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Science, perception, and some dubious epistemological motives

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Notes

  1. See, for example, H. H. Price,Perception, 2d edition (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 2.

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  2. Ibid., p. 171n.

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  3. Ibid., p. 2.

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  4. Ibid., p. 2. See also A. D. Woozley,Theory of Knowledge (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1949), p. 15.

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  5. A. J. Ayer,The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 27f, 46ff.

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  6. A. J. Ayer,Language, Truth and Logic, 2d edition (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948), pp. 50f, 151-52, Chapter III.

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  7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A7–B11; R. Carnap,Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 7–8, andLogical Foundations of Probability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 1–8; C. G. Hempel,Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science, Vol. II, No. 7, ofInternational Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 11.

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  8. Ayer,Language, Truth and Logic, p. 57 (understanding Ayer's “linguistic” in the sense of “analytic”).

  9. “Thus if we press our eyeball out of place, everything is doubled.” “Consider, for instance, the sound ‘tick-tock.’” Price,Perception, pp. 79, 115. Such empirical evidence includes also the following: “The most ordinary use of the phrase ‘knew with absolute certainty’ is such that ‘x knew with absolute certainty thatp is true’ entails ‘p is true.’ Therefore …” N. Malcolm, “The Verification Argument,”Philosophical Analysis, M. Black, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), p. 259.

  10. See L. Wood,The Analysis of Knowledge (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), pp. 44–51, 89.

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  11. W. V. Quine, “On Mental Entities,”Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 80–83:202 (1953).

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  12. Is C. D. Broad'sPerception, Physics, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914) only partly an epistemological study?

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  13. See, for example, A. Ames, Jr.An Interpretative Manual: The Nature of Our Perceptions, Prehensions and Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), and J. S. Bruner and D. Krech, eds.,Perception and Personality: A Symposium (Durham: Duke University Press, 1949).

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  14. “It is a contingent fact that any domain of sense-experience possesses the structure that makes it convenient for us to apply to it the language that we do.” Ayer,The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, pp. 255-56. See Price's review of the latter inMind, 50:291-92 (1941), and Ayer's “The Terminology of Sense-Data,”Mind, 54 (1945), reprinted in hisPhilosophical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1954), pp. 103-4.

  15. See, for instance, R. M. Martin, “On ‘Analytic,’”Philosophical Studies, 3:42–47 (1952).

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  16. L. W. Beck, “Constructions and Inferred Entities,”Philosophy of Science, 17:74–86 (1950), reprinted in H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck, eds.,Readings in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), pp. 368-81. It might be thought that the separation of conceptual analysis and factual investigation could be accomplished if conceptual analysis alone were confined within rigid frameworks. But if the analytic-synthetic distinction were drawn along fluid lines by the scientist and along rigid ones by the epistemologist, as would be the case if the epistemologist but not the scientist utilized the kind of context in question, then there might easily be statements which were synthetic for the scientist but which the epistemologist would take to be analytic, and such a statement might very well play a crucial role in an analysis of concepts. In these circumstances, either the epistemologist would be more directly interested in empirical fact than the present argument allows him to be or else his concepts would be so far removed from those of experience as to transgress the bounds of empirical propriety. Both conceptual analysis and factual investigation are required by the argument under consideration to be carried on within a kind of context characterized mainly by its inflexibility.

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  17. I. M. Copi, “Analytical Philosophy and Analytical Propositions,”Philosophical Studies, 6:87–93 (1953).

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  18. B. Russell,An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), p. 63.

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  19. A fact about philosophic analysis which probably has its roots in some facts about human perception, and should therefore receive the blessings of all true empiricists. See J. S. Bruner and L. Postman, “Perception, Cognition, and Behavior,”Journal of Personality, 18:26–27 (1949), reprinted inPerception and Personality: A Symposium, p. 27. Bruner and Postman speak of a hierarchy of perceptual thresholds, whose sequence in any perceptual situation is determined by the characteristics of that situation, and which determines perceptual starting points by tripping off various response tendencies on the part of the perceiver. (For the same reasons adduced against argument 3 above, this variable-threshold theory cannot be deemed epistemologically irrelevant on the ground that it is concerned with how perception comes about rather than with its sensory constituency.)

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  20. A story which up to a point would make heavy use of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. See his “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,”Revue internationale de Philosophie, 11:20–40 (1950), reprinted in L. Linsky, ed.,Semantics and the Philosophy of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), pp. 208-28.

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Pasch, A. Science, perception, and some dubious epistemological motives. Philos Stud 8, 55–61 (1957). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02308565

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