known. Now facts thus posited are…abstractions. And…the facts which form the subject-matter of any philosophical study…are in principle concrete, the full or complete totalities, from which the former have been split off. For thought is not only included within the entirety of things: not only something that occurs here and there, in patches…within the universe: not only the occasional activity of this or that thinker—the exercise of a function peculiar to…a privileged group of beings within the whole. So much, of course, even the special sciences and even a material or a realist philosophy would readily admit. But thought—to put it roughly and, for the present, dogmatically—is a power of the universe, a power rooted in the very nature of things; a spiritual force or energy which pervades, penetrates, and at least contributes to constitute the universe itself, both as a whole and in its detail.” (Joachim, Logical Studies, 13)
“Nothing, I am suggesting, therefore, can be what the facts of the mathematical and physical sciences are posited as being. So to posit them—to taken them as thought they were in no sense related to, or constituted by, thought—is to omit a relevant and essential condition of their being. They are, i.e. as they are posited, in some degree unreal—in some degree shorn of their full being, mutilated results of inadequate conception, abstractions.” (Joachim, Logical Studies, 13-14)
“That error occurs is undeniable, points out Royce, for if we deny it we commit at least to the erroneous belief that it does. But what is error? Error occurs when the thing we refer to is other than we say it is, when our judgement fails to agree with its intended object. It implies that there is a gap between what we judge about the world and what is actually the case. If they are to be in error ideas call for something other than themselves about which they err….How can our judgement fail to agree with its object if the only object it has it that which it describes? A paradox appears. By definition we are in error about what we don’t know, but how can we even speak about or refer to the unknown? “About a really Unknowable [writes Royce] nobody could make any sincere and self-consistent assertions that could be errors. For self-consistent assertions about the Unknowable would of necessity be meaningless. And being meaningless, they could not well be false.” He proposes an ingenious solution. If all reality is present to a single infinite thought in which, in our very limited and incomplete ways, we participate, then error may be explained as the phenomena in which, in our imperfect consciousness, we partially intend that which a wider thought successfully articulates. Our object of reference is given in the perfectly organized experience that completes it and which characterises the reality we meant, for if there is reference beyond our ideas there is no reference beyond ideas themselves. Reality just is ‘perfectly organised experience.’ But Royce’s point is not merely that another sees fully what I grasp only in part, rather he is suggesting that the divine perspective fixes that which I intend but erroneously put, for it is a view in which I actually participate.” (Mander, On Arguing for the Existence of God as a Synthesis Between Realism and Anti-Realism, 103)
“The [Neo-Realist’s] argument is that it is implied in the very nature of knowing qua knowing that the object of knowledge is independent of the cognitive relation in question. But, since the “independence” alleged must mean, if it is to prove the point, that the fact of knowing as such implies nothing in the object, we have the curious paradox that knowing qua knowing implies that nothing in the object is implied by knowing qua knowing. Or, in other words, it follows from the very nature of knowing that the object of knowledge has a quality by virtue of which no quality which it has follows from knowing. Is this not perilously near self-contradiction? Yet, unless we say that this “independence” is implied in the nature of knowing, the ground for making the relation external seems to disappear. It is indeed true that knowledge of anything is essentially knowledge of it as it is and not as different from what it is, but I do not see at present any way in which an argument based on this fact can be worded so as to prove that the knowing relation is not internal. To say that we know A as it is and not as different from what it is, is not the same as saying that A is not different from what it would be if we had never known it.” (Ewing, The Relation between Knowing and its Object (II), 309)
“In article (I), I use the argument that the verification principle is on its own showing meaningless since it cannot be verified by sense-experience. The reply has been made that the verification principle is not itself a factual statement and the conditions as to meaningfulness laid down by it were intended to apply only to factual statements. I accept this reply but almost all the argument of the article still stands, for even non-factual statements cannot be asserted without justification, and the verification principle excludes any possibility of its own justification. It cannot even be justified by its results in solving philosophical problems, for we can never tell whether a solution of a philosophical problem (or a scientific problem for that matter) is right or wrong simply by sense-experience….Those who say they are using the verification principle only as a methodological assumption must remember that, unless a proposition can be put forward not merely as an assumption but as true, one is not entitled to infer anything from it.” (Ewing, Non-Linguistic Philosophy, 12-13)
“Here it is required to prove that the Categories are necessary for the determination of objects. The aim is to show that they are objective as well as a priori. (1) Kant proceeds to prove at the outset that, unless all objects were related to one self, there would be no knowledge. If there be no permanent ego which remains unchanged throughout the passing flux of experience, then sensation cannot be arrested, much less worked up into the elaborate complexities of knowledge. Or, to employ Kant’s own technical language, objects cannot be characterized as such except by the synthesis of their manifold in relation to an identical self. By this he means that all the varied sensations connected with an object must necessarily be held together and united by a single self that remains unchanged throughout the entire course of their rapid alterations. (2) Having thus pointed out that, even to the mere naming of an object as such, an active, synthetic self is necessary, Kant next proceeds to show that the forms under which this unifying activity takes place are the Categories; that, in fact, the Categories are objective, because through them the permanent self characterizes objects as objects. From what has immediately preceded we are aware that knowledge is possible only because an identical self performs the operation of binding together passing sensations. The characteristic of this ego lies in its synthetic office. How, then, is this synthesis brought about? As we have already seen, by the faculty of judgment. But Kant, following the tradition of Formal Logic, supposed that the Categories exhaust the channels through which this faculty exhausts its possibilities of action. Hence, they are the forms whereby this synthesis is executed, and so they are objective in their primary nature.” (Wenley, An Outline Introductory to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”, 47-48)
“In conceptual space and time, there is no principle by which to distinguish different directions. In perception they can be distinguished as right and left, up and down, and so forth. But since what is right to one percipient is left to another, in conceptual space, where complete abstraction is made from the presence of an individual percipient, there is neither right nor left, up nor down, nor any other qualitative difference between one direction and another, all such differences being relative to the individual percipient. When we wish to introduce into conceptual space distinctions between directions, we always have to begin by arbitrarily assigning some standard direction as our point of departure. Thus we take, e.g., an arbitrarily selected line A______B as such a standard for a given plane, and proceed to distinguish all other directions by the angle they make with AB and the sense in which they are estimated (whether as from B to A or from A to B). But both the line AB and the difference of sense between AB and BA can only be defined by similar reference to some other standard direction, and so on through the endless regress….In conceptual time, there is absolutely no means of distinguishing before from after, past from future. For the past means the direction of our memories, the direction qualified by the feeling of “no longer”; the future is the direction of anticipation and purposive adaptation, the direction of “not yet.” And, apart from the reference given by immediate feeling to the purposive life of an individual subject, these directions cannot be discriminated. In short, conceptual time and space are essentially relative, because they are systems of relations which have no meaning apart from qualitative differences in the terms of which they relate; while yet again…the terms have to be taken as having no character but that which they possess in right of the relations.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 252-253)
“(1) Matter is that which moves and is moved by other matter. (2) Motion of matter is change of spatial relation to some other matter. (3) Change of spatial relation between matters can only be measured by some unchanging spatial relation between matters. (4) No two matters can be known to have unchanging spatial relations unless they are free from dynamical relations to each other and to other matter. (5) But [dynamical] relations constitute the definition of matter. Therefore, (a) No change of spatial relation can be measured. (b) No motion, and therefore no matter and no force can be measured. (c) Dynamics is rendered dialectically untenable by the contradiction arising from the essential relativity of matter. (d) Matter and motion cannot form a self-subsistent world, and cannot constitute Reality.” (Russell, On the Idea of a Dialectic of the Sciences, 49-50)
“(I) Space is continuous and infinitely divisible; the zero of extension, is called a Point. All points are qualitatively similar, and distinguished by the mere fact that they lie outside one another. (II) Any two points determine a unique figure, the straight line; two straight lines, like two points, are qualitatively similar, and distinguished by the mere fact that they are mutually external. (III) Three points not in one straight line determine a unique figure, the plane, and four points not in one plane determine a figure of three dimensions.” (Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, 52)
“Moreover, the judgment of quantity is the result of comparison, and therefore presupposes the possibility of comparison. To know whether, or by what means, comparison is possible, we must know the qualities of the things compared and of the medium in which comparison in effected; while to know that quantitative comparison is possible, we must know that there is a qualitative identity between the things compared, which again involves a previous qualitative knowledge. When spatial figures have once been reduced to quantity, their quality has already been neglected, as known and similar to the quality of other figures. To hope, therefore, for the qualities of space, from a comparison of its expression as pure quantity with other pure quantities, is an error natural to the analytical geometer, but an error none the less, from which there is no return to the qualitative basis of spatial quantity.” (Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, 64-65)
“Does a quantum of color mean a single line in the spectrum, or a band of finite thickness? In either case, what are the magnitudes to be compared? And how is superposition necessary or even possible? A color is fixed by its position in the spectrum…or even, roughly, their immediate sense-quality. We do not require superposition to measure quantities corresponding to different tones or colors; these can be discovered by analysis of single tones or colors. With space, on the other hand, if we seek for elements, we can find none except points, and no analysis of a point will find magnitudes inherent in it—such magnitudes are a fiction of coordinate Geometry. The magnitudes which space deals with…are relations between points, and it is for this reason that superposition is essential to space-measurement. There is no inherent quality in a single point, as there is in a single colour, by which it can be quantitatively distinguished from another.” (Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, 66-67)
“In The Religious Aspect of Philosophy in 1885, Royce gave the basic proof of his Idealism. Does error exist?, Royce asked. It must, for consider the statement “There is error.” If the statement is true, there is error. If the statement is false, then there is error. Therefore, there is error. But what is error? A statement is in error if it does not correspond to its object. But what is the object referred to? A statement about a particular tree must correspond to that tree, not just to any tree. In other words, reference is intentional; the statement must correspond to its intended object. But for one to intend a given object, one must already know the object, and how can one be wrong about an object one already knows? Royce’s famous example is the case of John and Thomas, each of whom refers to the other. But when John refers to Thomas, it is to Thomas as John conceives him that he refers, and John can hardly be in error about his own idea of John. For error to be possible in this situation, a third knower is required who can compare John’s idea of Thomas with real Thomas, and Thomas’s idea of John with real John. But then we face a regress, for the third knower can only know his ideas of John and Thomas, and so we would need a forth knower to guarantee the third knower’s ideas, and so on. The solution, Royce held, is that John and Thomas are both ideas in the mind of the third knower, for about his own ideas the third knower cannot be in error. John and Thomas are therefore ideal; the third knower is the Absolute who knows not only what John and Thomas think but what they intended—namely, the real John and Thomas. This is possible in the same sense in which one can intend to recall a name one knows but cannot bring to mind. John and Thomas can intend each other as they really are, yet only be able to think of each other erroneously. But the Absolute, whose ideas John and Thomas are, knows their unconscious intentions, and so can compare the two. This argument led Royce to conclude that whatever we can be wrong about, and so whatever we can make true statements about, must be ideas in the mind of the Absolute. The world is therefore Ideal.” (Murphey, C.I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist, 12-13)
“Physiological theories, treating sense processes as the transmission of coded information, lead to self-refuting epistemological theories of perception, which are not themselves entailed by the physiological evidence, but to which physiologists are sometimes led by the tacit adoption of epistemological presuppositions.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 240)
“Some writers have argued vigorously for unsensed sensibilia but none have succeeded in avoiding either confusion or self-contradiction or both. Consequently sense-data must be conceived, if one is to be consistent, as sensed data. This is so if only because the basic assumption of the theory is that the data of sense are the ultimate source of empirical knowledge. They cannot then reveal the existence of what is not included in their assemblage—that is, what is not sensed. But all physical objects have been excluded by the theory from this assemblage, they are all inaccessible things-in-themselves and no knowledge can therefore ever consistently be claimed, on this type of theory, about the external world, about relations, whether of resemblance, causation, or belonging, between sense-data and physical things.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 242)
“A sense-datum was held to be a sort of replica or reflection of some character in the physical world reproduced in the brain (or mind). Quite apart from the evidence available from physiology that no such reflection occurs in the brain and the numerous other considerations which make any such view untenable, no mere replication of external qualities, even though complex in structure, would by itself amount to a perception. The reason for this is that perception is the acquisition of knowledge about an object and no copy, photograph, or replica of an object, though it may serve as a means to the acquisition of knowledge, can by itself constitute knowledge. That involves at least recognition of the replica as a representation of the object—an achievement always quite impossible, ex hypothesi, on any sense-datum theory (for nothing is recognizable as a replica unless the original is also available for inspection). The proper understanding of the nature of perception depends on the clear realization of this fact, that perception is a form of knowledge—and, of course, the acquisition of knowledge is an achievement. That is why verbs of perception are achievement words.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 245-246)
“We do not, in fact, perceive stimuli, nor do we perceive neural processes and neither is in the least like the objects that we do perceive. We shall find psychologists most emphatic (for the experimental evidence is copious) that we do not “see” retinal images nor perceive objects in the way in which they are projected upon the retina. Still less are we aware of anything similar to the corresponding neural processes in the brain.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 247)
“‘Unconscious perception’ might in some special instances be a permissible phrase, but it would have to be used with caution and serious qualification, and still smacks strongly of contradictio-terminorum.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 273)
“Perceptual knowledge is thus a polyphasic unity. It us the awareness of a world continuously presenting itself through sentient experience as a system ordered both in space and in time. Each perceived object is a specification of the system which the organizing activity of the mind (what we may now call “perceptual thinking”) articulates out of the mass by applying the organizing or conceptual principles that enable it to “make sense” of its varied experience. Thus, each perceptum is a variation within the system, relevant to its structural organization (a relevant variation), which manifests, or realizes, the principle or principles of organization immanent in the whole.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 290)
“Knowledge is a single developing polyphasic system, that has at all levels a sensuous as well as a structural aspect…” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 291-292)
“It must not be forgotten that there are, strictly speaking, no fragmentary systems in experience, because every object cognized is interpreted in the light of the existing body of knowledge—the funded and accumulated experience as hitherto ordered. A defective theory is, therefore, not so much ‘incomplete’ as vague and confused. What was asserted earlier must be constantly borne in mind, that the progress of learning is from indefinite to definite, not from fragment to whole, and that at every stage we have a whole of related and connected elements.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 366)
“Is the aim of science the comprehension of things as they really are, or is it no more than the construction of a symbolic notation convenient for action in a merely phenomenal world? And if the first is the aim that scientists profess, can they ever achieve more than the second? These questions cannot be answered directly for they presuppose tacitly metaphysical and epistemological doctrines which have to be examined in their own right. To speak of “what things really are” presumes potential knowledge of the hallmarks of reality. How is what they really are to be distinguished from what they seem to be? And if we cannot answer that question, how can we allege, in any circumstances, that the world of our experience is purely phenomenal? By reference to what Ding an sich could we give it that status? What seems is subjective, what is is objectively real; so the demand is for clarification of the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity and some definition of these terms.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 372)
“This issue we have already faced in our account of perception. For common sense, what is objective is what belongs to an external world independent of our perceiving, and what is subjective is what is dependent upon our minds, or consequent upon the organic conditions of experiencing. To make this distinction, however, we must already be aware of those conditions as objective, and we cannot know what belongs to the external world as opposed to what is mind-dependent until we have already made the distinction between the subjective and the objective in experience. In primitive sentience there is no such discrimination, and the consciousness of a world of objects arises from it as the result of an activity of organizing and the imposition upon its content of schemata. Thus, the common-sense conception of an external world is itself dependent upon our thinking and on the conditions of experience, so that the distinction of objective from subjective cannot be made to rest on the common-sense criteria. The only reliable criterion we have of the “objectivity” of things is their stability and coherence in our experience and the persistent interconnexions which they display. Every other criterion proves unsatisfactory. Sensible immediacy will hardly do, for that is the acme of subjectivity. “Hard” sense-data are non-existent, so objectivity cannot be built out of them. Observation is reliable only to the extent that perception is veridical and the admission of veridicality already presumes the distinction of which we are in search. Objectivity, therefore, can only be understood as what repeated and consistent experience shows to be coherent.” (Harris, Hypothesis and Perception, 372-373)
2.png)