The Philosophies of Perception and Epistemology Today

Scholars in the humanities and to a lesser extent in the social sciences know that their disciplines are in a crisis today. To some extent, this is due to economic pressures. Utility has permeated so deeply into the culture, that there no longer seems to be an argument with heft that can be made in defense of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Things would be different, however, in proportion as it is understood that atomism is a philosophy. More than that: that atomism is a philosophy afflicted with fatal defects.

Hume, and to a lesser degree Locke, are the philosophers most frequently referred to by today’s writers on perception. Hume, as will be examined in later chapters, is regarded as having had the last word on the capacities of the human mind to know. From Hume’s point of view, I will argue, the mind cannot know. Yet this deduction does not prevent Hume from arguing that “secret principles” move human beings and the rest of nature along. This is the groove that subsequent philosophies have settled into. They prefer experimental evidence to literary discussion. Yet that doctrine of experimental science is laid upon metaphysical foundations. There are many pressures in academia which operate to foreclose on investigation, in the sense I am describing. Yet the scholar who presses an inquiry will eventually be led back to philosophy that is pre-experimental.

It is to be hoped that the introduction on the history of atomism will help revive the effort. Atomism is metaphysics. It leads us back into the domain of “being.” The domain of “being” of course is the domain of what exists. Political philosophers above all need to begin with what exists, because political philosophy in truth must begin as opinion: political philosophy cannot develop itself without first being opinion. Political philosophers cannot arise to more powerful knowledge than opinion, except on the shoulders of that opinion. If and when philosophy turns against opinion, forsakes it as fundamentally ignorant, and denies its own effective dependence on opinion for its original evidence: then we have a political crisis in addition to the educational one.

Allowance must be made for the Machiavellian wing of philosophy, which is pointedly averse to discourse. From Machiavelli’s point of view, congested and frustrated political opinions are necessary to good governance.^[1] For Machiavelli, for his style of political science, frustrated opinions lend vigor to the state. Political science, in the case of Machiavelli, has effectively established what the opinions are in the a priori: the opinions are either irresponsible, as in the case of the majority, or oppressive, in the case of leaders. Therefore, for this constituency, the suppression of opinion is good politics rather than a crisis. I regard it as a crisis rather than as good politics.

The larger project of philosophy in recent times has involved reducing the mental to the physical. In other words, when people articulate opinions about social and political situations, philosophy would like to interpret this as essentially due to conditions of the brain and nervous system. The “physicalist” interpretation of human opinion and action has picked up considerable steam. The physical, in this case, ultimately refers to atoms.

The physical as a focus can also take up issues that were once strictly the province of political science, involving ethics and opinions. There is no need to talk about political issues when the human being’s entire register of opinions can be reinterpreted as states of biological alteration. Instead of investigating society or the opinion, the philosopher investigates the one who feels and opines.

It might seem inevitable to the reader that the reduction of the mind to the physical will ignore normative issues. This is not the case however. In fact, the opposite is the case. The physicalist movement in the philosophy of mind and in the related doctrines of perception insists that the physical contains its own normative imperatives: this usually amounts to self-preservation, a moral obligation to avoid the blades of natural selection, or more powerfully, a demand that one’s every opinion be nestled in one grand over-arching web of opinions. This is a direction instituted by Early Modern philosophy. The early doctrines of self-preservation have been misunderstood as amoral. It was always the intention of Machiavelli, of Hobbes, of Spinoza and Locke, and indeed of Hume, that the individual be induced to choose feelings of compulsion as a moral guide. The pressure employed by philosophy to seek to induce these coordinates has always been part of a moral program. The program has become more ambitious over time.

At the root of Machiavelli’s political science—and this is the one that has served as an exemplar for the assorted modern political philosophies—is acute psychological insight. People tend not to like being anxious, or herded along, or provoked into confrontations. These situations expose the human personality to a range of painful injuries. The rough and tumble of Machiavelli’s politics is designed to unleash the sorts of utterances that, Iago-like, cut deep.^[2] It is only when human beings have been exposed to a certain amount of humiliation, by assaults upon their pride, that it becomes so momentous and traumatizing to elect self-preservation. Nobody wants to believe that they would put their good name at risk, merely in order to survive. Yet this is precisely the predicament that Machiavelli’s politics are designed to elicit. It is only when people have been compelled to surrender their own reputation, in order to survive, that the roots of the new regime are established. The philosophies of natural selection are a sanitized version of this philosophy, but they are fruit from the same tree.

Foundationalism

It is impossible to investigate the philosophies of atomism, and their correlative doctrines of perception, if we do not begin outside or before that philosophy. In epistemology, many scholars have insisted that some province of knowledge must be protected from the skeptical challenge. For this they often turn to Descartes. This is not a good choice. Descartes is an atomist. The very foundation of his Meditations is to forswear reliance upon perception, that is, a wholesale indictment of them. That Descartes will later claim to vindicate the perceptions, as a matter of deductive logic, is not the foundationalist we seek for.

According to Descartes, “anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if I had found it to be wholly false.”^[4] It is true of course that Descartes has proved some piece of knowledge that is certain. He has proved that he suffers from anxiety, and that this is proof of his existence. Proof of anxiety is not much of a foundation. It seems rather bound to skepticism, since when we know facts, we tend to settle down. Descartes is not the foundationalist. Plato and Aristotle are the foundationalists. Scholars find it easy to dispense with Descartes’ disembodied Cogito. They may not find it so easy to dispense with Plato’s theory of perception.

Descartes, in his Meditations, observes that he has not always been deceived by his perceptions. Yet he feels anxiety, and does not feel that they are absolutely trustworthy. Descartes’ early career as an atomist was never forsaken. In diverse ways, Descartes offers only a black eye to perception and its reputation. “Sensory perception does not show us what really exists in things,” Descartes argues; “but merely shows us what is beneficial or harmful to man’s composite nature.”^[5] Certainly, perception is not itself the foundation for Descartes: the foundation, for Descartes, is that which one is confronted by once one has forsaken one’s reliance upon perception. Anxiety. If one feels dread, one nevertheless feels. This is the foundation of Descartes, and it is only the indictment of sense perception that gets us there.

In the next step of the argument, Descartes reflects that God has made it possible for human beings to know this certainty: anxiety. This foundation, it should be noted, is far from the ordinary experience of belief: that is, from the perception of a dog, or a tree, or an act of courage. Yet, according to Descartes, God’s goodness has made some certainty possible for us, even though we had to surrender our confidence in perception to get it. Only then, based on the inference of God’s goodness, does Descartes revisit perception. IFF (if and only if) God is good, IFF God makes it possible for us to know our anxiety as certain, then he is a Good God, and we can thereupon deduce that our perceptions must be trusted also. Perception, therefore, is not the foundation. The certainty of anxiety is. It should not be hard for the reader to trace this certainty of anxiety back to Machiavelli’s founding.

Jaegwon Kim

Even if Descartes had a foundation worth the defending, most epistemologists are against him or any other philosopher advocating foundations. Jaegwon Kim is one of the more thorough recent philosophers to deal with the subject matter of perception and belief. Descartes, according to Kim, is problematic, because Descartes holds out the prospect that there is something different in the universe than body. “Mentality,” as Kim describes it, in Descartes’ theory, is something distinct from body. Kim thinks that this is problematic. Whatever “mind” or “mentality” might be, and to be sure Descartes certainly does give us this much in his foundation—Kim maintains that it must be “supervenient” upon body. “More specifically, I will claim that a physicalist has only two genuine options, eliminativism and reductionism.”^[6] Kim does not like to talk about atomism too much. Yet from time to time, he trots out the nomenclature. In Kim’s view, we really have no basis for thinking that there is something called “mind” that is different from the rest of nature, which is alleged to be merely “physical.”

It is also noteworthy, in the case of Kim, that this domain of belief is regarded as normative. Theory must somehow slip in front of perception. For this, Kim has recourse to Hume. Observation, Kim reflects, cannot itself be the foundation of scientific theory. Theory is necessary in order to reach perception, for Kim. This is because “mind” must be “reduced” to the physical. Kim is mightily interested in characterizing moral beliefs, values, as reducible to the physical. Let me be more accurate. Kim says that at the very least there is a correlation between “mind” and the physical, that is, between “consciousness” and the material organ of the brain and the rest of physiology. A “correlation” doesn’t get us very far. It gets us nowhere, as a matter of fact. “Correlation” exists between whatever we choose to compare: one way or the other. Kim is after a much stronger degree of causality than mere comparison. Reduction of the mind to the “physical” is Kim’s intent. He seeks to deflect from his theory any metaphysical issues: he claims not to be a metaphysician. He claims that he is not making an argument in favor of “global supervenience” of the mental upon the bodily. Yet he also insists that there is a stronger degree of causality operative in this theory of “supervenience” than mere correlation. Supervenience, Kim argues, is best left very vague. “Let one hundred supervenience concepts bloom!” Well, this isn’t very useful. The ordinary person feels, thinks, and acts very frequently based upon what is perceived about him or her. She does not know of this physiology with its own moral agenda. Yet this is where Kim keeps bringing us back to: in order to hold a belief, one must have “reasons” for it. These reasons cannot be limited merely to the situation at hand. They must be entirely internal to the organism, a constitutive worldview. The evidence that Kim seeks for in the case of any opinion or belief, must be general. Ultimately, it is not hard to see where Kim is headed. What is this normative basis for “belief”? Survival of the species. Avoidance of pain. Self preservation. Behaviorism or functionalism, in other words.

While there certainly are normative beliefs, what does our ability to discriminate that “this is a tree” have to do with norms? Kim will argue that we only see the tree because we need to make use of it; we need to make use of it in order to be able to survive; and on into the dense jungles of the “physical” and “naturalized epistemology.”^[7] Yet the brute fact of the matter is that the individual does not possess reasons for recognizing a tree. After all, we don’t cut down most trees we see, or scavenge them for food. Our belief that this is a tree is simply because we recognize that this is what it is: and we recognize it, because at some point in time, we first encountered one, and remembered it.

When Kim defines the category of the “psychological,” he is careful to exclude parts of our inner life that would cause trouble to his theory. “Memory,” according to Kim, is “not internal.” It is not part of the “psychological.” That is a strange argument. “Memory turns out to be non-internal for two reasons: first, it implies something about the past, and second, in most cases, like knowing, it implies the existence of something other than the rememberer.”^[8] It is possible for Kim to surgically eliminate inconvenient parts of our internal experience from his definition of the “psychological,” because like the modern atomists he denies that he can investigate anything that he has not himself designed as a measure. If perception really can’t reach the external objects, and Kim repeatedly recurs to Hume for support, then the domain of “belief” can be preserved for something that is only shared with the rest of nature, the physical.

Barbara Montero has made some interesting arguments to the effect that the apostles of the physical, or physicalism, have a rather difficult time defining just what the physical is. Does “being” qualify as “physical”? What about unity? What about “whole”? What about “part”?^[9] Plato has proved, and we have traced the proof, that these are all true and real things in nature, not mere mental instruments or conjurations. One gets the distinct feeling that Kim would like to discuss the physical in atomist terms, that is, as homogeneous. Yet no body can be homogeneous. Bodies themselves are composed of unlike natures, beginning with unity and being. There is that thread of “being” again, which should make the reader hopeful. For “being” certainly has to appeal to us as the familiar. It appeals to our truly foundational faculties, and memory certainly ranks among them most prominently.

Kim’s work is very useful, though, for it displays the commanding disposition of modern philosophy towards the domain of “belief.” An individual cannot just have beliefs, for Kim. He must have “reasons.” These reasons must “hang together” in a coherentist way: it must help constitute a web of belief, all of which is guided in the same direction, that is, a goal oriented direction. Yet that is precisely the problem. Kim’s very determination to dissolve “belief” into merely supervenient smoke and mirrors, that is, as caused by the “physical,” reveals his impatience with human beings and their beliefs. For people do not all have the same imperatives.

It would not be a very intelligent species where every individual lived primarily for the sake of survival, when it is the unique characteristic of this species that it knows that it will die. This is not to say that man is careless of his life, or reckless of his preservation. Quite the contrary. Yet it is not his normal state, to feel in fear for his life; unless he is being contemplated from within the tradition that Machiavelli started, that Florentine anthropology. “Why” is not really the question that is being suppressed, however. “What?” is the question that is being suppressed. Trees, rocks, lichen, sand: these are not normative objects for the self-understanding of man outside of these philosophies. They are aloof from the normative. Yet man cannot be tolerated to be aloof from the normative for even a single second when his life is intended to take place, more or less, in a mobilized condition.

Man cannot begin to situate himself morally, unless and until he can learn about his environment. He cannot begin to make choices, until he knows a good deal of “whatness.” Jaegwon Kim is more than a little insistent about this point. Kim cannot tolerate that epistemology, the very inquiry into what it is possible for human beings to know, be aloof from the normative for even a single second. That is because in Kim’s theory, the human morality is nature’s morality: and this is alleged to be survival. The fact of the matter is that philosophy did not have this “emergency” orientation until Machiavelli. Since that time, it has been proposed as an unquestionable imperative. It does not deserve that sort of deference.

W. V. O. Quine

Atomism as developed in the philosophies of Locke and Hume is not quite original. It builds upon the arguments made with less subtlety by Hobbes and Spinoza. The essential point is easy to overlook. Locke and Hume both lay claim to the mantle of “empiricism.” “Empiricism” sounds for all the world like good old-fashioned sense perception. The trouble is that Locke, Hume, and Quine lay claim to an atomist version of sense-perception. The result is that perception is denied the ability to know the objects external to us. For the purposes of ordinary opinion, that is all empiricism could ever meaningfully signify. It is kicked to the curb by philosophy. What the atomist philosophy of perception vouchsafes to the human beings, are certain “mental objects.” The individual cannot know if these mental objects refer to any actually existing objects outside of his mind. Yet it is these mental objects that philosophers such as Quine refer to when they indicate that they are empirical. They are indicating mental objects that are not, and cannot be shared.

Jeremy Bentham swooned over the work of David Hume. Not only was Bentham enamored of Hume’s theory of utility. Bentham also borrows Hume’s theory of the empirical. Bentham was important for Gottlob Frege, and thus for Russell and Wittgenstein. Quine traces this genealogy of philosophers in his own work. For Bentham, and his theory of fictions, it is the common external objects which fall into that defamatory category. It is the external objects which are dismissed as fictions. All that the individual can know is his own mental objects. From these mental objects, he can undertake to make sophisticated philosophical inferences. The ordinary opinion does not know of any inference that can be made, aside from the judgment as to what an object is; and that judgment is not inductive.

The individual sees a rabbit. He does not infer that he sees a rabbit. The individual sees a tree. He does not infer that he sees the tree. When the individual finds dog hairs on the ground, but sees no dog, at this point he can make an induction: that a dog has been by this way. Yet if the dog comes running into view, there is no longer need for any induction.

The formal logicians take a tremendous amount of time parsing the public discourse. They do not identify themselves as philosophers interjecting a new line of argument. They profess to be interpreters of what the plain speakers are saying. The terminology into which Quine squeezes ordinary speech, so changes the signification of that common speech, as to radically alter its meaning.

Quine, for his part, as we have noted, dismisses body itself from physics. We are supposedly able to get along now with merely space and time coordinates.^[11] What will possess these space and time coordinates? This is one of those questions that the physicists think should not be asked. It seems pretty clear, though, that the casting of physical objects into metaphysical purgatory has distinct political implications.

For Quine, what is perceived are “stimuli.” These stimuli do not discover to us any particular object in the world. Nor are any two people alike by how their “sensory reflectors” are affected. “But event stimulation, as I use the term, is the activation of some subset of the subject’s sensory receptors,” Quine argues.^[12] People do not perceive objects, from this point of view. The picture that Quine paints is quintessential Locke: out there is a shapeless nothingness, from the vantage point of the philosopher. The philosopher, as it were, invents the objects, by imposing names on the formless. There are no discrete objects that people are all referring to, in Quine’s analysis. Yet for some reason, perception is permitted to enable us to see other human beings, using names, “behaving.” Once the contours of the equation have been narrowed down to human linguistic practices, the embargo on perception is largely eased.

Yet clearly people come to speak about objects. How is this accomplished? Quine insists that this is a matter of reward and punishment. The child must look to see what others are saying, in some situation; and though it is alleged that there really are no distinct objects that we can truly know by perception, that the community, through praising and blaming its members, devises ersatz objects. “Meanings are, first and foremost, meanings of language. Language is a social act which we all acquire on the evidence solely of other people’s overt behavior under publicly recognized circumstances.”^[13] “We have been beaten into an outward conformity to an outward standard, and thus it is that when I correlate your sentences with mine by the simple rule of phonetic correspondence, I find that the public circumstances of your affirmations and denials agree pretty well with those of my own.”^[14]

It is instructive to observe the language that Quine employs when he refers to the child, or to the denizens of common speech generally. They are singled out as residents of “the jungle,” the “state of nature.” They are “savages,” or “natives.” For those members of the community, all of them doubtless, who do not possess this philosophy of Quine’s, who believe that they do perceive distinct objects, such as a rabbit, external to them and observable by all—Quine likens this sort of belief to ancient animism, where the people ascribed magical powers to the rocks and the trees. The most humble, rudimentary, elementary, effortless act of perceptual judgment is transformed by Quine into a noisy, messy, political affair based on the threat of punishment. Objects or names are to be employed in a certain way, because the people use names that way; and we could add, that if philosophy is redefining what ordinary perception and speech actually are, then the political levers of reward and punishment for the various uses of speech will be caused by this philosophy.

To observe Quine talk about a rabbit is an education. It is not possible, Quine insists, for an individual to simply recognize a rabbit. One must allegedly make a proposition to oneself, each and every time. “This is a rabbit.” The one-word utterance “rabbit,” in Quine’s interpretation, must still constitute a proposition, a combination of elements in the mind. Of course, if people should walk around uttering things such as “this is a book,” “this is a table,” “this is a tree,” it would upset us. It would seem to us that the person must be injured, or mentally debilitated. Yet from the vantage point of the philosophy of the mental objects, it is necessary to articulate a proposition: for one must get from the mental object to the external object, which it is alleged we cannot really know about. From the mental object to the allegation of an external object, in Quine’s view, a whole complicated mental process must ensue. One must hypothesize the existence of something.

The linguistic philosophy drapes itself in very complicated terminology. Yet the public is certainly going to feel the impact of this educational movement. The linguistic philosophy slows discourse down, affects as if it does not know of any common external objects. It will require of the ordinary speakers that they formally articulate what to them seems all too obvious. The public mind will chafe under these unfamiliar rules. Ordinary opinion does not possess the wherewithal to cope with these philosophical doctrines.

Quine is good enough to bring up the issue of being. He brings it up in an interesting place. Quine, in talking about being, offers us symbolic logic. In the symbolic logic, the domain of mental objects is enforced. No direct reference to any external object is possible except by inference or hypothesis. The equation of symbolic logic exudes the same antipathy to nouns that physics now exudes towards “body.” That which can be attached to a variable, or bound by it, can only occupy a certain place in the symbolic logic and its equation: that place must be substitutable. This means that the noun can have only the remotest purchase on the statement. It can only exist as a mental object; and it cannot matter to the degree that it should be kept in focus as some particular object.

What has being? Quine gives us his definition. That has being, which is bound to a variable.^[15] The bound variable sustains the embargo on sense perception. The designers of that logic limit the human speaker to two moods: in the case of Bertrand Russell, they are called “acquaintance” and “description.” “Acquaintance” is the mental object. This is a purely personal experience that no other person can share. It is atomist perception, that is, sensation induced by bombardment of atoms against sensory organs. “Description” is a purely hypothetical statement which concerns the domain of possible objects. The philosopher is not obliged to offer us a description of anything that must exist. As Carnap has said, this is the power of logic in the analytic philosophy: it obtains its power to know truth, by forsaking any attempt to know things about the actual world. This description is the object that is contained in the statement of symbolic logic.

Quine speaks about these people—the ones who insist that their use of names really refers to an actually existing, independent object called “rabbit”—as the domain of savage tribes. The ordinary person who refers to a green door, and believes that not only she, but anyone else by her, would see the exact same door—Quine believes that this ordinary person is a rattle raiser, a creature of enchantments, perhaps a believer in dwarves and elves. “We see the archaic dominance of mentalism in a preference for final cause over efficient cause as a mode of explanation,” Quine writes.^[17] Quine goes farther than this. He regards the people who insist that they refer to actually existing objects, as being more than primitives. Quine also believes that these people are possessed by delusions: delusions that life has meaning.

By contrast, are we supposed to believe that Quine thinks life lacks meaning? For Quine believes in order. Order is based in praise and blame, allegedly deployed against every infant and child who is trying to use words. According to Quine, we utter words because there is a moral reason to do so—conformity. When Quine observes that those who believe that words can actually refer to existing external objects are savages, he is indicating that these people have not yet been socialized into the rules of the game of society. Those rules do not include relying upon one’s own judgment to indicate what does and does not exist. The domain of truth is now forbidden territory. What objects are is not what this realism is all about: it is about taking one’s cues, for what one says, from those who have been ordained to establish the metaphysics of speech.

Quine’s tendency to talk about the issue of meaning in human life as somehow in need of explanation suggest a very grim view of today’s academe. It is indeed reason why the Humanities are called into question now, if philosophy itself has called into question the human capability of developing and executing purposes. Whatever else our educational institutions do, they do not succeed in revealing this debate. For so long as philosophy denies that we have truly common objects to talk about, and is successful in this denial; to that degree, the very road to the possibility of actual conversation will be throttled. The issue of purpose will wrinkle up and die from neglect. The suppression of the nature of body from philosophical discourse suppresses the political animal as well.

John Dewey

One of the major objectives of this study is to trace the relationship between the objects of perception, and perceptual judgment, that non-philosophers are accustomed to employ; and the relationship between these things and the exhortative language of modern philosophy or science. John Dewey is a philosopher of rare penetration. He is in many respects more candid than the thinkers who have succeeded him. First of all, Dewey takes a great deal of time to explain the following: yes, modern science is discrediting the evidence obtainable by ordinary perception. Modern science is embarked upon a project of renaming. It does not believe that it needs to ask leave of ordinary people for this enterprise; and Dewey is even willing to make his arguments in the context of the classical language of philosophy, that of being.

Dewey may well be a genius. Yet Dewey is candid in his dismissal of the evidence obtainable by ordinary perception. People, and the natural languages that they rely upon, take objects as “ends.” That is to say, ordinary perception takes objects as beings unto themselves: the object is a table, or a rock, or a tree. Dewey insists that this point of view is deluded, and unsatisfactory. “Life denotes a function,” Dewey explains, “a comprehensive activity, in which organism and environment are included.” “We learn, in short, that qualities which we attribute to objects ought to be imported to our own ways of experiencing them . . . this discovery marks an emancipation: it purifies and remakes the objects of our direct or primary experience.”^[19]

The unsophisticated point of view fails to observe the new definition of rationality that Dewey advocates. The object, say the tree, must be looked at first of all as a “means.” It must be looked upon as an opportunity for science to create new values: both of desire and of satisfaction. To approach the desk as a means, rather than as an “end,” would be to define the desk in terms of those elements in it which would survive its destruction. The desk, for a brief time, may be the object that a child or adult uses for study and the conduct of business. Yet time moves on, and the objects in the world are corruptible. The new rationality is not about to stand idly by while the desk slowly perishes. In decay, the desk may be defined as firewood; as firewood, it becomes part of a complex to generate energy for a construction project of some other value. That other value in turn summons new needs and desires from the people, and provides some opportunity to gratify them. Thus the ordinary language of “desk” and “chair” and “apple” is to Dewey naïve, almost animistic. It is guilty for being dependent on nature, or on what one has already been able to wrest from nature: experience instructs that the world is fleeting, that the objects in it are fleeting, and that enjoyment is fleeting. Therefore the individual in the new rationality must cease to view objects as “ends.” He must be made to think of objects as “means.” This ordinary opinion cannot do. Ordinary opinion cannot appropriate a language which would itself contravene its capacity to communicate effectively, and without this capacity to communicate effectively, the people could not begin to subject any object to use.

Dewey couldn’t be clearer. He is frankly dismissive of the ordinary language. He tips his cap to atomist philosophy, and to the language of “relations” that it makes possible. For in the domain of atoms, all is effectively one. The atoms are all eternal. They underlay “macroscopic” objects such as desks and chairs, but the scientist will name the objects (including desks and chairs) with mathematical symbols which can all be related to one another effortlessly. A desk and an apple may not seem to have a very strong relationship to one another to the ordinary person. Perhaps in days past a student fond of a teacher would put an apple on her desk in the morning. This is not the type of relationship that Dewey has in mind however. For Dewey, the desk, the apple orchard, human excrement, the bones of convicts who have perished in prison, are all intimately relatable. As matter, as possible means to future creation, as objects that science can organize for the propagation of new objects, the mathematical formulas of physics and industry have their use. The ordinary individual is obviously not going to be a conscious participant in this process. To be aware of choices being made, on the level that Dewey is describing them—sweeping changes in the attitude of philosophy to life in general—these are things to which human beings in general will be reduced en masse. Human beings, not in their conscious opinions but in their feelings, needs, bodies, will be incorporated into the new organization as the new organization increasingly becomes the only means for satisfying such needs.

Dewey does not bring up the philosophic point of view of Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes that is directly on point. Both Machiavelli and Hobbes, first of all, dismiss the old order of names. Machiavelli’s new republic, he insists, will make “everything anew.” Hobbes relies upon the atomist ideology to discredit perceptual evidence, but he too is working a political angle. People in these new philosophic regimes are being pushed towards their passions as a new way of life. This point needs to be clearer. To be sure, even Aristotle observes that most human beings are principally driven by their passions insofar as they guide their lives. Yet there is a difference, a major difference between Modern Political Philosophy and Aristotle. In Machiavelli, in Hobbes, the political philosophy undertakes to generate and supply the very passions that human beings will in turn operate in accordance with. These passions are futile passions, encumbered by fear and repetition. Aristotle never claims that all human beings are driven by passion, and there are better and worse passions. Modern political philosophy seeks to make all of this arena of character and at least potential choice moot.

Machiavelli argues, and Hobbes agrees, that one cannot begin to enjoy an object once it is possessed. One cannot begin to enjoy the object, because one begins to feel anxiety about its depletion. Thus, in order to be able to enjoy the object that one has, one must be busy acquiring new objects, new possessions, in steady progression. Hobbes produces for us his very definition of life from this vantage point: a “perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceases only in death.”^[20] For Hobbes, true enjoyment is not in the ravishing of the object possessed; true “felicity” is obtained in the quest for new objects, in the “hunt” as it were. Dewey’s point of view on perishability reflects this logic of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Machiavelli and Hobbes both seek to provide a new starting point for human mentality: that starting point is crisis. The political science of Machiavelli and Hobbes, quite irrespective of the actual historical situations in their respective countries, undertakes to found order upon conflict: to make of conflict, manufactured conflict, the source of reason. Reason is adaptation to the brute facts of the disorder.

In another book, I tried to make the argument that there is some continuity between Epicurus’s atomism and Machiavelli’s. It seems to me, more and more, that this is not correct. The Epicurean philosopher, I reasoned then, is seeking for more than his share of independence. He is not willing to entertain any obligations or duties. Yet the Epicurean, and Lucretius was a faithful one, sought out serenity. Lucretius has nothing but scorn for earthly treasures, and I was wrong to try to extrapolate from the Lucretian worldview to the Machiavellian doctrine of acquisition. “Wherefore, since our bodies profit nothing from riches or noble birth, or glory of kingdom, we must believe our minds also gain nothing. . . . Therefore this terror and darkness of the mind, not by the sun’s rays, nor the bright shafts of day, must be dispersed, as is most necessary, but by the face of nature and her laws”^[21] When Machiavelli brought the doctrine of atomism to acquisition, he bred a very different personality: one that cannot be separated from anxiety and turbulence.

For Dewey the world is a place full of absolute peril. No “state of war” is described. Yet desperation is seen to be the condition of man. He is unable to rely upon anything. He is unable to foresee how the next few hours are going to turn out. He is rent by anxiety due to the “gnawing tooth of time.”

The reader will think that this is indicative of a world of pain and negativity for Dewey, that this represents the evil that is to be overcome, or suspended. Yet it doesn’t seem to be the case.

For evil, as a word, suggests to Dewey the worldview of objects as “ends.” If one regards objects in terms of how perception presents them to us—as a desk, as an apple—then one is overtaken by the fear and anxiety that attend to the perishable bodies. This pain seems to be what Dewey has in mind in his basic characterization of the human race in this equivalent of a state of nature. Peril, fear, pain, privation, Dewey sketches them out. Yet he seems to be quite like Hobbes. For Dewey, suffering, or the point of view which dares to look at objects as objects in themselves, is somehow set apart from the life process of the whole world. It is alleged to be a philistine consciousness. It is a lazy consciousness. It is a “eulogistic” consciousness, an “apologetic” consciousness. The new reason refuses to use the common names for objects. It prefers mathematical symbols, as physics have taught us, because these symbols ignore the transient qualities of the objects. The mathematical symbols enable the thinker to view the perishable object as, in its demise, a mere means to new values.

Whereas Hobbes urges the individual to seek out other objects to allay anxiety, to enable him to enjoy the objects that he possesses—Dewey seems to take things a step further. One must behold one’s own objects, even oneself—as but a means. The coming into being and passing away that ordinary people celebrate and mourn, are dissolved by Dewey (as they were by Lucretius and the atomists) into an identity. Nature knows no good from evil, Dewey insists. It is all creation, and the hour of birth is no different from the hour of death. “The union of the hazardous and the stable, of the incomplete and the recurrent, is the condition of all experienced satisfaction as truly as of our predicaments and problems.”^[23] The new point of view therefore is indifferent to either births or deaths; and in Dewey’s view, what he is above all full of contempt for, is the proposition that there is some limited good, some finite good, which can constitute the boundary of the human goals and project. In other words, to view one life as a distinct whole unto itself, is for Dewey a leftover of romantic thought; of ancient Greek contemplation, aloofness from activity, “process,” that is, doing.

Dewey notes that the ancient Greek point of view, in the cases of Plato and Aristotle, is much like the ordinary opinion today and always. “Being” is what they are interested in. To be sure, they are. Plato, Aristotle, and the ordinary opiners, all care about what exists, because to them that is what is real. Dewey does not do a good job when he represents the physics of either man. Both Plato and Aristotle believe very much in the reality of coming into being and passing away. Dewey himself partakes of the prejudice of modern philosophy that regards the “forms” as eternal myths. Dewey paints the picture for us of the Greek philosophers, for whom form is the ultimate being; designed for a leisure class to contemplate, while the many toil for their leisure. Dewey makes it out to be the case that Aristotle has no concern for change. Aristotle, according to Dewey, is only looking at objects in terms of “ends,” ends in themselves.

“Form” is the highest state of being for Aristotle, Dewey argues. This seems incorrect. For Aristotle, form taken by itself, does not possess being. Like matter in its eternal aspect, for Aristotle, mere form is but potential being. It is only when form and matter are married together that being is revealed: and this is what Aristotle calls substance. Nobody is more aware than Aristotle that there is no guarantee for the generated beings, that their survival, or the accomplishment of their goals, is not assured. Moral philosophy for Aristotle is impossible to reduce to a science, because moral actions must be responsive to the unpredictable particulars of reality.

Aristotle does insist, that the objects that come into being in nature, including human beings, and including the objects of human art and science, have a purpose, a limited purpose. Dewey is not impressed by Aristotle’s fourfold theory of causation, but nor does he represent it properly. The “cause” of an object, in one very important aspect, is its purpose: “for the sake of which” it exists. Now this is what Dewey is adamantly against, this philosophy of “ends” which he finds in ordinary opinion, in classical philosophy, in religions, in ceremonies, at baptisms and funerals. Does Dewey mean to tell us, that a human being has no “for the sake of which”? That a human life, has no final purpose? If we are talking about that which human beings think about and value, we would have to dismiss Dewey’s claim out of hand. For most people do indeed think of their lives as limited ventures, and husband their energies for what they think would be a suitable achievement, of realization, of fulfillment.

Dewey is trying to banish this very part of mental culture to the dustbin. The point that I wish to make is that this very point of view of Dewey’s is full of zeal. It is almost fanatical. Human life is limited. The human being who views himself as simply one atom in nature is a crushed human being, and a deluded human being (since the atoms don’t exist). The logic of life, as the suppression of human personality, in its natural polarities—this to Dewey is the goal of his entire theory of mind. He tries to pass it off as democratic, because it would exempt nobody. Yet Aristotle’s physics remains vastly more realistic than the atomism with which Dewey is in train. Objects do have a limited purpose, and they do indeed aim for an excellence: artisans work from this premise, and human beings live their lives by this premise. When Dewey tries to indict all of Greek philosophy, his misrepresentation of Aristotle’s physics would enable him to obscure, and in obscuring denigrate and dismiss the very object for which we all live: a full and satisfying life.

One must go back to the “state of nature” that Dewey conjures up. Dewey insists that “childhood does not exist for the sake of maturity.”^[24] “The man comes from the boy, but the boy does not exist in order that the man may exist.” When Dewey says this, and he is controverting Aristotle’s Metaphysics in this example—what is Dewey trying to communicate? Certainly, most of us would allow that childhood is a time for its own enjoyments, a time for itself. It is regarded usually as the time of innocence. To this degree, all would allow, it is true that the boy does not exist for the sake of the man. It would constitute a suppression of life and purpose to think so. There are different stages of life, and each has its special needs, opportunities, and limits. On the other hand, the vast majority of parents spend a great deal of time preparing their sons and daughters for the life that is to come. They spend endlessly to get them educated, so that they can pursue a meaningful and satisfying career. In this aspect, what the boy does very much determines what the man shall become. The sports, the study, the friendships, the aspiration: it is all for a purpose, as Aristotle would say, and as Dewey would frown at. To look upon life as a single whole, would be for Dewey to think of objects as “ends.” They must all be looked upon as “means.” Right down to the bottom.

Let us count them off: sorrow, tragedy, love, triumph, beauty, drama, comedy. People in general, if we are thinking of these names as indicative of fates, shy away from sorrow and tragedy, and lean towards beauty and triumph, and comedy. If we return to Dewey’s state of nature, the one so afflicted by fear and anxiety, the one where nothing is stable or gives the promise of being stable for even a moment—one would think that Dewey is recognizably human in this regard. For he seems to side with the ordinary person. He seems to think pain and terror are bad. That this must be averted. Yet this would be a mistaken interpretation.

For Dewey, suffering is a delusion. It is a romanticizing of one’s existence, that is, the result of thinking about it as an “end,” which in Dewey’s view is the wrong way to think. Suffering in this respect is no different than celebration, or funerals, or any other occasion that human beings try to give special importance to. Marriages, christenings, testimonials, reunions, all of the emotional vectors of human life are swept up by Dewey into the category of mind which he has rejected, dismissed, ejected from polite conversation.

That pain, that suffering, that woe, from which human beings recoil—is not to Dewey indicative of the “bad,” or the “evil.” For Dewey, this very suffering is the opportunity, that is, the natural force that summons the new needs, that will enable us to treat our present situation as a mere means, that is, to quickly rename it and master the new creation. That chaos, that despair, that utter loss that human beings feel, are to Dewey self-indulgences, animistic and deluded beliefs. This suffering is to Dewey necessary. Here is where he parts company with the generality of the human race. For a human being to lack purposes, is for a human being to suffer. People seek out purposes by nature. Deweyan philosophy finds no place for these purposes. It regards them as retrograde. Deweyan philosophy is to this extent militantly opposed to the very nature of the ordinary opinions, and that is not something I would describe as democratic.

In Machiavelli’s founding, crisis is the initial opportunity for the founding of a regime. Yet laws and institutions must sustain the pressure. Dewey’s cultural engineering seems to leave no room for enjoyment, no time for reflection, no opportunity for the individual to be apart from the restless social metabolism which appears to have neither genesis nor end. It takes a Dewey to somehow make the literal crushing of human mentality, the methodical suppression of opinion, appear wholesome.

Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson prefers to write about moral philosophy. Yet he approaches moral philosophy, the philosophy of “intention” or mental imperatives, from the vantage point of physics. Davidson gives us a picture of what Dewey’s project looks like forty or fifty years subsequent. Davidson argues that the mental is finally caused by the physical. There is no mental “event” that is not caused by the “physical.”^[25] This view of the human being as an “action system” is as old as Hobbes. The external objects, as per Dewey’s instructions, are no longer viewed as “ends.” The entire philosophy of “ends” (a misnomer, given what it is trying to describe) is banished from philosophy at the time of Davidson’s writing. Nor, Davidson argues, is it possible for the “mental” to cause the “physical.”

Davidson works out an interesting argument. Davidson wants to give some special epistemological status to morality, while simultaneously defining all mental life as “physical.” In agreement with Kim, in agreement with Quine, in agreement with Dewey, Davidson argues that the “mental” is “supervenient” upon the physical. This indicates that the mental can be pared back, analyzed away, to reveal “the physical.” What exactly is “the physical”? We have seen that the philosophers and physicists have all but done away with “body.” Davidson relies upon this movement in physics very much, in order to reduce mental contents to “events” that happen in the brain. The scenes that we perceive, too, are purified of their nouns and objects. Language can be deployed to redescribe virtually any thing we experience.

Moral action is Davidson’s specialty. Moral actions concerns the “verbs” associated with mind: “desiring, fearing, intending, et al.” All of the mental events are caused by physical things, Davidson argues. In this he is just in step with his peers. Yet he wants to be able to talk about moral thoughts, as if they could not be reduced to physical events purely. Well, if all mental events are “supervenient” upon physical causes, then there is no mental really. Davidson is not troubled by this, he just wants to have this liberty, this freedom, to explore the mental without being encumbered by any problems of consistency with his larger argument. If mind and language reduce to “behavior,” as the analytic philosophers insist, then Davidson can certainly enact what he wants to enact. He wants to enact a pseudo respect for the mental, without doing so in terms of his doctrines. Language can make this behavior possible.

What is interesting in Davidson is his preference to concentrate on morality. Indeed, he likes to engage in discussion of Aristotle’s Nicochmachean Ethics, or of Plato’s Republic. Davidson likes to compare his theory of moral character and reason to Aristotle’s. I think that in this enterprise, Davidson does us all a service. For Aristotle, of course, the ordinary perception of objects as things in themselves, that allegedly accursed mentality which Dewey derides—is true and real. For Aristotle, the domain of moral reason is not a casual or constant affair. For Aristotle, people are not establishing their moral goodness or decay in terms of how they negotiate, say, their decision on whether or not to eat ice cream that day; or whether or not to brush their teeth after a particularly exhausting day of labor. For Aristotle, moral reason concerns occasions of special import: just as human deliberation generally concerns occasions of unusual import. It is not about tying one’s shoes, or opening the door for oneself, or any other of the myriad trivial actions that Davidson brings before us, as he tries to talk about incontinence, which for Aristotle is the ultimate perversion of character, “the wresting of the scepter from reason by passion.”

It is this change of subject matter, really, that reveals to us the public face of the new philosophic outlook. For, like Dewey, Davidson regards mind itself as simply one part of homogenous nature. Whether or not to turn a doorknob, whether or not to pick up a tomato, whether or not to tie one’s shoes: from the vantage point of the new science, these are occasions of as much weight as any other conceivable enterprise. That is the point of the humbling examples: to deflate the joy and anguish that ordinary people associate with truly important decisions. There are no such important decisions, from the new philosophic standpoint: this is just all “physics,” that is, all the emotions are explainable, reducible to physical causes, that is, to neurons and chemistry, and the world of external events and interactions just fades to black.

The new science isn’t going to just leave man alone by a long shot. People, as we all know, have opinions, or “beliefs.” “Belief,” in Davidson’s view, must be justified by “reasons.” Given the psycho-physical laws that Davidson is formally committed to, one wonders why any of this is necessary; but then it becomes plain why philosophy needs to be able to talk about morality as somehow not reducible to the physical, even though it is technically held (by those in the know) to be so: for philosophy needs a justification for interrogating the rationality of belief. It needs a justification for evaluating, and judging, the reasons that people have for what they believe. When the subject matter is tying one’s shoelaces, or eating ice cream, or turning a doorknob, the philosopher still demands laws. That about which human beings do not need to think; that about which human beings truly could be said to be hardly engaging in any kind of consciousness at all; these are the things that the new philosophy calls before its tribunals in study after study, to inquire as to the reasons for their being believed in, chosen, done.

From the vantage point of Davidson, we cannot understand any decision, or any mental “event,” until we have a clear grasp of the whole personality of a man: his past decisions, his present decisions and beliefs; the way that his beliefs about shoe laces correlate with his beliefs about ice cream; the emotional and psychological history that might explain his decision not to brush his teeth on a certain night. The philosopher, in order to judge of human beliefs (and these things that we are talking of, from the vantage point of ordinary opinion have nothing to do with beliefs), must investigate the whole personality and history of the individual. Since the philosopher’s definition of belief has excluded everything that the ordinary individual regards as a proper object of belief, it cannot be a surprise to us that this entire process is going to bruise him, confuse him, upbraid him. It doesn’t matter how anonymous the social scientific composites displayed in the popular media are; they all bring the bright lights close to the human animal’s face: the shoelaces, the ice cream, the door knobs.

In these above statements, Davidson could be referring to what a man indicates when he says “my shoelaces are untied.” He could be referring to a man who utters “this is a cool summer.” What is remarkable is that the interpreter cannot share any common reality with the speaker. Has the interpreter never noticed that his own shoelaces are untied? Is it not possible that the man is simply making an observation about his shoes? This is not the way Davidson proposes to investigate ethics, or moral judgments.

John Searle

John Searle, in his recent book, expresses a good deal of disappointment with the modern philosophical tradition. Searle is not restrained in his criticisms of the major philosophers. Searle refers to the modern philosophical tradition as “the mistake.” “The mistake has many different names, among them Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant.”^[28] Searle blames these philosophers for denying what he calls “direct realism.” Indeed, the title of Searle’s book says a lot: Seeing Things as They Are. Yet for all of Searle’s frustration with the philosophical tradition, Searle is very much a part of it. In Searle’s view, there are objective bodies out there, including atoms; and these are said to be the cause of subjective experiences in our brains. Thus, perception for Searle involves those “mental objects.” “And if you do not accept that an objectively existing object can cause ontologically subjective experiences, then there is really nothing more to be said because you cannot understand conscious perception.”^[29]

Searle wants to argue that human beings see objects “directly.” This is his choice of words. On the other hand, he wants to insist that the redness that people see is not objectively or truly a part of the tomato, the fire engine, the blood that they see. Searle argues that photons, atomic particles, are “emanating” from the external objects; and in this he is preaching a very old doctrine, that of Epicurus.^[30] Epicurus called them “images,” but they were still material particles said to fly off from the object and to cause an “event” in the mind of the percipient. Searle argues that the photons have the power, upon contact with the eye, to generate a color “red” that is not really in the tomato, or fire engine, or blood, or whatever other object is being talked about.

Searle has not left us only with this. He also leaves us with “intentionality” in the mind of the percipient. Intentionality, Searle argues, is intimately involved in the perceptual process. What is “intentionality”? Searle likens it to “hunger,” or “thirst,” or a need to breathe oxygen. Thus, “intentionality” is a primal urge or need. “Intentionality is that feature of the mind by which it is directed at, or about, objects and states of affairs in the world. Intentionality is above all a biological phenomenon common to humans and certain other animals.”^[31] What does “intentionality” indicate the need for? Satisfaction, of some sort, Searle says. What sort of satisfaction?

Searle’s theory of perception is bound up with his concept of intentionality, so we need to discuss that concept some more. Searle appeals to the examples of hunger and thirst to indicate that there are parts of the brain which give us correct information about our bodies. The brain in this sense is a part of nature. It impels man to seek food and water, and this will keep him alive. Searle would like to argue that a whole range of perceptions are also controlled by “intentionality”: that our brains are equipped to recognize well enough what is out there, to satisfy our needs. As soon as we part from our needs, or from intentionality, Searle states, we fall into difficulties. For “intentions” are biological. We see that the other animal species possess these powers. They know how to recognize their food, and their bodies know how to digest it. All of this can be explained by biology, Searle argues.

If man was not burdened by his powers of perception, perhaps it would be comforting to adopt an argument such as Searle’s. Searle believes uncritically in “nuclear forces” (43). The atoms come in between the human being and the external objects. Searle is emphatic about that belief: but this is precisely what the generality of the human race would never, and could never believe.

John Campbell and Bill Brewer

John Campbell is a significant writer in the field of the philosophy of perception.^[32] Campbell is not satisfied with the direction that Quine and the later Wittgenstein take, as regards reference. Quine and the later Wittgenstein essentially deny reference, and provide us with the behavioral process of language instruction discussed above. In order to restore the common sense of reference to the philosophical portrait of perception, Campbell decides to focus on the mental disposition of attention. The individual perception process cannot take place, for Campbell, until the human being has trained his faculties upon some particular object. Campbell’s argument maintains that there is an atomic or physicalist dimension to perception, but he would like to maintain that our conscious attention cannot be reduced to this.

“Suppose for the moment that the causal hypothesis is correct, that it is your conscious attention to the object that brings it about that your propositional judgment casually depends on a particular set of cell-firings, carrying a particular piece of information about the object,” Campbell writes. “That is, what is it about your identification of the object at the level of your subjective life that causes the selection of just the right underlying information to control your verbal reports?”^[33]

Campbell can be seen to share Searle’s concerns. Instead of “attention,” Searle makes the argument that “intention” is the decisive mental equipment. Searle’s account seems more anchored in biology than does that of Campbell, at least at this stage of our inquiry. It is useful at this time to make a couple of observations. The relationship between the philosophers of language and perception on the one hand, and the ordinary speakers on the other, is the relevant one. When Searle argues that there is a biological impulse in human beings which literally causes certain physiological transformations within our minds—causing us to perceive colors and shapes and sounds—this is not how the linguistic philosophers view themselves. Searle might actually hold himself to be one among the many when he provides us with his philosophy of intention. Yet the descriptions and the category of objects proposed by analytic logic are in no way limited to such cell firings or alleged physiological causes. The analytic philosophy, and the symbolic logic, exempt the philosopher from so much as attempting to speak about external objects. He is not straining, if he is Quine or Wittgenstein, to make do with his sense perceptions. He lays claim to a mental region of truth which is predicated upon forsaking the attempt to represent what actually exists in the world. This information is not going to be made available to the non-philosophers. This is a political problem. For philosophers of the behaviorist or functionalist orientation, their impulse is to maximize power. That is what natural selection urges them to do.

The ordinary individual relies upon his actual perceptions to provide him with the foundational knowledge of his opinions. He does not stop to stare at a tree in order to render himself capable of generating a perceptual experience of the tree, so that it is possible for him to reference it. In Campbell’s model, however, it is not conceded that the individual has anything like a direct experience of the tree. According to Campbell, there are several “information processing streams” which exist on the subconscious level. These information processing streams must actually furnish the bits and pieces of sense datums to the mind, which in turn must undertake a “binding” process to produce, to artificially create, the object for perception. Argument such as Searle’s and Campbell’s are trying to restore some respect for the common sense experience of perception; but their theories cannot overcome the objective-subjective division that is characteristic of atomist theories. “As I said earlier, there is much converging evidence that different properties of an object, such as color, shape, motion, size, or orientation are processed in different processing streams,” Campbell argues; “this means that the visual system has the problem of reassembling individual objects, as it were, from the results of these specialized processing streams. . . . We do not have perception of an individual object until this binding problem has been solved, and various simple sensory properties have been put together as properties of a single object.”^[34]

Campbell can be seen to rely upon the fundaments as laid down by Locke and Hume, insofar as perception is concerned. Non-philosophers are not aware that they are undertaking any kind of a “binding process” when they perceive, say, an apple. Ordinary perception is not even conscious that it is performing a proposition when it perceives an apple. This is only because the non-philosophers are not aware of any elevated mental processes that are involved in making these most effortless of judgments. One should say that Campbell would deny that he is imputing elevated mental concepts to the ordinary speaker in such a situation either, and in a sense he would be right. Campbell is certainly not imputing elevated mental functioning to the non- philosopher. What he is imputing to the non-philosopher is a whole series of non-conscious processes, the truth of which he takes to be antecedent to perception, that is, or rather as the causes of perception.^[35] Campbell, in other words, cannot truly begin with the non-philosophers in the search for truth. The non-philosophers engage in what David Chalmers refers to as “Edenic naivete”: they think that they have direct perception of the objects in the world about them; and science supposedly has disproved this assumption.^[36]

The “binding” process that Campbell alludes to suggests the classical paradigm of perception. In the atomist model, it is not possible for there to take place any coordinated perception. For both Plato and Aristotle, the conscious mind oversees the senses, integrates them during the perceptual experience, seamlessly. In the atomist model, distinct atoms collide with distinct sense organs: the implication is that the sensory material from the several senses enters the mind fragmented. This is very close to Locke’s model. Yet Locke does not conclude, that the philosopher must struggle along with his limited sense faculties like the ordinary opiners. Ordinary opinion is banished from the quest for truth, root and branch, by Locke. The philosophers, for their part, do not own a skepticism which is based on the limitations that the Lockean theory of perception assigns to the rank and file of human beings. What Lockean philosophers possess is not passive dependence on their sense faculties, such as is indicated for the generality of the human race: but a wholly new kind of active liberty, which is to be defended first and foremost in each individual’s right to use names however he pleases. Campbell’s arguments in favor of an attention-based perceptual model do not shield the ordinary opinions from this expropriation in their status as possible truth seekers.

Campbell’s “binding” process is a child of the atomist theory: it presupposes the rupture with the “Edenic” assumptions of ordinary speech. It is interesting that the mere ability of the mind to know an apple has become equivalent, to Chalmers, to man’s decision to eat forbidden fruit, such as from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Surely, to merely recognize an object as an apple involves no appropriation of moral judgment: it involves no claims as to what is right or wrong as regards one’s behavior in terms of the apple. Yet Chalmer’s theory of perception, since it is fused to a moral theory finally (which evolution certainly is), certainly can be compared to a wresting of fruit from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For Chalmers’ evolutionary ideology assumes that it knows better what is right and wrong, than what ordinary people and custom and experience teach. It does not therefore follow that the non-philosophers’ ability to instantly discern the forms of the various perishable objects about them involves any moral knowledge whatsoever.

Bill Brewer also falls into the category of those scholars who want to restore some measure of respect for commonsense perception. Brewer is making the argument that from perception, individuals without sophisticated knowledge of atomism or “microstructures” can nevertheless speak meaningfully about the objects in the common world. However, “reason” is needed in Brewer’s view, to prove that there is a rational cause to believe that there is a red ball under the table. The individual does not engage in such reasoning—this is obvious. Nor does the individual need to.

The reason why Brewer must argue that it is possible for ordinary speakers to provide reasons for their beliefs as to the reality of the red ball under the table is because truth is reserved to science.^[37] Philosophers of science talk about red balls under tables, or tomatoes, because their science has political ambitions: that is, to make the ordinary opinion aware that it is a guest in the house of science. “Red objects are those which have the . . . microphysical property which normally produces “red” experiences: this defines what redness in the world actually is” (55).

The only reason why the ordinary person would need to produce reasons for making a reference to an object in the world is if that object was somehow obscure, and thus not liable to be understood by his interlocutor. In the case of most incidents, the object is close to hand. Individuals usually easily understand one another in their references, and they supply reasons only when it is not obvious which object they are referring to. From the vantage point of analytic philosophy, every reference is problematic. And thus the strain in their requirement that one produce “reasons” for one’s reference as a matter of course and always.

Since the time of Locke, it has counted as a major indictment of perception that the human being may be undergoing a hallucination. From reports that I have read, people who are undergoing hallucinations seem to be well aware of that fact. People go to doctors if they believe that they are having hallucinations. People who live in close quarters with the individual are likely to indicate to the individual that he seems to be having hallucinations. Brewer concedes that the argument from hallucination however leaves a permanent question mark hanging over perceptual evidence. Nor is this the only one. There are cases, Brewer argues, where perception is simply illusory. This claim is quite a bit more damning. Upon what evidence can we rely to prove that perception is illusion, except perception?

One thinks of the classic example of a tree branch submerged in water. In the water, the tree branch appears bent. Upon pulling the tree branch out of the water, we discover that it is not so. Thus, and this example has been used by philosophers for over twenty five centuries, perception can be an illusion. One might say that the individual identified the tree branch. If the individual thought that it was a tomato, or a human being, or a trireme, that would be something different.

Another classical argument concerning perception as illusion involves a person suffering from a disease, who takes a taste of honey. The person suffering from the disease experiences a bitter, rather than a sweet taste from the honey. Ordinary human consciousness does not seem to have been undone by this sort of event. When the body is diseased, it stands to reason that ordinary perceptions might not be experienced quite the same, especially sensations of touch such as taste is. If the individual reaches for the arsenic instead of the honey, then perhaps he has a more serious disease than jaundice.

Frank Jackson and Paul Churchland

Frank Jackson’s book on perception is based on an atomist epistemology, he tells us. Metaphysics, I will say. Yet he leaves the atomist aspect to the later chapters in the book, preferring to take up sentences that people utter, about objects that they have perceived, and what this perception can amount to. Jackson invokes Hume and Locke in making a distinction between mental objects and external, physical objects. What we perceive are mental objects, Jackson argues; there is a gap between the objects that we perceive and what exists “out there” to be perceived. The first two chapters of the book take up the issue of what we mean when we say that we perceive a red wall or a white wall. What Jackson’s analysis, steeped in his discipline, is doing, is imposing an analytics upon the ordinary statement. This philosophy insists that it is laying out the framework for how to speak correctly.

The first thing Jackson proceeds to do is to shatter the belief that the ordinary person has that he perceives a red wall. We cannot say that anyone literally perceives a red wall, Jackson argues. “The theory holds that physical objects are in fact never immediately perceived. . . . It is . . . an empirical fact that sense data are mental.”^[38] There may be a painting on the wall which covers up that spot, and underneath is green paint. The wall may be so large that the individual cannot see it all at the same time. Therefore what we must say is that the individual can only see a part of the wall. This is just the opening salvo. It is sure to quiet the ordinary individual.

Jackson argues that the individual cannot say that what he sees is a wall. What he sees is a shape, a mental object, that has color. Everything we see has color, Jackson argues, and we have not yet gotten into the metaphysics of what color actually is. It is impossible for our minds to entertain any object, mental or otherwise, except that it is in some shape. So the speaker would be instructed to say that he sees a red square. Jackson, as I have indicated, rolls out his metaphysics long before he makes any kind of case for it. In fact he will not make a case for it, because atomism is accepted as part of the achieved stock of scientific wisdom, and he can just appeal to it. Early on in his book, Jackson argues that it is more appropriate to say that the individual who believes that he sees a red square has been entered into some kind of bodily “state.” His seeing red is therefore an “event,” the preferred language of perception for the analytic philosophers. The speaker of course does not know of any “state” that his body has allegedly gone into. This is in keeping with the atomist ideology: in atomist ideology, particles collide with a sense organ, which certainly is a collision of body against body; so it can be called an event. The language of events keeps the troublesome category of body away from the discussion. Indeed, as quantum physics prefers to only talk about bodies, that is, atoms, in clusters, insisting even that it is not possible that any atom exists individually, or is numerable, the language of events becomes ever more prominent in the academic mind.

Paul Churchland is certainly the Jacobin among the functionalists. He loves to utter the word “eliminationist” as the former loved to wheel out the guillotine. What the functionalist proposes to do away with is “introspective states” or “qualia,” which seem to reduce to pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are merely correlates of physiological processes, behavior outputs triggered by environmental inputs, in Churchland’s view.^[39] Churchland is highly critical of what he calls “folk psychology.” Churchland imagines for us a world in which language has been done away with, human language that is. Propositional speech is at an end, in Churchland’s vision, and superior ways of communicating are looked forward to.

Folk psychology to Churchland is a “theory” that has existed for “thousands of years.” It is intended to describe the way ordinary people register the emotional reactions of others; and how they rely upon these introspective inferences to predict the behavior of others. Churchland wants to eliminate folk psychology, and to replace it with references to neurobiology. “Folk psychology is justified by what standardly justifies any conceptual framework: namely its explanatory, predictive and manipulative success.”^[40] People can be taught to think of their feelings in a new way, Churchland insists. There is a set of cells in the brain that is the “anger” center; and there is a set of cells that is the “compassion” sector. And people can be trained to simply refer to their brains whenever they feel anything. One can do away with references to other people, unless one ascribes their feelings and attitudes to their brain states.

Churchland’s open critique of truth as the goal of scientific inquiry is perhaps impolitic, from the vantage point of his peers; but in no way could Churchland be described as a trailblazer in this point of view. Truth, along with propositions and language itself, represent the folk psychology that Churchland wants to emancipate civilization from. “Further, it is far from obvious that truth is either the primary aim or the principal product of this activity. . . . Natural selection does not care whether a brain has or tends towards true beliefs.”^[41] It is useful at least that Churchland has been honest with us, that he does not wish for truth to be a goal of his inquiries. The complicated recitation of the parts of the brain, and his speculations as to what is happening in the brain when human beings recognize an object, or feel a certain emotion: one wonders exactly what Churchland is attempting to tell us, since he does not appear to think that these statements indicate any reality.

Aristotle argues that speech is the human characteristic. Aristotle also argues that it is human nature to want to know the truth. Man is the animal who wants to know, Aristotle agues in the Metaphysics. However, the scientist and his theories are not simply about thoughts and comprehensions, Churchland argues. Thought for the scientist is like a tool, and the ability to use those tools with skill and power is what science is about. The moral agenda of Machiavelli’s Early Modernity peers out at us almost no matter where we look. What is mind for? To translate one’s experience into successful action in the “environment.” The mental equipment too is reduced to “outputs” of “behavior.”

All theories are instruments for Churchland, despite his dislike of that particular characterization. More to the point, though, the ordinary perception of objects must likewise be characterized as a “theory,” Churchland insists; such theories are endemic to sea slugs and infants as well as men and women, in his view. This is actually very much a take on truth, an interpretation of what it is. “Theory” in Churchland’s meta-politics shall be restricted to those ideas that a scientist wields as a possible tool for acting on the environment. It is noteworthy that these philosophers find perception to be so troubling.

Plato the Foundationalist

Human beings are not so simple as knowers. Plato argues that perception involves the simplest kind of judgment, and that this is not a propositional affair.^[42] Identification of an object, as a chair, or a just deed, or a tree, is not a matter of fusing together “this” and “that.” The individual human being recognizes the form. This recognition directly collides with the entire model of perception set forth by Locke and Hume. For Locke and Hume insist, and Einstein insists along with them, that perception itself delivers nothing but a “chaos” to human minds; and that the organization of sensory data is not only bereft of intelligible order, but that the mind undertakes to artificially impose such an order on allegedly chaotic sensums, which processes are all eventually linked to the principle of utility or even pragmatism.

It can be said, however, that Plato’s observations about the way human beings perceive, is full of important implications. For this recognition of the forms as images is effortless: so effortless, that Plato’s Socrates must advertise his teaching as the effort to undertake “recollection.” Recollection of what? In the Phaedo, it is true, Plato insists that every soul, in a prior life, had familiarity with all of the forms. But even in the Phaedo, Plato argues that perception alone reawakens this familiarity; and in the Theaetetus, which must be conceded to be Plato’s final word on the issue of perception (along with the Parmenides itself), Plato states that the soul is empty until perception furnishes it with images in its wax block.^[43]

Plato’s teaching about perception reveals, and does not muster or fabricate, a fundamental intelligence in the ordinary opinions: an intelligence that the contemporary view is fully mobilized to deny. The forms, as patterns, as indicative of natural kinds and of kinds made by human beings as well, are in Plato’s view the “cause” of the perishable objects. In other words, the cause is the form which makes them what they are. This aspect of perception, therefore, directly bears upon truth. If the individual has had prior experience of the form, when he comes across another tree, he will recognize it, and name it correctly. And while this may seem humble, even possibly trivial knowledge, it is far different than any conditioning or “stimulus” or physicalist or instinctive reaction pattern. Desire and aversion, pain and pleasure have nothing to do with the treeness of the tree. Yes, of course, our tree specialist can then bring before us about ten thousand species of trees. No, of course, the individual of average training is not going to be able to tell these kinds. Yet he knows that the tree is a tree, and not an automobile; and this is not due to any habit, but to memory, an attribute that Jaegwon Kim has elected to omit from his account of the “internal.”

This theory is set forth with great care by Plato in the Theaetetus, after he has finished refuting Protagoras and Heraclitus. The level of knowledge that Plato believes is common to all or almost all human beings is the capacity to correctly name the diverse objects in our world. It is not “habit” that enables a person to recognize a bird, or a house, or a snake. Contrary to what some of our modern psychologists would say, the individual does not have to go through everything he or she knows, to rule it out as a possible answer to the question, “what is this?” A man does not have to say “it is not a cat, it is not a mat, it is not a cat on a mat, but a tree.” The person who has had experience of a tree before, such that the perception of said tree does not strain his senses, and his senses are functional, takes into his soul the image of the tree.

The human being who perceives a tree, who has had prior experience of a tree (it doesn’t have to be the same tree), has the experience both of a perishable object, and of a universal at the same moment. This is to say that every perishable object is a combination of matter and form. The perishable tree is a kind of object. The wax block takes the impression of the kind, which is imbedded in the particular perceived tree. The universal exists in the single tree.

Plato did not have occasion to contemplate the argument that perception involves only mental objects, unless we consider Protagoras to be an example of that particular philosophy. The model of perception that Plato traces out—and he is quite convinced that it is extremely important to establish the authority of perception for philosophy—involves matching images to records in the wax block. This is why memory is so important to the theory. Memory is not like Searle’s “intention” or Campbell’s “attention.” It operates with much greater speed and facility, and it does not involve passion. Searle’s intention is biological: it is shared with other animal species. Searle’s intention is likened to hunger and thirst. The other animal species, to the best of our knowledge, do not possess memory. They cannot recognize patterns that they remember. If they can, this would indicate a superior level of intelligence in other animals. If other animal species possess memory, then to this degree they would not be driven by instincts, with which memory has nothing to do.

In the Theaetetus, Plato spends a great deal of time discussing the “wax block” model of knowledge. The wax block model of knowledge is heavily dependent on memory.^[44] When the individual is making the rounds of his day, he comes across countless objects. In fact, Plato would not limit the forms recognized to merely the easy physical objects. For human beings recognize justice and injustice in deeds that they witness. Contrary to Hume, who will argue that justice or injustice do not inhere in objects at all, Plato maintains to the contrary. There is a huge variety of experiences of non-material objects, including courage, grief, joy, perplexity, determination, sangfroid, timidity, confidence, and the list goes on for a very long time. People recognize these patterns as easily as they do the chairs and the tables, unity and plurality.

If we compare Quine’s model of perception to Plato’s, the differences are massive. For Quine, we don’t perceive objects per se. There really aren’t any objects in Quine’s ontology. There are stimuli, and there are sensory receptors which vary from individual to individual. The individual in Quine’s model does not seem so much to be naming an object, as to be looking and listening to what other people are doing and saying. The community will be uttering a name, and enforcing this name with reward and punishment. Quine actually offers this learning model as the correct interpretation of how children are initiated into the language community. One problem for Quine is that the individual, for most of the time, identifies objects without anybody else’s participation. When he walks down the street, he is not followed by a posse of commentators shouting out various names as the consecutive, and endless objects are presented to him. Quine’s model can’t account for patterns, or forms. Yet the individual does indeed learn these. Without the atomist theory, the sub-rational theory of perception would never have made much headway in learned circles. From the beginning, at least in the Early Modern period, with Bacon and Hobbes, the physics precede the description of perception. The debates on language trace this distinction as far back as Epicurus at least. What is conspicuous is that Plato’s model, and Aristotle’s model, are simply omitted from most contemporary discussions.^[45]

Presumably the individual knows all of the objects he encounters: doors and couches, tables and cars, papers and cups of coffee, and innumerable people. Now from time to time, we do come across a kind of object that we have never seen before. We might see an Octopus up close for the first time. We may see a badly burned human body. Upon the initial encounter, the individual may well speak in propositional terms. “That Octopus has so many tentacles.” Yet in subsequent encounters with a squid, the individual will not engage in propositional thought. Memory has recorded the pattern. In our experience, when we come to the kitchen table, we do not say: “this is a table.” And if we were to walk around our office saying things like “this is a book”; or “this is a pencil,” people would look at us most strangely. For when we utter propositions, it suggests very clearly that we are putting some mental objects together. “That car is beautiful,” would not attract a raised eyebrow. “This pencil is dull,” would pass comfortably amongst us as coherent speech. “This is a book” in most circumstances, would provoke stares.

Recognition is the irreducible form of knowledge for Plato. This is the gateway to the power of knowledge that skeptical philosophers do not like to pay attention to. They also do not refer to Plato when they are talking about “traditional philosophers.” Since Plato has the strongest counterargument to the theory of knowledge as irreducibly propositional, this is unsatisfactory. The individual, Plato argues in the Theaetetus, who has had experience of a kind of object, be it a man, a book, a swan, or a tree, will not mistake this kind of object for any other kind of object, when next it presents itself to him in his experience.^[46]

Plato is not a green interlocutor. Plato specifies that in order to first learn the kind of object, one’s experience of that kind of object must be within the comfortable range of one’s senses. Seeing some vague object in the distance, which turns out to be a camel, is not going to make an impression in the wax block. For the eyes cannot see from a great distance. If the camel is brought before the individual, and if his senses are not obstructed, this will register in the wax block. There is nothing propositional about it.

This original form of judgment is based on image. It is true, that Plato is arguing that the single camel has a form. This form is not strictly speaking, individual. There are other camels. It would not be of use to take an image into the soul, if there was only one camel in the world; or if there was only one kind of every object in the world. These forms are to Plato the irreducible objects of judgment. Notice, that the forms are not the smallest conceivable parts that the mind could choose to focus on: a skeptic philosopher could choose to focus on a hoof, and decide to call that the “object.” A hoof would not let anybody identify a kind of object, by itself. The point here is that the objects that exist in nature are formed objects. They are kinds of object. Even the manmade objects are kinds of objects: beds (Republic), drinking glasses, desks, and so on. The skeptic philosopher may argue that the human craftsman may make a new kind of object that has no existing form, in other words a new kind of model which expressly forsakes what Aristotle calls the cause as “for the sake of which.” The individual would quite rightly then judge that it is alien to him. If it seems to be a random construction, or like a child’s drawing, this is probably how he will view it.

The world is full of many, many different kinds of objects. And the least educated individual, who is of a certain age, effortlessly identifies them in all their difference, and makes no mistake. This is Plato’s argument: that if the individual has had prior experience of the kind of object, and then is brought into the presence of another individual of that kind of object, it will be impossible for him to mistakenly identify it. Not even in dreams does the individual confuse unity with duality. Not even in dreams does the individual confuse a snake with a horse. This, indeed, cannot be accounted for as “habit.” For it is discriminating. Identification depends upon what the objects are. Needless to say, these forms, are to Plato the objects that stand in need of names in society. This is what languages identify, natural languages anyway.

Here, in the identificatory process, Plato drives a deep foundation into philosophy: that the ordinary, unsophisticated opinions are intelligent. In neither Plato, nor Aristotle, is there any attempt to classify human minds with those of dogs, mice, insects, or cows. We do not know that cows or mice have this power of identification. If they do, they can have a language like our language. Plato’s point in the Theaetetus is that the domain of irreducible judgment involves sorting an image to a memorial seal in the wax block of the soul. That, and no more, is what takes place in judgment for Plato, in ordinary everyday judgment.

In Plato’s point of view—it has already been proved that there are immaterial things in nature. For this is what the forms or patterns are; and the doctrines of Parmenides and Democritus and even Epicurus are beholden to the logic of forms. They could not, after all, make “not-being” the centerpiece of their theory if they wanted to have any influence on the human community. No, they had to make existence the centerpiece of their theory. Thus they named reality after “being” and existence. This is a name that the ordinary people recognize. And yet as we have demonstrated, Parmenides and the atomists cannot really begin with the ordinary opinions.

In Plato’s point of view, therefore, awareness is not “material”; it is not “physical,” and it is not beholden to the senses. Rather, the mind employs the senses. Aristotle unfolds the same model of perception in his De Anima.^[47] There is a conscious mind which coordinates the sensory information. Pattern is both in the sensed objects and in the intelligent soul. Objects in the world happen to be formed objects, and in Plato’s explanation, this is the very origin of language. The common patterns call forth the general names, upon which natural languages are based.

When the modern philosophers impose this atomization upon the objects perceived, via the model of mind that they impose, this in turn gives rise to propositional arguments. The individual would now have to connect the colors, shapes, tastes, or properties. This is indeed the basis for Hume’s attack on causation itself, and on our ability to know causes. We can’t prove that the red and the circular shape of the cherry really go together. Some mysterious instinct will have to bear the brunt of responsibility for this feat. Unless, of course, the mind never experiences these things as atomized particles to begin with; unless, of course, the mind has no need to stitch together, that which it has originally perceived as a whole of parts.

When Hobbes and his successors blast the authority of perception, they are clearing the way for a new philosophy that will not be answerable to ordinary opinion. Aristotle long ago recognized that knowledge can be used for either good or evil. For to understand the perceptual process is to understand where it can be attacked. The non-philosophers do not know what “universals” or “forms” are, as a technical terminology. Yet I have been unable to discover what inconvenience, or superstition, or prejudice peoples’ recognition of forms ever presented to the human race.

The Philosophy of Functionalism

In Functionalism, as in the earlier theory of behaviorism, and indeed in the theory of pragmatism, the atomist critique of perception is quieted. A theory stipulating certain drives or instincts in the human being as a biological entity are advanced instead, and these theories come equipped with versions of perception that are like some of the models we have been investigating. Gilbert Harman, in his philosophy, draws upon principles from a wide variety of disciplines; the academic division of labor makes it hard for the learner to piece together the assorted pieces of the puzzle. John Dewey certainly helped to lay a path for this kind of theorizing, which moves the atomist nomenclature into the background. Yet it is still there.

Harman operates, in his description of society, very much from the vantage point of a model as to what human society is. He calls it “functionalism,” which is a cousin to the earlier behaviorism.^[48] In this point of view, the human mind is very physical, essentially brain as all the Early Modern materialists argued. There is a “system” that is being talked about: the “environment,” and there is a teleology of the system. In this system, the human being is an organism whose career goal is to adapt, to obtain from that environment what it needs. Pain and pleasure are to this degree hard wired. They flash “success” and “failure” respectively. The contents of the mind are seen, in the a priori, by Harman as features of this system. Whatever mental contents the non-sophisticated individual believes are before her mind, the philosopher knows much better, in Harman’s view, what these mental contents really are and must be: aspects of the system described above. The organism must strive for “success,” must learn from pain as “failure.” In this man is said to be nothing different from deer or arachnids.

To reduce a person to “function” or “behavior,” it seems to me, is to choose to forget a great deal about Western philosophy and literature and culture. It has been one of man’s primary concerns, to evaluate the environment in which he finds himself, and to judge its quality. The military involvements that we are embarked upon today in the Middle East are thought to have more than a passing relationship to our view of what a good regime is, and what bad regimes are. We undertake to help the regimes that we believe uphold or will try to uphold a certain set of values. We undertake to lend assistance to such regimes as engage in combat with those hostile to the values of individual liberty, freedom of speech, and so forth. Quite frankly, the philosophy of functionalism is not itself generous towards these beliefs which the popular political culture espouses. “Function” takes the existing order, whatever it may be, as a given. To adapt to it is the foregone conclusion. It is a strange philosophy for America.

If we stipulate that the environment in which the individual is living is just and constructive and involves a truly common good, it would be hard to argue with. Plato, of course, believes that the very philosophy of justice in his Republic is to be ordered in the assignment of the individual to his or her proper function. Guardians are separated out. Auxiliaries are separated out. Whether a human being is to function as a blacksmith or a farmer, in Plato’s view, should depend upon the individual’s aptitude rather than the individual’s preference. For Plato, the maxim of the just state is that “each individual should mind his own business,” that is, take care of his or her proper task. For Plato, the backbone of life resides in the contribution that the person makes to the common project of meeting needs. Need is the reason for the formation of the state in the Republic. Yet this is not the sort of function that Harman has in mind.

For Harmon, function reduces to “adaptation.” One cannot say that there is any adaptation involved in Plato’s assignment of human beings to particular tasks. Apprenticeship certainly; education certainly; but adaptation suggests a different register of conformity. The individual is not supposed to be capable of engaging in conflict with society, in the functionalist model that Harman designs. Obviously, Plato’s Socrates engages in dispute with the entire educational establishment of Athens. A man is not expected to ratify an unjust deed in the course of his labors. Plato believes that the individual’s ability to make a contribution based on his or her natural talents will indeed prove most rational, will not lead to puzzlement or confusion or misery. Yet in Harman’s functionalism, the adaptation seems designed to silence the individual’s capacity for speech. Function wields a kind of authority in Harman’s argument that it does not wield in Plato’s. The individual is adapting in Harman’s environment in order to survive. There is no state of emergency in Plato’s Republic when the roles and tasks are assigned by the philosophers. Harman brings us back to a version, a watered-down version of Machiavelli’s founding, where getting into a certain kind of order is the price of survival.

“Belief” in Harman’s theory is nudged away from objects, first of all. Plato would refer to the entire domain of ordinary perception as involving opinions. For Harmon, belief is more about shifting powers of desire or will. The direction of the category of belief in Harman is “functional,” yet one does not understand why belief would be involved. On a baseball team, the shortstop and the second baseman often employ hand signals to indicate who will cover second base in the event of a steal. The catcher will make hand signals to the pitcher in order to suggest what sort of pitch to throw. There is lots of communication taking place here, but is there any adaptation of “belief”? Second base is second base, and that belief is never going to change. The outfield grass is green and that is the reality of it. For Harman, though, it is the entire mental set which must be mobile, flexible, “functional.” “I say that meaning depends on role in conceptual scheme rather than on truth conditions. That is, meaning has to do with evidence, inference, and reasoning, including the impact sensory experience has on what one believes, the way in which inference and reasoning modify one’s beliefs and plans, and the way beliefs and plans are reflected in action. For me, the meaning of the relevant sort of sentence is determined by the thought it would normally express. The nature of thought is not in the first instance determined by its truth conditions; it is, rather, a matter of psychology.”^[49]

One thinks back to Plato’s Republic. Exactly what sort of beliefs are so fluid? In Plato’s Republic, to learn how to do one’s craft well, one studies it. One studies farming, tool making, house building, horse tending, soldiering, or ruling. In order to do well, that is, to be successful, one must master the art. Perhaps new techniques become available to a person in his or her profession. In Harman’s discussion of truth and meaning, the emphasis is on “success or failure.” “The most primitive psychological notions are not belief and desire but rather knowledge and successful intentional action. Belief and intention are generalizations of knowledge and success that allow for mistake and failure.”^[50] In Harman’s theory, the point is that “belief” is a feeble thing. One does not choose a career in advance, based on one’s abilities and aptitudes. One drifts into a career, and then whatever one’s state of mind, one must reconcile oneself to it. This is the theory of belief that Harman is working with: rationalization, is what casual speech would describe it as. “People create their lives at least to some extent. They adopt purposes which give their lives meaning. But they do not adopt these purposes ahead of time—only after the fact. To choose a career is for many people to drift into a career. Past acts done for other reasons assume a pattern in the light of ends adopted only now.”^[51]

In the sort of environment that Harman’s individual must adapt to, there is neither time nor opportunity to deliberate and choose. Pressure to adapt comes first, as in the emergency conditions of Machiavelli’s founding. Whatever position one ends up in, does not depend on how it suits reason, or purpose, or justifiable cause. Function suppresses these considerations. One obtains the function first, and then the conscious mind must adapt. “We adopt ends that help to rationalize and give significance to what we have been and are doing—not only in large decisions, as in choosing careers, but even in our smallest and most insignificant acts.” One gets the distinct feeling that Harman’s individual might well be dissatisfied with what he is doing. Nagging thoughts beset his peace of mind. These thoughts must be kept at bay. One must keep on doing what one is doing “so as not to waste what has gone before.” “One does something because that is what one is doing.”^[52] Functionalism gets extremely flustered at the slightest suggestion of the question of “why?” Functionalism enables the philosopher to dodge the question. Action comes first, beliefs must follow. This illustrates a set of perspectives about human life that have no place for speech, no time for deliberation, not even in major life decisions.

Politics oozes out of the functionalist paradigm. This is why philosophy, political philosophy, has such an ax to grind with perception. Perception brings up objects, that is, realities. There is nothing psychological about these realities. The individual does not perceive a chair because he wants to sit down. He perceives a chair because it is there. Yet facts are easily inconvenient for psychological theories which are only interested in behavior. Opening up the discourse to even merely the obvious external objects about one can obstruct the functionalist paradigm: they may raise questions that require answers, when the point is precisely that one must embrace a theory of rationality which focuses on self-protection. We never can quite get away from Machiavelli. The point is that the individual must not make demands upon the environment. It must be taken as is. If it is a political environment that actually does have some Machiavelli in the founding, then it will not be able to justify itself in speech. People need to be trained to cleave to a theory of reason which knows very well not to ask the wrong questions. The wrong questions are not a behavior that will be tolerated by the gatekeepers who count.

David Lewis

David Lewis’s philosophy is one that traffics much more robustly in atomist theory. One traditional atomist paradigm that Lewis repeatedly exercises is the problem of wholes of parts. It is the reality of the atomist paradigm that none of the atoms can undergo change. Since the whole is composed of the collectivity of atoms, change can only involve rearrangement of particles, or the addition of new particles. The atoms can subsist of themselves of course. This can wreak havoc upon the application of names. For what shall we do if somebody decides to call three or four atoms of the cat Tibbles, “cat” as if it were a discrete whole unto itself? Upon what logic could we disagree, since the whole in this model has no extremities, nothing but individual atoms which constitute it? If the cat Tibbles sheds one thousand cat hairs, based upon the atomist epistemology, what is to prevent us from calling each one of those hairs “cat” with propriety? In Lewis’s view, nothing prevents us.^[53]

Lewis lacks the concepts of part and whole. The key to this issue is composition: composition is not homogeneous. Composition, metaphysical composition, absolutely true composition, is of unlike parts. Lewis gets really squeamish when it comes time to talk about “being.” Again, this is a name he feels that he has a right to use with considerable liberty. He isn’t. Any object in nature must possess the part of being. It must also possess the part of unity. Unity and being cannot be conflated. This proves that “whole” is a real nature. And it is the proof of the reality of a whole which leads us to the deduction that the whole must have extremities, including parts of time; coming into being and passing out of being; and that alteration as well as coming into being and passing out of being are real aspects of the cat.

The shedding of hair poses no problem for this theory. Lewis thinks that because he can stand up straight or bend, that these parts shatter his wholeness. How can we fend off a multiplicity of Lewises? He eats and excretes. Thus there is new “matter” in his system one hour, departing matter in another hour. “My beginning was a rearrangement of pre-existing particles; my end will be a rearrangement of particles that will exist afterward. Further, I eat and excrete; so I cannot be identical with the particles I was composed of yesterday and to those I am composed of today.”^[54] How shall we preserve the integrity of being Lewis? All of this dissolves when we have the real portrait of a whole of parts. The particles are never really parts, and the whole is never really a whole in Lewis.

It is a major thesis of this book that Plato is correct in his view that there are no simples in nature, certainly no simple bodies. What is simple cannot undergo change, metaphysically speaking. This has led Lewis into all of these conundrums. To be charitable, the atomist theory is not easy to overcome. That so many philosophers succumb to it is powerful evidence of the weakness of our minds. Harman and Quine might say that Lewis is an atomist because this is the speech that is properly rendered in the academy when one asks “what is there?” Other answers will not be graded as highly, or perhaps even earn passing grades. Adaptation or functionalism is not interested in our questions about what kind of world we would adjust to. They seem quite determined to quiet that sort of locution.

Zeno’s riddles of infinite division led to the atomist theory, and Lewis is powerfully in its grip. “Think of a rusty nail, and the gradual transition from steel, to steel with bits of rust scattered through, to rust adhering on the nail, to rust merely resting on the nail. . . . Or think of yourself or any organism, with parts that gradually come loose in metabolism or excretion or perspiration or shedding of dead skin. In each case, a thing has questionable Parts, and therefore it is subject to the problem of the many.”^[56] Lewis does not beat around the bush. “I am a realist and a reductive materialist about mind. I hold that mental states are contingently identical to physical—in particular to neural—states.”^[57] “It is the task of physics to provide an inventory of all the fundamental properties and relations that occur in the world . . . we may reasonably think that present-day physics already goes a long way toward a complete and correct inventory.”^[58]

Barry Stroud on the Skeptical Mind

The philosophy of epistemology is very much a narrow professionalized discipline. It is as if the epistemologists do not know what their colleagues across the hall, the philosophers of perception, are doing. Certainly they get along fine. It is just that physicalism, functionalism and other such theories are hardly skeptical. As Carnap observes, those philosophers repair to a domain of truth that does not profess to describe the world as it is. Yet they still lay claim to the name of truth—infallible truth, at that. This is bound to be misunderstood by learners. For it is only in the fine print that the philosophers of science describe what they mean by logic. It is certain that the general public believes that the philosophers of science are making truth claims about the world in what they say and write.

Many epistemologists refuse to consider belief as something different from a proposition. Recognition of objects, as we have discussed above, is dismissed out of hand. “Belief” is treated rather broadly: as expectation, as perception, as proposition. Every philosopher will admit that not all things can be treated as needing supporting evidence. Eventually, evidence must be able to support the propositions or inferences. Epistemology refuses to concede this status to beliefs. They insist that the observation that the apple is red be justified. Perhaps a discussion of the alleged physiology of color will be required to prove the belief; and that physiology relies upon scientific theories, so the way is open for an infinite regress, if not for atomism.

The typical individual would regard the chair in front of her, for all practical purposes, as something “given” to perception. Wilfred Sellars has little patience with this point of view. “The idea of observation, “strictly and properly so-called,” is constituted by certain self-authenticating nonverbal episodes, the authority of which is transmitted to verbal and quasi-verbal performances when these performances are made “in conformity with the semantical rules of the language,” is, of course the heart of the myth of the Given.”^[59]

Scientific philosophy likes to make a show of being kin to “common sense,” and hence likes to represent itself as a disciplined belief formation. At least in the domain of examples that the epistemologists work with, the objects of belief are extremely humble: that Harry is wearing a hat; that the water is hot. In these examples there really isn’t anything operating more than perception.

Barry Stroud talks of how Kant was meaningfully shaped by the skeptical challenge. In fact, Stroud indicates that this is the road to a philosophic life, at least since 1781. Stroud keeps returning to Descartes in his dressing gown before the fire, wondering whether the fire, or he, really exists; or is merely a dream, or a hallucination. The argument from hallucination is a major pillar of the contemporary philosophy of perception. Schools of thought, such as “disjunctivism,” have been founded in response to it. Yet the fact remains: the skeptical grounds brought into play by Descartes are frivolous, the occasion of tactics. They do not reflect the actual predicament of the human race, based on its experience. For Stroud, true philosophy need not have any such basis in the common experience. I would say, however, that it is very much the common experience to seek and to need truth. This is not the same thing as feeling drawn to Descartes, this desire for truth. As Aristotle said, it is the characteristic of the human animal to desire to know. In all honesty, I do not think this essential human impulse is even on display in Descartes.

Whatever else one wants to say about Kant, one cannot refer to him as a tireless investigator of previous arguments. Very much like Descartes, Kant drifts with the tide of atomism. To hypothesize that the mind imposes qualities upon experience, such as parts of time, leaves quite a bit to be desired. It makes quite a huge difference whether time is actually a part of objects.

Atomism has huge implications for our thoughts about time. The atoms, metaphysically speaking, are indivisible. This is the entire justification for the theory that a whole is merely the sum of its parts. It is atomism alone that makes the prospect of change in an object seem an insurmountable obstacle to said object’s unity. It is denied that the atoms are true wholes of parts. In other words, it is denied that atoms are truly composite. The metaphysical foundation of any object has to be unity and being. No object can exist without these real and true parts. Yet to concede their existence is to concede the reality of the whole; which is to concede the reality of the extremities of a whole; which is to concede coming into being and passing away; which is to concede that the ordinary perceptions obtain knowledge about the real objects.

The atomist ontology therefore, whatever superficial concessions it makes to “parts,” denies the existence of a whole as the property of objects in nature. Thus the atoms can’t have time: they can’t have a past, nor can they have a future. Kant is of the opinion that Epicurus is the greatest cosmologist of the ancient period. Kant simply adapts to that atomism. He surrenders the ability of the mind to know “objects in themselves.” To ascribe time to the mind, as if the mind confers parts of time upon our perceptions of objects, is to fail to address the real issues. It is also to concoct mythical cognitive powers.

Kant elects to concede to the atomists their claim that we cannot know the objects in themselves. Kant does not subject Hume’s argument, or the atomist argument upon which Hume relies, to any sort of strenuous test. In all fairness to Kant, he does not seem to have been exposed to the critique of atomism even in the work of Aristotle. Yet it would seem to be the obligation of such a serious philosopher to expose himself to such teachings. Nobody wants to run away from the truth.

To return to an earlier point, serious philosophy must be an outgrowth of ordinary human thought. Curiosity is not the same thing as the desire to know. Amusement is not the same thing as needing to find the truth to the extent that one can. Certainly, there are philosophers who may philosophize mostly for the sake of entertaining themselves. Preference may so determine. Yet the human race is not therefore bound to the thought processes of philosophers who set out to amuse themselves, anymore than it is the obligation of the human race to defer to philosophers who will make any claim to win an argument. It is the responsibility of the human race to take from philosophy only so much guidance as alleviates its own wont of understanding, and which has proceeded to such investigations from the motives and the means that ordinary understanding possesses. Neither Descartes nor Kant really fit that criteria. Nor for that matter does Stroud.

In the atomist line of skepticism, which Descartes is actually a part of, and Kant certainly so (he thought Epicurus the greatest of the ancient cosmologists), what needs to be rethought is the very meaning of the term “skeptic.” Stroud faithfully accepts his starting point from the Early Modern tradition.

Stroud does not pause to note that to a man, despite their skepticism, Early Modern philosophers wrought a moral revolution among the feelings of the non-philosophers. Hobbes’s embrace of “the right of nature” as the human moral polestar; Locke’s representation of “uneasiness” as the true source of human morality; right down to Hume’s denigration of justice as an “artificial virtue.” Moreover, one should think carefully about what Stroud has said regarding the opacity of one human mind and feeling to another. This is obviously not the world that the vast majority of the population lives in. They understand each other all too well. Which is what should provide us with the insight as to what skepticism really means in the atomist context (the truly relevant context for thought today). It is to withdraw acknowledgment from what people obviously and ordinarily feel.

Stroud is concerned about skeptical philosophy, and he is disappointed that more philosophers don’t take it seriously.^[63] Stroud is perplexed by some of the issues that skeptical philosophy raises. One is compelled by Stroud to encounter the lonely philosopher, whose open mind cannot banish the skeptical challenge. What if the skeptical arguments are true? The skeptic asks where the individual obtains knowledge from. The ordinary individual responds, according to Stroud, “from perception.” How can that be? The skeptical philosopher wonders. How can knowledge come out of that which is not knowledge?

Yet perception is a kind of knowledge. Our faculties are equipped to know the kinds of objects. Ordinary people are not smart enough to make up kinds. Yet the skeptical philosopher wants to know how perception, which is defined nowadays extremely variously, can be a source of knowledge. Stroud wants to know what seeing finally “is.” In other words, like the atomists, who give an account of atoms colliding with the retina, creating pressure on the nerves of the eye, driving information toward the brain. The philosopher needs to know this: how are sounds broken down by the soul into comprehensible sources of information? Physiology is where Stroud begins to turn, and clearly, this is where a great deal of psychology and neurobiology have long since headed. Yet even if these questions are interesting, they are not interesting to very many. Stroud forgets the object. People are interested in beautiful things, ugly things, in the sorts of objects with which they have to do on a daily basis; and the ability of perception to know those objects is more than called into question by atomism. It is radically denied. The batteries of philosophers of perception ascribe all the knowing faculties to evolution, a theory that skepticism hasn’t really gotten around to doubting yet.

Stroud would reply that this is just the nature of philosophers. They can’t help being exposed to these sorts of questions. The possibility that we don’t really possess any knowledge bothers them, and so they think about it. Stroud denies that he is sympathetic to skepticism, but he thinks that it has made a major impact on human thought, and for that reason alone we should study it.

Stroud however, and the philosopher he represents, is not the philosopher of the modern period. The philosophers of the modern period insist, just as all of the philosophers of perception writing today insist, that they know better, with their sophistication, than the naïve ordinary people, as to what is real and what is not. Before Locke, in Bacon and Hobbes, modern philosophy coupled its skeptical attack on the authority of perception with a seizure of authority: “science” would be in charge of all matters pertaining to truth. The ordinary people and their faculties are barred from this sanctuary. The evidence which they are able to obtain from their senses is dismissed by Locke with a mere wave of his hand. Just because the people may manage to get along in life based on the evidence supplied to them by their sense faculties is, in Locke’s view, not the slightest reason to incorporate that opinion into the search for truth and the agencies that ascertain truth.

The skepticism of the modern period, in other words, is beholden to Machiavelli. Even before Machiavelli, if one wants to go back to Pyrrho, who is going to confuse his motives with innocent intellectual curiosity? Skepticism for Pyrrho is ataraxia, the source of an opiate-like tranquility. Pyrrho had a vested psychological interest in compelling all questions to empty into the “I cannot possibly judge” category. Skepticism has been inseparable from moral philosophy from the outset. Rather, it has been inseparable from weak moral philosophy from the outset. The “skepticism” of Plato’s Socrates is not of this variety. It confers the original authority upon ordinary opinion, not on philosophy. The innocence that Stroud reaches for in his representation of skeptical doctrine is itself naïve.

Stroud thinks that skepticism is a point of view which we need to expose ourselves to more openly. In Stroud’s view, Descartes’ suggestion that we do not really know whether we are dreaming, or awake, is a problem that faced openly, we all share. How do we know that we are dreaming, rather than that we are awake? Stroud evidently thinks that the experience of the unsophisticated is not worth bringing up. The human race after all does face its practical problems, in one way or another. First of all there is a distinction that needs to be contemplated: do we ever know it when we are awake? Do we have such experience, that we know, at least after the fact, that we were dreaming? Do we make, in our own experience, a severe distinction between dreaming and wakeful purposes? For an adult human being who could not make this distinction, philosophy needs to admit that this person would be relieved of his freedom by law enforcement in a relatively limited amount of time; or that at the very least this individual would be dismissed from his employment, since it is not an acceptable excuse to most employers that he does not know the difference between sleeping and dreaming and being awake. Most employers would dismiss such claims as beyond contempt. Would the employer be likely to question whether or not he is dreaming, when his employee fails to show up for work, and comes in the next day saying that he could not tell that he was absent from work, since in his dream he was working?

If there truly is no way to make the distinction between dreaming and waking hours, then people who do make the distinction would be regarded by Stroud as philosophically frivolous. The mother who does not feed her children, since she could not tell if she was awake or sleeping, would be prosecuted for insanity, or for depraved indifference to human life. Are these officers of society irresponsible for making such a judgment? How do they know that they are really officers of society, and not just dreaming about such designations? It is true that most philosophers and non-philosophers would become vexed by such questions, and irritated, and perhaps combative-but if Stroud is truly in this boat, why in his dreams must he be determined to bring these issues before other people?

Stroud keeps appealing to something like a sort of responsibility on the part of philosophers, to squarely face the skeptical dilemma. Responsibility is one thing that dreamland cannot sustain. In dreams it does not matter whether one is responsible or not, because nobody stands to get hurt in their dreams, not really. Dreams are those things from which we can wake up, and discover that what we thought was our experience was not after all our experience. Reality does not have that character. The individual who finds herself, one way or the other, at the mercy of an unsympathetic and unjust authority, is not going to find much solace in her dreams. They will not protect her once she has woken up. For all the world she wishes that her dream state would take away the sting of her actual predicament, but this is known to be worse than useless.

Stroud appeals to the quest for objectivity, the traditional philosopher’s quest, in his mind. There is nevertheless something problematic about Stroud’s attitude. His feeling that philosophers dodge the skeptical question, that the skeptical attitude is one that has been marginalized and neglected by philosophers, can only speak to philosophers who truly do spend most of their waking hours lost in dreamland. The contemporary, entire mobilized industry of the philosophy of perception, to say nothing of the bevy of schools of psychology which calmly dismiss the ordinary opinion that believes that it can know what the simple objects external to them really are, pervade academia today. The ordinary faculties which the non-philosophic part of the human race is condemned to rely upon for its information about reality is subject, not in dreamland but in reality, to an army of experts who indict the evidence that people are so much as capable of appealing to. The epithet “naïve” stings perhaps more than any other modern scolding. He who would dare to entertain the thought that his faculties might actually reach reality—a position that skepticism would need to share if it were honest with itself—should therefore actually be arrayed against the presumption of the philosophers of perception. Yet Stroud, meekly and quietly moves about their ranks.

Stroud does not speak of the realism of the modern world that began with Machiavelli, and which has never been disturbed from its lofty perch. This realism operates with the atomism of Lucretius, or some derivative of it. That formal skepticism as regards the senses believes that it possesses absolute knowledge, that is, that of atomism.

In Stroud’s discussion of Stanley Cavell’s work, the issue of the boundary, or lack of a boundary, between dreaming and being awake is raised once again. Stroud keeps referring to “traditional philosophy,” and the best that I can make of this phrase is that he is referring to either Descartes or Hume. That both Descartes and Hume are atomists, that even Descartes’ Meditations are a late work that come well after his adoption of atomism as the medium of skepticism, are left unmentioned by Stroud. One cannot simply sit by a fire and ask oneself if one is dreaming, from the atomist point of view. No, one has to have learned something. One has to have learned about indivisible body as a theory. This is completely intact, in the theory of the “conservation of matter,” in twenty-first-century physics, so again one is not sure where Stroud could possibly get the idea that skepticism is victim to a lack of attention.

The dream state of Stroud, however, apolitical as it is, makes one think of Leo Strauss’s discussion of the dream state, in the context of the philosophy of Hobbes. For Hobbes, who is strictly atomistic in his physics, the poison pin of politics is the individual who thinks that he knows what is right and what is wrong. The whole moral problem, in Hobbes’s view, is that the individual dares to trust his own judgment as to what is right and wrong, ever. For Hobbes, this is the dream state. This is a claim of great moment, because in ordinary society we praise and blame very emphatically individuals who fail to take moral accountability for their actions, or lack of action.

Strauss brings alive the political context, because Strauss is very much a political philosopher. What is the deliverance from this dream state that Strauss finds in Hobbes’s work? Nothing less than a humiliation that cuts one to the core. For the person who presumes to make moral judgments, that the world is such and so, has pride. He believes that his moral judgment matters. He commits the sin of what Quine regards as believing in “meaning.” Furthermore, he is wrapped up in what Strauss regards as the most toxic of dream states: the belief in the vindication of honor in life, that one can “be somebody.” “He can awaken from this dreamworld and come to himself only when he feels in his own person—by bodily hurt the resistance of the real world. . . . Because man by nature lives in the dream of happiness of triumph, of a glittering, imposing, apparent good, he requires no less imposing power to awaken him from his dream: this imposing power is the imperious majesty of death.”^[64] Strauss is unapologetically moved by Hobbes’s methodical attempt to force the individual to experience the reversal of this “dream state.” The individual must be reduced to a quivering mass of jelly, forced to profess his shameful helplessness in public, as the badge of his membership in the new kind of society. This version of the dream state includes man’s hopes for any happiness in life. As far as Strauss and Hobbes go, the vast majority of people must surrender this claim as a matter of course. This is Hobbes’s “realism,” which in its analysis of perception harshly persecutes anyone who dares to openly believe that he can perceive the actual objects about him. Still, with Stroud, all we get is Descartes before his fireplace.

Plato’s Socrates practices a skepticism, but it could more rightly be called “humility.” Descartes cannot be referred to as humble. Descartes waves away ordinary experience and ordinary mental life. Plato does not. Descartes is anxious to characterize man as a machine, and he proudly enlists himself in the ranks of a science that vacates the substance of ordinary awareness as evidentiary to any degree. Plato, however, observes that ordinary opinion is quietly intelligent. Whereas all of the modern philosophers, beginning with Hobbes, are so anxious to enroll human beings in the ranks of the broader animal population, Plato observes that ordinary human minds are possessed of an intelligence that they are not aware that they have. Ordinary minds recognize patterns. They know the natures of the objects around them. They have no trouble whatsoever recognizing the different kinds of objects, and all of their seemingly effortless activities are predicated upon this knowledge. Plato argues that the ordinary individual does not confuse a horse with an ox even in his dreams. Nor does the dreamer confuse unity with plurality. Stroud stays well away from this account of humility in philosophic thought. It is the baseline to which Plato returns every supposed philosophic flight to superior knowledge: but Stroud goes no farther back than Descartes.

Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke, in Reference and Existence: the John Locke Lectures, is very much concerned with the philosophies of Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein.^[65] The issue is objects. Russell has his theory of acquaintance and description. This basically reproduces Frege’s distinction between sense and reference. “Acquaintance” (Russell) and “sense” (Frege) indicate an entirely personal, Protagorean experience. This experience is atomist perception. Since one atom can only collide with one eyeball, no two people can experience the same atomic “event.” Hence there is cause for disjunction in what they perceive. Hence perception cannot indicate any common truths. For common truths, we must go to “description” (Russell) or “reference” (Frege). These descriptions and references must be capable of indicating what any and everybody in the universe experiences as regards a purported object. Description can only hypothesize that the object exists externally. Perception could not provide this information. Nor is the formal logic obliged, in its own view, to so much as believe that the objects it specifies exist in the world. That is the atomist result.

Which brings us to reference and description. Because perception has been discredited as the evidence for reference, and because the philosopher of formal logic takes it as his prerogative to create a definition for the hypothetical object to be talked about, reference becomes a very technical affair. Whatever the reader may assume or suppose, the formal logician is obligated to nothing except for what he stipulates in the definition of the object that he proposes; and as we have noted, he is by no means obliged to restrict his definitions to objects that actually exist in the world, or which he even merely believes to exist in the world.

It is a favorite statement in contemporary philosophy that this thing which is true must be true in the theory of “all possible worlds.” The existence of multiple universes is at least as old as Epicurus.

The reader who is trying to think of what could possibly be true of all possible worlds, should not forget about the logic of modern philosophy. For that philosophy which defines truth as having forsaken any attempt to describe any actual world, or any part of any actual world, will satisfy the requirement of a truth that holds in all possible worlds.

The individual object is reduced to this very limited description. “Thoreau is the author of Walden.” As if, had Thoreau not written Walden, one could not describe Thoreau. As if the existence of Thoreau entirely depended upon the rigid quantifier that the philosopher imposes. One doubt about the description, one suggestion that Thoreau had assistance in writing it, even divine inspiration for writing it, renders the description false. So this is just another way of destroying common objects to talk about. It is also a way of denying the universal “man” that Thoreau is. “The author of Walden” is not “man.” It is just Thoreau. But Thoreau is not “the” man. He is “a” man.

The argument that “being” itself is essentially a part of language, and the intention of he who speaks, enacts a direct rupture with the common highways of discourse. For when the ordinary individual states that an object exists, he knows nothing of this qualification separating the “is of attribution” from the “is of existence.” The ordinary fellow does not know that you can describe how an object is, without committing yourself to whether or not the very object itself exists. The symbolic logic insists that these are not only entirely appropriate translations of ordinary speech, but rather improvements on it. The linguistic philosopher knows better, because, well, he knows about the reality of the atoms, supposedly.

When one is reading Kripke, Quine, or one of a number of linguistic philosophers, it is common to come across a certain kind of argument. This sort of argument involves a statement about unicorns, “Pegasus the unicorn,” or whether or not Hamlet can truly be said to exist. It should be pointed out that these objects do not present any sort of problem for ordinary speech. Ordinary speakers who are familiar with Shakespeare’s play may well know of the character of Hamlet, and they may even make observations about him, such as “Hamlet is melancholy.” Is it possible to ascribe “being” to a fictional character?

By the same token, it seems ludicrous to attempt to deny that the fictional character “exists.” By leading us into this sort of conversation, Kripke and Quine and associates want to get the same point across: it is possible to discuss an object, and the existence of an object, even in such a case where the literal existence of said object is impossible. Thus one must allow that we can talk about Hamlet and his existence, his “melancholy”; even though at the same time nobody is persuaded or even thinks for a minute that Hamlet must eat, excrete, and pass out of existence such as is fated for all mortals.

The ordinary individual assumes that other people are referring, like he is, to the character from the play; that the character of the play exists in the play; and that plays certainly exist. They are written down on paper, lines are memorized by actors. It is because the ordinary individual takes it for granted that we folks can in fact discriminate the difference between kinds of objects, that we do not get our poor feet entangled in the lime twigs of Kripke’s problematic. The ordinary individual, that is, who certainly insists that he knows whether or not the apple exists, would not in a million years think of likening the character in a play, such as Hamlet, to the apple, in the nature of its existence. It is so obvious to him that he could never entertain the question. Yet, because the linguistic philosophy believes that it knows better than the ordinary speaker, and denies that the ordinary speaker can truly know whether or not an actual apple exists, then this mixture of objects, tossing objects of fantasy and fiction in with the typical furniture of daily experience, arises.

The linguistic philosophers are at times a playful group. It is not a novelty in their style of argumentation, but rather commonplace, that they will suggest that it is possible for some crafty individual to paint a billiard ball so that it appears for all the world to be an apple. Does this not indict our reasoning? Does not one example that proves the contrary of what we allege, destroy the entire foundation of our argument about perception and universals? We need be in no dire straits as to the answer. It is not impossible for human beings to willfully deceive each other. If someone goes to the trouble of disguising a billiard ball so that it looks like an apple, the individual will eventually pick it up and examine it, and discover this. Yet the answer to the zealous linguistic philosopher’s plaintive wail, that one deception of the perceptual judgment requires us to do away with the role that the entire faculty performs in our lives, is wishful thinking. That the philosopher can dress up a billiard ball to make it appear as an apple, does not interfere with the fact that every apple is characterized by a pattern or form which is recognizable to the human being as an apple. The presence of the universal is not a hypothesis. It is an inescapable observation.

These forms that Plato and Aristotle talk about so much, provoke in Quine the wrath of Jove. For a man who doesn’t commit to knowing of the existence of any object in nature, or even of his own existence for that matter, he lashes out wildly when the subject is universals. Once again we are brought back to Pegasus.^[68] In the case of Pegasus, per Quine, we are bound to the belief that the object both exists and does not exist. Quine again is attempting to introduce us to an object that can exist enough to be spoken of, without being able to exist enough to qualify as a real object. Pegasus has the existence appropriate to a work of fiction, which is certainly not nothing. Yet “being” is not a generic term. There are many different kinds of objects in existence, including human purposes.

Notes

Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. I, 4.

Discourses I, 3.

Meditation 1. In the Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Volume 2. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Meditation 2, 16.

Principles of Philosophy, part II. In the Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 1. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 224.

Supervenience and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 267.

W. V. Quine. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia, 1969.

Supervenience and Mind, 189.

“What Is the Physical?” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. Edited by Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann, and Sven Walter. Oxford: Clarendon, 2011.

10.

Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. C. K. Ogden. Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Company, 1959, 11.

11.

“Whither Physical Objects?” In R. S. Cohen, P. K. Feyerabend, M. W. Wartofsky, editors. Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos. Dohrdrecht: D. Reidel, 1976, 497.

12.

The Pursuit of Truth. Revised edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, 40. “Each perception that it is raining is a fleeting neural event. Two perceptions by Tom that it is raining are apt to differ, not only in time of occurrence, but neurally” (62).

13.

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 26. New York: Columbia University Press,

1969.

14.

Ibid., 5. Quine does not take up the fact that the only way he can determine that his affirmations and denials accord with those of others, is perception again. What shall the evidence be for that?

15.

Pursuit of Truth, 31.

16.

Philosophy of Science, 10–11.

17.

Pursuit of Truth, 75. The final cause to which Quine refers is Aristotle’s form, which indicates the common objects as ordinarily identified.

18.

Ibid.

19.

Experience and Nature. New York: Dover, 1958, 9, 14. “Romanticism is an evangel in the garb of metaphysics. It sidesteps the painful, toilsome labor of understanding and social control which change sets us, glorifying it for its own sake. Flux is made something to revere, something profoundly akin to what is best within ourselves” (51).

20.

Leviathan. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chapter 11, article 2, 66.

21.

Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, 2:38–62.

22.

Experience and Nature, 91.

23.

Ibid., 62.

24.

Experience and Nature, 99.

25.

Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980, 231.

26.

Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980, 238.

27.

Ibid, 55.

28.

Seeing Things as They Are. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 11.

29.

Ibid., 17.

30.

Seeing Things as They Are. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 17, 22.

31.

Ibid., 33.

32.

Reference and Consciousness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.

Ibid., 16–17.

Ibid., 30–31.

Ibid., 14, 63.

David Chalmers. “Perception and the Fall From Eden.” In Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne, editors. Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Clarendon, 2006.

37.

Perception and Reason. Oxford: Clarendon, 2002.

38.

Frank Jackson. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 140.

39.

A Neuro-Computational Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1993.

Ibid., 121.

Ibid., 150.

Theaetetus 192.

Theaetetus 191e.

Theaetetus 191d.

I allow, again, that Classical Studies which specialize in Plato’s texts obviously to take up these issues. Cf. my chapter on the Theaetetus in Plato Versus Parmenides. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Yet in the philosophical literature on epistemology and sense perception proper, Descartes is looked upon as the foundationalist, which really deprives the reader of “the other side” of the debate.

46.

Theaetetus 192.

47.

De Anima 430a20, 431a1.

48.

Gilbert Harman. Reasoning, Meaning and Mind. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999, 111, 250.

49.

Reasoning, Meaning and Mind, 201.

Ibid., 226.

Ibid., 73.

Ibid.

Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 166.

54.

David Lewis. Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 195.

Ibid., 91.

Ibid., 165.

Ibid., 291.

Ibid., 292.

Wilfrid Sellars. “Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?” In Ernest Sosa, Jaegwon Kim, Jeremy Fantl, and Matthew McGrath, editors. Epistemology. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011, 98.

60.

“How a Pyrrhonian Skeptic Might Respond.” Epistemology, 45.

61.

Understanding Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

62.

Understanding Human Knowledge, 61.

63.

Understanding Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

64.

The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Translated by Elsa Sinclair. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.

65.

Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

66.

Letter to Herodotus, 45. The Epicurus Reader. Translated by Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004, 8.

67.

Saul Kripke. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

68.

From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.