Abstract
Common-sense realism need not confine reality to what we can immediately see or perceive. In contrast to traditional empiricism, the evolutionary naturalist (in virtue of being a common-sense realist) defends a view where instrumental observation is a reliable source of information about the external word. The natural realist argues that we may rightly maintain that we can observe what we cannot perceive with the naked eye. The argument rests on a distinction between first and second order beliefs resulting from the observation that our view of reality is not formed by passive experience alone but in virtue of bodily actions as well as sensory information.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Gärdenfors (2006), p. 25.
- 2.
See Faye (2012) pp. 96–102 for a discussion of interpretation in the humanities and the postmodern claim that everything is interpretation. I believe that interpretation takes place in case we do not understand what we perceive. A scientist perceives the spectrum from a galaxy but she thinks it is abnormal in comparison with spectra from other galaxies. This forces her to make an interpretation of the abnormal one.
- 3.
Sellars ([1956]1997), sect. 32.
- 4.
For instance, it is evident that birds, fish, and apes have the ability to perceive colors. Thy need not be aware of their color beliefs to have them. Not even in principle. Awareness of the colors is enough to have color beliefs.
- 5.
The evidence is abundant. Each time an animal recognizes its own species it shows that it possesses a concept of that species. Since even lower animals can identify their own species automatically, it seems reasonable to assume that some concepts are inborn, whereas others are learned by experience.
- 6.
The issue about “language” depends in part on how we define “language.” It is unquestionable that animals communicate with each other by a variety of symbolic systems that may use auditory techniques like whales and some birds, or use behavioural patterns, like building a nest or a bee’s “dancing.” They also “mark” various things in their environment as a sign of their presence to other animals. In all of these cases a semiotic system is used to communicate a message. Is that “having a language”?
- 7.
Cf. Dretske (1963) Chap. 1, and his papers “Simple Seeing” and “Differences That Make No Difference” in Dretske (2000), pp. 97–112 and138–157. See also Brown (1987) Chap. 4.
- 8.
If I speak naturally, not in a philosophical setting, I would just say “I see a cell phone.” To say “I see it as a cell phone” or to say “I see that it is a cell phone” seems to me to suggest the two-level sense data plus interpretation model of perception. This is certainly not Dretske’s intention. Suppose someone makes a cell phone that looks like a wristwatch. I might, being presented with such a device, inspect it to discover what it really is and proclaim: “I see that it is a cell phone.” But I would assert this latter sentence, rather than simply “I see a cell phone,” only in the special circumstances where it is not, as it were, immediately apparent to me what it was that I saw. The two sentences are subtly different in meaning.
- 9.
van Fraassen (1980), p. 15.
- 10.
Cf. Sperry (1970). See also Marks (1980).
- 11.
In some animals juveniles seem to learn concepts from experiencing their own species’ behavioral actions (prairie dogs). We may even assume that before Homo sapiens developed the capacity of a language they had developed a rather sophisticated conceptual system in relation to their environment that was partly genetically inherent and partly taught from one generation to the next by sounds, signals, and actions.
- 12.
Bourdieu ([1997]2000) aptly describes the situation: “The world is comprehensible, immediately endowed with meaning, because from the very beginning, the body has been exposed to its regularities. Having thereby acquired a system of dispositions that are coherent with these regularities, the body finds itself predisposed and ready to anticipate them practically through behavior that activates a type of knowledge through the body, which ensures practical knowledge of the world…In other words, if the agent has an immediate understanding of the familiar world, this depends on the fact that cognitive structures, activated by the agent himself, are the product of an incorporation of the structures of the world in which he acts and on the fact that the instruments used to know the world are constructed by and through the world” (pp. 135–136).
- 13.
Faye (2012), pp. 98 ff.
- 14.
It is not obvious that the evidence has to be “adequate” but it must be relevant. It seems to me that observation can and sometimes does lead to beliefs that are mistaken. When Herschel first observed what we now call Uranus, he interpreted it to be a comet. Of course, he was making observations. So we might make an observation and might be able to point to evidence we might think is adequate to justify the beliefs we get from this observation, but that in fact this evidence is not adequate, and all we have is a mistaken belief. In other words, our mistake was about the adequacy of the evidence. But this does not mean that an observation was not made.
- 15.
Probably this is also the mechanism behind association and the Rorschach test. The sensory information is the same for every test person but various people process this information in virtue of different conceptual modules determined by their psychological character.
- 16.
Michotte ([1945]1962), p. 87 and p. 125.
- 17.
See Rubin (1950), and Tranekjær Rasmussen (1955).
- 18.
Hanson (1958), pp. 19 ff.
- 19.
Also Dretske defended such a distinction as one between non-epistemic simple seeing and epistemic perception. He then identified simple seeing with information encoded in an analog form and perception with information encoded in a digital form. See his paper “Sensation and Perception” in (1981), pp. 135–153.
- 20.
Cf. Faye (2002) p. 38 and p. 74.
- 21.
van Fraassen (1980), pp. 16–17.
- 22.
See van Fraassen’s answer to Ian Hacking in van Fraassen (1985), pp. 297–300.
- 23.
van Fraassen (1980), p. 19.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 57.
- 25.
Dretske (1981), Chap. 6.
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Faye, J. (2016). Sensation, Perception, and Observation. In: Experience and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31077-0_3
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