The Defence of Qualia.
Dr Edmond Wright
In view of the excellent arguments
that have
been put forth recently in favour of
qualia,
internal sensory presentations, it
would
strike an impartial observer - one
could
imagine a future historian of philosophy
- as extremely odd why so many philosophers
who are opposed to qualia, that is,
sensory
experiences internal to the brain,
have largely
ignored those arguments in their own.
There
has been a fashionable assumption that
any
theory of perception which espouses
qualia
has long since been overcome by a number
of 'formidable' objections, in particular,
the Homunculus/Infinite Regress Objection,
the Solipsism Objection, Austin's Illusion/Delusion
Objection, the Ludicrousness-of-Colours-in-the-Brain
Objection, the Indirect-Realist-has-to-assume-Direct-Realism
Objection, the Impossibility-of-Comparing-Internal-with-External
Objection, the Impossibility of Intrinsic
Experience, and several more minor
varieties
of these. It is uncanny how they continue
to be repeated, indeed, with a kind
of automatism,
evidenced by the fact that none of
those
who repeat them appear to have taken
note
of the answers to the objections. Indeed,
they only appear to refer to those
philosophers
with whom they agree: it has long been
insisted
upon in the study of rhetoric that
one of
the weakest things to do in an argument
is
to ignore the main points made by one's
opponent:
[it is] the wisest plan to state Objections
in their full force; at least, wherever
there
does exist a satisfactory answer to
them;
otherwise, those who hear them stated
more
strongly than by the uncandid advocate
who
had undertaken to repel them, will
naturally
enough conclude that they are unanswerable.
It is but a momentary and ineffective
triumph
that can be obtained by manœuvres like
those
of Turnus's charioteer, who furiously
chased
the feeble stragglers of the army,
and evaded
the main front of the battle
(Whateley, 1828, 175) Some philosophers
have
specifically noted how prone anti-qualia
people are to attacking imaginary opponents:
J. B. Maund complains of their failure
to
flesh out their arguments by reference
to
the positions actually being taken
(Maund,
1993, 45-6); Jonathan Harrison accuses
the
anti-qualia cohort of 'learning about
Sense-Datum
Theory from its critics without reading
the
work of Sense-Datum theorists themselves'
(Harrison, 1993, 20). It is not too
much
to say that it has become something
of a
scandal in philosophy that there should
be
such a blinkered response. One can
hardly
open an introduction to philosophy
today
without being taken through the old
Objections
as if they still retained their force.
One
wonders how many sceptical undergraduates
are being led to question this supposedly
received opinion among their mentors.
The distinction between the uninterpreted
field and what can be selected from
it is
perhaps one of the most fruitful to
have
been made in recent inquiries into
the nature
of the mind. It can be found in neurophysiological
research: John R. Smythies speaks of
the
essential distinction now being drawn
between
phenomenal and epistemic perception
(Smythies,
1993, 208). In philosophy the field-and-representation
distinction was perhaps first adumbrated
by C. D. Broad when he spoke of perceptions
that were attended to and those which
were
not: 'A sensum is not something that
exists
in isolation; it is a differentiated
part
of a bigger and more enduring whole,
viz.,
of a sense-field, which is itself a
mere
cross-section of a sense-history '
(1923,
195). If his technical terms look daunting,
a better view of their interpretation
can
be gained if a thought-experiment of
J. R.
Smythies (1956, 40-42) is taken into
consideration:
taking up the idea that a television
system
might be usefully applied as an analogy
to
the perceptual system, he imagined
a situation
in which a population of persons were
wearing,
unbeknownst to themselves, the equivalent
of 'virtual reality' hoods, with the
difference
that the input to those hoods came
from two
miniature cameras set in front of them.
He
was able to use this illustration to
argue
convincingly that those agents would
be able
to interact in the world without any
difficulty,
even though they only had an indirect
causal
access to the continuum existing around
them.
Apply the situation to what Broad said:
the
'sense-field' can be taken to be the
screens
of the cathode-ray-tubes; the 'sense-history',
the sequence of changes upon those
screens;
a 'sensum' an area actually picked
out on
that screen. The field/representation
distinction
can be readily detected, for it is
possible
to distinguish the actual state of
the phosphor
cells on the screen from what the observers
take themselves to be seeing on it.
Furthermore,
if one were to make the input on those
screen
something purely abstract in the painter's
sense, a phantasmagoria of computer-generated
imagery, the wearer (unaware that he
is wearing
the 'virtual reality' hood) would be
exposed
to non-epistemic imagery. This is a
demonstration
of the empirical possibility of non-epistemic
experience that has been commonly denied
in current philosophy (Rorty, 1980,
154;
Davidson, 1989, 170; Harman, 1990,
39-40;
McDowell, 1994, 24-45). One of the
very latest
books on the philosophy of perception
begins
with the declaration that ' a sensation
of
red is first and foremost a sensation
of
an object that is red' (Clark, 2000,
2).
A significant advance was made by J.
B. Maund
(1975), who was the first to point
out the
logical confusions that arise if one
tries
to use the same descriptive terms of
the
screen as of what is selected from
the screen;
it would be like trying to describe
the state
of the phosphor cells on the TV-screen
by
means of the terms used to describe
what
can be seen on it. As ordinary TV viewers
we have no immediate way of referring
to
the states of the screen except by
speaking
about what things appear on it, even
though
one can actually get close to the screen
and observe the criss-cross matrix,
and,
if one attends closely enough, one
can ignore
what the screen is ostensibly representing.
Only a neurophysiologist will be able
to
describe the visual field at that level:
for the ordinary observer the field
will
remain ineffable. The inability to
acknowledge
this distinction, which the TV Analogy
makes
plain, has led some to use the ineffability-for-the-observer
as an excuse for dismissing the notion
of
an inner field as occult, when in principle
it could be scientifically described.
There has been resistance to the TV
Analogy,
but this is due to a misunderstanding
of
what criteria are relevant in the metaphor.
As will be argued below, within his
theory,
TV screens are not really coloured,
so that
pictorial resemblance is not being
claimed;
nor could they exist within a brain
with
eyes in front of them, but that is
not being
claimed either. The only relevant criterion
is their presenting a display which
is structurally
isomorphic to conditions at the input,
that
is, in some not necessarily direct
ratio,
though being different in character,
it varies
concomitantly with the input. In the
case
of TV screens, the uncoloured state
of their
phosphor cells is indirectly isomorphic
to
the uncoloured input of light-rays
into the
camera: in the case of human sensing,
the
coloured state of the neural display
is indirectly
isomorphic to the uncoloured state
of the
light-ray input into the eyes.
In the 80's Virgil C. Aldrich was also
concerning
himself with the logic of representation.
He drew attention to the fact that
in a picture
there are two aspects to consider,
what one
sees in the picture and the body of
the picture
itself. In an important article (Aldrich,
1980) he took up the same distinction
made
by Maund, that between the field in
which
the picture appears and the field of
the
picture itself. Aldrich was using the
argument
against that type of physicalism that
rejects
phenomena, for he concluded that, since
the
thrust of physicalism was towards a
single
field, it could not logically cope
with the
notion of such a distinction. This
correctly
points to the problem of how the supposed
causal path between 'object' and perceiver
is to be described, for Aldrich shows
that
there is an epistemological break between
stimulus and response. This is why
he is
consistent in arguing that in this
'primary
field' (1980, 52) there is no given
perceptual
awareness. It is rather that the intention
of the observer must be taken into
consideration
when the actual sorting out of what
is to
constitute a represented object is
examined,
an assertion that recalls Roy Wood
Sellars'
dictum that the physical existent is
not
an object in its own right, but is
made so
by 'the selective activity of the percipient
organism' (1919, pp. 418-19). This
is precisely
the same as what Aldrich argues (1980,
56).
Clearly such an assertion is relevant
to
the whole issue of how representations
can
be 'about' anything. This disposes
of those
who believe that the supporter of qualia
must hold to an Object-Causal theory
of Perception,
when all that need be proposed is a
'whole
input/whole-field' causal theory, ignoring
at the sensory level the selection-of-entities
process, the perceiving itself, which
may
or may not be being applied.
The question of sentience (or 'qualia',
secondary
qualities, sensa, the phenomenal) is
moving
to the forefront of discussion. Nicholas
Humphrey's attempt to explain consciousness
(1992), for example, has the merit
of trying
to give the sensory its proper place,
whereas
Colin McGinn in criticizing him believes
that there is little sense in trying
to consider
how the visual field could be inspected,
for he thinks that it would be a matter
of
examining one's retina from the inside
(1992,
18). There has been much consideration,
particularly
in the philosophy of mind, about what
can
be said in defence of functionalist
and computationalist
positions if qualia do exist, but little
about the arguments for and against
them.
Even Thomas Nagel's defence of the
subjective
(1981) is largely about the difficulties
of leaving phenomenal aspects out of
the
philosophy of mind than an attempt
to address
their place in the structure of perception.
As regards the common objections themselves,
they can all be shown to be attacking
the
wrong target as far as the present
theory
is concerned. The keys to overturning
them
lie in (1) holding to the sensory fields
being in a non-epistemic state which
is structurally
isomorphic to input conditions at the
sensory
organs, providing bare, non-mental
evidence
in which natural signs can be detected
(see
'sensing as Non-Epistemic' for an explanation
of the terms 'non-epistemic' and 'structurally
isomorphic') and (2) seeing 'common'
perceptions
as the projected co-ordination of differing
motivated selections from the differing
non-epistemic
evidence within each person's brain
(see 'Perceiving as Epistemic'). Let
us go
through the objections one by one.
(I) The Homunculus/Infinite Regress
Objection
(including (II) the objection that
a pictorial
resemblance between input and sensory
display
is impossible)
This is a very old objection. It was
first
mooted by the 19th-century philosopher
Hermann
Lotze (Lotze, 1884, 492-3). It claims
that
any theory which proposes that there
is a
sensory visual presentation in the
brain
is doomed to an infinite regress. The
argument
then goes, if there is a screen in
the brain
upon which a picture of the outer world
is
displayed, there would have to be another
viewer of the picture, a homunculus
with
his own set of eyes and therefore another
screen in his head, ad. inf. (for a
modern
statement of this view see Gilbert
Ryle 1966/1949,
203). There have been additions to
this argument:
Alan Millar (in a talk to the Cambridge
Moral
Sciences Club, 1995) and Zenon Pylyshyn
(2002)
ask how the inner observer could move
his
eyes over the picture to inspect various
parts of it; J. K. O'Regan and A. Noë
ask
how there could be 'red neurons' in
the brain
(O'Regan and Noë, 2002; also for the
same
kind of question Dennett, 1992, 28;
Tye,
1992, 159; Kirk, 1994, 9-10)). This
is no
advance on the question put over a
hundred
years ago by F. H. Bradley to Thomas
Case,
1888), namely, 'when I smell a smell,
I am
not aware of the stinking state of
my own
nervous system' (see Price, 1961, 127).
Pylyshyn
also asks how there could possibly
be a physical
surface in the brain to match the physical
surfaces outside.
To take vision as our example. The
colour
registration in the brain 'structurally
isomorphic'
to the light-ray input at the sensors,
that
is, it is 'differentially correlated'
to
it, not necessarily in direct ratio
(Sellars,
1932, 86). This implies that sensory
phenomena
of any kind are utterly unlike what
triggers
them, so that there is no external
'colour'
to match neural colour (i. e. the actually
experienced red), no external 'smell'
to
match neural smell, and so on for all
the
modalities. There is only a complex
causal
connection between the whole field
and the
whole input at the sensory organ.
To get structural isomorphism clear
consider
this example: there is a structural
isomorphism
between the sound-track of a movie
film,
the impulses in the wires leading to
the
loudspeakers, and the sound which the
audience
hear, but no one would say that any
of these
were like each other except in the
variation
of their intensities. In the same way,
the
internal colour distribution could
be shown
empirically to vary concomitantly with
the
external input, but to be in no way
like
it. A fortiori, since real external
pictures
are therefore actually uncoloured,
there
cannot be pictures in the brain. With
that
qualification one can readily agree
with
the objection. But, nevertheless, this
theory
can still claim without inconsistency
that
there is a neural-colour registration
in
the brain. So it is quite true that
a pictorial
resemblance is impossible but that
is no
argument against there being a coloured
inner
visual display. The external world
is actually
'unpicturable', as Virgil Aldrich noted
over
twenty years ago (Aldrich, 1980, 55).
Thus
this also disposes of (III) the Ludicrousness-of-Colours-in-the-Brain
Objection as a case of the fallacy
of ignoratio
elenchi, that of attacking what has
not be
proposed.
One thing John Locke pointed out is
pertinent
here (Essay, II, viii, 6). We still
experience
a colour when no input is coming into
the
eyes. If you are suddenly plunged into
a
completely dark room, you do not experience
nothing - you experience Blackness
(see Brain,
1951, 10, 15). Now obviously there
is no
external object for the brain to recognize
and yet we are still sensing. Here
too is
a pure non-epistemic experience, the
sort
of thing anti-qualians deny. If someone
protest
that you would know that you were in
a dark
room, one can easily change the circumstances:
you wake after a drugged sleep, not
knowing
where you are and whether something
has been
done to your eyes. You would not be
able
to know anything, except that, though
you
were still sensing, you were not pereiving.
That Blackness is unmistakably an inner
experience,
because there is no input to the eyes
whatsoever.
Anyone who is tempted to think that
all lightless
spaces in all parts of the universe
are actually
'black' has some scientific explaining
to
do! But the problem is no different
for those
who think that external objects are
really
coloured.
The approach adopted here also renders
useless
the complaint that some inner 'eye'
would
have to scan a field in the manner
of the
real eye, for the direct sensory experience
can be of that very scanning without
any
supposed movement of a supposed eye
(does
a TV screen have to move to 'scan'
round
a cup?). In any case, real eyes have
evolved
to pick up light rays, which are uncoloured,
and there are no light rays in the
brain.
Therefore, there can be no infinite
regress,
for no homunculus with eyes of his
own is
required: the visual sensing in the
back
of the brain is a direct experience.
It is
an evidential field from which our
motivational
module can select gestalts, but this
does
not require a looking-about over a
picture
since there is no picture and no eyes
to
look. Ryle's attempt to maintain that
one
would have to have another sensation
to sense
a sensation as an argument (Ryle, 1966/1949,
203) remains as Ayer described it,
'very
weak' (1957, 107). Ryle could only
think
that, in the argument for inner presentations,
a literal inner eye was involved that
scanned
some metaphorical 'mental linen', as
he put
it.
This counter to the objection also
renders
explicable the sensing by snakes of
infra-red
rays or sharks of electrostatic fields.
There
will be some inner experience to correspond
to the input but it will not be like,
say,
the infra-red rays: perhaps it will
be another
colour, but, whatever it is, it will
be only
vary with the input, not match it colour
for colour. Infra-red rays like all
other
rays of the electromagnetic spectrum
(including
gamma-rays, X-rays, light-rays, and
radio-waves)
have no colour whatsoever. Nor obviously,
since they are heat-rays, can any real
heat
be in the snake's sense-field in its
brain,
only something varying concomitantly
with
the heat. When we see on the television
screen
films that have been taken through
an infra-red
camera, we see the warm and hot portions
of the view as shades of green; the
green
is structurally isomorphic to the heat
but
does not resemble it - does your TV
screen
get hot?!
Under this theory there is no riddle
about
the world being uncoloured when no
animals
were in existence: it never was, nor
is,
nor can be coloured. We manage reasonably
well to act in the world with our internally
coloured, structurally isomorphic evidence.
There is no riddle about wondering
what the
difference could be between a ray of
200
nanometres (invisible far-ultraviolet)
and
one of 420 (visible violet) that has
nothing
to do with animal eyes, for obviously
there
is no scientific difference between
them
except in wavelength and frequency.
The experience of stereoscopic space
also
must bear no pictorial resemblance
to the
real space with which it is correlated
(stereoscopic
space can be turned inside out, see
Nakajima
and Shimojo, 1981). There is no point
therefore
in Pylyshyn's claiming that there cannot
be a registration because it could
not be
on 'a physical surface' in the brain,
for
there is no requirement that the neural
registration
be on a physical surface similar to
that
of an external object; structural isomorphism
rules out any such similarity. Kant
was on
the right track (Kant, 1787/1964, p.
69):
sensory stereoscopic space is thus
not like
real space (although in some form it
is in
real space in the brain. Price (1961/1932,
111) thought it would be 'awkward'
if we
had to distinguish 'Sensible Space'
from
'Physical Space' since he believed
that this
would force us to conclude that 'sense-data
were nowhere in the physical world'
- but
there is no such entailment. The inner
presentation
can be structurally isomorphic without
matching
external space in a direct way and
yet still
exist in the brain in physical space.
Space
we are now told by the theoretical
physicists
may consist of 11 dimensions, so there
can
be certainly no direct resemblance
between
real space and our visual 3-D space.
Visual
3-D space, in any case can be turned
inside
out and yet still be isomorphic (Shimojo
and Nakajima, 1981, who placed reversing
spectacles on a subject so that the
right
eye's input went into the left eye
and vice
versa; this turned the world inside
out,
objects in the Real distance appearing
stereoscopically
'close' and vice versa).
(IV) The Objection that Indirect Realists
have to assume Direct Realism in order
to
state their Argument
A typical statement of this objection
has
been made by Stephen Wilcox and Stuart
Katz
(Wilcox and Katz, 1984), but there
is a clone
of it in Hilary Putnam's objection
to naturalized
epistemology (Putnam, 1982). They claim
that
it is a self-defeating absurdity for
the
qualia supporters to espouse Indirect
Realism
precisely because they are covertly
relying
on Direct Realism to make the assertion
at
all. The whole causal chain revealed
by the
Indirect Realist as proving his case
is couched
in Direct Realist terms: he is therefore
bound to two rival epistemologies,
the ostensible
one of his argument in which objectivity
is ever at one remove, and the concealed
one of his practice, which actually
presupposes
objects. The philosopher or psychologist
'has committed the most common of philosophical
follies: he has failed to examine his
own
presuppositions' (Wilcox and Katz,
153).
The core of this new argument for the
place
of qualia in human life is their structurally
isomorphic nature. They are bare evidence
causally connected to the whole-field
input
at the sensory organs, from which each
body,
via the processes of motivation, has
to learn
what to select as significant for action,
that is, learn to treat regions of
it as
'natural signs'. This includes the
entities
of the self, other persons, all objects
and
all recognizable properties. Out of
the basic
difference at the both sensory and
the perceptual
levels, an evolutionary advantage for
all
species, members of the human species
have
learned how to update (hopefully) each
other's
selections by means of symbolic communication.
The central trick is to bring the differing
selections into a rough co-ordination
by
behaving as if they had achieved a
perfect
co-ordination. Another way of putting
it
is to say that, in each spoken sentence,
the logical subject of the sentence
has to
be treated initially as if it referred
with
absolute precision (in perfect 'synchrony',
as the linguists would say). For example,
the Speaker might begin with 'The tree
in
the garden . . .' Once this presupposed
perfect
superimposition of the differing perspectives
has been assumed, then the Speaker
can introduce
his or her correction of it the logical
predicate
- completing the sentence with, say,
'has
been chopped down.' (The logical subject
is not always the grammatical subject,
for
if the Hearer had asked 'What has been
chopped
down?', the logical subject would have
been
a chopping-down of something, and the
correcting
predicate would have been 'the tree
in the
garden', a point noted by John Cook
Wilson,
1926, 123-6). So the first move in
the communication
process is for both partners in dialogue
to presuppose, to assume that they
have together
successfully sorted out the Real into
the
'reality' of singular true referents.
Co-ordination
would be impossible without this methodological
fiction of absolute coincidence.
It must now be seen why the Objection
misses
its aim, for the presupposition of
singular
referents is a initial necessity for
communication,
but, being a convenient fiction, it
is not
wholly true, the reason being that
each partner
in dialogue has his or her own set
of criteria
of selection, the differences of which
cannot
all be mutually salient to them. Everyone,
in order to speak at all, has to presuppose
a 'direct realism' of entities, but
none
of that implied that there are such
perfectly
singular entities. Instead what exists
are
rough co-ordinations on the viscosities
and
nodules of the ever-changing Real.
Objectivity,
even of selfhood, is not existence:
it is
only a socially maintained overlapping
of
selections from existence. For any
'common'
entity, each person has indeed made
a selection
from the Real, but what is not known
is its
differences from that of others, and
there
is also the block that the bare evidence
cannot turn into information. Notice
the
insidious temptation here: each has
certainly
a portion of the Real that he or she
has
sorted out, so there is an easy slippage
in thought that turns the selection
into
'existence'; But what is not known
is the
degree to which it coincides with others'
selections from roughly the same region
of
the Real. 'I think: therefore I am'
is thus
fatally mistaken if it claims a true
objectivity
for the self that speaks it. Nevertheless,
to enunciate anything useful, even
of the
Argument for Qualia, one has to join
in the
language game of presupposing a perfectly
singular entity, but this is a harmless
necessity
of speaking at all and does not undermine
the argument.
As a valuable corollary, we are now
able
to meet Putnam's objections to naturalized
epistemology. First, he said that it
begged
the question of a Correspondence Theory
of
Truth, but, if the system is one in
which
such correspondence has to be mutually
projected
as a useful make-believe, then his
objection
loses its force. Second, he said that
naturalized
epistemology 'presupposed' reason,
but his
very own words point to the weakness
of his
argument, since reason is essentially
constructed
through an active presupposing of universally
agreed unities and deductive validities.
Lastly, he said naturalized epistemology
can find no base for normativity because
it was driven back to a circular argument
in which the subject strives to be
his own
guarantee of reliability (Putnam, 1983,
245).
But the present theory yields verdicts
whose
reliability requires mutual co-operation
to establish. As it should have become
obvious
that this theory, New Critical Realism
(see
for the name, adopted in honour of
Roy Wood
Sellars, Wright, 1994, 478) is a version
of naturalized epistemology, this is
a very
helpful entailment.
(V) The Solipsism or 'Veil-of-Perception'
Objection
The argument claims that to admit that
sensory
fields were internal to the brain would
leave
one with no access to external fact.
The
whole of reality would disappear in
a Berkleian
dream-world, with a solitary self having
no basis for either the reality of
what it
experiences nor its own reality (John
McDowell,
1994, 42).
If sensing is an involuntary, material
occurrence,
bare evidence containing no knowledge,
it
can exist without a self being present
at
all. Indeed, before any learning has
taken
place in the organism it just exists
as evidence
that has not been sorted out in any
way (innate
instinctive reactions are not knowledge).
One can also imagine an unfortunate
mutation
born without any connection between
its pleasure/pain
system and its sensory fields, that
is, there
would be no placing into memory of
any experience
that produced pleasure or pain. No
knowledge
would be forthcoming, but the sensing
would
continue as before. So the notion of
an internal
sensory field does not entail an observing
self. A self is one of the entities
that
has to be learned from the history
of the
body's experiences. Thus, the accusation
that solipsism is implied by such a
theory
passes it by, for there need be no
solus-ipse
present while sensing is in progress.
Again
the objection fails as an example of
the
logical fallacy of ignoratio elenchi.
A further corollary strengthens the
argument.
The entity the self is dependent on
experience
with others for both its inception
and its
continuing development. There comes
a continual
adjustment affecting how the sensory
fields,
especially those which register the
states
of the body, are to be treated as a
'self'.
Whenever such an adjustment takes place
at
the behest of another person, even
of a simple
perception of an external object (a
perception
which, under this theory, is a product
of
motivation), the self suffering the
adjustment
has the experience of an external corrector
being able to invade his or her own
sensory
fields and re-order them anew in a
way not
considered before. This also disposes
of
(VI) the Impossibility-of-comparing-Internal-with-External
Objection (Hoernlé, 1926; Searle, 1983,
59;
Kelley, 1986, 108) because it establishes
that the only possible comparison is
a structurally
isomorphic one, for it is this that
enables
another person to effect the updating
of
one's own perception. The evidence
was there
as sensed, but it had not been perceived.
The other is able to work from behind
the
supposed 'veil of perception' to establish
and then alter the self observing,
proving
several things simultaneously:
the existence of the internal field
as Real
evidence separate from the self; the
fact
that the other who is acknowledged
as altering
the nature of the 'self' observing
must possess
a comparable field with comparable
access
to what lies 'beyond the veil'; the
existence
of the external causes at the sensory
organs
(see for more detail, Wright, 1990,
78).
So one can have an internal sensory
field
without any danger of being trapped
behind
a 'veil of perception'.
(VII) Austin's Illusion/Delusion Objection
The old Sense-Datum theorists had used
what
they called the 'Argument from Illusion'
to support the claim that sensing was
internal.
They would point out that there are
many
occasions when we have the sensory
experience
of an object and there is no corresponding
object in the external world to match
it.
One might see a mirage of an oasis
and there
be no oasis at all in actual fact;
one sees
a galaxy that, because of the time-lag
of
seven million years, may have not be
now
where we take it to be, or it may even
have
gone out of existence. They have pointed
out correctly that we see everything
as it
was in the past, because, no matter
how fast
light travels, it still takes real
time to
reach us, so that even things within
reach
are seen a nano-fraction of a second
earlier
than what they are at the instant of
seeing.
One sees a stick that looks bent in
water,
but we know that it is the appearance
is
the result of refraction, so the appearance
and the reality come away from each
other
and we have the 'veil of perception'.
Then
there are after-images, which plainly
occur
within the visual field, but are not
a part
of the external world. There are finally
the experiences of dreams and mental
imagery,
and, more peculiarly of hallucination,
as
of the drunkard who sees pink elephants
running
over the ceiling.
Austin's complaint is that the Sense-Datum
theorists were confusing illusion with
delusion.
He says 'it positively trades on not
distinguishing
illusion from delusion' (Austin,
1976/1962, 25). All these illusion
cases,
he argues, are subtly turned into a
delusion
case, where, instead of a mix-up over
an
object, the theory tries to suggest
that
we are more fundamentally deluded into
thinking
that there is an immaterial something
that
interposes itself between ourselves
and the
world. Illusions, he claims, are misreadings,
which on greater familiarity are recognized
for what they are, so that you may
have thought
that the stick was bent, but, once
you have
had the phenomenon scientifically explained,
the illusoriness falls way. To suggest
that
it does not is to try to turn an illusion
into a delusion.
Now one can certainly agree with Austin
that
the Argument from Illusion, when it
confines
itself to those cases of misinterpretation
like the Bent Stick or that of Time-Lag,
does not prove the existence of an
inner
field. If the sensory fields are brute
evidence,
then there is no reason why we cannot
use
such a supposedly 'illusory' state
of the
field to find out something of use
to us.
As long as a causal path of some kind,
however
indirect, even in time, can be traced,
something
verifiable can be elicited. Someone
'familiarly'
acquainted with the refractive indices
of
various liquids would be able to pass
along
a row of jars and say 'Alcohol, water,
paraffin,
amyl acetate . . .' etc., etc. As regards
the Time-Lag Argument, nothing prevents
an
astronomer learning scientific knowledge
from observing a galaxy in its state
seven
million years ago. Even the sun in
broad
daylight could be described as an illusion
since it cannot be precisely in the
position
where we see it, light from it having
taken
eight minutes to reach Earth, and the
refractive
power of the atmosphere shifting it
from
its 'true' place. The elliptical state
of
the sensed image of a penny seen at
an angle
can be taken as good evidence for the
viability
of the perception of a round penny.
So, for
these illusion cases this aspect of
his argument
has to be granted to Austin.
What is really significant about the
illusion
cases is their pointing to our ability
to
change our selections from the field.
It
is obvious that one perceiver can make
a
different selection out of his or her
sensory
field from that of another of what
had been
thought of as the 'same object', for
it is
not only obvious cases like bent sticks
that
must be included in the generality
here,
but actual puzzling ones in which new
interpretations
are made that hopefully advance our
knowledge.
Those who try to say that 'all our
"seeing-as's"
are just versions of "seeing-that"'
are like Austin in playing this fact
down.
In your youth when looking down from
a bridge
over a stream did you never play at
seeing,
not the water going under the bridge,
but
the bridge moving over the water? -
so it
is not impossible for some early scientist
on one special occasion to have seen
for
the first time, not the sun going down
behind
some very distant mountains, but the
mountains
rising over the sun, and consequently
come
to the novel conclusion that the Earth
it
was that revolved. Austin could not
say of
this example that this gestalt-switch
was
an illusion which 'familiarity' would
banish.
It looks as though Austin was unconsciously
endeavouring to ignore this plain fact
of
the mutual updating of perceptions.
One person's
"seeing-as" is never the
same as
someone else's, though we have to behave
as if we are all "seeing-that"
in the same way in order to co-ordinate
them
for communication and action purposes
(see
Objection III).
But, in particular, Austin is on very
insecure
ground when he tries to dismiss after-images,
mental images, dreams and hallucinations,
for this was a positive claim and not
a negative
one. It is simply a non-argument to
try to
dismiss dreams as indicative of an
inner
experience by saying 'dreams are dreams'
(Austin, 1976/1962, 27). That is the
equivalent
of those Jesuits who would not look
through
Galileo's telescope. Note that logically
it is precisely parallel to saying
of a TV
screen showing a cartoon that the screen
cannot be real because it is showing
an 'unreal'
cartoon. His involved discussion of
the meaning
of 'real' (64-77) collapses to the
same riposte.
A cathode-ray-tube's screen can show
all
kinds of 'unreal, illusory' sights
- interference
patterns, abstract screen-savers, videos,
the output of infra-red cameras, a
wax-model
of President Bush, computer-created
dinosaurs
- but not one of these would induce
us to
say that the screen itself was a 'delusion'.
Similarly, the inner sensory field
can show
dreams, hallucinations, after-images,
mental-imagery,
memory-images, as well as open-eye
vision,
and all of them be on a Real inner,
non-pictorial
display.
One point of glaring weakness in Austin's
case is the attempt to downgrade the
vividness
of dreams and mental imagery. Of dreams,
for example, he says,
I may have the experience (dubbed 'delusive'
presumably) of dreaming that I am being
presented
to the Pope. Could it seriously be
suggested
that having this dream is 'qualitatively
indistinguishable' from actually being
presented
to the Pope? (Austin 1976/1962, 48)
It is
obvious that Austin was not acquainted
with
texts in the psychology of dreaming
(Hadfield,
1954; Lee and Mayes, 1973). The fact
that
he himself may not have had any such
vivid
dreams is dismissable anecdotal evidence
(yet it is unlikely that he never had
any
nightmares; Dennett takes the same
stance,
for he denies outright that someone
could
have a hallucination of a ghost that
'talked
back'; Dennett, 1992, 7). Dreams and
mental
imagery can certainly be as vivid as
real-life
experience and can include tactile,
kinesthetic
and olfactory sensations. A. R. Luria's
'mnemonist'
was able to read off numbers from a
mental
image of a table of them to order,
namely,
vertically, diagonally, or horizontally,
but what was important for the present
argument
was the following: he was certainly
not just
remembering them propositionally, for
Luria
points out that, where one of them
had not
been written distinctly on the paper
he had
had to mentally-image,
he was liable to 'misread' it, take
a 3 for
an 8, for example, or a 4 for a 9 (Luria,
1969, 23) This is an empirical proof
that
he was reading from a vivid mental
image
of the actual writing, iconically stored
in his brain apart from the 'propositional'
information in the text
(see also for evidence of inspecting
vivid
aural mental imagery Wright, 1983).
Iconic storage is, of course, non-epistemic
storage, an imprint of the whole field
regardless
of 'what' can be selected from it by
the
motivated knowledge/perception system.
Zenon
Pylyshyn denies the possibility of
such iconic
storage as being beyond the brain's
storage
capacity (Pylyshyn, 1973, 9). He has
no empirical
evidence for this unlikely claim; indeed,
when Mozart remembered the whole of
a piece
of choral music that he heard in Rome
and
was able to write down later in Vienna,
it
was not a propositional written record
of
the piece that he was remembering!
Many musicians
have this ability in varying degrees,
and
are able to listen with pleasure to
their
inner 'recordings' of the music - a
fortiori,
if it is with pleasure, they are appreciating,
perhaps for the first time, subtle
patternings
in the music that they had not picked
out
before. So it cannot be that they 'tacitly'
knew these novel aspects beforehand,
as Pylyshyn
would be forced to maintain (Pylyshyn,
1981,
24; Wright, 1983)).
With regard to Austin and Pylyshyn,
it is
worth recalling what Bertrand Russell
said
of the Old-Behaviourist Watson's denial
of
mental imagery. Russell, having read
that
it was found that the older and the
more
educated you were, the less your ability
to call up mental imagery, said, "Professor
Watson is a very educated man."
Another empirical fact entirely ignored
by
the anti-qualia philosophers is the
fact
that one can dream with one's eyes
open.
A person exceptionally tired was being
driven
home by a friend in the pouring rain.
As
he did not want to fall asleep in his
friend's
car, he strove manfully to keep his
eyes
open. This did not defeat his dreaming
module,
for he found himself dreaming that
he was
watching an impressive firework display
in
which a number of amber-coloured rockets
went off in succession. He woke up
with a
start on his friend's suddenly speaking
to
him, to discover that what he had taken
for
'rockets' in his dream was actually
the appearance
of sodium-vapour lamps seen through
the windscreen
as the wipers went back and forth.
This is
an interesting case for it contradicts
the
claims of those Wittgensteinians like
Norman
Malcolm who tried to argue away the
inner
experience of dreams (Malcolm, 1959).
Here
there was empirical confirmation by
another
of the Real non-epistemic base of the
dream,
a succession of brilliant sparking
lights,
seen as 'sodium-vapour lamps' by the
wide-awake
driver, and seen as 'amber-coloured
rockets'
by the dreamer. It certainly seems
to point
to dreams and open-eye vision being
on the
same inner display.
Austin could not but think of the world
of
'reality' being conveniently divided
up between
thoroughly singular 'dry-goods', as
he liked
to put it, and mistaken perceptions,
a clear
division of truth and falsity. His
'delusion'
attack is really the Solipsism Objection
is another form, and it has no understanding
of the possibility of sensing being
non-epistemic,
non-mental - just a part of the Real
itself,
having no necessary relation to the
process
of knowing, however much it has evolved
to
present evidence to the motivational
knowing
module. Those brain-damaged persons
known
as 'agnosics' (translated from the
Greek
- 'not-knowers') can see, that is sense,
perfectly well but are not able to
look,
that is, to perceive, to use either
their
powers of attention or their memory's
motivations
to select any entity whatever. They
are condemned
never to interpret the bare evidence.
Austin's
argument fails utterly to explain their
state
since he resists the separation of
sensing
and perceiving.
However, if we think with Piaget as
our range
of familiar 'objects' being the present
state
of our co-operative learning venture
on the
Real (sensory) evidence with which
we are
presented, then no such clear distinction
can be made from the philosophical
position.
However much we must perform the truth-falsity
game in the position of ordinary life
in
order to co-ordinate these differing
selections
from the Real that 'objects', that
they are
singular, have definite boundaries
spatial,
temporal and qualitative that are
(impossibly) the same for all of us,
they
never capture the whole of the brute
evidence
- How could they since the evidence
is (valuably)
different for each of us at the very
moment
when we have to behave as if it is
not? This
was the cogent point made by A. J.
Ayer is
his answer to Austin (Ayer, 1969, 131),
that
our perceptions manifestly do not capture
all the evidence that is available.
For Austin,
if you see a pig, that's it - there
is nothing
more you can learn about it! So there
is
always more evidence there than we
know how
to interpret, for there is no end to
interpretation.
Perceptual selections, in theory, could
be
moved about infinitely; it is like
trying
to count all the points in a straight
line.
Austin's is an Objectivist argument
for it
all depends on his assuming that his
opponent
must be arguing for a pictorial resemblance
between external 'objects' and internal
'objects'.
There were of course some Sense-Datum
theorists
who wrote of 'the datum' corresponding
to
'the thing' (e. g. Price with his talk
of
the datum of a red tomato,
1961/1932, 3), though not all of them
did
(C. D. Broad preferred to think of
'objects
as hypotheses'; Broad, 1951/1923, 152).
If
'objects' are the co-operative selections
from the Real as has been argued in
the present
theory, an attempt to bring our individual
guesses into co-ordination upon the
evidence
from the undoubted Real, then Austin's
complaints
do not upset the notion of an internal
field.
Martin Lean made the same complaints
as Austin
before him when attacking C. D. Broad,
but
his argument all depends on the same
naïve,
even occult belief in the 'commonsense'
reality
of objects, all without any inquiry
into
the construction of 'common' sense
(Lean,
1953).
What is suspicious about this Direct
Realist
insistence on the object-as-currently-understood
is that it magically sacralizes the
received
opinion: thus (1) it is authoritarian,
privileging
the speaker's traditionally favoured
objectifications
of the world as beyond correction,
and (2)
it ignores the fact that objectification
is actually based on the Idealization
of
Reciprocity, that 'naive and unreflecting
faith' (Rommetveit, 1978, 31) between
persons,
which makes every identification, including
that of oneself, an act of trust in
the other.
All language is based on this social
trust,
as was argued in the Times Literary
Supplement
letter on the opening webpage, so the
authoritarian
objectivist is trying to turn trustful
co-operation
into a command-obedience structure
with him
as the master. But we do not need Hegel
to
tell us that masters can be corrected
by
slaves.
Here an argumentum ad hominem is fully
appropriate,
for those who are fearful of self-correction
are at the mercy of a fear-generated
narcissism.
This ignoring of the trust is exactly
what
gives their argument the specious force
it
seems to have, for to say with Austin
and
Ryle 'talk of deception only makes
sense
against a background of general non-deception'
is merely to repeat the Idealization
of Reciprocity
- that we have both singled out exactly
the
same entity - without realising that
that
agreement is only an ongoing trust
which
has to acknowledge the risk that both
may
not have understood it in the same
way. Our
criteria of selection might be significantly
different without either of us knowing.
But
the Austin-Ryle mantra insidiously
suggests
that anyone who tries to show that
if someone
who tries to claim that something in
the
agreed 'background' of 'non-deception'
is
actually deceptive is an untrustworthy
person.
This is where the spurious strength
of this
bland assertion lies: if you challenge
the
received opinion, you must be a devious
relativist.
The truth is that the accuser is the
one
lacking in trust in his human partner
in
the language game. He is really no
different
from the relativist he berates, for
both
are Humpty Dumptys, their words being
what
they privately choose them to mean
without
leaving anything open to mutual correction:
for the authoritarian it is the received
opinion, for the relativist it is the
'private'
meaning. There are no private meanings,
for
we are not and cannot be wholly aware
of
the intimate sensory evidence for those
meanings
in our own heads. To this degree Putnam
is
right when he says meanings depend
upon extension
(Putnam, 1988, 49) for the sensory
evidence
does move concomitantly with the whole-field
input, but wrong to believe in given
objects;
he actually says that one should see
science
as 'a story of successive changes of
belief
about the same objects, not as a story
of
successive "changes of meaning"'
(ibid., 12; my emphasis). He should
have
taken more notice of his own metaphor
of
'story', for in a story the transformation
at the core of it may even be of the
singularity
of the 'thing'. This is like David
Woodruff
Smith's false reliance on a 'determinable
x' that remains the same from the old
perception
to the new (Woodruff Smith, 1982, 52).
But
this is insufficiently general, for
there
are many cases of perceptual change
in which
the original 'singularity' is abandoned
and
entirely new boundaries are selected
(such
that there may be two or more 'objects'
where
one was thought to be, or an overlap
with
another). Here is an example:
"See that bird on the tree there?"
"Yes." "Well, it's really
two-and-a-bit leaves." As the
ninth-century
Indian philosopher Dignaga wrote, 'Even
"this"
may be a case of mistaken identity'
(Matilal,
1986, 332).
This also disposes of (VIII) The objection
that Intrinsic Experience is impossible.
Gilbert Harman maintains that it is
impossible
to distinguish sensory features from
the
object with which they are associated.
For
example, he says that, when we look
at a
tree, 'the sensed qualities are always
features
of the presented tree' (Harman 1990,
39). The reader will probably by now
see
the form of the mistake here, a carrying
of the Idealization of Reciprocity
into the
authoritarian's superstitious temple:
it
forgets that objectivity is based on
a social
trust that accepts risk, ignoring the
sensory
evidence upon which all such identifications
depend, from which others may be making
the
selection (here of 'the tree') with
a hidden
and different set of criteria.
Consider another of Helmholtz's observations.
Butchers often surround the red meat
that
they have on sale with green paper.
The effect
is to enhance the red colour of the
meat
because of the after-image effect of
the
green as the eyes move over the red
of the
meat. Now few, if any, customers are
aware
of this transformation, and so all
would
agree with Harman that 'the sensed
qualities
are always features of the presented
meat.'
But it was patently not in this case.
Another example. Daniel Dennett believes
that once one has taught the cry of
the osprey
to the point that they have passed
'all the
objective testing procedures', then
no queer
(in the Wittgensteinian sense) private
understandings
could remain, and public meaning would
be
guaranteed (Dennett, 1985). However,
let
the cry of the osprey have characteristic
overtones in the 16Hz to 20Hz region.
Our
pupil, being young, happens to be able
to
hear these overtones which have been
present
for him on all the exemplary occasions,
though
without either his own or his teacher's
conscious
knowledge (his teacher, being over
40 years
old could not hear those overtones
at all).
On a day of torrential rain when the
rest
of us only hear the noise of the downpour,
the pupil claims to hear the osprey.
The
majority deny it and are amazed that
after
his thorough Wittgensteinian training
he
can come out with such a queer private
judgement.
The authoritarian objectivist is confused
about the word 'public' in the phrase
'public
meaning': he thinks it implies the
notion
of being arrived at by a majority decision,
but, on the contrary, it implies the
involvement
of many persons, one of whom may turn
out
to know better than the rest !
The same point about the 'object' being
an
act of trusting co-ordination with
the other
on the Real evidence, comes out in
Austin's
treatment of hallucination and after-images.
In the case of hallucination, like
many another
Direct Realist (from Gram, 1983 to
Huemer,
2001), he never considers the well-known
empirical case of a non-epistemic hallucination
that is, an hallucination 'abstract'
in the
painter's sense, rather like a computer-generated
screen-saver, one representing nothing
at
all. Price
(1961/1932, 28), following Broad (1923,
284)
called them 'wild' sense-data. In spite
of
their being discussed in the debate,
Austin
and his like completely ignore the
possibility,
bound as they are to given objecthood,
and
confine their consideration to instances
such as the drunkard's pink elephants;
for
them, those experiencing an hallucination
are never lucid nor can an hallucination
be non-objectified. R. J. Hirst says
that
all those who suffer hallucinations
are 'confused'
(Hirst, 1959, 44). Moltke Gram is so
convinced
he never considers the possibility
of non-objectified
hallucination: 'an imaginary or hallucinatory
f is the same kind of f that is encountered
in veridical perception' (Gram, 1983,
121).
But if they had read their Price (Price,
1964, 18) it is perfectly possible
to be
fully conscious and critically observant
when having a hallucination of something
that is not 'an object' at all. can
instance
the migraine sufferers and others who
experience
'fortification patterns', bands of
flickering
zigzags which slowly expand to cover
wide
regions of the visual field. The sufferers
are not under any 'illusion'; if they
are
so inclined, they can inspect these
non-objectified,
that is, non-epistemic, patterns at
leisure
and attend to different aspects of
the show,
but what they will then be objectifying
will
be their own inner sensory experience
without
any connection to familiar external
objects.
None of these persons who experience
such
patterns are suffering from a 'delusion',
nor in essence is what they do see
propositionally
present to them.
It also seems distinctly counter-intuitive
to try to maintain that the rest of
their
visual field is not on an inner display,
but the fortification pattern is. The
rest
of their visual field is being memory-selected
into familiar 'reality' - that is all
the
difference. Just as on a TV screen
we can
see simultaneously a real person and
a cartoon
character (as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger
film Action Man) without doubting for
a moment
the reality of the glass screen and
the phosphor
cells on its back, so too the combination
of 'wild' hallucinations and normal
perception
strongly suggests that one display
encompasses
all visual experiences.
(XI) The Objections to the Double-Vision
Argument Supporters of qualia have
often
used the fact that one's visual field
often
shows us double images as a proof that
the
internal field does not correspond
directly
to the external world. If we read our
Helmholtz,
we discover, perhaps to our surprise,
that
a considerable portion of our visual
field
is always covered by double images,
the reason
being that, when we focus on something
near,
all the background is doubled, and
vice versa
(Helmholtz, 1968, 177). The Direct
Realists
are not fazed by this argument, responding
in a characteristic fashion that, in
the
case of double images, we just see
one thing
twice, that is all (Ryle, 1966/1949,
207;
Pitcher, 1971, 41; Gram,
1983, 102-3; Huemer, 2001, 130-1).
This is
how Ryle puts it, but the same argument
is
used unchanged by his admirers:
The squinter, aware of his squint,
who reports
that it looks just as if there were
two candles
on the table, or that he might be seeing
two candles, is describing how the
single
candle looks by referring to how pairs
of
candles regularly look to spectators
who
are not squinting; and if, not being
aware
of his squint, he says that there are
two
candles on the table, he is, in this
case,
misapplying just the same general recipe.
(Ryle, 1966/1949, 207) Right through
to Huemer,
fifty years later - 'There is a single
physical
object you are seeing' (Huemer, 2001,
130-1)
- the argument is as before.
However, to get the matter clear, one
has
to consider all the empirical facts.
When
the superimposition of the two eyes
comes
apart, as in squinting, there is an
immediate
loss of stereoscopic sensory space
for the
portion producing the 'doubling'. For
the
Fingers example, the two fingers are
now
only 2-dimensional, whereas for the
normal
superimposition, they were stereoscopically
'solid'. A sensory feature has changed
but
Ryle and the others make no mention
of it.
What does this omission imply? That
they
have completely forgotten - or were
never
aware - that the two images of 'the
finger'
were actually different at every point.
The
difference in the angle of incidence
of the
two eyes upon the same region of the
Real
produces a whole-field difference at
the
level of the continuum of the sensory
field.
So one cannot describe the 'two' candles
as merely the 'same' candle seen in
an illusory
fashion, when there is a distinct non-epistemic
difference in those portions of the
visual
field as in every other part of it.
Notice
that we can use Ryle's own unawareness
of
this as a proof of the non-epistemic
state
of the field because it was outside
his knowledge
at the very moment he believed that
the 'object'
description provided all the characterization
necessary. One may observe something
of this
non-objectified difference by examining
those
figures constructed by Bela Julesz
(1960)
in which two squares of apparently
random
correlated dot patterns produce stereoscopically
solid pictures when squinted together:
a
close inspection at the edge of the
place
where the 3-D form appears will show
a tiny
but distinct difference where a section
has
been shifted over. The same kind of
difference
is present in 'Magic-Eye' pictures,
where
the vertical computer-generated bands
are
different in the fine detail of their
composition.
What is particularly relevant here
is that,
in the 'Magic-Eye' pictures, the 'field-determinateness'
of the dots that makes them up is on
an entirely
different logical level from that of
the
3-D forms which appear when we move
our eyes
away from them while maintaining our
fixation.
A computerized list of those dot-differences
could be made, but it would make no
mention
of the 'pyramid' or 'leaping dog' that
shows
up in the 3-D picture. This is equivalent
to the difference between the non-epistemic
level of the sensing and the object-recognition
level. Some anti-qualians have tried
to deny
the existence of the non-epistemic
by saying
that its bare presence becomes magically
'ineffable'
(see, for example, Daniel Dennett,
1985,
4): however, just as the point-states
of
the 'Magic-Eye' pictures could be propositionalized
at the level of the field without reference
to the 3-D objects, there is no logical
bar
to some neurophysiologist of the future
being
able to list the point-states of the
inner
visual field, in which case it would
not
be in the least 'ineffable'.
Another empirical fact which demonstrates
how the evidence of the non-epistemic
can
produce surprising epistemic results
that
do not sit easily with a Direct Realism
of
objects. Helmholtz reported how the
police
can check for forgeries of banknotes
by putting
the note in question into a stereoscope
with
a genuine note. The fusing of the images
of two genuine notes produces no alteration
in appearance: the fused picture looks
exactly
like an ordinary note. The fusing of
a forged
note with a genuine one produces strange
alterations in the stereoscopic appearance
of 'the' note: certain letters seem
to be
standing an inch or two above or below
the
level of the paper; pictures have solid
distortions;
the detailed background patterns have
strange
dips and lumps in them. All these are
the
result of the mismatches in position
of the
forger's engravings with those of the
genuine
note: for example, a 'lump' in the
pattern
could show that the forged note's pattern
was a little too far over to the left
in
a certain area. What is inexplicable
from
a Direct Realist stance here is how
what
appears to be a 'single' note can give
non-illusory
information about two notes; it is
not a
case of one thing looking double but
of two
things looking single! From the New
Critical
Realist point of view this is merely
using
the evidence of Real non-epistemic
sensing
in a perfectly understandable way,
a tracing
of indirect causal chains. As far as
the
Direct Realist is concerned there is
nothing
in the appearance of the forged note
to indicate
this. He would even have to say of
all stereoscopic
pairs, that they are only 'illusory'
doublings
of a 'single' object; I am at a loss
to hazard
a guess as to what he can say about
the forged-note
case, the two 'things' looking 'single'.
The non-epistemic difference between
the
two eyes' versions of the whole field
can
be made startlingly plain. Cover up
the left
eye and expose the right eye for a
while
to dazzling illumination, as of bright
sunlight.
Then go indoors, remove the blindfold
from
the left eye, look at a red candle,
and squint.
You will see a red candle (the left
eye's)
and a brownish-green candle (the right
eye's),
the latter being produced by the overstimulation
of the cones of the retina. We can
still
agree with Pitcher that we are seeing
'one
thing twice' (Pitcher, 1971, 41) and
yet
deny that this proves that there is
no inner
presentation, for we can see a difference
that is not accounted for in the language
of common 'reality'.
Finally, this objection can be seen
to be
nothing but a form of Objection III,
because
in its insistence on the 'common object',
it is forgetting Ayer's insistence
on the
sensory and perceptual differences
between
person and person, which no amount
of performed
agreement in action can erase. The
non-epistemic
sensory experience of the other person,
which
he or she may be acting on without
it being
salient, out-in-the-open knowledge
to both
of you, is present in every 'common'
identification,
and this is because the evidence cannot
turn
into information.
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