Experience: An Inquiry into Some Ambiguities

CLARENDON LIBRARY OF LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY

General Editor: L. Jonathan Cohen

EXPERIENCES

EXPERIENCES ~

AN INOUIRY INTO SOME AMBIGUITIES

]. M. HINTON OX:FORD

FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1973

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON

Oxford University Press, ElYHouse, London W. I

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© Oxford University Press I973

Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by Vivian Ridler Printer to the University

PREFACE

I HAVE been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the authors listed in the Bibliography, to which the bracketed names and numbers in the text refer. However, I have been guided by so many people, teachers and students and others, that a list would be very difficult to draw up. I apologize to anyone I may unwittingly have quoted; to me this is a lively fear. If it has happened, then the process of recollection mistaken for discovery was, in all but a very few passages, laborious. I have drawn upon three of my own articles, which will be found in The Philosophical Quarterly, January 1967, Mind, April 1967, and Inquiry, October 1967. I drew on these same sources for my contribution to Wisdom: Twelve Essays, ed. Renford Bambrough. During the writing of those articles I was stimulated by reading L. B. Grant's doctoral thesis on Visual Experiences. During the writing of this book I had helpful discussions with 1. C. Hinckfuss, O. R. Jones, R. Sorabji, W. E. Cooper, J. A. Schumacher, and L. Kojen among others: I may have helped myself to some ideas from them. The Appendix contains some clarifications, relating mainly to Sections 10 and 13-

CONTENTS

An event of which one is the subject: general Things that you can experience, but that can also happen to you without your experiencing them

PART I. A VERY GENERAL NOTION AND SOME SPECIAL ONES

INTRODUCTION

I.

2.

3. Transitional: senses and forms of the verb, 'to experience' 4. Things that could not happen without being experiences 5. A contrast

PART II. A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

II a, PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

6. Perception-illusion disjunctions: general 7. Some descriptions that apply to certain perception-illusion disjunctions 8. Some descriptions that do not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions

lIb. THE COMMON ELEMENT IN PERCEPTION AND ILLUSION g_ The common element: general 10.

Experience-reports Something about which nothing can be said 12. Comments

II.

lIe. PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (2) 13. Perception and other matters 14. Dlusion and other matters

APPENDIX BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

1

5

8 13 21 34

37

37

38

46

60

60 63 100 100

103

103 114

145

147

149

S

I

INTRODUCTION

The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge, 1971.

OMEONE who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself, 'How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?' He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely COmmon that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. Drawing a breath of fresh air is still a very common experience in many parts of the globe, but he does not mean that kind of an experience. Like the COmmon experience of doing a monotonous job of work amid exhausting noise, it would be too much an event in what he calls the external world. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something 'inner', is one on which recent logico-Iinguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light, or so I for one believe. I still hope to throw a little more, mainly or wholly reflected, light on it in Part II of this book, where the visual case .is concerned. There might be more originality if I could offer to defend that way of thinking of visual experiences. Not that one need be opposed to anything and everything that might be meant by calling visual experiences 'inner'. Iris MurdochI is right when she says that an experienced painter might tell someone who lacked his experience, 'You do not know what red means.' However, in the relevant controversial conception-which Miss Murdoch neither ignores nor defends-sense-experiences have an 'inner' quality quite independently of any quality that is conferred on them by experience. This general idea is not devoid of truth; something may remain to be said about what truth and what falsehood there is in it. One way of getting clear about a notion is to contrast it with another, particularly another that is expressed by the same word or phrase. This can, and will, be done here. The relevant

2

INTRODUCTION

special notion of an experience contrasts, among other things, with a certain more general biographical notion of an experience, which some dictionaries indicate by the definition, 'an event of which one is the subject'. An experience, in some special sense of the word, would of course not necessarily be debarred from being an experience in that very general biographical sense as well. Indeed, if 'an experience', in the given special sense, is an experiencing and is of no very great duration, then we should rather expect it to be an event of which one was the subject, whatever else it was. The very general sense is what I shall talk about first, however. Part I is almost, though not quite, a self-contained Prologue.

PART I

A VERY GENERAL NOTION AND SOME SPECIAL ONES

(5)

I

A VERY GENERAL NOTION, AND SOME SPECIAL ONES

1. An event of which one is the subject: general

extent.

X

N event of which one is the subject': I can see three components, three requirements, in the idea of 'the subject of an event' here. In the first place, whoever is reported as having or having had the experience is the grammatical subject of the event-report, or he can easily be made the grammatical subject. Then he is also still to some extent the test-subject; it seems that the event must not depart too widely from the old, submerged meaning of an experience as an experiment, test, or trial to which something is subjected. The third requirement is one which I will now state in an ambiguous and potentially misleading, though not unnatural, form as a preliminary to analysing what it involves: the grammatical subject and test-subject of the event must also be the conscious subject, or there must be the right sort of consciousness or awareness on his part. Most of Part I is an attempt to say how this third requirement is to be taken in various types of case. The other two requirements do not present so many problems. One of them, the requirement that you be the grammatical subject of the event, just puts a ring round things you 'do' or 'are' that happen. The other adds'... and that test you in some way'. Given that you are human, this is likely to involve you in some sort of consciousness; the requirement of being tested has faded, though that of consciousness has not, or not to the same

Instead of just saying that the grammatical subject did or 'did' or 'was' or underwent whatever it was, swam the Bospharos or was ferried across it or whatever, the event-report sometimes says what almost comes to the same thing, that he 'had the experience of' swimming the Bosphorus or being

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

7

1

I

6

and knowing this or that. More restrictively again, we could impose the further requirement that the so-called 'act' must be a happening. And then we could further impose, in all its unclearness, the proviso that there must be the right sort of consciousness on the part of the subject of the verb, if the happening is to be an 'act'. I do not see any difference between an act, in this last possible sense, and an experience in the ordinary biographical sense of the word, unless you count the restriction that survives from the old meaning of a test. Where an experience is just an act in this sense, to experience it is just to 'do' it. In other words, to experience X-ing, in this sense, is just to X -provided that X-ing is a happening, provided that there is the right sort of consciousness on your part, whatever that may mean, and subject to the further restriction just mentioned that survives from the old meaning. I do not want to stress this last restriction too strongly, that the experience must be something like a test or trial through which the subject passes-to which he, she, or it is subjected. In some cases this reqnirement is imposed in a very attenuated form if at all, and we can lift it completely if we are so inclined. Still, a loose and altered connection with that old meaning of a test may help to explain why we do not colloquially call just anything and everything that we literally live through as conscious subjects an experience. The connection is altered; not only because the 'experiencing' used to be the testing and not the being tested, but because from being an occurrence whose 'event' in the old sense, outcome, establishes whether Or not the thing tested has certain qualities, an experience may now by extension have become alternatively something whose mere occurrence, or whose tautologous outcome, establishes that he, she, or it has them--{)r even merely something that has a characteristic result, such as the giving of a report. The experience of passing through the streets of a foreign city may fail to establish more than that one has some part of the wealth and leisure of a globe-trotter, and may result only in one's boring others. Yet perhaps it also tests whether one can make something of what one sees, and perhaps this fact is thrown into the background only because the outcome of the test is so often thought by others to be negative. The connection is loose; it can always be tightened. Sean O'Faolain writes, looking

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

ferried across it. It almost comes to the same thing because when our talk in English about someone's, or the, 'experience of' doing this or that has the present sense, as distinct from another sense that I shall come to, the word 'of'is like a mere comma. (In some languages, German for instance, it is translated by one.) The experience of swimming the Bosphorus is just the experience, swimming the Bosphorus, What the origin of this queer 'of' is, linguists would know. Probably they can tell us why we talk about the island of Mull and the township of Craignure and the virtue of honesty and the sum of one pound and the act of raising your arm, but not the postmistress of Mary Donaldson. What I have to point out is that, just as the island of Mull is not something like the map of Mull; not something other than Mull which is related to Mull in a way indicated by the word 'of'; so the experience of being ferried across the Channel, in this sense of the phrase, is not something other than being ferried across the Channel. The experience, (of) X-ing, in this sense, is no other event or thing than X-ing, the event of which one is the grammatical subject.-The reason why talk about someone's, or the, 'experience, (of) X-ing' only almost, and not qnite, comes to the same thing as talk about X-ing is that the characterization of X-ing as an experience may be essential to the sense of the passage; for instance if the question is whether things that come nnder that characterization always or sometimes come under some other specified characterization or classification. There is quite a marked resemblance between the common noun, an 'experience', and the common noun, an 'act'. The last of these common nouns is, or could be, used in an indefinite number of different ways on a scale of generality. Most generally of all, as a word for anything at all that you 'do' in the sense that you are the grammatical subject of it-you did get born, did grow. Ifwe used 'act' in this utterly general way, then even getting cremated or mummified, or posthumously rehabilitated or otherwise revalued, let alone dying, would be an act. A little more restrictively, we might impose the proviso that the subject of the verb be at least alive. Being operated on, even under a general anaesthetic, and even if you died on the table, would be an act then, in contrast to undergoing a literal or figurative post-mortem-but so would weighing eleven stone

8

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

I

back,' that the revolutionary period in Ireland which he had come out of when he wrote his first successful short story was too filled with dreams and ideals and a sense of dedication to be what he would now call an experience 'in the meaning of things perceived, remembered and understood'. The basic idea, here, is that-of things and times lived through; a more general idea. than that of an event of which one is the subject, and one with which I shall not be directly concerned. In other words the verb, here, is 'to live through' in a broad sense, broader than that of 'doing', while alive, something which is a happening. Within that broader general idea, the reference to 'things perceived' shows a shift towards a meaning of 'to experience' that I shall come to in Section 3; a meaning more like 'witness', 'behold', or 'perceive' than 'do' or 'undergo'. Yet these last two ideas are very much alive in the context, and to the extent that they are, the stress is on a test or trial of the mind's power to remember and understand the things done or undergone. No doubt it has something to do with the older meaning of a test that suggestions of passivity, belied by that example and many others, and of something out of the ordinary, even of something rather unpleasant, cling at times to the noun an 'experience'. However, these are associations merely, and not requirements; we speak of the gratifying experience of clearing six foot two in the high jump, and of humdrum, everyday experiences too. There remains to be investigated the requirement that there must be the right sort of consciousness on the part of the grammatical subject of the event, or in other words that he must be the conscious subject ofthe event. What does this mean?

2. Things that you can experience, but that can also happen to you without your experiencing them

Stories of Sean O'Faolam, Penguin Books, 1970.

We characteristically require the grammatical subject of an event to be in some sense its co.tiscious subject, before we are happy to call the event one of his experiences in the ordinary biographical sense of the word. But what, more exactly, does this requirement involve when the event is of the sort men~ tioned in this section's title? The answer suggested is that, in this type of r

2

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

9

case, we nonnally require the subject to have a certain specialkind of awareness of the event itself. This awareness, which need not be simultaneous with the event, can take many forms within certain limits. It need not amount to knowledge that the event in question is occurring or has occurred, nor is such knowledge sufficient.

8244037

B

Let us take cases in which the grammatical subject of the event might not have been the conscious subject of it, because there might not have been the right sort of consciousness or awareness on his part. And then the event would not have counted as one of his 'experiences'. Only that is putting it too strongly; the requirement of the right sort of consciousness is only more or less built into the ordinary biographical notion of an experience in this type of case-and in a more or less stringent form. For instance, suppose a young man tells you that when he and his friend Peter were conscripts, sent to suppress revolution in a distant former colony, and were taken prisoner, Peter had the experience of being operated on, in a field hospital of the revolutionaries, for the removal of six bullets. Your informant's using the word 'experience' may lead you to assume that they were not able to give Peter a general anaesthetic, but only a local or regional one, or only rice wine, or nothing at all. However, you may be inclined to let the word 'experience' pass even if you are told that Peter did have a general anaesthetic and was completely nnconscious throughout the operation-no simultaneous relevant awareness, presumably. But what if your informant goes on to add that Peter now remembers nothing at all about the entire period of his captivity? You may still be willing to call the operation one of Peter's experiences. This is partly because you will naturally assume that when Peter came to, after the operation, he realized or was told what had happened-though of course he has now forgotten this. But what if you are told that, for some peculiar reason, when Peter came to, he did not know he had been operated on, and was led to believe that his wounds had been caused by falling on stakes of sharpened bamboo in a man-trap? Even now, you may still be prepared to call the operation one of Peter's experiences, perhaps because his now-forgotten former awareness of his wounds before and after the operation counts, for you, as the right sort of consciousness on his part. His awareness of his

IO

A VERY GENERAL NOTION I

wounds was, after all, relevant to the operation although Peter did not know that it was. Let us now exchange the case for one in which we can more easily suppose the subject to have no consciousness, whether before, during, or after the event, that is at all relevant to what he undergoes. The convalescent Peter is sound asleep on the ground in a clearing when he is gently turned over by some tame animal that can smell the pahn leaves or hay he is lying on. The friend who now tells you of the incident is sure that Peter knew nothing about it at the time and knows nothing about it now. There was no sign of its disturbing his sleep, nor did he later tell of a dream that could be connected with what happened. Yet your narrator, who believes Peter to have had no kind of awareness at any time that was at all relevant to the animal's turning him over, still says that Peter had the 'experience' of being turned over by the animal. His is, in virtue of his belief, an unconventional use of the word. Nevertheless, someone might so use the word, not just as a momentary aberration but regularly; making it cover any event you literally lived through as the grammatical subject, and altogether suspending the requirement of consciousness, whatever this requirement is exactly. We could countenance such a use; partly, perhaps, because we lack some such noun as an 'undergoing' for what the happening was if it was not an experience. In point offact we sometimes countenance a use in which not even the requirement that the grammatical subject and testsubject be a living thing, let alone any requirement of consciousness, is involved; when we are told that a bullet, or the fuselage of an aircraft, or the hull of a ship, experiences such and such testing stresses under such and such conditions. Since this is just a matter of refraining from imposing a proviso or restriction, it is not strictly speaking an analogy; or at any rate not quite in the way in which it is an analogy to talk about a malicious deck-chair. But returning to cases in which we do require 'the right sort of consciousness', and keeping to cases in which there might fail to be this, what is the right sort of consciousness? To be less vague by a perceptible degree, it is, in these cases, some sort of awareness of the event in question, the very event of which one

2

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

is the grammatical subject, and about which the question is whether it is to be numbered among one's experiences or not. Some sort of awareness of it; you need not know, need not in that sense be at all aware, that it is X-ing that is happening or that happened. Twinges of pain, accompanied by quite confused ideas as to what was going on, are enough-sufficient, not necessary-for Peter to be said to have had, in being operated on, the experience of being operated on. In the ordinary biographical sense which is our sale concern at present, it is possible to have a certain experience without knowing that you are having that experience, and even 'without knowing a thing about it' at the time. But do we include all cases where you know? Is knowledge that you are X-ing sufficient for experiencing X-ing? I do not think so, or at least I do not think it is sufficient to make the case a clear one. I am being attracted to the earth by its gravitational pull, and I know this, but I am not exactly having the experience of being so attracted-as I might, if I were ending a period ofweightlessness. It is not just that I am always being so attracted; I might know that I was again being so attracted, without having the experience of again being so attracted-if some arrangement to eliminate the effects on me of having attained escape velocity had been operating, a rotating space station perhaps. A blind man with the wind in his face and a voluble sighted companion at his side may have the experience of coming into New York harbour, but does the stoker have that experience, given merely that he hears the chief say 'We are entering New York harbour'? Only at a pinch. If knowing that you are X-ing is neither sufficient nor necessary for you to experience your X-ing, then it seems that some special sort of awareness of your X-ing is necessary: not just any and every sort of awareness of your X-ing will do. The sort of awareness we require is, I believe, a queer and complex thing, which varies as X-ing varies. Not surprisingly, or it would hardly be awareness of X-ing. Because the awareness must be appropriate to the X-ing, someone who is always discontented though lovingly cared for hardly experiences being cared for or being loved-the aim or object of such love and care is the happiness of the loved one. Someone who is

I2

A VERY GENERAL NOTION I

contentedly exploited scarcely experiences exploitation, and the first task of the agitator may be to get him to experience it-resistance is an appropriate reaction to injustice, though hardly its aim or object. To narrow the question down, what does the so-called right sort of awareness, the kind that makes the common noun 'an

experience' conventionally applicable, involve in this type of case, when moreover the awareness is simultaneous with its object, the event lived through? There is the hypnotized or locally anaesthetized patient who perceives the operation in a more or less normal way. There is the case where the patient does not perceive the operation but feels a certain amount of pain. Illusion is another thing that sometimes counts as the right sort of awareness. When you have the experience of being left standing in the station by another train, it is sometimes because you have the illusion ofleaving the other train standing. Sometimes it is perception, but perception of something other than your X-ing. I assume it will be sufficient if your perceiving the other thing is pretty directly due to your X-ing, as when a motorist in a car with good suspension has the experience of being in a major earthquake, perceiving only the sudden swaying of some trees and then the effects in the first township he comes to. I think one can give something like the following general account. The awareness, when it is simultaneous with the X-ing, where the X-ing could have happened without being an experience, may consist in the subject's perceiving by means of his senses that he is X-ing. It may consist in his perceiving something else, where his perceiving that other thing is pretty directly due to his X-ing. It may consist in his perceiving something that is a part of what we mean by his X-ing, or that is closely connected with the fact of his X-ing. When he does not know that he is X~ing, his awareness will consist in his 'doing' something that can be thought of, analogically perhaps, as a confused, indirect, or incomplete way of perceiving that he is X-ing; his relevant awareness is then a 'bad picture' or confused impression of his X-ing. This awareness, whatever it may consist in, e.g. feeling pain, must be a pretty direct result of his X-ing and must have a sort of relevance or appropriateness to X-ing, whatever X-ing may be in the given case.

3

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

'3

3. Transitional: senses and forms of the verb, 'to experience'

To experience is, roughfy, 'to undergo, witness': two different verbs here, and each verb has various forms. Confusion threatens as a result of this situation.

'To experience' is really two or more quite different verbs: two concern us here. (aJ There is the transparent, colourless, or empty verb, akin to 'undergo' or 'do', with which we have so far been concerned: to experience X-ing, to X plus provisos. I will mark this verb off as 'to a-experience'. (b) There is a verb of which a very rough paraphrase would be 'to witness'. I will mark this one offas 'to b-experience' and will describe it further. We can distinguish, independently, between different kinds of grammatical object which those two verbs might take; different sorts of thing that you might be said to a-experience and/or b-experience. A thing you a-experience is of course always something you 'do', but a thing you b-experience is only sometimes something you 'do'. When a thing you a-experience or b-experience is something you 'do', it will belong to one of two kinds: (1) the kind of thing with which Section 2 was concerned, things that could happen to you without exactly being among your experiences, because you can fail to have the right sort of awareness of them, and (2) the kind of thing with which Section 4 will be concerned-things of which we find it natural to say that they could not happen without being experiences, intending some sort of rather ambiguous contrast with the first kind of thing. I will say that you I-esperience the first kind of thing and 2-experience the second. So, as far as what has been said up to this point goes, there might be: a-I-experiencing, b-I-experiencing, a-2-experiencing, and b-2-experiencing. However, it will turn out to be less than certain that there is such a thing as b-2-experiencing. I said in Section 2 that we do not invariably impose the stipulation that the grammatical snbject of the event must have the right sort ofawareness or consciousness if it, if you are to call it one of his a-experiences. But when this pointed stipulation is being imposed-and it must not be confused with a mere vague stipulation that there must be the right sort of consciousness 'in the case' or 'on the part ofthe subject'-then I shall say that the

'4

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

I

verb 'to ca-experience', is being used; a special form of 'to a-experience'. 'To ca-experience' is the verb you are using when you say that a man who is engrossed in the hovering of a hummingbird while he is being approached by an alligator does not have the a-experience of being approached by an alligator. Or that a man whose attention is wholly devoted to a pretty girl while he is being cold-shouldered by another man or while he is missing his train does not have the a-experience of being coldshouldered or missing his train. It is also the verb you are using if you say that, on the narrator's assumptions, Peter did not really a-experience the animal's turning him over. But this example must not lead one to forget what those other examples bring out; namely, that you can fail to ca-experience your xing, without being 'unconscious' in the flat, modern sense; provided that you do not have the right kind of awareness if your X-ing. When the requirement that you must have the right kind of awareness of your X-ing is not being imposed; when you are not requiring the grammatical subject of the event to have any sort of awareness if it, before you will consent to call it one of his 'experiences', then I shall say that you are using the verb, 'to ua-experience'. The letter u merely indicates that the colourless, empty, auxiliary-like verb, the a verb, is now unencumbered by that particular, pointed consciousnessstipulation. It is not meant to suggest that the verb is now exactly the same as the verb 'to undergo', or that the subject is unconscious, or even that he is unconscious of X-ing. These associations mayall, even including the last one, be seriously misleading in some contexts. If you were to stretch a point and say that the man whose attention was elsewhere did have the experience of being cold-shouldered, this would not mean that he was having it while unconscious. True, he would be unconscious of being cold-shouldered. But it is now widely helci.through the influence of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Hampshire, and others-that there may be things of which it is neither appropriate to say that you can do or undergo them unconsciously, nor yet true to say that whenever you do or undergo them you have some kind of consciousness of doing or undergoing them. If there are such things, and Section 4 is about this, then you might be said to ua-experience them. Then perhaps some things

3

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

'5

you can be said to ua-experience are by no means passive, in which case 'undergo' would not at all be a happy word to use. 'To ua-experience', then, is just the a verb unrestricted by the pointed consciousness-stipulation which is imposed in the use of 'to ca~experience'; so that whichever of those verbs you are using, you are using the verb 'to a-experience'. So now, as far as what has been said goes, there may be: ua-l-experiencing, ca-I-experiencing, ua-2-experiencing, and ca-2-experiencing. However, it will turn out to be less than certain that there is such a thing as ca-2-experiencing. Although ca-l-experiencing involves awareness, it would be misleading to call the verb a verb of awareness. This would make it sound a lot more like 'witness' and 'perceive' and 'b-experience' than it is. Since 'to b-experience' is a verb of awareness, there is a difference here between the act and the object, the b-experiencing and the thing that is b-experienced. The thing that is b-experienced is, say, an operation which is being performed on someone with a local anaesthetic or under hypnosis, while the b-experiencing is not the operation, but the having of a certain sort of possibly distinct, possibly indistinct awareness of the operation. Contrastingly, in the case of aexperiencing, there is no difference between the act and the object. The 'doing' is what is 'done', the experiencing is what is experienced in the a sense-though of course you can make the linguistic distinction, otherwise you could not say that there was no difference. A 'b-experience' then, if you mean the experiencing, is a very special kind of a-experience, since not all our a-experiences are cognitive acts: it is also not the kind of a-experience mentioned in the title of Section 2. And if by 'a b-experience' you mean the object, the thing that is b-experienced by the b-experiencer, an odd thing to mean but hardly an impossible one in philosophy at least, where 'a perception' has been used to mean a thing perceived, then this is not necessarily an a-experience at all. Although I have said that the awareness involved in ca-lexperiencing X-ing need not be simultaneous with the X-ing, and although I will now say that b-experiencing need not always be simultaneous with the thing that is b-experienced; still it does seem that when the awareness involved in ca-l-experiencing X-ing takes the form of experiencing, in the b sense of

16

A VERY GENERAL NOTION I

course, then it has to be virtnally simultaneous with the X-ing. In other words, b-I-experiencing is virtually simultaneous with the thing you a-I-experience and b-I-experience. The letters and numbers give this remark the look of an arbitrary stipulation, but it is not meant to be one. The prefixes mark off expressions in ordinary use, actual received uses of the verb 'to experience'. In one sense or use of the verb we cannot experience something we ourselves undergo or 'do' without being aware of it at the time; prefix b-l. In another sense we can; prefix ca-I, or of course ua-l. In one sense we can experience something that is not happening at anything like the same time-experiencing a supernova; prefix b. In another sense we cannot; pre-

fix a, alternatively b-l. And so on. I The general b sense sometimes shows itself by ceasing to take as its object something one does or undergoes. It then may take as its object some environmental event or object, and stands for a kind of perception. This, therefore, is 'b-' without being either 'b-I' or 'b-Z'. I will sometimes call it 'db-experiencing', because it has got detached from objects that are events ofwhich one is the grammatical subject, and because, with a qualification we shall come to, the b-experiencer in db-experiencing is pretty much of a detached observer. This is when you experience the great firework display, the carnival of flowers, the enthronement of the Patriarch without being the Patriarch, the Northern Lights, a supernova, the Taj Mahal. As a second kind of b-experiencing whose object is not an event of which one is the subject, we should perhaps list the b-experiencing of a state of which one is the subject, but which is not a happening. As when, in and by the pangs of thirst, one experiences dehydration conceived in a static sense; OT, in and by an unbearable itching, experiences the lack of some vitamin or other chemical. We are strongly inclined to introduce, and ifwe are careful we can introduce, a 'seeming' or 'ostensible' sense of b-l-experiencing X-ing, call it sb-I-experiencing X-ing, which does not entail X-ing. The only thing is that we are then prone to fall into a certain mistake. We may get the mistaken idea that 'b-Iexperiencing X-ing' can be defined as 'sb-I-experiencing X-ing because of, or accompanied by, X-ing'. This is a mistake' I Ifin some of these cases the reader would use the noun but not the verb, then this counts in my sub-language as 'using the verb or function'.

3 A VERY GENERAL NOTION 17 because b-I-experiencing X-ing does not necessarily involve sb-I-experiencing X-ing. This is so because, in the case of b-Iexperiencing X-ing, which is linked to X-ing by being pretty directly due to X-ing, the links of relevance or appropriateness between the awareness and the X-ing can afford to be quite loose; it will still count as awareness of X-ing in virtne of the causal link; whereas in the case of sb-I-experiencing X-ing the links of relevance or appropriateness have got to be that much tighter or closer, since these must unaidedly make the awareness count as (ostensible) awareness ofX-ing, there being no causal link to help them out since there need be no actnal X-ing. For instance, one would hardly report a sudden pain in the back, as one lay awake in bed, in terms of one's having 'seemingly had the experience of being turned over by some animal', and yet such a pain could, with the event, have constitnted Peter's actually b-I-experiencing this indignity ifit was caused by this. Thus if we say that 'sb-I' is weaker than 'b-I', we must remember that in defiance of the literal meaning of weakness it is equally true the other way round; neither logically entails the other. A thing which may at first sight seem rather odd is this, that the feature or peculiarity, of b not entailing sb, fails to be displayed by the parallel notion of sdb-experiencing, which we can introduce ifwe like. {No numbers here, of course, any more than in db, since the object of the verb here is not something I 'do' or that happens to me at all, and consequently neither a Type One nor a Type Two thing of that kind.) The tourist, and this is just a fact of usage, is only at a pinch said to db'experience the enthronement ofthe Patriarch' ifhe has broken his glasses and, as a result, it might just as well have been one of those festivals where they wear masks and throw tomatoes at one another. He might keep the English language growing by saying, drily and wryly, that he really mis-experienced the enthronement of the Patriarch. So, it is hardly, only at a pinch, possible to db-experience something without sdb-experiencing it; not that this fact gives us a deep understanding of what sdbexperiencing is. The fact ought not on reflection to seem too odd: b-I-experiencing is 'experiencing' a thing anyway, since it involves a-I-experiencing it, whereas db-experiencing has got to work harder to be 'experiencing' a thing. A further reason

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for the fact may be this, that the notion of db-experiencing may still vestigially involve the notion of something not so merely observational, a notion of experimenting or testing as distinct from being tested. There is not much left ofthis idea; the man who tests metal springs is not 'experiencing' them, or if he is this would now be called trade jargon. And it is mainly the streets of Calcutta that put the tourist to a test, rather than the other way round; still there is a trace of the suggestion that he is seeing whether they are what they are supposed to be. A warning: what we say about any form of the verb 'to experience' is about that verb, not about the verbs which report particular forms of, say, b-experiencing or db-experiencing. Thus what we say of sb-I-experiencing and of sdb-experiencing does not go over, automatically, to such particular forms of sdb-experiencing as, say, seeming to see. To represent oneself as talking about 'kinds of thing' is a source of confusion here. Whatever is true of men, is true of Englishmen; not everything that is true of 'perceiving' or of 'b-experiencing' is true of 'seeing' or 'hearing'. Similarly, you could say all there was to say about all these special verbs or functions without having even begun to talk about the general ones. In distinguishing so many uses of 'to experience', have I seen matters as more complex than they really are? Can it be argued in particnlar that it is a mistake to posit both the a and the b senses? Partly recapitulating and partly expanding: if someone maintains that there is the a sense but not the b sense, then one may retort that the verb is nsed in the db sense nowadays. People do say that you should experience the Northern Lights, the Taj Mahal. Perhaps the 'a only' theorist will say they are using language bad!y; I should prefer not to say so. True, he may alternatively say that such uses are elided a uses-you should experience seeing the Northern Lights. But there are other arguments against him. The argument from adverbs and adverbial phrases for instance: the operation is experienced hazily but not undergone hazily. To attach an adverb is, as a rule and excepting queer adverbs, to make a predicate or function more specific: to see shortsightedly or love hopelessly entails, without being entailed by, seeing or loving. Hence in

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general, though not universally, the adverbial test for a difference of sense is as fair as the test by a difference in respect of species, such as 'Some men are castles, no male humans are castles, therefore "man" has another sense as well as "male human".' Then there is the argument from the fact that the interrogative 'What ... ?' in 'What did he experience?' does not always seem to mea.." what was it that got a-experienced or b-experienced; we ask the question when we know this already. If, for instance, we idly wonder what the rook which is being swung about in its nest by the wind is experiencing, this is not a question which answers itself: we are idly wondering in what W'!J' the bird is (ca-l, b-l) experiencing being swung about in its nest by the wind. It reminds us of the similar use of 'What ... ?' with 'see'; what do they see, the Dungarvan townsfolk wonder, as the tourists from overseas gaze at the perfectly ordinary market square, with its shops of no vast size and their, unsurprisingly Irish, proprietors' names on the boards. Then there is the argument that the 'of' in 'the experience of' is surely not always a mere comma, but sometimes more like a weakened form of the 'that' in 'awareness that one is X-ing'. In other words it would surely be wrong to say that in no sense of the verb, 'to experience', was there a difference bet-ween act and object. If someone maintains that there is the b sense but not the a sense, then against him there is the retort that one can caexperience things without b-experiencing them. Moreover the previous or subsequent awareness, in such a case, need not always be an event or process, which is what experiencing is; so that there would still be ca-experiencing without b-experiencing, even if b-I-experiencing did not have to be simultaneous with the thing b-I-experienced. There is the argument that people do not look forward to a chronicle of mental events merely, when they look forward to hearing about a sailor's experiences. There is the argument that the verb sometimes has the ua sense. There is the argument from adverbs and adverbial phrases again: it is not the patient's awareness which we mean to describe as having had no ill effects when we say that he experienced the operation without ill effects. There is the argument that witnessing is not the same thing as undergoing, but that many dictionaries define 'erleben' as 'live through,

20

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For the 'also' see the Oxford Latin Dictionary, Fasc. III; cf. Lewis and Short.

undergo, witness' and 'erfahren' as 'discover, witness, undergo'. The shorter English dictionaries are probably going to go on saying that there is just the one sense of 'to experience', namely 'to undergo, witness'. But from some points of view it seerns useful to stress that there is an important difference between undergoing and witnessing, even when we allow that someone can witness what he undergoes. And of course these are only very rough synonyms: there is no reason to think that any other expression means exactly the same as 'He a-experienced Xing', or that any other expression means exactly the same as 'He b-experienced Y'. It is not hard to see how the b sense might have come into being. The sense of 'being human and being put to a test' would emerge with or soon after the obsolete English sense, 'to put to a test', since the first English users of the verb had their eye on Latin and experiri meant to try, either by testing or attempting, also to resort to or to undergo.' To be human and be put to a test is often the same as to ca-experience something, X-ing. Attention might focus on, and the verb might come to stand for, the simultaneous awareness of X-ing which ca-experiencing X-ing often involves, b-I-experiencing X-ing. The b sense might then be broadened as to its objects. Another way of explaining why we do not find it strange that the same verb is used in the two senses, but this makes it seem more like purming on our part, is to say that both verbs can be paraphrased-'to be the subject of'. In the a sense this means inter alia the grammatical subject, and the grammatical object must be an event, while in the b sense 'subject' means something like witnesser and the object can be anything witnessable. True, the first of those working models has imperfect application to those languages in which the word for an experience is not derived from experiri. But if a poet has to attend to his own language in order to exploit its peculiar strengths and avoid its peculiar pitfalls, then the same is true to some extent of a philosopher. Most obviously in the case of a critical philosopher, an anti-sophist, who wants to find out how much of its plausibility some conception owes to the tricks oflanguage. These, at least as far as my knowledge reaches, are always the tricks of some particular language; they may or may not be easy to

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parallel in others. One would have failed to avoid such a pitfall if one were in effect to reason: 'I am at present the subject of a state of consciousness. Such a state is a categorial thingexperienced, something that could not happen at all without being experienced. Therefore, I am in a state whose esse is to be b-2-experienced or otherwise ca-2-experienced, one whose esse is to be the object of consciousness. And the occurrence and nature of this state are things I have established by the most rigorous empirical method.'

4. Things that could not happen without being experiences

In what sense do we require the experiencer to be 'the conscious subject' of the event, when the event is the sort of thing that is mentioned in this section's title? The answer which is accepted here is that we do not in this type of case require consciousness of the event itself. It is enough if the event consists in or involves consciousness of something else. This widefy heldview is tested in three types of case, and the discussion narrows to a preliminary exploration if the sense or senses in which we may besaid to experience seeing.

Still under the general heading of events of which one is the subject, we come to a different kind from the kind with which Section 2 was concerned: we come properly to things you 2-experience, or Type.Two cases as I will call them. They are non-probingly defined or demarcated as things which it is natural to describe in the really rather ambiguous way that appears as this section's title, intending some sort of indistinct contrast with Type One cases, things you I-experience. Type Two cases include seeing, being tortured, and going for a walk. Our essentialist tendencies may sometimes lead us to use the expression 'an experience' to mean 'a Type Two thing'; thus producing a special sense of the expression, a special notion of an experience, to set beside the special notions already mentioned: e.g. 'a b-experiencing' and 'a b-experienced'. None of these special notions is the same thing as the very special notion of Part II. As I have implied, we sometimes call Type Two cases 'categorical' or 'categorial' experiences, in contrast to the 'experiences per accidens' with which Section 2 was concerned.

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from someone whom I cannot identify.

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I Although what I shall say here has been arrived at by discarding numerous ideas and formulations, I have the fear that the outcome is almost a quotation

4 (i). Let us begin cheerfully with the kind exemplified by being tortured.' Being tortured by having your finger-nails pulled out is not just the same thing as having your finger-nails pulled out, since if you have lost consciousness you are hardly being tortured, not being tormented, certainly not being 'put to the question', though you are still being physically abused. Being tortured is, roughly speaking, ca-I-experiencing and b-lexperiencing having your finger-nails pulled out-or some such physical abuse which would normally cause great pain. More accurately speaking, to be paradigmatically tortured is to be a central case of ca-I-experiencing physical abuse: it is to ca-lexperience and b-I-experience such abuse by undergoing itwi~h, simultaneously, the most appropriate kind of awareness of It; the kind that it would normally cause and that it is intended to cause. However, this leads to a linguistic puzzle. We say quite naturally of someone that he had the experience, (of) being tortured, or that he experienced torture. And being tortured is the same thing as (ca-l-, b-l-) experiencing physical abuse. So why do we not quite naturally say that he had the experience, (of) experiencing physical abuse, or that he experienced experiencing physical abuse? One answer would be that, in 'He experienced torture', the verb has an unweakened 'ca-l, b-l' sense but the noun has a weakened sense-some form of torture, some form that being tortured can take such as having your finger-nails pulled out; i.e. some kind ofphysical abuse, i.e. physical abuse. So since the noun does not occur in the unweakened sense there, you cannot substitute for it the paraphrase '(ca-l-, b-l-) experiencing physical abuse'. You cannot in that way obtain the thing we do not say; but the idea of its being obtainable by substitution is what made it seem puzzling that we do not say it. True, you could substitute 'ua-experiencing physical abuse' for the noun

being experiences. Or if you prefer, we are inclined to say'Experiences; that is what they are, whether they occur or not.' This in-between sort of a-2-experiences itself splits into at least two different kinds.

Just using these terms does not throw much light: my id~a in this section is to test, and in the event to confirm, a certain widely held view of what it is for something to be a Type Two experience: namely, that it is a trivial linguistic matter ~nd. has nothing to do with any awareness of awareness. 0,:, this Vl~w, the only sense in which 'you are invariably the COnsCIOUS subject in these cases' is that these are cases of consciousness. It is not that in these cases, you invariably have some kind of awareness of the event of which you are the grammatical subject. So ifyou express the consciousness-stipulation in a vague way, by saying that there must be the right sort of consciousness in the case, or on the part of the subject, for the case to count as an experience; then although this requirement is always satisfied in TYpe. Two cases, and only sometimes satisfied in Type One cases, It 18 ll?t always satisfied in Type Two cases in the one and only way in which it is sometimes satisfied in Type One cases. The only way in which it is always satisfied in Type Two cases is, not by the event's being attended by the right sort of awa~enes~ of it ~or it to be called an 'experience', but by the event s being or involving the right sort of awareness of something for it, the event to be called an 'experience'. In the terminology I have introduced, the view can be expressed succinctly: 2-experiences are not invariably ca-experienced and a fortiori not invariably b-experienced. (Not invariably ca-experienced, for 'to caexperience' was explained, not as the auxiliary ~th the :-ague proviso that there must be the right sort of consc~~usness. m the case or on the part of the subject, but as the auxiliary WIth the distinct, pointed proviso that there must be the right sort of consciousness of the X-ing, the event of which one is the grammatical subject.) The examples of Type Two experiences which spring most readily to mind are states of consciousness, such as pain or the varieties of sense-experience. Things, in fact, that are or can be involved in b-experiencing things-so that they are inevitably experiences in the sense of being instances of b-experiencing, even if they are not inevitably experiences in any ot~er ser:se. However, I will first consider an in-between class. ThIS consists of things that are not exactly states of consciousness, anyway not naturallv so classified, but about which we are none the less strongly inciined to say that they could not happen without

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abuse. If it is, then we can say that (a-2-) experiencing torture is ca-2-experiencing torture; i.e. ca-2-experiencing ca-I-experiencing and b-I-experiencing physical abuse. Otherwise, it will be sensible to opt for the view that by (a-2-) experiencing torture we just mean, ua-2-experiencing it. For it would not be sensible to conclude both that there is in fact no such invariable secondorder awareness, and that we are all for ever mistakenly saying that there is such awareness-when we utter the gnomic saying, 'Being tortured is the same thing as experiencing torture'. Instead, we ought in that case to take it that 'experiencing' has a weakened, ua sense in the gnomic saying, which therefore reduces experiencing torture to being tortured rather than asserting some sort oflaw by which the latter involves the former. Another thing that would not be sensible is, simply to assume for no reason at all that 'experiencing' does not have a weakened sense here, and to conclude from this that, since we cannot very well be mistaken in that gnomic saying of ours, there must be the invariable second-order awareness. That would be glossogenic pseudo-psychology of the worst sort; not because of any general principle that one cannot infer from language to reality, but because one cannot infer from a baseless assumption. We would be assuming that language is, at a certain point, more regular than in general we know it to be. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this. Is it or is it not true as a matter of psychological fact that when someone is tortured by having his finger-nails pulled out, he invariably has a second-order awareness, an awareness of his awareness of having his finger-nails pulled out, or in other words an awareness of his pain? To the best of my knowledge and belief the only reason for the affirmative is the following bad reason; that we cannot make ordinary, non-theoretical sense ofthe remark'In his agony he had the awareness of his finger-nails being pulled out, awareness that makes it linguistically correct to call his having his finger-nails pulled out one of his "experiences"; however, he was in no wqy aware of hauing that awareness.' We can, in a way, make non-ordinary, theoretical or anti-theoretical sense of this remark; we can take it to mean that the distinct and resolute posit, of such a second-order awareness as a psychological fact, is unwarranted. We cannot, however, make ordinary, non-theoretical and non-philosophical sense, datum82«037

'torture' in the weakened sense of 'physical abuse'. This would give you 'He (ca-l-, b-l-) experienced ua-experiencing physical abuse', which would be like 'He (ca-l-, b-l-) experienced undergoing physical abuse'. But it is not surprising that, although you can legitimately say this, we do not say it; the use of iundergo', or 'experience' in its place and in the same sense, is pointless here. Another answer, to much the same effect, would be that 'torture' and 'being tortured' have an unweakened sense in 'He experienced torture' and 'He had the experience of being tortured', but that the verb 'to experience' has the weakened, 'ua' sense here. So by substitution you can get 'He ua-experienced ca-I-experiencing physical abuse' and 'He ua-experienced b-I-experiencing physical abuse'. But it is not surprising that we say neither of these things, i.e. that we do not say 'He experienced experiencing physical abuse' in either ofthese senses. For neither of those things is worth saying. The first would be like saying 'He underwent undergoing physical abuse not without the relevant sort of awareness', and the second would be like saying 'He underwent or "did" having the relevant sort of simultaneous awareness of physical abuse that he was undergoing'. On neither of these views is there any regular implication, when we speak of someone's experiencing torture or having the experience of being tortured, that he has an awareness if his awareness of being physically abused. The real alternative is to say that this implication is indeed present, i.e. that whenever we speak of someone as experiencing torture or having the experience of being tortured, we mean that he ca-2-experienced ca-l- and b-I-experiencing physical abuse. Ifwe do not naturally say 'He experienced experiencing physical abuse', this must simply be because you cannot in fact ca-l- and b-I-experience physical abuse without also ca-2-experiencing your ca-l- and b-I-experiencing physical abuse. How are we to choose between these alternatives? Surely the only way is by an independent attempt to ascertain the relevant non-linguistic facts. We must ask ourselves whether, in point of fact, the ca-I-experiencing and b-I-experiencing of physical abuse is always accompanied by a second-order awareness, an awareness of ca-I-experiencing and b-I-experiencing physical

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

.,

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happened; while the statement, that someone had a certain capacity, as distinct from the statement that he acquired or lost it, is not. Not being an event in the modern sense of a change nor, for that matter, necessarily an event in the older sense of an outcome, a capacity is not a process if a process is a series of changes, or a change in which different phases can be discerned; b-experiencing is often and hence characteristically, though not always, a process in this sense. There is thus no warrant for positing a b-Z-experiencing of one's b-l-experiencing having one's finger-nails pulled out, nor is there warrant for positing any other kind of invariable awareness of the b-l-experiencing. The conclusion to be drawn is that 'experiencing torture' just means undergoing torture, i.c, being tortured, i.e. experiencing physical abuse. We are presented with an explanation of why you cannot be tortured without experiencing it; of why, and in what sense, torture is 'categorically' an.experience. Someone who does not want to say that there is an invariable, and who consequently does not want to say that there is a necessary, b-experiencing ofone's b-experiencing physical abuse may still insist on saying that, if you b-l-experience extreme physical abuse, then you not only a-experience but also bexperience torture. (Note that if you b-experience torture, then since being tortured is a Type Z X-ing or being X-ed, you b-Zexperience torture.) In this case, however, what he is pleased to call b-experiencing torture, or cognitively experiencing torture, will for him be nothing over and above b-experiencing extreme physical abuse; it will consist solely in this. You will be said to b-experience torture simply in that, inasmuch as, in the sense that, you b-experience physical abuse. Awareness of that which, since you are in the given way aware of it, can be called torture, is to be called awareness of torture for short. This is an intelligible proposal and rule. In contrast, if someone wants to say that you b-experience your b-experiencing ofphysical abuse simply in that, or inasmuch as, or in the sense that, you bexperience physical abuse, we can hardly understand him. Your b-experiencing physical abuse is to be called your bexperiencing your b-experiencing physical abuse-for what? For long? He must either make a substantive claim that you b-experience your b-experiencing, or else not say that you do; on pain of merely being silly.

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

sense, of the remark. A certain kind of philosophy seeks to infer that we can make sense of, and indeed must accept as true, the remark that 'he was in some way aware of having that awareness'. This kind of philosophy is, once again, what linguistic or glossocentric philosophy exists to destroy: namely glossogenic philosophy in the bad sense, and pseudo-psychology. From the mere fact of our not having any use for the remark, 'He X-ed, but he did not 1" that he X-ed', in ordinary language, we cannot infer that the remark, 'He who X-es, 1"-s that he X-ed', is true. That inference wonld again involve a simplistic view of ordinary language, whose departures from logicomathematical simplicity and regularity are notorious. It is obvious, when you come to think of it, that-taking 'He 1"-ed that he X-ed' as a case of 'He 1"-ed'-we may in ordinary language have no use for either 'He X-ed but did not T or 'He X-ed and 1"-ed'. This will necessarily be the case if we have no use for either 'He 1"-ed' or 'He did not T. Or we may have an idiomatic use for one or both of these expressions, without their being expressions that 'mean what they say'. So the inference from 'He X-ed' together with the rejection of 'He X-ed but did not T to 'He X-ed and 1"-ed' does not go through. The thesis, that one who X-es 1"-s, has got to be supported in some other way than that if it is to be well supported. Certainly a tortured man who has not been brought up by wolves will, unless he suffers from congenital mental defect, know or be aware that he is in agony and in danger ofdisclosing information, in the sense that he will be able to apply these general terms or these concepts to himself. The capacity to apply general terms, however, so as to have the thought that 'this is agony', is not invariably attendant upon agony under any kind oflaw. One who lacks that capacity Can be tormented; even if you may wish to say that he can hardly be put to the question. The fact, that awareness of this sort is not invariably associated by any kind of law with b-l-experiencing physical abuse, should not be allowed completely to overshadow the fact that, if the opposite were true, then still the capacity could not be called one's 'experiencing' the b-l-experiencing. Experiencing, whether a or b, is an event of which one is the subject; the statement that someone experienced something is a grammatically appropriate answer to the question as to what

A VERY GENERAL NOTION I

4 (ii). Other cases, which will now be instanced, in which we are tempted to say that the thing 'could not happen without being experienced although it is not exactly a state of consciousness', are different. They do not consist, as things like being tortured do, in having some Type One, per accidens experience together with the right kind of might-be-absent awareness of it for it to be called one of your 'experiences'. It is not in their case, as it is in those cases, a matter, of our simply generating Type Two things by introducing a set of terms that are to apply to specified Type One things, but only when you (ca) experience them. This new lot of Type Two cases can be distinguished into two groups. There are those like 'eyeing your food with relish', which I assume are Type Two because they involve states of consciousness like seeing and anticipation that are not, as far as common knowledge tells, the awareness of any per accidens experience. Then there are cases that are Type Two because they are actions, things to which the question 'What did he do that for?' applies. The first group are presumably to be dealt with by talking about the states of consciousness they involve. To speak briefly of actions, some cases are ambiguous as between these and Type One cases. Chairing a meeting falls back into Type One if it just means literally being alive in the chair, as you may be asleep. On the other hand, if it is meant to entail doing something about the meeting, however ineffectually, then the appropriate sub-heading is that of action under Type Two. Enjoying, from the chair, the disorder of a meeting would be a Type Two non-action case rather like eyeing your food with relish, though chairing catastrophically with enjoyment would be a case of action. Which again makes the point that we are not really distinguishing between things, since there is no difference between chairing catastrophically with enjoyment and enjoying, from the chair, the disorder of a meeting. There is a difference between the verbs or terms. I do not propose here to review, still less to try to rival, the contributions which have been made in recent years to the philosophy of action. The question, when you come at it from the present angle, is this. Is an action an a-2-experience in a full, unweakened ca sense, or only in the ua sense of being done? (The u, with its associations with 'undergo', is admittedly

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distracting here; however, as I said, it should be thought of as standing for 'unencumbered by any stipulation that one must have awareness if what is done'.) In other words, when the a-2experience of Y-ing is an action, is Y-ing always accompanied by some sort of awareness of Y-ing? Partially paralleling what was said in the torture type of case, we need some better reason than a glossogenic one for giving the answer yes. We cannot simply assume that, if we have no use in ordinary language for the remark, 'He clambered up the halyards in a gale to relight the masthead light without in any way being aware of doing so', then this in itself proves that he must have been to some extent aware of doing so. And if we think that an agent is always to some extent a spectator of himself and his environment, otherwise he would not be an agent; if we think that he always b-l-experiences his own motion and rest, and/or db-experiences his environment; then we must distinguish between two forms of the idea that he b-2-experiences his action, rather as we did in the torture case of non-action. The idea may simply mean that he shall be said to b-2-experience his action inasmuch as, in that, he b-experiences those other things-that his doing this, given the occurrence of the action, is to be logically sufficient for what one is pleased to call b-2-experiencing the action. Or the idea might mean what is more dubious, that over and above those b-l-experiencings he b-2-experiences the action, either by b-2-experiencing those b-l-experiencings or in some other way.

4 (iii). Coming now to states of consciousness, or to speak less confusingly, coming to verbs, functions, or general terrns for things that can be involved in b-l-experiencing and dbexperiencing things; and in particular coming to seeing, since seeing is what we shall be concerned with in the next Part: is there good reason to hold-that seeing, visual perception in an unweakened objective or external sense, is a-experienced in an unweakened, ca sense? Does one who sees, invariably have some sort of awareness of his seeing-an awareness which is what justifies us in saying that his seeing is experienced? Does he have an extra-sensory perception ofhis seeing or else get a 'bad picture' of his seeing or have some other kind of awareness of it? Or is seeing invariably experienced only in the sense that it is 'done'?

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To anticipate: if we avoid bad reasons by applying again the ~egative pr~ciples: I see no reason to hold that seeing is mvanably expenenced m any other sense than that. Seeing is of course also an experience in the sense that it is an instance of b-experiencing. Usually, of db-experiencing. If it cannot occur without being an experience, this is merely to say that it cannot o~cur ~thout occurring and being an instance of b-experiencmg. Ius not hard to see how this truistic fact might give rise in error to the idea that seeing is an experience in the third sense of a b-experienced. . What I have just said contrasts with the view that seeing is m no sense an experience; a view to which Ryle appeared to ?ommit himself in Dilemmas. But I take Ryle to have been sayr~g that seeing is not an 'experience' in a redefined philosophical-psychological usage, for whose existence he, Ryle, is not responsible. In this special usage there is a contrast between an 'experience' and an achievement, whereas if we avoid special dictions there is no contrast between an experience and an achievement. Winning a game of chess against a much better player n;ay be one of my more memorable experiences, and so may seemg a flash of light if my doing so saved my life. In the ordinary and literary use of the common noun 'an ~xperience',.an event of which one is the subject, there is no mescapable Implica~on that an experience is a process, a series of changes; or an ,:pI.sode, something ofwhich one is a spectator; ~r a s:retch of, as distmct from a momentary happening in, one's lif~ history; or something that one was 'engaged in'; or somethi~g that has 'a beginning, a middle, and an end'; or a passive busmess; or anything at all like that. But in order to get to closer grips with the matter ofawareness of seeing, let me make what I believe to be a familiar, though not self-explanatory, distinction between two meanings of 'see X'; (1) the meaning exemplified by 'see a cobra, in the general sense of seeing something which is, in point offact, a cobra' and (2). a narrower meaning exemplified by 'not only see what is in p.omt of fact a cobra, but also see a cobra as distinct from only (Just, merely) seeing what is in point offact a cobra'. There is a natural paral~el with, for instance, 'try to pick up a cobra, I mea? try to pick up something which is in fact a cobra' and 'try to pick up a cobra; I mean try to do that, as distinct from only

4

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

31

or just trying to pick up what is in fact a cobra'. In this case the difference lies in whether one knows that it is a cobra; the case of seeing is similar to this extent, that seeing what is in point of fact a cobra, while knowing it to be a cobra, is sufficient even if nat necessary for 'seeing a cobra' in the narrower sense. I must make it clear, by the way, that I shall be concerned with 'seeing what is in fact X' only to the extent that such a phrase clarifies some established non-theoretical usage of 'see X' (same X as in the first expression). Not when 'see what is in fact X' is used where no such usage of 'see X' (same X as in the first expression) exists. For instance, I shall not be concerned with the sense in which a man who sees a table sees what is in fact a set of nltramicroscopic, i.e. invisible, particles, since this is not, neither is anything else, a case in which we wonld ordinarily speak of someone as seeing a set of invisible particles. The distinction I am making between 'see X, see what is X' and 'see X, as distinct from only seeing what is X', is a distinction between and within ordinary uses of 'see X' (same Xl-it does not go beyond these. I was saying that it is clear that seeing a cobra, in the sense ofseeing what is in fact a cobra, does notlogically entail seeming to see a cobra in any sense. But what about seeing a cobra in the second and narrower of those two senses, call it 'properly' seeing one? Does this entail seeming to see a cobra? If we were to say so, we should be using the notion of 'seeming to see', or ostensible visual perception, more broadly even than the broad and vague notion of the relevant visual appearance's being present or being presented. For someone who sees what is a cobra, looking to him then and there exactly like a root, but who happens to know for certain that it is a cobra, may if you like be said to see a cobra, as distinct from just or merely seeing what is in fact one. Now we are not here interested in any sense of 'seem to see' or 'ostensibly visually perceive' which is broader than the vague notion of a visual appearance of the relevant sort's being presented. We therefore shall not say that 'properly' seeing an X entails seeming to do so. What ifwe simply leave out ofconsideration all those cases (of seeing X in the 'proper' sense) in which what is seen does not look like X to the one who sees it, as well as all cases in which. while it does look like X to him, it also looks to him to a non:

I

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

33

4

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

32

necessarily the same thing. This could be interpreted as the view that if you see what is X, then for some r, you seem to see r. If this is true, then the question arises whether your seeming to see r, where r is not X, can be regarded as your having a more or less 'bad picture' of your seeing X; a more or less indistinct awareness of your doing so. The question arises, but I shall not try to answer it now; the next footnote applies here. The principles already mentioned, those anti-glossogenic ones, seem sufficient to show that it is quite unwarranted to posit any other sort of invariable awareness of one's seeing what is in fact X. The same principles will show that there is no warrant for positing an invariable awareness of plainly seeing X, or rather they will unless the case proves to be, that one's consequential 'seeming to see X' (same X) can be said to constitute such an awareness; another question I leave open at present. I The case of visual apperception, since this does not entail 'seeming to see' what is apperceived, is like that of 'seeing what is'. Finally, there is- no justification for positing an invariable awareness of 'seeming to see', itself; a fortiori no justification for the idea that the act of 'seeming to see' is itself b-experienced, consequently no justification for the idea that it is an act whose esse is to be b-experienced, a possible philosophical meaning of 'an experience'. In contrast we can say safely enough that the esse of any a-experience is to be a-experienced, provided we do not equivocate with the c and the u: the esse of a ca-experience is to be ca-experienced, that of a ua-experience to be ua-experienced. "What goes for seeing and seeming to see, which are forms that b-experiencing can take, seems likely to go for b-experiencing in general. Certainly we have so far found no warrant for the idea that b-experiencing is ca-experienced or b-experienced. So; what sort of 'of' is the 'of'in 'the experience of seeing'? It depends what sort of 'seeing' the 'seeing' is. Where it is either 'seeing what is in fact' or 'visually apperceiving', the 'of' can only be the mere comma, and the mere comma that follows ua at that, unless one's seeming to see something or other can play the role of a b-experiencing of those things. Similarly where 'seeing' is 'plainly seeing'; the 'of' will be the comma that

I The answer 'Will surely be 'No' unless there are what I shall call E-reports (0£ Ifb).

negligible extent like something different?' Do the remaining cases, those in which, as we say, the unambiguous testimony of his visual sense is of X, yield a sense of 'see X' which entails seeming to see X (same Xl? It is plausible to say yes, plainiJ seeing X, in this sense, entails seeming to see X (same Xl. I defer (until 7 (ii-iii)) the question as to what truth exactly there is in this reply. I think there is truth in it. It is worth stressing a couple of things about what has just been marked out as 'plainly seeing': first, that plainly seeing X is a special case of seeing what is in fact X; second, that plainly seeing X does not entail taking what you see to be X. This last point is true because I may see what is in fact a cobra, not looking to any extent worth mentioning like anything but a cobra, in my sitting-room and yet, on the assumption that English sitting-rooms do not have cobras in them, take it to be a toy or a spoof Here I plainly see, but to revive an old word I do not 'apperceive', a cobra because I do not realize what it is, do not correctly identify what I see as a cobra. "When a man both apperceives X and plainly sees X, unlike the man who apperceives a cobra looking exactly like a root, then it might be said that he 'strongly' visually apperceives X. We can now ask the question about whether there is an invariable awareness of one's seeing what one sees, in each of those cases: (1) seeing what is in fact X; (2) 'properly' seeing X in the sense of seeing X as distinct from just, only, seeing what is in fact X; (3) plainly seeing X, which is to say, 'properly' and where the unambiguous testimony of the visual sense is of X; (4) visually apperceiving X; (5) strongly visually apperceiving X; (6) seeming to see X. But it will do if we consider the first, third, fourth, and sixth of those cases. In the case of seeing what is in fact X, there is certainly no invariable knowledge that one is doing so; this is part of the main point about seeing what is in fact X. And this does not entail seeming to see X, in any sense, so there is no question of this latter act's constituting an invariable awareness of seeing what is in fact X. However, it has been argued (Ayer, chap. 3) that seeing something entails seeming to see something, though not 1 Here the relevant use of 'look' is one in which you (just) say how some optical object looks to you, without intending any guess or estimate as to the object's nature or properties.

34

A VERY GENERAL NOTION

I

follows ua, unless it proves that your seeming to see what you plainly see can count as b-experiencing your plainly seeing it. And where 'seeing' is 'seeming to see', whatever that is exactly, the 'of'in 'the experience ofseeing' can only be the comma that follows ua. 5. A contrast Apart from any interest which such a philosophico-lexical study may have in itself, the main point of Part I has been to make a contrast between the ordinary biographical notion of an experience and the special philosophical notion of one, to which we shall come. The contrast emerges in its most marked form if we compare the notion of an experience in certain philosophical discussions with that of an a-experience. When someone avers that if you dream that you are being cut into small pieces then you 'have the experience of' being cut into small pieces, he does not mean that you have the a-I-experience. Nor, when someone says that if you dream you are being tortured then you have the experience of being tortured, does he mean that you have the a-2-experience. He means that you sb-I-experience being cut into small pieces, or some other form of physical abuse. This means that we are or may be getting into philosophy. For many questions arise as to how that special kind of event is being conceived, and the answers when elicited will often reveal some decidedly philosophical conception. The same thing is true when someone says that in a hallucination you sometimes have the experience of seeing flashes of lightningcertainly not meaning that you have the a-2-experience, (of) seeing such flashes, but possibly meaning that you sdb-experience them by seemingly seeing them. The eliciting and appraisal of the philosophical ideas that may lie behind such a statement is a task often left to the critical philosopher, and some part of it will be attempted in what follows.

PART II

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

IIa

PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

6. Perception-illusion disjunctions: general

By way of what is seen as an essential, and so to speak contiguous, preliminary to the investigation in lIb of the relevant, very special, philosophical notion qf an experience, IIa concerns itself with a type rif proposition to which lIe returns, called perception-illusion disjunctions. These are first roughly defined in Section 6. In Section 7 certain propositions ofthis kind are assumed to be true in a hypothetical case, and some qf their properties are setforth. Section 8, in contrast, considers a number ofdescriptions that hardly apply to those, or any other, perception-illusion disjunctions.

E

V E N if few things are certain, it is certain that there are what I will call perception-illusion disjunctions: sentences or statements like 'Macbeth perceives a dagger or is having that illusion', which you can compose by adding words like '... or x is having that illusion' to a sentence which says that a particular person, x, perceives a thing of some particular kind. Words like c••• or x is having some different illusion' are to be counted as unlike '. . . or x is having that illusion': a perception-illusion disjunction mentions the illusion of the very perception it mentions. This does not mean that no perceptionillusion disjunction is or would be troe when, for instance, it is troe that 'Macbeth perceives a dagger or is having the illusion of perceiving Banquo'. But this sentence or statement is not what I am calling a perception-illusion disjunction. It is perhaps surprising that perception-illusion disjunctions are not more often deliberately placed in the centre of the picture, in the philosophy of perception. Philosophers do quite often introduce the notion of an experience-report as that of a statement, or even the statement, which is troe both when you perceive a given thing and when you have the illusion of doing

38

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

II.

so. This makes it sound as if they had in mind a perceptionillusion disjunction. In a high proportion of cases, however, one has only to ask them whether they do, to find that they do not. They did not express their whole thought. They had in mind a suppositious kind of statement which has the property they mentioned, but which also has other properties. I believe that they often have in mind something that 'answers the question as to what is happening to the subject', in a sense which I will pick out. (Sense A in Section 8 (i).) But this in itself, apart from not being invariably required, would never be enough. In lIb (Section 10) I am going to set forth some requirements which the sort of statement they have in mind might have to satisfy in a particular hypothetical case, defined as one in which certain perception-illusion disjunctions are true: I will describe the hypothetical case in Section 7. In what I say in lIa and lIb about the case, and about perception-illusion disjunctions, I shall be sketching with fairly broad strokes. Much detail and corroboration, as well as some further questions, will be left until lIc. Among the matters deferred is the question as to what exactly is meant by perception and illusion here: it is hardly too much to say that a good deal of lIa and. lIb would be close to mere foolishness, given traditional assumptions about the need to 'analyse' these notions. When I return to them in lIc the relevant concepts of perception and of illusion will not be obtained by analysis in any traditional sense, though I shall do my best to identify them. 7. Some descriptions that apply to certain perception-illusion disjunctions I will use 'D*' as a name for the following statement, which we will assume someone to make truly-perhaps by pressing a button which he has been told to press if and when the statement is true. D*. 'I see a flash oflight of a certain sort or I am having the perfect illusion of seeing one of that sort.' Solely in virtue of its containing the words'•. , of a certain sort . . . of that sort' in the way it does, D* is what I shall call .a 'pointed' perception-illusion disjunction; 'pointedness' is in-

7

PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

39

dicated by the asterisk. Contrast the 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunction, D. 'I see a flash oflight or I am having the perfect illusion of doing so.' A more specific, yet 'blunt', perception-illusion is Db. 'I see a flash of bluish-white light or I am having the perfect illusion of seeing one.' This, as well as D*, is to be true ex hypothesi of the person who states D*, but we do not assume him to state Db. Similarly we assume the truth of Db*. 'I see a flash of bluish-white light of a certain' sort or I am having the perfect illusion of seeing one of that sort.'

The addition of the sign, " will indicate the omission of the word, 'perfect'. So D*' and Db' and Db*' are also true ex hypothesi of the same person. I In blunt perception-illusion disjunctions, the 'or' has just the sense of the logical constant 'v'; to suppose such a disjunction to be true is to suppose no more and no less than that its limbs or disjuncts are not both false. The 'or' in a pointed perceptionillusion disjunction gets as close to that as it can. It can be clarified by the speaker's saying things like 'Just not neither is all I mean, get rid of any further suggestions or associations.' For instance any suggestion, which may arise from the fact of the speaker's or button-presser's having stated D*, that he does not know whether his case is one ofperception or one ofillusion, may be a suggestio falsi; or may not be. There is to be no difference at all between D* and 'I am having the perfect illusion of seeing a flash of light of a certain sort or I perceive a flash of light of that sort'.

So, if you like, D* is really D*. 'Of at least one sort of flash of light it is true either that I see, or that I am having the perfect illusion of seeing, a flash of light of that sort.'

Perhaps this is true or false under just the same conditions as D; perhaps not. In any case, it goes against the grain to say

t You could call these 'imperfect' perception-illusion disjunctions, and call D*, Db, Db*, and D 'perfect' ones.

40

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

IIa

that it means just the same as D. Obviously D* does not mean the same as Db. The fact that Db is true may be what has given our speaker his incentive to state D*, but this does not mean that in stating this he states something which means the same as Db. Rather similarly, if he were to state Db, let us say again, by pressing a button which he is to press if and when the statement is true, and if Db* was what he would really have liked to convey, then he would not have said or stated something that meant the same as Db*. What you 'say' or 'state', at least as I am here and now using these verbs, is a matter of the meaning of the conventional sign you use, not of what you have in mind. It is a little, though in the first person not very, like the fact that if I say 'At least one Australian is of Chinese origin', having in mind a certain colleague who, however, in point of fact is of Korean origin, then what I say or state is true all the same if at least one Australian is indeed of Chinese origin. The illusion, and it might be the perfect illusion, of (seeing) a flash of light is-1 say-what you get for instance when an electric current is passed through your head in a certain way by experimental psychologists. They call it giving you a 'phosphene', etymologically a light-appearance. No light is involved. I will now note some things that are true of some or all of those perception-illusion disjunctions, as I shall continue to call them in virtue of their ordinary-language form, though there is a distinct possibility, to be discussed in lIc, Section 14, that the 'pointed' ones are not strictly disjunctions from a logical point of view. So in the rest of this section I shall, explicitly or in effect, be listing some descriptions that fit some or all of those perception-illusion disjunctions. The point is that the descriptions are all ones which have been thought to apply to a suppositious class of statements,' experience-reports in a narrow sense. The conclusion, then, is that some of the descriptions which have been thought to apply to this suppositious class of statements do in fact apply to some perception-illusion disjunctions. In the next section, 8, we shall see by way of contrast that" others of the descriptions which have been thought to apply to the suppositious class of 'experience-reports' do not apply to any perception-illusion disjunctions. This will raise the question whether there is anything to which these Section 8 descriptions do apply. That there is nothing to which they apply

7

PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

4'

in our hypothetical case is roughly the conclusion reached at the end of lIb.

are at least so tempted when, as we say, the unambiguous

7 (i). D* and Db, in this respect unlike D*' and Db', logically entail that the subject is at least tempted to believe that he visually perceives a flash oflight. For if D* or Db is true, and if it is not a case of perfect illusion, which entails the temptation for reasons that will be very briefly discussed in lIc, then it is a case of seeing a flash of light. But I rule that 'seeing', 'visually perceiving', and 'perceiving', in all these statements, have the sense we called 'plainly seeing'. And if you plainly see X then you are at least tempted to believe that you do. For you

testimony of your senses is to the effect that there is X in your environment. Your plainly seeing X is one of the things this saying can relate to; your being perfectly illuded that you plainly see X is another.

8244037

D

7 (ii). D* and D*' are propositions that can be worded, without doing much violence to language, in one of such ways as 'In a neutral sense, it is/seems/appears to me a little/rather/very much/exactly as if I saw a flash of light'. Or simply as 'I see a flash of light', used in the relatively incorrigible sense of neutral appearance; any perception-sentence can be used exceptionally in this weakened sense by making it, for the moment, equivalent to a pointed perception-illusion disjunction. D* can obviously be worded in those ways without doing any violence to language at all: e.g. as 'In a neutral sense, it appears to me exactly as if I saw a flash of light of a certain sort'. Here 'neutral' just means that no per:ception-proposition or illusion-proposition follows deductively. In this sense D* is of course neutral, though I am going to say shortly that the word neutral is misleading in another way. As for 'relatively incorrigible', the comparison is of course with perception-claims, illusion-reports, and anything else that stands to be corrected in ways in which the disjunction does not stand to be corrected. What about 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunctions? Can they, too, be called neutral seem- or appear-statements and expressed in terms of, for instance, 'seeming to see'? There is some room for doubt on the point, when we distinguish a blunt perception-illusion disjunction, one that has said all it means,

IIa A VERY SPECIAL NOTION 42 from an incomplete verbal expression of a 'pointed' one. I retnrn to tbe matter in Section 14. At any rate you could hardly apply the tag 'neutral seem- or appear-statement' to a perception-illusion disjunction in which 'visually perceive' or 'see' did not have tbe sense 'plainly see'. If, for instance, tbe disjunction disjoined seeing what is in point offact a cobra witb having the illusion of doing so, tben this would be made true by visually apperceiving a cobra which did not look in tbe least like a cobra but looked exactly like a root; it could tberefore hardly be worded in terms of 'seeming to see a cobra'.

7 (iii). Each oftbose perception-illusion disjunctions is of course a proposition which follows from at least one perception-claim and from at least one illusion-report. Taking tbe blunt ones first, each follows from its own disjunct of perception and from its own disjunct of illusion. It is true that tbe logical principle involved, that (A v B) follows from A and from B, has been held to flout a certain intuitive notion oflogical consequence; which must tberefore begin, rather unhappily, to distinguish itself from logical deducibility. However, the usual motive to tbis distinction is tbat A and B may be totally irrelevant to one another or may have no subject-matter in common. That is not tbe case here; nobody is going to say that 'I am having the illusion of seeing a flash oflight', aliter 'I am being illuded tbat I see a flash of light', has no subject-matter in common with 'I see a flash 01 light'. In tbe case of 'pointed' perception-illusion disjunctions we are in a difficulty about picking out something as the disjunct of perception and something else as the disjunct of illusion; tbis lends plausibility to the suggestion tbat 'pointed perception-illusion disjunctions' are not strictly speaking disjunctions at all. Nevertheless, every pointed perception-illusion disjunction follows from some perception-proposition and from some illusion-proposition; for instance, D* follows from 'I perceive a flash of light of a certain sort' and from 'I am having the illusion of perceiving a flash of light of a certain sort'. Putting what Was said about pointed perception-illusion disjunctions in the previous subsection together witb what has just been said about them, we find to tbe vindication of much in the literature that tbe very paradigm of a 'neutral appearance-

7

PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

43

statement' always follows from some perception-proposition and from some illusion-report.

7 (iv). U* fits tbe description of being a neutral appearancestatement which lies behind, witbout following from, D*. It lies behind it in tbe sense of being sometbing from which D* follows and which tbe subject could have asserted witb equal trutb had he chosen to be more specific. Iftbe subject advances to tbe bare claim that he perceives a flash of light, tben in a ratber different, but still intelligible, sense Db* lies behind, witbout following from, his perception-claim. It lies behind it in tbe sense of being something which he could have asserted witb trutb and witb relative incorrigibility.

7 (v). The great ambiguous notion of 'possibility' is such, tbat D* clarifies one meaning which tbe tbought 'Possibly I see a flash of light of a certain kind and possibly I am having tbe perfect illusion of doing so' can have. It is a sure sign tbat 'possibly A and possibly B' has this meaning, if tbe word 'and' can be replaced by the word 'or' without change of sense. This use of 'possibly ...' amounts to saying tbat tbere are two possibilities, there are alternatives. An interesting feature of tbis use of 'Possibly A or possibly B', or 'Possibly A and possibly B', as a logically redundant form of 'A vel B', is that under certain conditions it gets verbally contracted to 'Possibly A' or to 'Possibly B'. This happens when, in the context, it pretty well goes witbout saying what the alternative is: for instance, when tbe alternatives are A and not-A, but also when, as in our case, tbey are A and 'false'-A in tbe otber sense, A and illusion-A. There is tben, by tbe way, a danger tbat 'Possibly illusion-A', derived in this manner as a mere contraction of a redundant form of 'A vel illusion-A', will be mistaken by tbe speaker or thinker himself for some other use of 'Possibly illusion-A'; say, one in which this militates against a claim on his part to know that A. This could take him from 'I know that A' to 'I do not know that A' in five easy steps: I know that A, so A, so A vel illusion-A, so possibly A and possibly illusion-A, so possibly illusion-A, so I do not know that A. Of course 'A vel illusion-A' is not characteristically or usually derived in tbat way. But if one's whole initial thought is 'A vel

44

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

IIa

illusion-A, I don't know which', then one cannot use this to prove that one does not know which. This form of the confusion between just saying that you do not know which and showing tJ;at you. do. n~t know :which is, I feel, a factor in the queer kind ofhistnomc credulity that we keep miscalling 'scepticism', as well as other forms of the same confusion. Not in all minds at all times a major factor, but surely more of a factor than the b:,~iness of it~ being what is unhappily called 'a logical possibIli~, mea;ung a non-contradictory supposition, that I am having the Illusion that I am reading a page at the moment. For it is not one whit less of a 'logical possibility', in that sense, tha: I am having the illusion ofsighting tropical fish as they and I glide among reefs of coral. Yet one is hardly expected to count this as a possibility when entertaining so-called 'scepticism' as to whether one is reading a page. The fact that D* can be given curtailed expression as 'Possibly I see a flash oflight (of a certain sort)' vindicates an idea which might otherwise appear to be very dubious. I mean the idea that there is a use of 'Possibly p', and a synonymous use of 'Appar~nt1y p', in which you can build up to 'p' by adding somethmg that is not equivalent to 'p', For you can build up from 'Of a certain sort of flash of light it is true that I either perc.eive a fl~sh of,light of that sort or am having the perfect illusion of domg so, by the addition of '(and) I am not having the perfect illusion of doing so', which is not equivalent to 'I perceive a flash oflight of that sort', to this.

:?

(vi). A !~rther point, ,:",d one that is relevant to 'scepticism', IS that D IS a truth which makes it reasonable, in the absence of proof or counter-evidence, for the speaker or thinker to accept that he sees, visually perceives, a flash oflight. For there is a sense of 'appear' in which it is the abuse of terms a self. . ' answenng question, to ask why someone to whom it appears that p has pro tanto reason to believe that p. And what could be a better example of its appearing to you, in this sense, that you se~ a flash of li~ht, than your either plainly seeing one of a cert:"m sort or having the perfect illusion that you do so? This means that although statements like D* are neutral in the sense mentioned earlier, they are not absolutely neutral as between perception and illusion; there is a weighting of the

7

PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (1)

45

alternative of perception. So the 'I don't know which', in the sense of 'I have no belief as to which', that can attach itself here though it need not, is evanescent in the absence of counterevidence to the perception-claim. ~y s~ying this I do not mean to suggest that a perceptionclaun IS at all commonly based on a perception-illusion disjunction; to start a new 'theory of knowledge', according to which everything is based on perception-illusion disjunctions, is far from being my wish.

~ (vii). D*,D*', and to a lesser extentDb* r andDb*', fit a description whose short form might be, 'things that seem oddly prefixed by "I am inclined to believe that ..."", However, the oddness in question is of a special kind. It is a matter of seeming like an abuse oflanguage, or of making us wonder whether the speaker has perhaps misunderstood the prefix or else what it is prefixed to. An apparent incongruity between these two things, exemplifying, with reference to the prefix, the dictnm that 'You can't always say it'. Rather as in 'I am inclined to believe that/I exist' and 'I am inclined to believe that/I am conscious'. If someone had been instructed to say 'Fipp!' as an abbreviation for D* and to use the suffix, -0, as equivalent to the prefix, 'I am inclined to believe that ...', and to use 'Fapp!' as anabbreviation for 'I visually perceive a flash of light'; we should be rather surprised to hear him say 'Fippo!'. We should be quite likely to ask him, 'Don't you mean "Fappo"?' It is not the same kind of oddness as there is in 'Now as I survey the varied scene, I am inclined to believe that something is going on in my head, such that unless that thing or an adequate substitnte for it were going on there, I would not see anything'. Here our natnral retort begins with 'You are inclined ... ! In God's name, do you think the liver may be the seat of consciousness ?-etc.'. Nor is it the same kind of oddness that there would be if someone said that certainly all men were vertebrates and that certainly Socrates was a man and that he was inclined to believe that Socrates was a vertebrate. Here there is no incongruity, or not of the right sort, between the prefix and what it is prefixed to, though we might well wonder whether the speaker had misunderstood something else.

A VERYSPEOIAL NOTION

8. Some descriptions that do not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions

IIa

8 (i). Do perception-illusion disjunctions 'answer the question as to what is happening to the subject'? Do they fit this description? In one very unambitious sense of the description, they do. N othing 'prevents us from introducing some such general term as 'flash-experiencing', stipulatively defined as 'perceiving or being illuded that you perceive a flash of light', and nothing then stops us from saying that the statement, 'Bob flashexperienced', or 'Bob had the experience ofa flash', or whatever form of words we choose to define in that way, 'answers the question as to what happened to Bob'. It does so in the sense that it reports an event of which Bob was the subject. True, this may mean only (a) that it is about Bob and (b) that it does, in a purely syntactical sense, answer the question 'What happened?' as distinct from, say, only aoswering the more general question, 'What was so?' (i.e. puttingtogether 'What happened ?-He had the experience of a flash' is all right). So at any rate something that was deliberatelyintroduced as a paraphrase ofa perceptionillusion disjunction could, in a sense, 'answer the question as to what happened to the subject'. It would be over-scrupulous to say that an explicit perception-illusion disjunction could not do so. There is a pedantic sense in which, though over-scrupulous, this would nevertheless be true. What I have in mind here is merely the fact that you might say that no explicit 'either-or', even if both alternatives are aoswers to that question, answers that question. However, this would be rather trivial. Qnite apart from this, however, there is a sense in which neither an explicit perception-illusion disjunction, nor a sentence introduced as a paraphrase for such a disjunction, answers that question, though an explicit disjunction is not as such debarred from so doing. As a matter of fact, irritatingly enough, there are several such senses. Let me get two irrelevant ones out ofthe way first. They do not require truth in an answer. They are senses of 'giving a right or wrong answer to the question as to what happened to the subject' in which a perception-illusion disjunction no more does this than the statement that it is a fine day does. Each of these tiresome, irrelevaot senses is a context-dependent sense; in the first, answering the

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question means correctly or incorrectly answering the question \ which alternative it is that is the case, in the context of a given perception-illusion disjunction's having been asserted: only the disjuncts of that very disjunction score here, it is trivially true to say. The second tiresome sense means, answering the question 1\ in the sense just mentioned, but without logically implying anything about the subject's environment: only the relevaot disjunct ofillusion scores. This second sense, though profoundly unimportant, is not quite as much of a non-sense as it may appear: answering the question in this sense is something a statement cao do, though it would be rather Henry Ford-like-s'They can have any colour they like as long as it's black'-to ask someone to do it. Now for two context-dependent senses that matter. I will call them Sense A and Sense B. Sense A is the sense to which I want to point, in which neither an explicit perception-illusion disjunction, nor a sentence introduced as a paraphrase for such a disjunction, can 'answer the question as to what happened to the subject', though ao explicit disjunction, as such, is in no way prevented from doing so. Sense B, mentioned for the sake of contrast, is one in which both those things can, if you like, be said to 'answer the question, etc.' Sense A could be a little more clearly, though a lot more cumbrously, expressed as follows. To answer the question, in Sense A, is to be a more precise statement of-or, failing that, the beginning of a more exact statement of-what happened to the subject; mrywtry; at or after the first moment at which he began to be affected. ('Account' of, or statement 'as to', if you prefer.) Here 'more precise' means: more precise thao the given disjunction; more precise than either of its disjuncts; more precise thao anything true that entails one of the disjuncts. (Similarly with '..• more exact .. .'.) A more precise statement, the beginning of a more exact statement; I take it that these phrases, which are always correlative with the other pole of some particular implicit or explicit contrast, are not exactly equivalent. 'X' could be a more precise statement (than 'r) of what happened when Y, aod yet not be merely the beginning ofa more exact account of what happened when Y-if'X' was the beginning and end of such a more exact account, because it omitted nothing of any consequence. Equally, 'X' could be the

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8

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48

ized report might, as was implied above, not be entailed by x's Y-ing but only by something more specific that was true and that entailed x's Y-ing-his Y-ing Z-wise. But also something can be entailed by my having Y-ed, not entail this, and nevertheless be no mere vague or generalized report of my having Y-ed., I think the point is that for this to be so there has to be a positive reason. If something is overentailed by my having Y-ed, then it is a mere vague or generalized report of my Y-ing unless there is some positive reason why it is not. For instance, 'A bicycle-frame has just gone by' is overentailed by my having just gone by on a bicycle, but the statement about the frame nevertheless has some claim to be a more precise account-or at least the beginning of a more exact account-ofwhat happened when I went by, as a bicycle-frame is a part of a bicycle so that the frame's going by is a part of what happened. Similarly if something is overentailed by an a fortiori report of my Y-ing, without being entailed by my Y-ing. For instance, suppose in fact I went by on a black bicycle. Then 'A black bicycle-frame has just gone by' is saved from being a mere generalized report of my going by on a bicycle, by the fact that a black bicycle-frame is a part of a black bicycle. To take another type of example: the statement, that object o fell to earth from the stratosphere, is overentailed by the statement that object 0 re-entered-in the sense in which we speak of the re-entry of a space capsule, which does not mean a second entry. Yet though '0 re-entered' overentails '0 fell to earth from the stratosphere', still this last statement has a claim to be called a more precise (though less informative and so, you might say, less exact) statement of what happened at or after the moment at which 0 left the stratosphere. I take this to be because O's fall to earth was a part of its trajectory, the part in which it moved after leaving the stratosphere. Again, 'He said that he would not go' has some claim to be called a more precise statement of what happened when he replied that he would not go; this is because 'replying that you will not go' can be spelt out with some exactitude as 'saying that you will not go, in reply' . It is noteworthy that there is no differerue between the particular re-entry and the particular fall to earth, or between the

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

beginning ofa more exact account (than 'r) of what happened when Y, without being a more precise account of this-s-if the rest of the exact account is too important for its omission to be compatible with precision. The other pole of the implicit or explicit contrast, in Sense A (and in Sense B which we shall come to) is-I have impliedthe perception-illusion disjunction which is given ex hypothesi as true; whatever this disjunction may be, e.g. that the subject perceives a flash of light or has the illusion of so doing. The notions ofprecision and exactitude pull their weight, and imply truth. The emphasis on 'to the subject' means at least that the statement must entail nothing about the subject's environment. The 'anyway' means that the statement must not, alone or in conjunction with any kind oflaw, provide certainty as to which of the disjuncts is true. These last two requirements, those expressed by 'to the subject' and 'anyway', could of course be met by a perceptionillusion disjunction. But a perception-illusion disjunction, even one that was true, could not meet the requirement of being a more precise statement, or the beginning of a more exact statement, than any of those above-mentioned things, of what happened to the subject. Nor could a deliberate paraphrase for such a disjunction meet that requirement. On the other hand, a physiological statement about what was going on in the subject's head would not appear to be excluded by any of its features, necessarily. And this shows that 'answering the question in Sense A' has got nothing to do with being or not being an explicit disjunction, since as far as we know everything can be re-expressed as an explicit disjunction. Answering the question in this sense excludes being something that a perception-illusion disjunction is bound in the context to be: what we would, with wisdom after the event, knowing what it was that had in fact happened, call a 'mere vague or generalized' report of this. Which is what we would, literally after the event but without that much wisdom, call a 'mere vague or generalized report of whatever it was that happened', e.g. of x's visually perceiving a flash oflight. A mere generalized report of x's Y-ing is not, be it noted, exactly the same thing as a statement that is 'overentailed by'~i.e. entailed by, without entailing~x's Y-ing. For one thing the mere vague or general-

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particular reply and the particular act of saying; the less informative, more general description of the event nevertheless has a claim to be called the more precise one. Greater generality does not, even in the case of contingently true reports of what happened, and even in the case where there is no difference between the particular event to which the more and the less general statements relate, preclude greater precision; it does create a defeasible presumption against greater precision. In the case of perception-illusion disjunctions and their deliberate paraphrases one sees nothing to rebut the presumption that they are mere vague or generalized reports ofwhatever it was that happened. This is in spite of the fact that such a disjunction is by no means the most vague and general report that can be conceived, of the event reported by whichever of its disjuncts is true. It does not sink or dissolve the specificity of the happening completely in its broader characterization. It neither does this, nor yet 'answers the question' in Sense A. Such a disjunction is a mere vague or generalized report of whatever in point of fact happened; let me stress that this has nothing at all to do with the way in which the disjunction is reached or arrived at by the one to whom it relates. It does not mean that he infers it from one of its disjuncts, or anything like that. The relevant sense of 'a mere vague or generalized report of what in fact happened' is, as was implied, one in which this description of a statement is an expression of a commentator's knowledge that, after the event, when you were given what in point offact happened, you could call the statement that. And of course, by being given what in point of fact happened, I mean in the context what it is natural to mean: being given that perception of a specified sort occurred; or, being given that illusion of a specified sort occurred. Coming now to Sense B. 'Answering the question as to what happened to the subject', in this sense, just means being a true statement which expressly reports something about the subject that happened at or after the time at which he began to be affected. The main point, or a main point, about this is that a report of the subject's having perceived something 'answers the question' in Sense B. My perceiving something is itself something that happens at or after the time at which I begin to be affected-after, to be more accurate. I

8

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Here we are tempted to a queer redefinition of 'the perceiving', or to a much less queer though potentially misleading definition of something like 'the perceptual process', so as to include in the former, or more defensibly in the latter, some part of what relevantly happened before the first moment at which it was true that the subject perceived the thing. This makes us feel as if we had to restore the balance by introducing some qualification, something like 'the perceiving qua mental act', if we want to get back to the original, unredefined notion of the subject's perceiving the thing; a condition first satisfied at the first moment when-he perceived the thing. Such qualifications are pointless and absurd. If you speak of the 'perceptual process', or less defensibly the 'process of perceiving', in that broader way, then the subject's perceiving the thing-which is what I, for one, always mean by the perception or the perceiving-is itself ouly a part ofthe 'perceptual process' or 'process of perceiving' ; you do not need any qualification to distinguish it as a part. In the case of the Brontosaurus as we like to think of him, with poppies still dangling from his mouth while something is chewing the end of his tail, it is futile to say that 'the perceiving' has already begun, so that we must at all costs carefully distingnish between 'the perceiving as a whole' and the perceiving qua something or other, which is yet to come. Unfortunately for the Brontosaurus, no perceiving has yet occurred. Still more" absurd would it be to suggest that perceiving or an instance of perceiving began when the supernova exploded which I now perceive. The point is that with a whole family of verbs or functions, 'to perceive', 'to after-image', 'to react', 'to respond', 'to reply', 'to re-enter', etc., the function or proposition entails something's having happened before the first moment at which the function is true of the thing; so that its being true of the thing is, if a happening, then a part and not the whole of what happens during the time which begins when the first thing happens that is of a kind whose happening is logically entailed by the function or proposition. Given that a perception-proposition, if true-and alternatively of course, an illusion-report, if true-'answers the question' in Sense B, it is hardly worth quarrelling about whether a perception-illusion disjunction does so. Why not say that it does? If an objection is raised, this will perhaps be

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION II.

because the objector does not like saying that such a disjunction expressly reports something which, etc. There is not much in this. Either he is just focusing on the fact that the thing is an explicit disjunction, in which case his objection does not apply to something introduced as a definiendum for such a disjunction; or he is moving from 'expressly' to 'explicitly' and from this to 'exactly, with exactitude'. Certainly a perception-illusion disjunction does not score high for exactitude; its account of the what-it-is of what happened, though non-null, stops short of that degree of informativeness which a normal human interest in the matter exacts. Since all those things 'answer the question' in Sense B, the fact of something's doing so cannot be used to show that it answers the question in Sense A, which involves being a more precise statement of what happened than any of those things. 8 (ii). Can you ever call a perception-illusion disjunction 'an express report, or explicit description, of an experience that you have both when you perceive a given thing and when you have the illusiou of doing so'? I suppose the answer is that every perception-illusion disjunction, or at the very least every nondisjunctive paraphrase of a perception-illusion disjunction, can at a pinch be called that; in such a trivial, vacuous sense that it is not worth while to apply the tag. It is even rather well worth while not to apply the tag, so strongly would the tag suggest that the perception-illusion disjunction or its paraphrase was not this but-something else. Can a perception-illusion disjunction like D* or Db be called 'an express report, or explicit description, of an experience which is (would be) the same whether the case is (was) one of perception or one of illusion'? Surely the same reply is intuitivelyappropriate, though the inwardness of the matter remains to be explored (in IIb and IIc). 8 (iii). To put a general question in particular terms; does my true statement, 'I see a flash oflight or I am having the illusion of doing so', describe a feature of an event of which I am the subject, a feature in virtue of which I might decide that my case is one of either perceiving a flash of light or having the illusion? That it does not, is surely the answer one would expect from an uncorrupted mind not stunned by the question. This

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is at least partly because what the perception-illusion disjunction does; when stated, is precisely to express t~e decision th~t my case is one of either ... or . And there is an absolute If trivial distinction in common parlance between p, on the one hand, and something in virtue ofwhich you might decide that p, on the other. Though trivially true, this is not quite unimportant in the present context. It reminds us, even if this is all it does, that people who speak of 'something in virtue of which' one decides that a given perception-illusion disjunction is true do not mean by that 'something' the truth of the perceptionillusion disjunction.

8 (iv). The next description to be considered is that of what is called an 'intentional' statement, or statement involving an 'intentional object'. To say that this description does not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions, is too flat. One ought to say rather that the description seems hardly worth applying to such disjunctions; qualifications do not go easily into section headings, though. The philosophical conception of 'intentionality' does not always t-akethe same form. I will assume that no statement will be called 'intentional' if it neither is of the form 'X that P' and can be true though p is false, nor has, as it is sometimes put, a grammatical object which, consistently with the truth of the statement, may not exist. I will also assume that, at least in t~e present context, this last condition would, for those who use It, be sufficient. A paradigmatic example of an 'intentional' statement then is, 'Ponce de Leon went in search of the fountain if youth'. 'Diogenes went looking for an honest man' is another, however; even if such a man exists, the statement does not entail this. The reason why it would not be quite right to say that the description, 'intentional statement', does not apply to a perception-illusion disjunction is that it does,for instance, apply to: 'Bob visually perceived or was illuded of visually perceiving a flash if light'. I think it would also be the custom to say that 'a flash of light' was the grammatical object in 'Either Bob perceived a flash of light, or he was illuded of perceiving one', so that this statement would count as 'intentional' too, by that test. And of course if you use 'see' in the neutral sense of

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perception or illusion, then 'Bob saw a flash if light' gives you a much less cumbrous example; certainly something which is ex hypothesi clarified as a perception-illusion disjunction can be 'intentional', by that grammatical test. True, there is the complication that 'the illusion of perceiving a flash of light' is the grammatical object of some sentences, just as 'the perception of this or that' is sometimes the grammatical object of a sentence. In such formulations, and in those in which the grammatical object is a sentence, or a clause like 'that he saw a flash of light', we may feel that we do not quite know how to take the question whether the statement could be true 'without that object's existing'. It is certainly not easy to see what is achieved here by applying the term 'intentional' when this is governed by school-book grammatical criteria. Logical criteria seem only marginally, if at all, more promising for the applicability of the term. Like any 'vel'-statement, a 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunction is one whose truthvalue depends solely on that of its constituents; this is regularly called a form of 'extensionality' in contrast with 'intensionality' or 'intentionality'. (True, there may be something a bit more intensional or intentional about pointed perception-illusion disjunctions; here there is a question of what has been called intentional identity, which will be touched on in Section 14, though not under that imperspicuous name.) One motive, though only one motive, for interest in 'intentionality' is the wish to test Brentano's thesis that 'intentionality is the mark of psychological phenomena'. Since '» perceives that p' is itself of course not 'intentional' when perception has the objective sense in which we are using it here, a defender of that thesis must either say that perception, in this sense, is in no way a psychological phenomenon, or else must explain how 'intentionality' is in some way in the ofEng here. One way, though only one way, in which this task may be attempted is by trying to show t-hat 'x perceives that p', in the objective sense, must be unidirectionally defined as the conjunction of an 'intentional' condition with some other condition, the former : condition being the strictly psychological part of perceiving. In virtue of its unidirectionalism rather than its emphasis on 'intentionality', this is a form of the relevant controversial conception of an experience which will be in question.

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The fact, that an 'intentional' sense or use of 'x saw a flash of light' can so readily be clarified in terms of a perception-illusion disjunction, might by the way lead to a mistaken inference. It might lead to the idea that one could clarify, in terms of a disjunction of realization and illusion, the familiar weakened sense or use of such locutions as 'mowing the lawn', 'entertaining an audience', 'helping the gardener', etc., in which what is meant is merely that the intention of the person, who is described as doing the thing, is to achieve or produce the relevant result or effect. No such clarification is possible, since someone may for instance be entertaining an audience, in the weakened sense that this is what he means to be doing, and yet may be neither producing the relevant effect nor getting in any sense, however weak, the illusion of doing so. The fact, that a so-called 'intentional' sense of perception can readily be clarified as the disjunction of perception and illusion, seems indeed to be connected with the fact that what we have here, usually at least, is precisely not the ordinary notion of intention. Ifwe were to introduce, as we could, a sense of 'perceiving a cuckoo at the edge of the wood' in which by saying that someone was doing this we meant neither more nor less than that his intention or hope was to be achieving the identification of something at the edge of the wood as a cuckoo; then this 'perceiving in the sense of intention' would be sufficient, but not necessary, for what is intended as a general rule by the philosophical notion of an 'intentional' or purely psychological sense of perception. When I am given a phosphene and know that this is what is happening, it is not true that I mean to be detecting a flash oflight. Only a philosopher whose eccentric conception of the 'intentional' or purely psychological sense of perception did not regularly include illusion conld clarify his conception in terms of the ordinary sense of intention (cf. Anscombe, Cohen).

8 (v). We next come to two descriptions which definitely do not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions, if these are identified by the mode of sentence-composition which I gave as a recipe. Here we must bear in mind the question whether these descriptions might nevertheless apply 'to the same thing in other words', in such a way that, so to speak, it was not worth not applying them to perception-illusion disjunctions proper.

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any other perception-illusion disjunction, if ouly because the idea ofsuch a definition would be to analyse perception as such. This applies as much to causal as to non-causal definitions; it does not matter whether 'x perceives that p' is sought to be defined simply as 'X and r, or as 'X and as a result r. As for things that mean much the same as perception-illusion disjunctions, what we have said in the other cases applies; if something that means much the same as a perception-illusion disjunction is suitable in this role, it is suitable not because it means much the same as a perception-illusion disjunction, but in spite of the fact. That something which means much the. same as a perception-illusion disjunction can be a conjunct in a clarifying paraphrase of 'x perceives that r. provided that this clarification is not conceived unidirectionally, is something I shall in IIc admit, or even claim (c£ Grice).

82<14037

E

8 (vi). Finally in this section, with its rough and ready heading, let us look at two tags about which it is hard to say whether they do or do not apply to perception-illusion disjunctions. The difficulty with these tags, the first of which is '(ordinary) phenomenological description', is that someone who uses the tag may have various things in mind. Is a perception-illusion disjunction a 'phenomenological description'? The mere etymology of the adjective would not be what prevented us from saying so: such a disjunction can, as we have said, be a 'seem'- or 'appear' -statement. As for 'description', the term is now used so broadly as to have become virtually synonymous with 'statement'; the narrower sense, of' something. more pictorial, is largely lost· in philosophy at least. Besides, the narrower sense is not altogether inappropriate. There have been pictographic symbols for things even less easily picturable than a flash of light. If we suppose there to be a pictograph for a flash of light, observed or unobserved, then this pictograph in an eye-shaped frame might be the hieroglyph for seeing a flash of light; the same pictograph between two lips rriight do for asserting the occurrence of a flash oflight; the same pictograph in a third frame, possibly derived from the shape of a theatrical mask, might be the symbol for getting the illusion of a flash of light. A symbol for 'or' between the first and last of these symbols, the whole attached to one's own personal symbol and

The first of the two descriptions I mean is that of a member of a candidate reduction-class for perceptual sentences, or for physical-world sentences. Perception-illusion disjunctions are not members of such a candidate reduction-class, since a perceptual sentence is a constituent in a perception-illusion disjunction. The same is, incidentally, true of any 'seem' or 'appear' statement in which some prefix or suffix is attached to a perceptual sentence or a physical-world sentence. The discussion of Phenomenalism, when by this the meaningreductive translation-thesis is meant, presupposes as the candidate reduction-class a class of statables or propoundables that do not have to be expressed in such a way that a member of the class to be reduced appears in each member of the reductionclass. True, a sentence or statement which means much the same as a perception-illusion disjunction, or even is what we would ordinarily call the same thing in other words, might for all I have yet said be snitable in this role. It could not, however, be shown to be suitable by being shown to mean much the same as a perception-illusion disjunction, or by being shown to be the same thing in other words as such a disjunction. Itssuitability for the designated role, if not self-evident, would have to be shown in some other way. True, one could in any case discuss whether the act of accepting a perceptual proposition could be reached, or could be approached as a limit, by accepting a series of perceptionillusion disjunctions. The answer 'yes' would not, however, reduce certain sentences, distinguished by the sort of meaning they have, to complexes of other sentences, having a different sort of meaning. In one sense of the term 'proposition' it therefore would not reduce one kind of proposition to another, but would ouly show that the acceptance of a complex proposition of the one kind was tantamount to, or approached as a limit, the acceptance of a proposition of the other kind. The second of this pair of definitely inapplicable descriptions is that of being a snitable candidate for the role of a conjunct in a unidirectional conjunctive definition of some kind of perception, 'perceiving that p'. Obviously, 'perceiving that p or having the illusion of perceiving that p' cannot be a conjunct in such a definition since, rightly or wrongly, non-circularity is then and there being aimed at; nor is the prospect brighter for

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So if there is any objection to the suggested description of a perception-illusion disjunction, the objection must either lie in the designation of such a disjunction as 'psychological', which will be widely regarded as not worth quarrelling aboutexcept by those attached both to Brentano's thesis and to a definition of 'intentionality' that excludes perception-illusion disjunctions-c-or else in further implications which 'law' or 'psycho-physical law' may have for a given thinker. It may of course be a part of someone's personal conception of such a law that the psychological part of it fits one or more of the descriptions that have been mentioned above as not applying to perception-illusion disjunctions.

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

a time-reference, might be the expression of a first-person perception-illusion disjunction. The fact of its being easier to conceive of such a hieroglyph for a perception-illusion disjunction than for, say, 'Everything has at all times some property that something else sometimes lacks' might warrant calling the former a 'description' in a sense that excluded the latter. If these considerations do not conclusively establish that a perception-illusion disjunction is a 'phenomenological description', this is because it seems possible that some people intend the phrase to impute the possession of properties which a perception-illusion disjunction does not possess. Perhaps they think of a 'phenomenological description' as being 'intentional' in some more worthwhile sense than that in which we were able to concede that a perception-illusion disjunction was sometimes 'intentional'. Perhaps they are thinking of what they call a 'phenomenological description' as fitting one or more of the descriptions we have mentioned as inapplicable to perception-illusion disjunctions. Another uncertainty, and here the messages are conflicting rather than absent, concerns the relationship between the putative discovery of '(ordinary) phenomenological descriptions' and the kind of philosophy known as Phenomenology. Does a perception-illusion disjunction fit the description of 'psychological constituent in a psycho-physical law', or '... in an ordinary psycho-physical law' ? We are in the same difficulty as before; the tag can be applied, unless its users are investing it with some meaning which prevents this. He who says 'psychophysical' usually means 'psycho-physiological', and of course the latter is sufficient for the former. So taking eP in this narrow way, as purely physiological, is there any objection in principle to supposing a perception-illusion disjunction to be the X in a law, iftP then X? I see none. Could it be the X in if X then tP? I do not see why not; though of course if X is 'A v B' then the second law will be equivalent to the conjunction of the two laws, if A then tP and if B thentP. Nor does there seem to be any objection to supposing such a disjunction to be the X in a law, X if and only if tP; though of course this will be equivalent to the conjunction of the two laws about A and B just mentioned with the law, iftP then (A v B).

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IIb THE COMMON ELEMENT IN PERCEPTION AND ILLUSION The relevant philosophical notion is first, in Section 9, identified in a rough way in relation to the relevant hypothetical case. Next, in Section 10, requirements are laid downfor what is called an Ic-statement; this, if there were such a thing, would be a hard-core example ofa reportofan 'experience' in the problematic conception ormisconception. A weaker set of requirements for an 'experience-report or E-reportis thenextracted. It is maintained that, as far as anyone knows or has the right to believe, there is no such thing as an E-report, let alone an R-statement. In Section 11 the idea is dismissed

if these, cannot be reported at

all. Some

that there areevents whick wouldbe reported by E-reports if there were such concluding comments on the philosophical notion (Section 12) bring the ex-

reports but which, in the absence

9. The common element: general

plicit discussion of the notion to a close, though some of its roots mqy be uncovered in lIe.

W

E now come to the special, philosophical notion of an experience, which it is the main purpose of this essay to reconsider, though not to rehabilitate. It was referred to, in the opening paragraphs of the book, as involving a form of the following general idea: that a visual experience is 'inner' independently of the extent to which it is given meaning by the subject's experience of life. There is truth in this general idea, if only because one's individuality is not a function of experience alone. Inherited as well as acquired differences, together with the essential interminability of an account of the meaning which a given object or change that affected his eye had for a given human being, make the supposition that two people have given exactly the same total meaning to such a stimulus always unverifiable, and often easily falsified. The relevant philosophical notion, however, is a form of the

I I

I 6

THE COMMON ELEMENT

6r

general idea that the experience had by each of tw.o people would still be 'inner',however many tests or observations, of a kind that might have revealed a difference in the giving of meaning, failed to do so; and not at all because the next test or observation might have revealed such a difference. We can say that there is truth in this general idea, too. Take for inst~nce the (a-2-) experience, (of) visually perceiving a flash of light. (Light, that which affects photographic plates and causes photosynthesis, a photic flash.) Visually perceivi~g a fla~h. of light is 'inner', quite apart from any differences m the gIvmg of meaning that might be detected, in at least two senses: something literally inner, an electrical or electrochemical process occurring in the central nervous system, is ~ sine qUf} n~n for its occurrence; and others depend upon the sentient subject s behaviour, or his reports of one sort or another, in order to be as sure as they can be that it has occurred. There is, by the way, no special kind of report that we need. A perception-claim will do though we do not need it; so will a mistaken illusion-report in the right circumstances, and so will a perception-illusion disjunction. . However, the relevant philosophical notion is not the notion of a kind of perception, in the objective sense in which we ~re using the word. So it is not, in this present context, the n?~on of perceiving a flash of light, nor is it the noti?n of RerceIvm!' some optical object that looks like a flash of lIght-if there IS such an optical object. This last point ought perhaps to be stressed. In the main-line notion of an inner experience which we are selecting for scrutiny, there is a gap between one's report of such an experience and any proposition as to how so~e external object, event, or process looks; a gap exactly as WIde as the gap between such an experience-report and a'!Y sort of proposition about the 'external world'. Connectedly, by 0-e way, the perception-proposition in a perception-illusion ~s­ junction can very well be a proposition about how something looks; one kind of perception-illusion disjunction is exemplified by: 'Either I visually perceive an optical object which looks (a great deal, a little, hardly at all) like a two-dimensional coloured shape, or I am having the illusion of doing so.' The relevant philosophical notion is also not the notion of a kind of illusion. So it is not, in this present context, the notion

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of getting the illusion-under which heading I include the total hallucination, see Sections 7 and 14-0f a flash of light. An experience of the relevant sort is supposed to occur both when you perceive a flash oflight and when you have the illusion of seeing one. We can almost, but not quite, add that the kind of experience which is supposed to occur then is supposed not to occur on any other kind of occasion. Not quite, because in one subconception which could be further subdivided, that kind of experience might occur without there being either the perception or the illusion. Still, the experience is mostnaturally assumed to occur only when, as we say or used to say, one's visual sense is giving testimony of a flash of light. So it is roughly though not exactly correct to say that-as applied to our case-the relevant notion is of a kind of experience common and peculiar to the perception and the illusion of a flash of light. (Obviously, the relevant kind of experience is supposed to be divisible into indefinitely many kinds.) The notion is not the only one which can be expressed by the phrase 'the COmmon element in the perception and the illusion of a flash oflight'. It is, perhaps, the most general notion which this phrase can express and which is not merely truistic. Someone who thinks in the relevant way, and who says that the common element in perceiving and having the illusion of a flash of light would be an example of the sort of experience he has in mind, does not mean to be saying merely that perceiving a flash of light is an event which belongs to some wider class to which the illusion also belongs, so that the common element is 'the occurrence of an event of that class'. On the other hand he may not-though equally he may-want to say that there would be a difference between someone's perceiving a flash of light on a given occasion and the relevant particular experience, or that there would be a difference between someone's having the illusion on a given occasion and the relevant particular experience. It is because he may not want to say that there is or would be a difference, that I had to speak carefully, and say that the notion of having the experience is neither the notion of perceiving something nor the notion of having a certain illusion; instead of saying that the posited experience is neither

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a perception nor an illusion. Positing the experience is not the same as positing a perception or positing an illusion; it is other than those posits, and other than the posit that 'one or other of those things has occurred', but not, necessarily, the posit of something other than those things. If the philosopher who advances the notion thinks that 'there is a difference', then he mayor may not think that the common element is common to the two 'acts', the perceiving and the being illuded. He may think it precedes the acts. After these general remarks about the relevant controversial conception I will try to get to closer grips with it by articulating the question as to whether there is indeed an 'experience', in the relevant sense or non-sense, in the hypothetical case which was constructed in Section 7. But first the question will be, whether there is such a thing as a report of such an experience.

10. Experience-reports

10 (i) R-statements. Is there, can one compose, such a thing as an R-statement: a statement that meets all the following requirements, from R. 1 to r. x? R. 1. The statement must be one that we can assume, suppose to be true in our hypothetical case in which n b is true; without the new supposition's being, in this context, either problematic or extraneous. By an extraneous supposition, here, I mean one which is no more strongly suggested as a possibility by the assumption D" than by some completely different assumption. (For example, the supposition that the subject experiences 'deja vu'.) R. 2. The statement must be one that can without absurdity be supposed, in our hypothetical case, to 'answer the question as to what happened to the subject' in Sense A of Section 8 (i) above. Moreover, it must be one that can be supposed to identify, state exactly the what-it-is of, the event by whose occurrence the subject was at least tempted to believe that he perceived a flash of light. (I assume this takes care of 'extraneousness', but the point is that I shall be talking about subsets of these requirements as well as about the whole lot.) As a brief way of expressing R. 2, I will sometimes say that it requires the

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statement to have 'the desired kind of precision'-it is less my duty to be invariablyexact about precision and exactitude than it is (as Austin indicated) the duty of one who espouses the problematic conception of an experience. R. 3. The statement must be one which it would seem incongruous, in the way indicated in Section 7 (vii), for the speaker ~ to preface by 'I am inclined to believe that .. .'. R. 4. The statement must expressly, or ifyou prefer explicitly or formally, report what in Part I we called an a-2-experience. That is to say, the statement must speak of, declare the occurrence of, an 'act' or 'doing' in the broadest auxiliary sense, which is moreover an event of which x is the grammatical subject, and of which furthermore we naturally, albeit ambiguously, say that it 'could. not occur without being an experience', or 'could not occur without there being the right sort of consciousness in the case for it to be an experience'meaning by this remark to distinguish it, in some way which the remark leaves unclear, from what we called Type One cases. This ambiguous requirement might be satisfied vacuously, trivially; by the act's just being, as distinct from being the object of, a certain sort of awareness-if the act is a form of b-experiencing or sb-experiencing. ~ (Here s indicates the weakened sense, 'seemingly' or 'ostensibly', and b marks the coguitive sense of the verb, the sense in which the student spectator and' the patient ~ under local anaesthetic both experience the operation.) If someone who speaks of visual experiences has in mind things (s)b-experienced, then we can point out that there will not be these without acts of (s)bexperiencing. Another possibility left open by this ambiguous requirement is that of its being satisfied in the way in which we held that it was satisfied in the case of torture: merely because the act expressly reported consists by definition in the occurrence of something, say a brain-process, that logically could have occurred without the subject's b-experiencing it, together with his b-experiencing it. And finally there may, for all that this ambiguous requirement says to the contrary, be the possibility whose existence was contra-indicated by our earlier inquiry, that the act is ca-2-experienced; is one ofa kind that is somehow necessarily accompanied by one's having some suitable sort of awareness of it.

10

terms.

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Not only must the statement expressly report an experience, an a-2-experiencingfed, it must expressly report one that is visual in a natural sense which, while it must be broader than that of visual perception, must not be clearly analogical like talk of 'seeing the point of a joke'. Here the notion of expressly reporting something visual entails reporting it in visual

atic, conception of 'a visual experience-report relevant to the

R. 5. The statement must be such that the subject, x, can satisfy himself that it meets requirement R. 2; moreover, he must be able to do so without relying on any undischarged assumption about the physical. The rest of the requirements that will be mentioned may well be, and I should have thought they were, corollaries of those five; I will lay them down.in case they are not all corollaries: (r. vi) The statement is not allowed to be a physiological one, nor (r. vii) is it allowed to be a non-specific statement whose truth would follow from a physiological fact. .It cannot (r. viii) in any natural or normal sense of the words be an idea or hypothesis or conjecture or theory or thesis when asserted by the one to whom it relates. He, if he states it, states a fact; or at any rate he does not put forward an idea as distinct, for instance, from stating a fact. He speaks very much as he finds, not at all as he fancies. (r. ix) The statement must neither be nor entail a perception-proposition where 'perception' has the full, objective sense-in this class I include all statements about how an object looks-and (r. x) it must neither be nor entail an illusion-proposition. Those requirements collectively, R. I to r. x, are intended to capture or recapture a certain elusive, fairly broad yet problem-

case of a bluish-white flash oflight'. If nothing meets all those

requirements then there is no such thing as an experience-report

of that kind, in one sense or non-sense. I do not see that anything does meet all those requirements. Indeed my impression or tentative belief, which may of course be entirely mistaken for all that I am by no means the first to hold or to have received it, is that as far as anyone knows or has the right to believe, nothing meets all those requirements. This declaration may seem pointless, and even a breach of the ethics or manners of disputation. Is it not too much like

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requirements lies within man's ken, and leave it at that. One must at least try to show that the existence of statements which meet all the requirements, R-statements, should not be taken for granted and cannot easily be proved. Why, for instance, should one not take it for granted that the statement, (S) '(1 see) an even, moderately bright bluish-white flash, filling the whole visual field, rather like sheet lightning', has among its various possible meanings one in which it is an R-statement? I think there would be nothing wrong with this assumption if the requirements for an R-statement did not include R. 2 and R. 5-but in that case a perception-illusion disjunction could be an R-statement. (That the trouble is with R. 2 and R. 5 does not, by the way, mean exactly that the whole matter can be reduced to the question whether S can be meant or intended in such a way that it meets those two requirements. It would be useless for S, or anything else, to meet those two requirements without meeting all the others when taken in the same way. And S may not be everyone's idea of the most promising kind of candidate.) In order to meet R. 2, S must 'answer the question as to what is happening to the subject', in Sense A of Section 8 (i). Let us go through some things that would have to be the case, for it to do this. For a start; S must be true. So one condition which would have to be satisfied is the condition which S itself explicitly states to be satisfied: namely, that the hypothetical subject, x, sees an even, moderately bright bluish-white flash, filling his whole visual field, rather like sheet lightning. We can unproblematically suppose that this is indeed true in some sense, in our hypothetical case. Then S must not entail anything about the subject's environment, and it must not be a premiss that enables one to decide with certainty which of the disjuncts in Db is true. There is no real difficulty about these conditions, if only because S might be explained by the speaker as an abbreviation for a perception-illusion disjunction. S must be, and it is, about x in the sense that the reference of the pronouo '1' in S is to x. S must, and it does, 'answer the question as to what happened'. I do not say, '... to the subject' in Sense A, but in the broad and purely syntactical sense which was mentioned at the beginning of Section 8 (i). This is merely to say that in

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

declaring with a judicial air that one is not convinced by the other party's arguments? The criticism might be fair if, today, familiar arguments were generally held to establish that there are statements which meet all those requirements. In effect this is how things used to be. For it was widely held that the existence of such things as visual sense-data, sensa or sensibilia, conceived as actual or possible objects of a kiud of vision, or at least as having qualities such as bluish-whiteness which are normally thought of as being detected by sight, or if not as haviug such qualities then as containing things that have the;n, could be established by familiar arguments. These would illdirectly establish that there were statements about such entities. These statements would include some that met all those above-mentioned requirements, R. 1 to r. x, which relate to the case of a bluish-white flash of light. The present philosophical and psychological situation is one of widespread scepticism about such arguments aud such entities, among which I hope we may include. the 'visual field' if this is something that sense-data are fouod ill, as well as the transparent stream of consciousness in which round red patches floated like red cells in the plasma. Yet unless I am quite mistaken it is now often believed, and more often taken for granted than argued, that there are statements which meet all those requirements without being about such entities. Visual sense-data and things like that are discredited; we tend to talk nowadays about 'statements about visual experiences' , meaning for instance statements that meet all those requirements. Of course I do not mean that everyone speaks or thinks in this way. I think that the number of those who do would be fouod to be augmented if we changed the 'way' by modifying R. 5, so that it only required the subject to ascertain that his statement meets R. 2; no longer requiring him to do this without relying on any undischarged assumption about the physical, and hence no longer requiring him to be able to propound the problem of the 'external' world. I do not, in point offact, see that anything would meet all the requirements even after that modificationand shall have further, still more far-reaching, 'avowals of nondiscovery to make. Even in this situation one cannot, of course, simply declare one's inclination to believe that nothing which meets all those

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the ordered combination of expressions Q.A, where Q. is "What happened?' and A is 'I saw an even, moderately bright bluishwhite flash, etc.', the Q. and the A are not incongruous, as they are in 'What happened?-Socrates was mortal' (as distinct from 'proved mortal') 'How many deer have got into the quadrangle?-Brown', 'Of what sort are the deer in the quadrangle?-Two', 'What is this queer-looking object?Broken', etc. In just the same unambitious syntactical sense, S must answer the question as to how the subject, x, was affected; there must be nothing wrong, as an ordinary use of language, about the combination, 'How were you affected (by that stimulus) ?-1 saw an even, moderately bright bluish-white flash etc.'. I take this to be like 'What effect did that stimulus have on you ?~I saw, etc.'. Again it seems to me that this condition is satisfied, if only because, as was said earlier, a perception-illusion disjunction can be stated in response to a request as to the effect of a cause; if you cannot do better. (This is not to admit that S is a proper answer to the question 'Exactly how were you affected by that stimulus?' To say that it was, would mean or at least would very strongly suggest that it had the desired kind of precision-which is the claim we are investigating a part of.) Continuing to state conditions which S must meet: on the further supposition that the disjunct of perception in Db is true, i.e. that the subject perceives a bluish-white flash of light, S must not be an exact, an a fortiori, or a mere vague or generalized, less precise, report of the subject's perceiving a bluish-white flash oflight. This is where I see the first difficulty. We can rule out easily enough the possibility that S is an exact or an a fortiori report of the subject's perception, simply by ruling that it is intended 'neutrally', and remembering that to explain it as a perceptionillusion disjunction would guarantee its 'neutrality'. We cannot, of course, in that way rule out the possibility that it is a mere vague or generalized, less precise report of the perception. The question is, whether there is some other way in which we can rule out this possibility. I do not see that there is. A part of the difficulty is this. We cannot just take it for granted that S, or anything else which is neither an explicit perception-illusion disjunction nor a deliberate paraphrase of one, has a 'neutral' sense.:This can be.iand has been, doubted;

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the relevant candidate sentences, whether expressed in terms of seeing, or seeming, or neither, are ambiguous; We needva procedure by which to establish that such a sentence is being given a 'neutral' sense by a 'speaker in a given situational context. There seems to be no procedure by which this can be done without leaving open the possibility, or even making it to some extent rationally credible, that the sentence in question is, in its context, much the same thing in other words as some perception-illusion disjunction. I take it that the least unsatisfactory procedure which offers itself, short of our supposing the speaker actually to introduce some expression stipulatively as a definiendum for some perception-illusion disjunction, as a way of establishing that a speaker is making a 'neutral' statement relevant to perception, is the procedure used by John Wisdom. Here we do not brood upon or savour some form of words, but investigate the 'conversational behaviour' of whatever form of words we imaginatively suppose to be used. For instance we may find or imaginatively suppose that someone utters S in a stating way and in the belief that he perceives a flash of light, but that he still does not withdraw or admit that he was wrong in what he has said when he becomes convinced that no 'such flash, no photic flash, occurred. On the assumptions, which are natural though they might be hard to vindicate, that he is guilty neither of logical inconsistency nor of equivocation, this establishes that he was making neither a perceptual claim nor an illusion-report. Far from establishing that he was not making a statement which was much the same thing in other words as some perception-illusion disjunction, it provides some ground for thinking that he was doing just that. But if the procedure, which most reasonably tends to convince us that S in a given context is 'neutral', is also a procedure which makes it proportionally credible that S, in that context, is much the same thing as 'I perceive or have -the illusion of perceiving' an even, moderately bright bluish-white flash of light, filling my whole field of view, rather like sheet lightning'; then, in and by satisfying ourselves that S meets the other requirements, we make. it proportionally doubtful whether it meets R. 2, the , requirement of the desired kind of precision. The general sifuation we are in is neither that it is doubtful whether there' are 'neutral' statements relevant to perception,

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION lIb

nor yet that these are given independently, so that we can speculate qnite freely about their relationship to perceptionillusion disjunctions. It is not in the least doubtful that there are such 'neutral' statements, since there are perception-illusion

disjunctions. And the suggestion that something is such a 'neutral' statement is plausible pro rata with the suggestion that it is the same thing in other words, or much the same thing in other words, as a perception-illusion disjunction. Even if this were not so, there would still be great difliculty in showing what has to be shown, namely that on the further supposition that x perceives a bluish-white flash of light, 8 is not a mere vague or generalized account of his so doing. On the two suppositions, that x perceives a bluish-white flash of light and that it is true in some 'neutral' sense that (8) x sees an even, moderately bright bluish-white flash of light filling his whole visual field, rather like sheet lightning; on those two suppositions, it is tempting though not perfectly safe to infer that (P) x perceives an even, moderately bright bluish-white flash of light, rather like sheet lightning, filling his whole field of view. And surely 8, if intended in a 'neutral' sense-one that neither logically entails perception nor logically entails illusion-is entailed by P, without entailing P. But if so then, in line with the discussion in 8 (i), we are going to need a positive reason in order to rebut the presmnption that 8 is a mere generalized, less precise account of what happened when x perceived a bluish-white flash oflight. I do not see what this positive reason would be. What I have just described as a tempting inference is not perfectly safe; it might be wrong, in the following way, at least. Simultaneously with perceiving a bluish-white flash of light of some other sort, say, one that resembles a flashlight signal, x has the illusion of perceiving an even, moderately bright bluish-white flash of light rather like sheet lightning, filling his whole field of view. This is why 8 is true, and not because x perceives any sheet-like flash. But in this case, in the absence of any positive reason to rebut the presumption, we shall again do right to set 8 dowu as a less precise account of what happened; of what happened when x had the illusion of perceiving such a flash as this and perceived such a flash as that. Perhaps it will be felt that, in considering only these two possibilities, I assmne the point at issue against one, rather

THE COMMON ELEMENT 10 7' extreme, form of the doctrine of the 'experience' as the common

element in a given perception and its perfect illusion. Namely, the doctrine according to which the common element is not exactly peculiar to that pair of occurrences since it could occur bare, without its being either a case ofthe designated perception or its perfect illusion. Both the perceptual claim to which one might be at least tempted, and the illusion-admission which might appear to be available to fall back sadly upon, would then collapse; leaving one with the 'experience' in puris naturalibus. Whatever may be thought of this doctrine, it is untrue that I have assmned its incorrectness. I did not assume that those are the only possibilities, in assuming only, that those are possibilities. If, on the other hand, I were to assume that there is another possibility, I might indeed be in danger of assuming the point at issue-against my owu side in the dispute. Might 8 be shown to 'answer the question', in sense A, by being shown to be an explicit report of an event that was, in point of contingent fact, numerically identical with one that could be explicitly reported in different terms by some designated physiological statement? No, this would reverse the necessary order of procedure. We must first know that S has thy desired kind of precision, or at least that it is not a mere vague or generalized report of what happened, before we can pose, in the way which the suggestion we are considering requires, the question whether the event which it explicitly reports is really one and the same as the event explicitly reported by some designated physiological statement. For otherwise, if S is a mere vague or generalized, less precise, report of whichever thing happened, the perception or the illusion as the case may be, then the identity-question will be more precisely posed in the one case as the question whether the perception is identical with the designated physiological event, and in the other case as the question whether the illusion is identical with the designated physiological event. A mere vague or generalized report will, to that extent at least, be like a perception-illusion disjunction; even if it differs from one, in the way and to the extent that the definability of a man as a rational aniroal makes 'A man came in' different from 'There came in a black or a white or a tawuy ... man'. Those identityquestions, about the perception and about the illusion, are

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a stain on the wall' .

F

interesting but tangential to our present concerns; they are not questions, affirmative answers to which could show that S 'answers the question' in Sense A. The Australian school of Central State Materialism is, by the way, quite unscathed by these remarks. For instance J. J. C. Smart's seminal article, though entitled 'Sensations and Brain Processes', is about afterimaging; everyone believes in that. The extent of the difficulty that there is, in showing that S or anything else has the desired kind of precision, can I think be seen by looking at an example in which a parallel feat might seem to promise to be easier and yet proves hard enough. Suppose someone has afterimagery of a kind that could lead him to think there was a stain on the wall. What would be a more precise, albeit less informative, report of this happening? That he had had such 'imagery' perhaps; cutting off the entailment of a very specific external aetiology which 'afterimagery' involves. But even the word 'imagery' is, in one acceptation at least, still a member of the same family of terms, in the sense that it implies the physical existence of something, to some part of aspect of which it has in some way or respect some degree of fancied similarity. If and when we feel the wish to replace 'imagery' in this sense by some still more precise and less informative term, cutting off that implication, then what we lack is not a term that stands ready and waiting to be illegitimately, arbitrarily assumed to fill the bill. 'Idea', 'image', and 'impression' in supposedly purified senses, 'sensation,' 'experience', and so forth are all, so to speak, dancing eager and competitive attendance on our wishes. What we lack is a reason to believe that the bill is actually filled by these or any other terms, and that for instance 'He had imagery in a more general sense' is not just a vague and generalized, less precise report of his having had afterimagcry of a kind that could lead him to think there was a stain on the wall. If we lack a reason to think that an advance in precision is achieved here, then still more must we lack a reason to think that the more precise statement, which we have allegedly reached, is the very same one we would have reached by a process of similarly prescinding from the objective or external implications of 'He perceived

8244037

we cannot show that something 'answers the question' in Sense A by showing that it does so in Sense B. That S does this, there is no doubt; S expressly reports something about the subject that happened at or after the time at which he began to be affected. So, however, does the disjunct of perception if this is true; so does the disjunct of illusion if this is true; so does, in any case, the perception-illusion disjunction Db itself. Therefore the fact of S's answering the question in Sense B cannot be used to show that it is a more precise statement of what happened than any of those three things. But this is necessary if it is to 'answer the question' in Sense A. The point is worth stressing because, if we forget that all those other things answer the question in Sense B, then we may feel as if the fact of S's doing so made S like the statement about the object falling to earth, or the statement about the man saying he would not go (in Section 8 (i)). What I mean is that the fact of something like S's answering the question in Sense B may combine with the mistaken idea of, say, the disjunct of perception's not doing so, to produce the mistaken conclusion that S gives a mar" precise account than the disjunct of perception does of what happened, on the supposition that this disjunct is true. Or, the fact of S's answering the question in Sense B, combining with the fact of S's not entailing anything about the environment, may produce the same mistaken conclusion-until we remember that a perception-illusion disjunction, or a non-disjunctive rewording of one, also answers the question in Sense B without entailing anything about the environment. In sum, I do not see how it can or could be shown that S meets R. 2. And this is before we come to the part about identifying, stating the what-it-is of, the event which at least tempts x to believe that he perceives a flash of light. (My own view as to the what-it-is of that event will be gleaned from Section 14; it is the perception in the non-proper sense in the case of perception, and the illusion in the weaker sense in the case of illusion.) It is true that the method we have used, in rejecting the claim of S to be an R-statement, could not be used to dismiss a claimant about which we found ourselves unable to decide that it was bound to be entailed by something true that entailed whichever disjunct in the given disjunction was true.

It should be borne in mind that, as was pointed out in 8 (i),

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We shall be unable to reach that decision if the meaning of the candidate sentence is sufficiently unclear, but in this case it is hard to see how it can meet the other requirements. If there is an unambiguous (seem'-statement, or other putative R-statement, which is entailed by no perception-proposition and by no illusion-proposition, then again we shall be unable to reach that decision and the method we have used will not be usable. However, it is hard to see why it should be thought that there is such a putative R-statement as that. No ground for thinking that there is such a statement is provided by what seems to be the fact, that if you are given as an example some perceptionproposition or illusion-proposition X, then you can always supply a seem-statement or other putative R-statement which is not entailed by X since it is more specific than X, yet in virtue of whose truth X might be true. From 'Given a number, you can always mention a larger' we cannot infer that there is a number larger than every other number; nor, from 'Every perceptive and every vain man is born of some sensual woman whom he did not beget', can we infer that there is a sensual woman begotten by no vain and by no perceptive man. 10 (ii) E-reports. In order to broaden the question, I will introduce the notion of an 'E-report'. If there were such a thing as an R-statement, then it would be an E-report, but there might be an E-report which was not an R-statement. An Ereport need satisfy only two requirements. It must meet R. 1, the requirement of being something we can suppose to be true in the context. Moreover it must fit a description which, in Section 8 (ii), we held to be unsuited to a perception-illusion disjunction-the description, 'report of an experience which is or would be the same, whether the subject's case is/were one of perception or one of illusion'. This tag must be not just applicable in some tongue-in-cheek way, but seriously worth applying to the statement in the present philosophical context. Within the suppositious class of E-reports I would distinguish, as 'precise E-reports', any which met R. 2, the requirement of the desired kind of precision. I do not see that there are any E-reports, precise or not. For the rest of this section let us consider some arguments or trains of thought which might be held to show that there are.

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10 (ii) (A). The argument from Science

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Some trains of thought, which appear to justify the belief that there are Ereports, and which appear to be based on Science, turn out to be based on dubious and arbitrary general metaphysical beliefs about objects if reference and about effects of causes. Others are genuinely b-ased on Science, but do not terminate in the conclusion that there are E-reports. Others agam arerather based on Science Fiction.

With more than a little plausibility one can say in a general way that, if the elusive controversial doctrine of 'experiences' were to prove sound after all, this would be because it had proved after all to be a genuine product of creative science. And one can, without any difficulty, find in scientific writings passages about 'sensations' or 'experiences' which may appear to endorse, more particularly, the doctrine that there occur reportable events whose reports would be E-reports. Some of these passages, however, present a stronger appearance of doing this than others. The appearance is not all that strong when a physiologist, after giving a careful, accurate account of certain electrical and electro-chemical changes in the eye-brain system that are normally initiated by light striking the retinas, merely tops off this account by adding that there next occurs an event of an entirely different, not physiologically describable, kind called a sensation or experience, with which he is not professionally concerned. His talk of one's 'then, and only then-after the relevant changes have occurred in the relevant structures-getting the sensation or experience of a flash' might merely mean that then, and only then, one visually perceives a flash of light or has the illusion of doing so, according to the character of the initial stimulus. However, what I have just said gives rise to an objection. The impulse reaches certain specified structures, and then-what? My continuation was, '-and then, one perceives a flash of light or has the illusion of doing so, as the case may be, according to the nature of the initial stimulus'. But it is natural to make some such retort as this, that what then happens cannot depend on the initial stimulus; what happens next must be the same, whether the initial stimulus was light striking the retina, or an electric current passing from an electrode through the retina, or whatever it was. Well, and indeed it would be

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strange if, given a certain type of impulse reaching certain structures, what happened next tJ.':tere, or in adjacent structures, was different according to the nature of the remoter cause, the initial stimulus; the mechanically 'observable' effect of the given proximate cause taking after its grandfather, so to speak. But this is not the only possibility which the person who makes that retort means to exclude. He means, that the immediately following event which the subject can explicitly and truly report must be the same. This is true in the sense that the subject can, no matter what the stimulus was, truly make the same eventreport, the report that he sees a flash; which we are not, by this fact, prevented from interpreting as the report that he perceives a flash of light or has the illusion of doing so. But the objector wants to say: 'Not only can the subject thereupon truly make the same event-report irrespective of the initial stimulus; but also the event, which he can truly and explicitly report, is then the same.' Here we have a linguistic distinction; do we have a difference? The feeling that there is a difference may persist; let us reconsider the objection. It is based on the principle, 'Same cause, same effect', It is fair to point out that the assumption of there being the same (proximate) cause, in the case of a perception and its perfect illusion, tends to be derived from an application of the converse principle, 'Same effect, same cause', where the premiss, that we indeed have here the 'same effect', is intended in a sense that assumes the point at issue. Nevertheless, let us suppose for the sake of argument that the condition, thatfor all one can tellfrom what happens one perceives aflash oflight, is the invariable. consequent of some neural condition which could in principle be exactly specified. To use the sort of language that comes naturally; the consequent condition must, we. are liable to feel, be a definite, identifiable type of event, which is what it is in itself, though there may ofcourse be a rule or convention to call it "perception of a flash of light' if its remoter antecedents are of one kind, and to call it 'illusion of a flash of light' if they are of another kind. It cannot, we may feel, be something that is not identifiable more precisely, without knowledge of its ancestry, than as 'perception or illusion of a flash of light'. It must be 'this' specific and wellidentified type of event, whichever of those two descriptions it

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may fall under in virtue of its relation to other things, not just 'this' generic type of event, perception or illusion of a flash, whichever of those species it may belong to in virtue of its antecedents. That is the idea we tend to have, but is it well founded? One thing it may be based on is the further idea that, otherwise, we should not know what we were talking about-and indeed should not be talking about anything, really-when we said that it, the event which the subject can expressly report when the relevant impulse reaches the relevant structures, is the perception or illusion of a flash of light, according to the character of the initial stimulus. That we could not answer the question, 'What do you mean; what are you referring to? What is the perception or illusion of a flash of light according to the antecedent circumstances? What is it, that is the perception or the illusion according to the circumstances?' It is clear that when we think like this, we are not disposed to accept, as a sufficient condition for one's knowing what one is talking about, the mere availability of a substantive or substantival phrase to sustain the pronominal reference. For this could easily be arranged. We could introduce the phrase 'the flash-experience', simply to mean 'the flash-perception or flash-illusion, as the case may be'. It is no good doing that, if we are back where we started as soon as an explanation of the meaning of the substantival phrase is asked for-so we are liable to feel. When this is how we feel, then it turns out that our idea that the effect must be 'a definite something' is based on an idea about what meaningful speech and thought involve. An idea which, laudably enough, tries to get through and beyond conventional grammar and sees as too permissive its standards for knowing what one is talking about. Three comments can be made on this. First, there may be a touch of a plainly mistaken idea here. N ame1y, the idea that if 'the flash-experience' just means 'the flash-perception or flash-illusion', then when I say 'The flash-experience is perception or illusion according to context', I am saying 'If it is a case of perception, then the flash-perception is perception or illusion according to context'. Of course I am saying no such thing; one who says that 'the A or B is an A or a B according to context' is not saying that the A is an A or a B according to

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context, or that the B is. But this is not the main thing. Two points are more important: that the standard which that way of thinking seeks to impose, for knowing what you are talking about, could be met by introducing a conception of a flashexperience which would still not be the right one from the point of view of someone who defends what I am trying to impugn; and that ~the standard is in any case arbitrary. To take the first point. We could say 'It is the flash-experience which is perception or illusion as the case may be', without having to collapse this straight away into 'It is the flashperception or flash-illusion which is perception or illusion as the case may be', provided that a flash-experience could be defined in terms of a feature, call it flashicality, common to a flashperception and a flash-illusion. Let us assume that this can be done. Then we can say that what is perception or illusion according to the antecedent circumstances is the flashical event of which the given subject is the subject-the flashical experience. But this conception of the 'flashical experience' is still what the defender of the relevant controversial conception of an experience will want to call an irrelevant, because a merely generic one--unless he is vacillating or prevaricating. And this will come out in various ways. First and foremost; the statement that a subject has had a 'flashical experience' in this sense, is not a more precise, but on the contrary a less precise, statement than the statement that the subject perceived a flash of light, or the statement that he had the illusion of doing so. Rather as the statement that an animal has come into the room is a less, and not a more, precise statement than the statement that a cat, or the statement that a dog, has done so. The subject's having had a flashical experience, in this sense, is overentailed by his perceiving a flash of light as well as by his having the illusion of one, without there being anything to rebut the presumption which this fact creates, that 'He had a flashical experience' is a mere vague or generalized report of his doing whichever he did. It might be a little different, though not all that different, if 'flashical experience' was a little more like the common noun 'vertebrate' than it seems to be. Although we will surely judge on balance that 'A vertebrate has just come into the room' is not a more precise statement ofwhat happened when the cat came in than 'The cat has just come in', still

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there is the beginning of a case for the other view in the fact that the cat's vertebrae are part .of her, and in the fact that the detection and classification of vertebrae and vertebrates is a more accurate business than any detection or classification of cats that we ordinarily do. Another, closely connected, way in which the difference between this present conception and the relevant controversial conception will come out is that, in the case of perception, the question as to the identity or nonidentity of the 'flashical experience' with some physiological event can be put more precisely by asking whether the perceiving is identical with some physiological event; similarly, in the case of illusion, the question as to the identity or non-identity of the 'flashical experience' with some physiological event can be put more precisely as the question, whether the being illuded is identical with some physiological event. The defender of the relevant controversial conception does not agree that these are the more precise ways of putting the question; we saw this before, from another angle. Certain other ways, in which the difference between the controversial conception and this 'merely generic' conception will come out, are confined to special forms of the controversial conception. For instance, first, if the defender of experiences thinks of the experience as 'given' in a sense which involves its occurring before the first moment at which it is true that the subject perceives whatever it may be, then the experience will not be, for him, the 'flashical event' since this is, in the case of perception, simply the subject's perceiving whatever he does. Also ifhe thinks of the experience as 'given' in a sense which, without implying the temporal priority of the occurrence of what is given to the perception, implies its distinguishability as an element within the perception -then, too, the experience will not be 'the flashical experience', the perception, any more than a man's body is the man clothed. Again and thirdly, if for him the perceiving is not, and the being illuded is not, but the experience is, the very same thing as the thing that tempts the subject to a belief, then he will have to say that he does not mean the 'f1ashical experience'. Three remarks in passing are: (i) that if any of the three ideas we have just mentioned could be substantiated, then it would presumably be possible to show that some putative E-report had the desired kind of precision; (ii) that someone

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in a certain way to a flash of light of that sort, while what happens in the case of illusion is not. A new argument for the narrow identifiability of a flash-experience may then emerge, one whose property is to suggest that, otherwise, everything including the Tower of London would be a flash-experience because this would just be, 'a related phi-wise to a Z-flash or not'. Suppose someone were to say that this seemed to him to follow. A natural reply would be that it does not follow, because a flash-perception is not just 'a related phi-wise to a flash of light' or even just 'an event related phi-wise to a flash of light' ; nor is a flash-illusion just 'an event not related phi-wise to a flash of light'. But the sense of the objection is that if this is so, then a flash-perception must be 'a ... related phi-wise to a flash of light' and a flash-illusion must be 'a ... not related phi-wise to a flash of light', where what fills the blank must be, or must be short for, a description in which the what-it-is of the kind of event in question is 'narrowly' stated. Why must this be? If we are not returned, for all answer, to the ideas which have just been dismissed, then we shall probably be directed to the idea, discussed in connection 'With 'one-way neutralism' in Section 14 below, that all truth ex vi termini is from the strength ofproperly Logical terms. Since this doctrine does not command our assent, we need not agree that if it is true ex vi termini that each and every flash-perception is related phi-wise to a flash of light, then a flash-perception must be unidirectionally definable as a something-or-other which is so related, i.e. a 'somethingor-other' and a 'so related'. Similarly with an illusion and the matter of not being so related. An objector may still feel that what results from the impulse's reaching the relevant structures in the cranium, when the initial stimulus is provided by a flash of light, cannot strictly speaking be perception of a flash of light. For he may wish to assert that an effect can always be described, and is always most precisely described, in terms which do not logically entail the previous or simultaneous occurrence ofany cause, proximate or non-proximate. But perceiving a flash of light entails the occurrence of a flash of light, so we cannot strictly say that it is due to this. Nor, of course, can we offer 'flash-experiencing' as a more precise description of the effect if we explain 'flash-experiencing' merely as 'perceiving or having the illusion

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may think of the 'experience' .as that of noting the flashicality of what is happening, but there will at best be bad, glossogenic reasons of the sort mentioned towards the close of Part I for saying that such noting always occurs; and (iii) that if we decide to speak of the common flashicality of a flash-perception and a flash-illusion, we are in no way prevented from explaining this as consisting in their being respectively the perception and the illusion that there occurs a flash 'If light; indeed, I do not see that the flashicality or flash-o'-Iight-icality can very well be explained otherwise. The common 'flashicality' of the two things then consists in their being respectively what is the case if one, and what is the case if the other, disjunct of a certain specified proposition, a perception-illusion disjunction, is true. The second point I have to take about that, and I will take it very briefly indeed, is that the standard. which the abovementioned way of thinking sets up for knowing what you are talking about is arbitrary. When you look at it, what reason is there to say that the pronoun 'it', in 'it is perception or illusion, according to the circumstances', must grammatically refer to something other than 'the perception or illusion'? None. True, there is the feeling that if not everything, then .at any rate every effect, must be what you might call 'narrowly identifiable'; meaning that one can state the what-it-is of it, to a degree of exactitude which satisfies normal human interest in the matter, without having to know what its proximate, let alone more remote, cause is. But what is the feeling based on? . Surely it is based only on the tautologous fact that an effect is always narrowly identifiable where, as in a purely physiological case for instance, public procedures enable us narrowly to identify it. Here they do not, and it does not follow that private procedures do. I need not assert that they do not. The point at present is merely that a universal principle of the narrow identifiability of effects does not, in view of its basis, compel ' our assent and oblige us to attribute a narrowly identifying character to whatever procedures issue in the recording of a 'private' effect. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that the only difference between perceiving a flash of light of a certain sort and having the perfect illusion of perceiving one of that very same sort is, that what happens in the perceptual case is related

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the impulse has taken. Rather the intensity and quality of the sensation are conceived as things to be estimated by accepting the subject's report, or from other behavioural evidence, except when one happens to be the subject, in which case the assumption is that one is in no doubt as to the quality and intensity of one's sensation, even if one is unfamiliar with these terms. Another thing which is always made clear by the context is that the relevant conception of a sensation is of course a great deal broader than the narrow, colloquial, and non-theoretical, uninstructed use, the child's use, of the common noun 'a sensation', and extends to the visual case. Its breadth is just what it would be ifit resulted from two movements of the mind: an initial placement of the term 'getting a sensation' to cover all cases in which sensory, afferent, fibres have been affected in a way that causes impulses to travel along them, and a subsequent correction to exclude all cases where this has happened without the subject's thereby being made aware in any way or of anything. It is also clear that the concept is not meant to apply to humans only; the new function or predicate, 'x is having a visual sensation', will for instance normally be applied without much hesitation to the higher kinds of infrahuman subject. The application is to shade off, so as to produce uneasiness in some cases and a laugh perhaps, in the case of copilia (for which see Gregory, pp. 28 seq.). In sum one can say that the new general term is in a way of the same kind as the child's term 'a sensation', in that the experimenter pretty well takes it from the test-subject or his 'speaking' behaviour, but that it is more general in those ways, and brings with it

which reaches that area, and in another respect of the route

impulses and on their destination in the central nervous system.! The context usually, if not always, makes it clear that the notions of a sensation, of its intensity or the urgency of the message, and of its quality which are being used are not strictly physiological ones. The statement is not saying, or at any rate it is not saying only, that the character of the electrical or electrochemical change produced in a designated brain area is a function in one respect of the frequency of the impulse

Beginning to work our way back to modern scientific facts and ideas from general 'metaphysical' ideas that tend to be in our minds as we reflect on science: I should have thought that, in this whole area (the 'argument from science') most food for thought was provided by scientific statements which, without pronouncing a sensation or experience to be something that could not be described in physiological terms, assert-as holding between some physiological condition and a sensation or experience-a relation of concomitant variation; something more specific than a relation of mere succession, or that of one thing's being a partial or complete sufficient condition for another. An example would be the statement, in an introduction to human physiology for the general reader, that the intensity of a sensation or the urgency of the message received depends upon the frequency of the impulses in the sensory or afferent fibre, while its quality is determined by the particular fibre along which the impulse travels. I Or the statement, in a more detailed work intended for the student specialist, that the sensation aroused by the stimulation of any end-organ or nerve depends on the route taken by the nerve

I Bell, Davidson, and Scarborough, Textbook of Physiology and Biochemistry, Livingstone, 1968, p. 768.

ofa flash oflight' . So runs his argument. However, the principle on which it relies is dubious, and even if granted fails to apply to the case. It does not appear to be true, except in so far as it makes itself true, that an effect can always be more precisely described in terms that do not logically entail any cause. The re-description of something's being literally impressed, as its changing from one specified shape to another, is more precise only in the sense that-it does not entail any cause. You might well say that it is a good deal less exact. There is no reason to think that we always should, or that we always can, aim at that particular kind of 'precision'. Moreover, if we do aim at it, then we can sometimes achieve it by a re-description of the cause rather than the effect. Here, for instance, we can say that the subject's perceiving a flash of light was due to photons striking his retinas in a certain manner. This is not logically entailed by perceiving a flash of light, even if the occurrence of a flash of light is.

I G. L. McCulloch, Man Alive, Aldus, 1967, pp. 96-8. But McCulloch does not speak:of the 'intensity' of a sensation; others do, of course.

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general notions of intensity or urgency and kind or quality which involve a distinctive use of these terms. The notion is of course nowadays so familiar to everyone from the sixth form onwards that it comes as a shock to realize that the child's use of 'a sensation' is considerably narrower, and that the novelist's or dramatist's use will L'1. general be like the child's except when he is writing about the talk ofscientists or people interested in science (cf. Ryle, 1, chap. vii (6), and 2). So familiar is the notion, that what needs to be explained to the typical educated man who is interested in general ideas is the difficulty some of us profess to see in it; nor will he allow us more than a strictly finite amount of time in which to explain ourselves.

Those of us who worry, to use Ryle's verb, about this do not all have exactly the same worry. However, it is often that we are accustomed to sorting sentences and statements, but find it hard to say what sort of statement the statement that people get visual sensations is. I nearly said, the statement that visual sensations occur. However, a part of the difficulty is that it is not completely clear whether someone who uses the physiologically originating though (as we say) psychological notion of a visual sensation is committed to saying that the sensations occur, happen. Of course he thinks the term has instances, but it is not completely clear that he has to think of its instances as events, happenings. Had he expressed himself in a way which he might have regarded as equivalent, in terms of the urgency and kind of information or input, then it might not have been particularly tempting to interpret him as meaning that the receiving of the information was something that happened at the end ofthe line, unless in the sense merely ofits coming about that the subject is in possession of certain information. This, if we think of the sleep-taught in Brave New World-and in fact it is said that one can learn some things in that way-might be a rather oddly un-clockable sort of happening and in any case might fail to be an experience. What sort of statement is the statement that someone is having, or will have, or has had, a visual sensation?-Behind

this philosophical question there sometimes lurks the preconception that nothing but a strictly physiological statement could in any way be justified by physiological investigation in conjunction with common experience. That preconception will stand

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One is, the way in which the question whether a sensation is

accused of embodying a compartmentalism alien to the practice of creative science. The accusation is plausible, but the worry is not necessarily due to the preconception. Independently of that, at least two things are found puzzling.

an event in the central nervous system tends to be left open. And yet, if only because one can understand the suggestion that the question m'D' be based on some sort oflinguistic or logical mistake, one really ought not to be puzzled by its being left open. It would of course be a mere play upon words to accuse the person who speaks of visual sensations of not knowing what he means by them, just because he leaves the question open. In general, someone can have an entirely adequate grasp of the sense or meaning ofa term he uses while being in some way igoorant as to the precise nature of what-if anything-the term refers to. A second thing which is found puzzling is the hybrid appearance of the statement that people have visual sensations. It seems to be like a fact of common experience such as 'Biting one's tongue is painful' to the extent that everyone, ifnot blind, is supposed to be able to confirm it without more ado in his own case. On the other hand, it seems more like a scientific finding or a scientific hypothesis to this extent, that it involves a special use of terms and arises out of koowledge that uninstructed people do not possess. Within this latter, dual, category it seems more like a simple experimental finding when we remember what makes it seem like a fact of COmmon experience, and more like a hypothesis when we remember that the question as to the precise .nature of a visual sensation is left open. All this may make the philosophical critic seem to see the lion's head, the goat's body, and the serpent's tail. However, he will be accused, and it is surely a counter-criticism that has to be taken very seriously, of merely puzzling himself by having too neat and simple an 'image' of science, or of what science should be; as in the case where he assumes that only the strictly physiological can arise from investigations in which the novelty is all physiological, the discovery all physiological. Here, it may be said, .he is far too neal' to being sure that every genuinely scientific proposition must fall into one, and only one, of a number of classes which he has formed around examples drawn from other

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From the relatively determinate logical or linguistic form of this non-specific-unspecifying----.statement SSS, we can clearly say that it leaves open, and even looks to, the possibility that the so-called 'sensation' is a physiologically describable change or state. (It may be that the notion of an expression in SSS needs clarification; ifso, this is beside the present point.) The presentday statemental use of the sentence SS itself, on the other hand, is not the assertion of something to this extent formally determinate. For surely what is sometimes done in science, and what is being done here, is not to make a statement whose structure

reported by SS.'

(SSS) 'Something or other is happening or is the case in x, of which SS, in the first person present tense, is an expression. Call that state or happening the sensation non-expressly or non-formally

-are precise E-reports. They are not. They do not satisfy R. 2, the requirement of the desired kind of precision. One reason why they do not, is that they share with the above-mentioned more general statements about sensations a certain ambiguity or indeterminacy, which in itselfis no defect. It does not prevent SS, for instance, from being true in the sense intended on particular occasions, or from being couched in a terminology that may have some desirable qualities of generality and simplicity. In time and with the progress of science such a statement may lose the ambiguity or indeterminacy to which I refer; the foreseeable ways in which it may do so do not include one in which it would become a precise E-report. The ambiguity or indeterminacy I mean lies in the way in which the possibility is left open, that the visual sensation which SS mentions or tells of will turn out to be a physiologically describable event or state. To be pedantically accurate, one should perhaps say that what is left open is the possibility of the possibility. For the possibility itself would be left open only if the question as to the admissibility of the question were already decided affirmatively; as it is, for instance, in such a statement as-

(SS) 'x is having a sensation of visual quality, flash quality, and moderate intensity'

accepting that there are precise E-reports, unless certain more specific, though kindred, statements-such as

scientific fields. I find this charge hard to answer. Perhaps under these conditions people have a right to expect from the philosopher what most of them manifestly do expect: a provisional acceptance of, or at least a provisional suspension of disbelief in, the familiar idea that under certain specifiable physiological conditions 'you have a visual sensation of a certain quality and intensity'. The progress of science, rather than the animadversions of philosophers, will decide whether this idea prospers. The philosopher can still usefully do various relevant things. For a start he is entitled to point out, really as a matter of General Logic and general logicality, that the idea has not already prospered. The familiar statement, or statement-like sentential utterance, that'... you then have a visual sensation of a certain quality and intensity' is a sort of bracket into which it is hoped to insert a statement, rather than already a statement in any real or substantial sense. For a sentence of that form has statement-meaning in proportion as it is possible to specify, '... for instance ...', and to do so convincingly over the relevant wide range of cases. Yet the sense of well-being associated with the idea that '... you then have a visual sensation of a certain quality and intensity' is at its greatest when nothing whatever is attempted by way of exemplification, since this attempt soon encounters the dilemma ofhow to avoid a discredited 'atomism' of coloured patches or what not, without having embarrassing recourse to sensations of cat quality, or lecturer quality, or room-full-of-people quality, and fair or unremarkable intensity. The statement, that'... you then have a visual sensation of a certain quality and intensity', has an air of being preceded by a tacit prefix, 'The precise account ofwhat happens is that .. .'. Here the reference must of course be to statements which specify the quality and intensity; nobody can really think that 'You have a visual sensation of a certain quality and intensity' is in itself a precise account of what happens at any time. The philosopher can also ask various questions. For instance, he can ask whether acceptance of the idea of a visual sensation commits us to accepting that there are precise E-reports. Surely it does not. The general statement that those of us who are not totally blind have visual sensations, and such statements as have been quoted from scientific works, can hardly commit us to

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is to that extent clear and whose application will in due course be rather neatly ascertained. It is to make a statement whose logical form will be determined, within quite wide limits, by the subsequent progress of science. The decision, that it makes sense to ask whether a gene is a molecule, need not be taken unless and until it is found that the question has an answer. Now if the notion of a 'sensation' does not become what it is in SSS, then the visual sensation in question will remain identifiable only as 'that which is expressly reported by SS'. In neither case will we have been given any fresh reason to think that SS had, or has come to have, the desired kind of precision. We shall essentially be back at the situation that obtained in respect of S. At least three factors tend to obscure this. One is that we may not at all times distinguish sharply enough between two quite different possibilities: the possibility that SS will turn into something like SSS, and the possibility that SS "ill turn into a specific, a specifying statement, wholly physiological in its verification, which expressly reports the cerebral event or state to which SSS alludes or refers.' In neither case would SS have turned into a precise E-report, but this fact is obscured by the fact that in the second case it would have come to 'answer the question as to what happened to the subject' in Sense A. (Some will plausibly say, at the price of changing its meaning altogether. That is not my present concern.) A second obscuring factor is the terminology of 'intensity', 'extending across the whole visual field' and so forth, borrowed from spheres in which similar terms are associated with public, intersubjective methods of physical measurement and trailing clouds of glory from those spheres. A third obscuring factor is the idea that if, as it is tempting to think, such a statement as SS in the first person can be said to report the speaker's b-experiencing of a brain-process, then it must at least be an E-report, precise or not. This does not follow at all. Assuming for the sake of argument that one may be said to b-experience a brain-process when one sees, visually perceives, a flash of light, and also when one has the illusion of doing so; there is no reason why one should not be said to I To talk only in terms of 'what a sensation may turn out to be' is to make it almost impossible for oneself to make this distinction.

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b-experience the brain-process in and by perceiving the flash of light, or in and by having the illusion. In the case ofperception, the db-experiencing of the flash of light-where this db notion implies a certain clarity, as we said-would also be the b-lexperiencing of the brain-process; having in that aspect the characteristic unclarity of b-l-experiencing. Thus SS, if it were the same thing in other words as a perception-illusion disjunction, or if it were 'merely generic' in the other way, could be called a report of one's having b-experienced the brain process in One of those ways. Whether one can in fact properly be said, in and by b-experiencing a flash oflight, to b-experience also a brain-process, is a question I need not decide. It is a purely lexical question, to whose discussion a backdrop of white coats in a laboratory would be quite incongruous-except in the sense that any answer, yes or no, makes an assumption which could be confirmed from that quarter. The point is that even if the answer is yes, we need not posit an E-report. In connection with the second of those factors, the vocabulary, the question arises whether such a statement as SS could in time acquire the desired kind of precision through a largescale matching of subjects' reports about intensity, quality, extent to which the visual field is filled, etc., with electroencephalographic or other experimental evidence. At present, within certain limits, only I can estimate the 'intensity' of my 'flash-quality sensation', and I shall estimate it as intense in exact proportion as I would, if I expressed myself differently, estimate that I perceive or have the illusion of perceiving a flash of light which is bright. However, it may in time become customary to regard either the frequency of the impulses, or something else which is ascertainable in the same public way, as an index of the intensity of the sensation. And perhaps a whole new test-subject's vocabulary, a large one, of qualitative discrimination between sensations will be devised, which is found to match an experimenter's vocabulary, equally large, of discrimination between brain-states. Will the kind of statement which SS exemplifies then have acquired the desired kind of precisionr-i-Are the ultra-hard data of the philosophy of here and now, conceived as a kind of report, a rational hope for the future? If so, would this show that the data, conceived as things to be reported on, are already with us?

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l The basis here would be science fiction of the bad sort, the sort that conceives theoretical possibility as the mere undisprovability of the possibility of the relevant condition, i.e. the unprcvability of its impossibility.

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rebut the suggestion that 'illusion of seeing a flash of light' would at any rate be a more exact, because more informative, description? Will he say that this is more exact but that the other description is more precise? If so, how will he make this claim good? (ii) If I do not become a rival authority as to the quality, type, and intensity of the sensation I -am having, then a plain physiological statement could be substituted. If I do become a rival authority, the new kind of report being inserted into the context of my ordinary expressions, then the question of the logical relation of the new kind of report to my ordinary expressions, and so to perception-illusion disjunctions, can again be raised. (iii) If the possibility we are to envisage is that I am instructed in the new terminology in something like, and yet necessarily also unlike, the manner above mentioned, by experimental intervention, from birth, as a substitute for the learning of language as we know it, then the whole matter ceases to be of much interest because the science, philosophy, or ideology of 'sensations' is supposed to provide a basis for, rather than to be based on, science fiction. I I have concentrated on the question whether Sand SS are precise E-reports, because I do not see what would be the case for saying that they are E-reports but not precise ones. However, I shall return to the question of non-precise E-reports in 10 (ii) (B). Such statements as Sand SS do not, I am saying, really have the precision which we are tempted to attribute to them by the kind of generalization and simplification they involve. Generalization and _simplification regularly go with precision and exactitude in mathematics, and they are compatible with precision in the description of phenomena as we have said (in 8 (i)) so it is not surprising that one should be thus tempted. Such statements as S and SS cut off any entailm.ent about the environment and stop short of a perceptual claim; this makes them seem precise until we reflect that perception-illusion disjunctions do the same. Such statements are made with care, care not to offend the absurd 'sceptic' whom We philosophers keep talking about, and perhaps with a meticulous, wine-tasting

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

Even if the answer to both questions were affirmative, this would not show that anything was or might become an R· statement, a hard-core E-report so to speak. Under R. 5 the subject not only must be able to ascertain that his statement has the desired kind of precision, but also he must be able to do this without relying on any undischarged assumption about the physical.-Otherwise, his statement would not bean experiencereport in a sense cognate with the sense of 'an experience' that is required for-the questions about an 'external' world that were mentioned at the outset. But in any case the answer to the first of those questions is surely no, so that the second question falls to the ground. My reason for saying so, is as follows. Either the matching could, or it could not, be done by using perceptionillusion disjunctions instead of 'quality and urgency ofsensation' sentences. If it could be done with perception-illusion disjunctions, on the model of correlating higher or lower frequency of impulse with reports of perceiving or having the illusion of perceiving something more or less bright, then since perceptionillusion disjunctions simply do not have the desired degree of precision, it is hard to see why such large-scale matching should be regarded as evidence of some other kind of sentence's having it. If the thing could not be done with perception-illusion disjunctions, then it is not easy to see what precise form the training or instruction of a subject in the new test-subject's vocabulary of sensation-quality and sensation-intensity could take. At present, to the extent that I know how to use the embryonic form of the vocabulary, I do so by assuring that certain translations from my everyday vocabulary-which 'Can be drilled and marshalled into one of perception-reports, illusion-reports, perception-illusion disjunctions, and other things-are in order. It is not clear how it would be, to manage differently. Is this the idea: that at some time in the future I am perhaps to be taught the vocabulary by the experimenter's producing in me by interference with my head certain physiologically describable states, and telling me things like 'Call this a retinal sensation of Type One; call this a cochlear sensation of Type One; and call these, sensations of the same intensity but of different general quality'? The following comments and questions seem relevant. (i)_ How, if he gives me a phosphene and tells me to call it a retinal sensation of Type One, can he

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selection of some locution in preference to another; this makes them seem accurate until we reflect that perception-illusion disjunctions can involve the same kinds of care. Such statements may be a reply to an exacting series of questions and may be expressed in a terminology whose use is enforced by an exacting taskmaster; this makes .them seem exact until we reflect that perception-illusion disjunctions can have that kind of 'exactitude'-pity the poor student who is always compelled to substitute, for his spontaneous expression, the nearest perception-illusion disjunction in due canonical form. By the way, this task, though irksome, is not as difficult as lack of familiarity with it might suggest. Given some so-called neutral sensation-statement, seem-statement, or experiencereport which one has made or is disposed to make, one can try asking oneself: 'So, it is to me a little, quite a bit, 'or exactly as if I perceived-what?' If the answer is '... as if I perceived X', then 'I perceive X or I am having the illusion of doing so' will in substance be the nearest 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunction. There remain syntactical and interpretative refinements that will be dealt with in IIc. In the cases on which philosophical attention tends mainly to focus, there will moreover be an 'I perceive X' which I am tempted to believe to be true, and the nearest perception-illusion disjunction can be formed from this. Of course there is, after these questions-'It is to me as if I perceived what?' and 'I am tempted to believe that I perceive what?'-a tacit'. . . exactly' which relates, not at all to its being exactly as if I perceived something, but to the task of making one's -answer neither more nor less specific than the selected 'neutral experience-report'. If no particular 'neutral experience-report' has been selected, then the whole matter had best be dropped; I cannot find the perception-illusion disjunction that best suits my case without specifying my case, either in perception-illusion-disjunctive terms or in other terms. If the terms in which I specify it do not enable me, even with Socratic prompting, to answer either of those questions, then it is not easy to see how my 'experience' can be relevant to perception. 10 (ii) (B). Miscellaneous arguments. An objector may think it worth while to point out, rather quaintly perhaps, that a given

10

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I,

perception and its perfect illusion 'have something in common' ; the conclusion he draws is that there is an E-report which reports the occurrence of that which the two things have in common. We shall go over a part of this in IIc----or to eliminate the terrain from the image, we shall do some going that has a family resemblance to the going which this calls for. So let us say briefly that it would be very strange indeed to declare that a perception and its perfect illusion had nothing in common. It would be a little like saying that a man and his nephew were no kin. When we give a sharper focus to the broad, soft-focus, analozical notion of 'having something in common', the fact of beingbrespectively a perception and the perfect illusion of that very perception is one of the things we sometimes find. A perception and its perfect illusion have, by way of und:rstatement, something in common in that they are, respectIvely,. a perception and its perfect illusion. If our objector chooses o~ tries to see it the other way round, this is not for any particular reason but just by way of a general preconception. He tries to " apply the model of the earth-sun system and the earth-moon system to all cases where the analogical talk of 'something in common' is in any sense or way appropriate. To two patches of the same shade of red-where the model has already broken down-for a start, and further down the line to a perception and its perfect illusion; either as instances of, for example, 'seeing a flash' in a broad sense, or as instances of 'having something in common' in a broad sense (cf. Wittgenstein 1, Geach). One of the reasons why we feel that the philosophicalpsychological 'visual experience' cannot be the ghostly impulse, the needless reduplication of the posited cerebral common element which Ryle says it is, is that we are inclined to open our eyes wide and say 'This is no ghostly impulse!' Some of the apt retorts, such as 'To judge by the direction of your gaze you are referring to the eat's washing itself', are contextdependent. However, a retort appropriate to all situational contexts is that one does not ascertain the what-it-is of what is going on by calling it 'This'. Nor can you in this way ascertain the what-it-is of any putative object of reference; why some logicians sometimes say that the word 'this' identifies, it is hard to see. Certainly the speaker's or thinker's intention is adequate

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to guarantee that he does not 'mean the cat, or the eat's washing itself' ; it can guarantee that he has neither the one nor the other in mind. In the same way his intention can guarantee that, even in the perceptual case, he does not have his perceiving in mind -in other words, his thought is not, that his perceiving is no ghostly impulse. What his intention 'cannot unaidedly guarantee is that the event of which he is the subject, and in respect of which he is quite rightly averring that it is no ghostly impulse, is not his perceiving. Still less, since he has given no description ofwhat is happening, can it guarantee that he has given a more precise description of his perceiving. But is it not the very same experience, when one sees a flash of light and when one has the perfect illusion of doing so? Well; the perfect or indistinguishable illusion is, to the subject, from itself alone, indistinguishable from the perception. And you can dress up this tautology as 'The perfect illusion is experientially, subjectively the same as the perception', and this in turn as "The perfect illusion is the same experience as the perception'. However, the relation underlying this growth of verbiage is non-syrnmetrical.jmlike identity. From the fact that 'you could not tell this from the real i:hiiig', it does not follow that you could not tell the real thing from this; the real thing may occur only under a condition which is not present to the memory in the case of the simulacrum, and which issues in

decision. Though it does not follow it may nevertheless be true that, given the perception, you could not 'then and there' tell it from the perfect illusion; if 'then' is defined narrowly enough. Even when this is true, it does not follow that on each occasion something occurs the report of which would be an E-report; your premiss is merely that the perception and the illusion cannot, under certain conditions, be told apart by the subject himself. Some people feel that you must have a ground for a perception-illusion disjunction. Why? Are they unprepared for a contingent disjunction to be assertible without a ground? If so, they have perhaps forgotten that their suppositious E-report .could itself be formulated as a disjunction unless there are absolutely simple propositions. Moreover, even if it were to be shown that the now widely rejected doctrine of absolutely simple propositions was wrongly rejected, it would still be

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necessary for the objector to show that none but absolutely simple propositions can be both contingent, and assertible without a ground. This idea certainly looks like a mere confusion between what makes a thing true and what makes a thing known..A disjunction cannot be true otherwise than by one of its disjuncts being true, but of course this does not mean-nor is it true-that a disjunction cannot be known otherwise than by one of its disjuncts beiog known. If this were true, then a , perception-illusion disjunction could never take the agnostic suffix, '. . . I don't.know which', and the philosophy of 'experiences' could not get started.

If someone says, of a certain non-disjunctive 'neutral' state.ment relevant to perception in which he is interested, that it is certainly no precise E-report since it has no kind of precision; then we can apply the following procedure. We can find out what descriptions he does regard as applicable to the statement, and we can ask whether those descriptions are ever applicable to a perception-illusion disjunction. If there is no 'perception-illusion disjunction to which they are applicable, then we can ask how we are to be sure of their applicability to the statement itself. Obviously in some rather trivial cases, such as that of the description, 'not (explicitly) disjunctive', there will be no problem about this: however, if we run in this way through the descriptions which we found in Section 8 to be inapplicable, or hardly worth applying, to explicit perceptionillusion disjunctions, then I do not myself really see how it is even to be shown that anyone of them is both applicable and worth applying to some other kind of sentence or statement relevant to a flash oflight-except that the (precision-implying) description of 'answering the question in Sense A' is applicable and worth applying to a physiological statement.' Whatever may be the reader's considered view on this, he may perhaps find that suggested procedure a useful approach in the case of alleged examples of non-precise E-reports. To test the idea of its beiog so, I will take an interesting example. A. J. Ayer introduces (Ayer, chap. 3) the locution

I Well; perhaps the description, 'phenomenological description', is sometimes at a pinch worth applying to such a statement as 'I perceive a flash of light which looks to me like a flashlight signal'.

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question, a difference in respect of its being worth while. to apply the tag, 'statement which describes an experience that would be the same etc.'-eall it Tag T-unless there is also a difference between my perceiving a flash of light on a given occasion and my then and there having a flash in sight. I see no difference here. And if you think that someone ought to claim to see a difference where you see none, then surely you can quite properly ask 'What is the difference?' without fear that the question will normally be turned to 'What is the sameness?' If I were to say, without particular emphasis, that there must be a difference not only between those statements, but also between those particular events or states of affairs, this would just be a way of saying what has already been said. Or, if you prefer, it would be a way of saying that, if Tag T is to apply to 'I have a flash in sight', then it must not be the case that in the ordinary meaning of the words 'there is no difference' between my perceiving a flash oflight on a given particular occasion and my then and there having a flash in sight. This need not have anything to do with there being two ofsome kind or classification which you still use when you express yourself as clearly as you can, one member of the pair being my then and there perceiving a flash of light, and the other my then and there haviog a flash in sight. There being 'a difference' between things, in this sense, does not really require that the things make two of any such kind; any more than there being 'no difference' between things, in this sense, requires that the things be one of some such kind. For example, there is obviously no difference between my perceiving a flash of light on a given occasion and my then and there either doing so or haviog the illusion of doing so; whether or not these 'things' make one of some such kind or classification. The demand for a 'criterion of identity', tied to a class-name or general term, would be over-solemn here. I say there is obviously no difference in this last case; someone may retort that there is a difference, and that it is this: one's seeing a flash of light on a given occasion logically entails various things, such as itself, and there being a flash oflight on that occasion, which one's then and there either seeing a flash of light or having the illusion of doing so does not entail. There is more than one point of view from which this ought not to be called a difference between those things. Many will be drawn

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

'I have X in sight as one which is to be true for as long as it is true that I see X; the point being that the new locution has a linguistic form which should, Ayer suggests, enable one to say that what it expressly reports is an experience, in the sense in which R yle says that seeing is not an experience; it will be remembered that I attach little importance to that. (Ayer's new locution is not very happy in the case of a flash of light. It would be happier in the case of a light; as it might be, the port navigation-light of a vessel, or anything else that one can be required to keep in sight or hold in view.) Rather importantly the descriptions which Ayer would inferentially regard as applicable to such statements as '1 have a flash in sight' or 'I have a light in sight' include these: 'statement which describes an experience that would be the same whether a flash of light really occurred or not' (' ... whether a light was really there or not'). We virtually held (in 8 (ii)) that these descriptions or tags are not worth applying to perception-illusion disjunctions, such as 'Either I see a flash of light or I am having the perfect illusion of doing so' and 'Either I am keeping a light in sight or I am haviog the perfect illusion of doing so'. We even held virtually that you might go further, and say that the tags are very well worth not applying to perception-illusion disjunctions, sO misleading would they be. 1 do not see how it can be shown that the tags are, in contrast, worth applying to the abovementioned statements to which, inferentially, Ayer would apply them. Which is to say that I do not see how these statements can be shown to be even non-precise E-reports. To some readers it may seem that the burden of proof lies on my shoulders. They may further think that it is an undischargeable burden, if they assume that I would have to establish, as holding between the Ayerian statement, 'I have a flash in sight', and the disjunctive statement, 'Either 1 see a flash of light or I am having the perfect illusion of doing so', a relation of absolute synonymy; or a dubious, context-independent, unidirectional'... means -' in that order; or somehow, both these relations at once. ' As 1 see it, it is not a matter of my having to establish anything. For although there is of course a difference between those two' sentences or statements, I find it hard to see how there can be the particular difference between them which is in

99

and for short, the requirement of the right kind of precision. If this is right, then I can only conclude that the idea of the statement's being well described by Tag T without meeting that requirement is an absurdity, so that the idea of its being an E-report without meeting that requirement is also an absurdity.

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Of course there are many ideas, apart from those that have been discussed in this section, which could be considered as arguments for the existence of E-reports. Some will be, or have been, handled. For instance in lIc, Section 1+, I shall reject what I call one-way neutralism, under which heading are considered some ideas that could have been brought in here. And Part I was meant to show, among other things, that the case for there being events whose esse is to be b-experienced is not strong enough to provide support for the doctrine that there are E-reports. Strictly speaking we ought perhaps not to count, as arguments, statements to the effect that some undoubted fact makes some indistinct conclusion mysteriously attractive: say the fact that we have afterimagery and the conclusion that we have sense-impressions, or the fact that an afterimage can be mistaken for a stain on the carpet and the conclusion that perception and illusion involve something of the same category. Without an exact definition of the conclusion and a clear view of the rule by which it is to be derived from the premiss, it cannot be true to say what is sometimes said, that we at least seem or appear to be bound to derive the conclusion. On the contrary, we at least seem or appear to be bound not to derive it. The whole battery of arguments in favour of sense-data proper could of course be brought in, to the extent that they are applicable. The painterly, draughtsmaulike, or collagemaker's vocabulary of patches, lines, expanses, shapes, specks, blobs, stipplings, etc. is admittedly not at its best here: what, of that sort, would we be alleged to see, in the case of a flash of light? If the flash of light is like forked lightning, then a 'streak' perhaps; it is not very good. The best notations, for 'such a flash are rather non-representational, but it does not seem likely that we see a Fascist political symbol or an Australian

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

to the view of A. N. Prior, that it is not a difference between anything and anything, because 'My then and there seeing a flash of light entails .. .' is like 'If I then and there see a flash oflight, then.. .'. However, all that need be pointed out is that if you do callthat a difference, then you will say that it is 'not a difference in rebus', since it is the sort of 'difference' there is between the death of the victor of Austerlitz and the death of the husband of Josephine. In those terms, then, the point is that-given the context-if Tag T is to be appropriate to 'I have a flash in sight' then it must not be the case that there is no difference in rebus between my perceiving a flash of light on a given occasion and my then and there having a flash in sight. An objector may ask, 'Why?-Why ought Ayer in your view to claim that there is a difference between those things?' It is tempting to reply that it is precisely because (for reasons that lie beyond our present concerns) Ayer does not claim precision for statements like 'I have a flash in sight'. Might not the idea, thatTag T could be: appropriate to such a statement without there being 'a difference', stand or fall by the claim that such a statement was-s-in the case of perception-a more precise account of the perception than the perception-report itself? If this claim were sound, then Tag T would be appropriate to the statement because one's 'having a flash in sight' was simply one's perceiving a flash of light, more precisely described. In contrast, it looks as if a philosopher who-quite rightly, I would say-s-docs not claim precision for the statement, but who still regards Tag T as applying to it, has got to see a difference between those things. However, to rest the position on what looks as if it might be the case would irritate some readers. I will rest it, just as precariously, on a set of indubitable facts: that I do not see any difference between those things, do not see that one can be expected to accept that there is a difference until one sees a difference, and do not see how Tag T can be appropriate to the statement if it is not precise and moreover there is no difference between those things. Someone may object, or rather interject, that if there were a difference between those things, then the statement would be 'the beginning of a more exact account of what happened, and consequently would in that way meet what I called, roughly

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aboriginal's bark-painting notation fur lightning. However, this is not an essay on sense-data proper. 11. Something about which nothing can be said If there is no reason to think that there are E-reports, then is there any reason to think that there occur events which would be explicitly reported by E-reports if there were any E-reports to report them, but which in the absence of E-reports cannot be reported or described at all? It does not seem to me that any of the trains of thought we have considered, as possibly leading to a belief in the existence of E-reports, can be adapted so as to become good arguments for this rather strange idea. The nearest was, perhaps, the train of thought which projected E-reports as a possibility for the future; we found it wanting. I know of no better argument for this idea of unreportable Eevents, so to speak; it is hardly the sort of idea one can accept without a reason. Its acceptance seems unwarranted. Yet it is not easy to see what else but this idea can be intended by philosophers who say that we cannot describe our sensations. They do not mean that I cannot describe the sensation which I do describe, quite well, as 'the queer tickling sensation you get all up your spine when you are a fourteen-year-old boy and the attractive art mistress looks over your shoulder'. Nor do they mean that we cannot make perception-claims and illusionreports, or assert perception-illusion disjunctions.

12. Comments The question in 10 is, if one likes to say so, a question as to the existence or non-existence of a certain terminology, one in which E-reports can be couched. In that sense it is a terminological question, unlike the question in 11. However, it is not a question, any answer to which merely expresses a preference for one way of putting something, as against another way of putting the same thing. If one person dislikes another's way of speaking when he reports that he has just had a bluish-white experience, this is because the first person finds this way of speaking ambiguous and suspects that the speaker, or someone,

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may be disposed to credit the report with properties it does not possess. One may have this suspicion without being able to say exactly what the properties are, and perhaps this is why it sometimes appears as if one merely disliked the way ofspeaking. One's thought then is, 'I don't think your statement is-something or other'. The reply is, 'You don't think my statement is what?' It seems a fair question and I have tried to answer it. I do not think his statement, or any other statement, is an Rstatement, for a start, or any other kind of E-report, to be going on with. To call the claim that there are E-reports unwarranted, and to take the same adverse view of the claim that there are unreportable events which E-reports would report if there were E-reports, is to resist what seems like part of a whole way of thinking. If this is indeed what it is, then the scrutiny of the rest of that way of thinking-a-the complicated ideology, presumably, which has to be grasped by one who would understand Anglo-American social and political institutions-would be an interesting way of broadening the question. A different way of broadening it would be, to expand this essay's limited taxonomy of the visible in order to treat generally of vision, or sense-perception. This would almost certainly involve altering the hypothetical case, from the case of a flash of light; as distinct from, and perhaps as well as, making other cases bear on that case, a thing we shall in the end to some extent have done. Altering the hypothetical case, and to that extent changing the subject, doubtless has various attractions. Not doing so might, on the other hand, help to decide whether there is so much as one case of what passes for perception in which no 'experience' in the crucial sense or non-sense occurs; for this reason, it might help us to decide as to the truth or falsity of a whole philosophy, wider than Hume's, which is essentially an ali-or-nothing venture. At any rate this book does not try to describe, let alone explain, vision-or any other psychological act, unless in an unexpected sense: it is a contribution to the perennial process of stating the what-it-is, in this case and that, of the illegitimate intellectual act known as reification or hypostatization. The object is chiefly to be able to decide when one, or another, has been guilty of the act; also to assess the idea that it consists in

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mistaking an ensfor a res. What is said in this essay tends rather towards the view that it is sufficient for the act if you accept something which satisfies three conditions: first, that you had no business to accept it; second, that it can be expressed in the form 'There has X-hood at least one X'; third, that it owes its plausibility to our ordinary forms of expression or our too simplistic attempts to get behind them. You have every right to accept some things that satisfy the second and third conditions: for instance, a manifest truth to the effect that there is, there has 'form-of-expression-hood', a certain ordinary form of expression. Or if you find, on reflection, that you do not want to distinguish between the thing you accept and some 'other' or other-looking thing, a thing whose acceptance is indisputably warranted. However, it does seem to me to be an example of illegitimate reification, and of what is glossogenic in the bad sense, to accept that there has 'experience'-hood so much as one 'experience' relevant to our hypothetical case, ·if by such an 'experience' one means an event that is explicitly reported by some E-report or an event that would be so reportable ifthere was an E-report to report it.

( 103)

.rr-

PERCEPTION -ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (2)

A closer look is now taken at perception-illusion disjunctions and their constituent parts. In Section 13 the sense of 'perception' involved is examined in relation to belief and othermatters. In Section 14 the sense qf'illusion' involved is studied. This study ends in the discussion rif a once strong, but today much weakened, preconception, here called one-way neutralism, on which the controversial notion of an experience has sometimes depended.

13. Perception, and other matters

I will now go into detail about the constituent parts of perception-illusion disjunctions; first, the part about perception. We can often see some of the logically relevant properties of some sentence, 'P', most clearly if we consider the sentence in what you might call-s-a non-assertive context. This phrase can be used in various ways; what I mean by it is, any context of 'p' in which it would not be true to say in the ordinary meaning of the words that anybody had 'explicitly said, stated, that P', and in which moreover it would not be true to say that anybody had in that sense said or stated anything, from which it followed logically that p. For short; a context of 'p' in which neither explicitly nor implicitly has anyone said, stated that p. Here we have a case in point, I mean a case where it is useful to consider a sentence in a non-assertive context. If we make the letter f an abbreviation for 'A flash of light is occurring', then it is true to say that we can get a particularly clear view of the logical properties of the sentence,

"x perceives thatf',

V

ex is having the illusion thatf)'.

by considering it for instance in the context of the perceptionillusion- disjunction.

'ex perceives thatf)

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IIe

This disjunction is much the same as the one we called D'. Of course a disjunction, like any other sentence, can itself occur in a non-assertive context. But .let us assume that someone commits himself to what that disjunction says and means with reference to himself. It may seem obvious that our hypothetical subject does this, when he states D*. In fact I intend to confirm that he does, though it is not quite obvious. Let us rule that in committing himself to that disjnnction, and in being the person to whom it relates, he uses an'!' which is like 'I, Claudius'. Then we can say that he, Claudius or x, states or says or reports that he, x, . • . vel . . . It is, made clear in advance that the hearer is not being licensed to pick up, from the statement, any idea except this one: that he would be wrong if he thought that the speaker neither perceived nor had the illusion of perceiving (that there occurred) a flash of light. Or, in the case of D*, that he would be wrong if he thought, ,Of no sort of flash of light is it true to say either that the speaker perceived, or that he had the illusion of perceiving, (that there occurred) a flash of light of that sort'. Since that is made clear in advance, I take it that there is not going to be anything troublesome in the nature of what H. P. Grice has called a doubt-or-denial condition, to restrict the use of this kind of neutral appearstatement, a pointed perception-illusion disjunction (Grice). But I was beginning to say that there are some properties which the sentence 'x perceives thatf' has, and which we can clearly see it to have when we consider it in the context of a perception-illusion disjunction. To give the properties names as a prelude to saying what they are: in this context the verb 'to perceive', or the special verb of perception such as 'to see, visually perceive' if such a verb is used, can be not narrowly doxastic; at the same time plain, and consequently both broadly doxastic and objective.

Not narrowly doxastic. Not narrowly doxastic. By a narrowly doxastic sense of a verb, 'to V that p', I mean a sense in which the saying 'He who V's that p, believes that p' is true, and true in virtue of the meaning of that verb, 'to V that p'. A not narrowly doxastic sense of '» perceives that p', then, will be a sense in which this does not logically entail that x believes that p. (Consequently it

13

PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (2)

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I05

will also not entail that x knows that p, if knowing a thing entails believing it. However, I shall not discuss whether knowing a thing does entail believing it.) Another aspect ofthe matter is this. Since a sense of '» perceives that p' which is not narrowly doxastic is a sense in which x may perceive that p while needing to be told that p; and since you can hardly need to be told that p and yet not need to be. told that you perceive that p ; a not narrowly doxastic sense of 'perceive' is one in which a person can need to be told that he is perceiving something. That the expression 'x perceives that P' can be used in a sense which is not narrowly doxastic, is to be seen by reflection on what I believe to be two facts, though some people will want to regard them as non-facts. They are these, (1) that one may have occasion to say or think 'Either I perceive that p, or else I am having the illusion that p; I don't know which' and (2) that one may have occasion to say or think 'Either I perceived that p, or else I had the illusion that p; I didn't and still don't know which'. Objectors there will be, as I say, who think that one really cannot have occasion to say those things. I assume they will advance one of two contentions. They will contend either that 'perceive' is always used to mean what we earlier (Part I) called apperception, or that at any rate 'perceive that p', as distinct for instance from 'perceive an X', is always used in the sense of apperception. They would, I assume, grant that my two facts are facts if you express them in terms of seeing X and having the illusion of seeing X, but they may not like it with 'see that P' or 'visually perceive that p'. I am going to assume that these objectors are wrong; I will do my best to vindicate the assumption, shortly. Now the 'I don't know which' and the 'I didn't know which', in those things I say we can say and think, are idiomatic. They mean, or they can very well mean, not only that I do not or did not know, but also that I have or had no belief as to which. We are of course familiar with many contexts in which 'don't know' means 'have no belief', and this can be one of them. It can easily be shown that 'perceive' is not being used in what I called a narrowly doxastic sense if and when the speaker's whole thought is the one mentioned in (1) or in (2) above, and his 'I don't/didn't know which' means that he has or had no belief 8244037

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as to which. For if 'perceive' had a narrowly doxastic sense in such a context as that, then the speaker could validly reason in the following absurd way: 'Either I perceive that p, or I am having the illusion that p. Now I do not have the belief that p. Nor do I have the belief that I am having the illusion that p. But from the fact of my not having the first of those beliefs it follows that I do not perceive that p. So I must be having the illusion that p-.although, as I have just said, I do not believe that I am.' That, of course, is an absurd train of thought even without the last' twist; we must conclude that 'perceive' does not have a narrowly doxastic sense in such a context as that. Moreover, though less obviously, we must conclude that 'perceive' is not narrowly doxastic when, although the agnostic suffix 'I've no belief as to which' is not a part of the speaker's or thinker's thought, it could be added without licensing the absurd inference just mentioned. For the question, whether 'perceive' in a given context is narrowly doxastic or not, is a question as to the logical consequences it has. If and when it .is narrowly doxastic, it has absurd consequences when combined with the agnostic suffix, and these are just the same whether it and the suffix are thought to be true or not. You can, in actual point of fact, often add the suffix without licensing the absurd inferences, and this proves that 'perceive' in a perception-illusion disjunction is often not narrowly doxastic. Someone may want to go further and say 'never' instead of 'often not', because he thinks that the agnostic suffix is always part of the thought in 'Either ... or - ' ; so that any assumption, on which paradox would result from making this part of the thought explicit, must be wrong. I reject his view, in accordance with my caveat that 'vel', not 'Either ... or -', is what I am talking about if there is a difference. The agnostic suffix is quite certainly not a part of what is meant by ' ... vel -', nor is the truth of the suffix a condition of the permissibility of asserting the vel-statement. Possibly the colloquial 'Either ... or - ' is only said when one means that one 'does not know which'; if so, this is irrelevant. So I say only, that 'perceive' in a perception-illusion disjunction is often not narrowly doxastic. True, this may make us wonder momentarily whether the verb is ever narrowly doxastic. And we must not reason, 'It

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sometimes is, because you can hardly believe or accept that you perceive that p, without believing that p'. This last-mentioned fact does not prove, though it may give rise in error to, the conclusion that you cannot perceive that p without believing that p. The missing premiss is, ofcourse, that you cannot perceive that p, without believing or accepting that you perceive that p. And this is false, since you can truly say, 'Either I perceive that p or I am having that illusion; I have no belief as to which is the case', without the case being one of illusion. I Still, it may well be that 'perceive' is sometimes narrowly doxastic. For perhaps it is sometimes, even often, used to mean what I called apperception, since the verb 'to apperceive' is used so little. By definition, in 'apperception that p', the mind is not deceived as to the fact that p, though the eye may be. Thus '» apperceives that P' is narrowly doxastic-unless it is just epistemic. One can therefore hardly say 'Either I apperceive that p, or I am having that illusion; I don't know which and I have no belief as to which, and I don't know whether p or not and I have no belief as to that either'. This being what you certainly can say with 'see', and what I maintain you can say, in one sense, with 'perceive'. However, it will be objected that whatever seeing for instance may sometimes be, visual or other perception is by definition always and only a form of realization; so that 'perceive' is always used to mean 'apperceive'. It might seem right for me to reply concessively, that 'perceive' is certainly a rather serious old verb, not much used nowadays in non-theoretical discourse; that perhaps it is always confined, and anyway it can be confined if you like, to apperception; and that the point I have made about 'perceive' having a sense which is not narrowly doxastic can be made in terms of 'see', etc., instead. However, I do not think that it would be right for me to reply in this concessive way, I think that a point of substance is involved. For sometimes, in a perception-illusion disjunction, there is no special verb of perception like 'see' that you can substitute; it must be 'perceive' itself that has the not narrowly doxastic sense. There are things you can perceive by means of your senses without perceiving by anyone sense-s-Plato

I C£ Martin and Deutscher, 'Remembering', Philosophical Review, 1966, for a similar argument; cf also Warnock.

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sense, the same thing as to perceive by means of one's senses three thunderstorm signs, or a Jovian triad. x might in a sense be said to see a flash, hear a bang, and feel a drop without perceiving three thunderstorm signs if x happened to be a dog, or for some other reason lacked the concept of a thunderstorm or a thunderstorm sign; or if x had these concepts, but was a Bushman whose 'one, two, many' number-series was not quite up to saying how many thunderstorm signs a flash, a bang, and a drop made. In which case x would not perceive a Jovian triad either. We may adapt here the familiar distinction which we used in the case of seeing at the end of Part 1. The Bushman and I both perceive what are in fact three thunderstorm signs, and what is in fact a Jovian triad. But this is all the Bushman does; I also perceive three thunderstorm signs and a Jovian triad, as distinct from only perceiving what are in fact three thunderstorm signs and what is in fact a Jovian triad. Now the point is that in the enriched perception-illusion disjunction, 'Either I perceive three thnnderstorm signs or I am having that illusion; I don't know which', 'perceive' can, or even must, have the narrower or more 'proper' of those senses, the one in which the Bushman does not perceive three thunderstorm signs. Moreover in that context it can, or must, have a sense which is not narrowly doxastic, and in which therefore it does not mean 'apperceive'; yet it. cannot simply be analysed out by verbs like 'see', 'hear', and 'feel'. Whether it can be, so to speak, complicatedly analysed out, by such verbs together with verbs like 'know', 'remember', 'understand', and 'learn the meaning of', I do not know; it is at any rate clearer that it can occur in a sense which is not narrowly doxastic here, than that it can be so analysed here. The sense of the objection was to brush aside uses of 'perceive' that appeared not to be narrowly doxastic, and in that sense it fails. Not only 'see', 'hear', etc. but also 'perceive', can be not narrowly doxastic. However, someone will quite rightly point out that what I undertook to show was not merely that 'perceive' can have such a sense, but that 'perceive that P' can. This he will perhaps resist, saying that even if 'perceive' is not used for apperception only, still 'perceive that p', as distinct from, say, (perceive an X', is used for apperception only, in ordinary English at least. On his view, one would not say 'Either I have just perceived that

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

sophistically argues that they are perceived by the mind by itself, without using any of the senses. One kind of example is that I may perceive by means of my senses a flash, a bang, and a large drop of cold water falling on my nose. This could be a complicated hallucination, so nothing prevents me from saying something short for-'Either I perceive a flash, a bang, and a drop, or I am having the illusion of so doing; I don't know which'. It will be objected that,in that kind of example, we can regard 'perceive' or 'perceive by means of one's senses' as short for something like 'see, hear, and feel respectively'. To perceive by means of one's senses a flash, a bang, and a drop-on this view-is no more than to see a flash, hear a bang, and feel a drop; 'perceive' means 'apperceive' when it cannot simply be got rid of in this way-so runs the objection. However, it is surely wrong, for two reasons. In the first place, perceiving by means of one's senses a flash, a bang, and a drop can mean more than seeing a flash, hearing a bang, and feeling a drop. It can be taken to mean that the perceiver's thought is of a flash, a bang, and a drop; for instance, that his thought is that a flash, a bang, and a drop are what he has perceived unless it was an illusion; while 'seeing a flash, hearing a bang, and feeling a drop' can be taken as not involving this, necessarily. Not, say, in the case of a dog. In the second place, even if 'perceive by means of one's senses' could be simply analysed out in cases like that, it would still not be true that it means 'apperceive' except when it can he simply analysed out. For we can use some such term as 'thunderstorm sign' as a genus to which flashes, bangs, and drops belong; equally, we can introduce some such term as 'a Jovian triad' for a flash, a bang, and a drop in quick succession. And one can then say or think, 'Either I perceive three thunderstorm signs or I am having that illusion; I don't know which', or 'Either I have just perceived three thunderstorm signs or I have just had that illusion; I didn't, and I don't, know which'. Or the same things with 'one Jovian triad' instead of 'three thunderstorm signs'. Not only can 'perceive', in such a context, not be replaced by anyone special 'Verb of perception such as 'see' or 'hear' or 'feel', but also it is in this case much clearer that the whole context cannot simply be analysed by such verbs. For to see, hear, and feel respectively a flash, a bang, and a drop is not, in every

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there occurred in quick succession a flash, a bang, and a drop of cold water falling on my nose, or else I have just had that illusion; I didn't and I don't know which'. One would say 'Either I have just perceived a flash, a bang, and a drop of cold water falling on my nose, occurring in quick succession, or else I have just had that illusion; etc.' (c£ Warnock). This may be correct as an account of ordinary English usage. If it is, then I want to defend a departure from ordinary English usage. For a start, I should have thought that the distinction between 'perceiving an X T-ing' and 'perceiving that an X T-ed' was unlikely to have the international character which we desire in logico-philosophical matters, since the distinction between 'stating that an X T-ed' and 'stating an X's T-ing' does not have it. But also, I want to use the '. . . that p' locution where we

would more naturally speak of perceiving an X, so-and-so many Xs, an X and a T, the X, etc. To use the linguistic distinction between'... that P' and'... an X', etc., to mark the difference between apperception and not necessarily apperceptive perception may be desirable when the verb 'to apperceive' drops out of use. It is a waste of linguistic resources when we use the two verbs. I shall therefore ask leave to extend the range of the locution, '» perceives that p', beyond that of apperception or whatever it is that it is normally confined to. I propose to extend it in such a way that at least one instance of that locution is applicable whenever the case is one of seeing plainlyor otherwise perceiving plainly, a matter we shall come to. (In point of fact I believe it could intelligibly, and in a principled way, be used more widely; I shall not argue that case here.) This leaves the question as to how the extension is to be effected. Our normal way with language, of course, is to extend first and ask questions afterwards, but that will not be necessary here. Whenever someone plainly perceives something, it will be found that there is at least one sentence or proposition 'p', a true sentence or proposition to the effect that there is or occurs in the subject's environment a thing or things of the sort he plainly perceives, and such that he either believes that p, or else withholds belief from the testimony of his senses as we say. In other words if you plainly perceive something, then you perceive something such that, for some p, it is true that p and true that you either believe that p or are withholding belief

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from the evidence of your senses. So if we use "x perceives that P' as short for' x perceives something, from his perceiving which it follows that P and that he either believes that p or is withholding etc.', then we shall always be able to supply a replacement for the letter p, in any case of plainly perceiving, and shall be able to say that since x plainly perceives whatever it is, he perceives that p. For instance, if someone plainly perceives a cobra, then (a) there is a cobra in his environment and (b) either he believes there is, or he is withholding belief from the evidence of his senses. He therefore 'perceives that there is a cobra in his environment' in our sense of the phrase; any other meaning or associations of which must be entirely disregarded, whether their misleadingness lies in suggesting apperception, or in otherwise suggesting that he believes that there is a cobra in his environment, or in anything else. This point needs to be stressed, because the formulation, 'perceive that p', is so strongly associated in some philosophers' minds with the idea of an epistemic or narrowly doxastic sense of 'perceive', that they put the question to what extent perceiving is narrowly doxastic or epistemic by asking to what extent it is 'perceiving thatp'. I am, of course, treating these as entirely separate questions. Indeed, a main motive I have for wishing to extend the accidence, ', . . that p', is to be able to state compactly in particular cases the point as to content, that perceiving is not narrowly doxastic-the point comes out neatly as 'Here, perceiving that p does not entail believing that p', Another motive is the wish to have the disjunct ofperception, in a perception-illusion disjunction, formally comparable to the disjunct of illusion. It is relevant in a general way to say that, in this type of work, we are among other things making notes towards a formal logic of perception, similar to the logics of alethic, deontic, and epistemic modality in which operators form sentences from sentences. For logical and logico-philosophical purposes a simplification of the sometimes arbitrary syntax and accidence of a particular natural language may be desirable. I The point makes little or no difference as far as the

I The extent to which I appear to be odd man out here is admittedly a little disconcerting. My special use of 'perceive thatp' could, if desired, be marked in some special way: say, as 'perceive that p', with a weakening umlaut.

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questions in lIb are concerned, but we are here considering some further as well as some prior questions since the two kinds of question are closely interconnected.

Plain, broadly doxastic, objective. This brings us to more about 'plainness', and in the first instance to plainly seeing, since here the adverb is most at home. It is obvious that, in a perception-illusion disjunction whose disjunct of perception is in terms of seeing, seeing plainly is sometimes meant. One can have occasion to say or think, 'Either I see a cobra, looking every inch a cobra and not looking to me in the least like any kind of non-cobra, or I am having that illusion'. This is as much as to say in our sense, 'Either I plainly see a cobra, or I am having that illusion'. Which in turn is as much as to say in our sense, 'Either I plainly see that there is a cobra before me, or I am having that illusion'. Now '» plainly sees that p' is objective. Plainly seeing something-orother is a 'special case of seeing what is in fact something-or-other, so plainly seeing that p is a special case of plainly seeing that in (objective) fact p. The idea that every objective or external sense must also be narrowly doxastic is an error which we have avoided by considering perception-sentences in the context of perception-illusion disjunctions. Another error-and this we have avoided by concentrating on plainly seeing-is that ofthinking that an external or objective sense can avoid being narrowly doxastic, but only by having nothing at all to do with belief. Or at least, as little to do with belief as 'seeing what is X' has. This is an error because seeing plainly, though not narrowly doxastic, is broadly doxastic in a sense whose explanation is a repetition ofwhat has already been said: if someone plainly sees that p, then either he believes that p, or else he is being unavailingly tempted to believe that p. A verb, 'to V that p', may reasonably be called 'broadly doxastic' when it is true to say of it what we have just said of 'plainly seeing'. All narrowly doxastic verbs are of course also broadly doxastic in this sense, but not vice versa. Tangentially; what we called 'properly seeing X', i.e. seeing X as distinct from only seeing what is X, is also broadly doxastic in this sense. For it is literally true, though without the parenthesis there would be a suggestio falsi, to say that he who properly sees X either

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believes (on or against or without much help from the evidence of his senses) that there is X in his environment or else is unavailingly tempted to believe this. Less tangentially-plainly seeing that p entails seeming to see that p; so, another error would be to think that an external or objective sense of 'see X' or 'visually perceive X' can avoid being narrowly doxastic, but only at the price of not entailing 'seem to see X' (same Xl. It is independently obvious that 'perceive', in the context of a perception-illusion disjunction, can have a sense that is both broadly doxastic and objective. Broadly doxastic, because someone who says 'Either I perceive ... or I am having that illusion' often, even characteristically, means to say that,.either way, he is at least tempted to believe the relevant thing. Objective, because perception in the full, unweakened sensethe sense in which it iuvolves some waste of breath to talk about perception of external or objective reality, since it would be something other than 'perception' if it were not of something that could exist or occur without the subject of the verb's being aware of it in any way-s-is the natural alternative to oppose to illusion. The 'or' of a perception-illusion disjunction can characteristically be expanded into .'and not both', which is a suggestion though not an entailment of 'or else'; if 'perception' had here the weakened, subjective, sense made familiar by the British and American Empiricist philosophers, there would be no 'and not both' about it, illusion being a form of perception in the weakened sense. The fact that we can naturally add 'and not both' is something we shall try to understand more thoroughly in the next section. It should be borne in mind that if it is true that 'p or q but not both', then it is true that 'p V q'; contrary to what certain tricks of language suggest. The rather tangential question remains, to what extent the notion of 'plainness' can be extended to other senses than sight, and to the general notion of'pcrceiving by means ofone's senses, as distinct from that of perceiving by means of some sense. The notion can certainly be extended to the other special verbs, even when the adverb itself rings strangely; you can hear X without its sounding to you at all like anything else, touch or feel X without its feeling to you at all like anything else, smell X without its smelling to you at all like anything else, and taste X without its tasting to you at all like anything else. Where the

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general verb is concerned, we may say that I plainly perceive a Jovian triad if (a) I perceive one and (b) the seeing, hearing, and feeling involved are plain. One's mind perhaps goes to the question whether one can perceive by means of one's senses that p, without seeing or hearing or ... anything plainly, and if so whether one can in such a case nevertheless perceive plainly. However, I will not go into that. My point is that perception by means of one's senses can at any rate be called plain in some cases in which it is not a notion easily got rid of in favour of those of seeing, hearing, etc.

The question as to the content, the relevant meaning, of 'illusion' is interwoven with the question as to the syntax or structure of the illusion-proposition, in such a way that it will be convenient to make some preliminary remarks about the meaning, next turn to the syntax, then return to the meaning, and so on. On the meaning we may say for a start, even ifwe should not say only, this. 'Illusion', here, is simply the general-cultural, non-technical notion. But it is the proper general-cultural notion; i.e. it is 'illusion, illusion', as distinct from 'illusion, something else'. Possibly it is more common in French than in English to say that some countries have 'independence, independence', while others have independence, some degree of autonomy. The proper sense is not always what it is in that case, the stronger or undiluted sense. There is the 'unwarranted, unwarranted' and the 'unwarranted, disprovable'. The main thing that 'illusion, illusion' has to be contrasted with is illusion, mistaken belief. Contrary to what some rough-and-ready pocket or concise dictionary entries say, it is obvious to everyone from the commonest examples, of optical illusions for instance,

impossible figures you get the illusion that you see what might be a faithful representation of a thing that looks a bit like a tuning fork and has got three prong-ends projecting from a base from which only two prongs depart, or that you see what might be a faithful representation of a static staircase you could go on c1imbingfor ever (cf. Gregory). An illusionist, a conjuror gives you the illusion that objects materialize out of thin air, or that you see them do so. When given a so-called 'phosphene' by having an electric current passed through your head in a certain way, you get the illusion that you see a flash of light; with ringing in the ears, the illusion that there is a high-pitched sound to be heard; with smell-hallucinations that there is a smell of perfume, say, in the room. By crossing your fingers and stroking your nose with them you can get the illusion that you have got two noses. Tactile sensory revivals can give you the illusion that you are still in the arms of your sexual partner. Of course the c• • • that p' accidence or formulation is not the only one we use; the point is that we use it.

It is now possible to specify a little more closely the hypothetical case I constructed in IIa, Section 7, with what was meant as a warning that its details would not be all in until the end of the book. The case is one in which the perception-illusion disjunction D*, about a flash of light, is trnly stated by one to whom it relates; 'see' or 'visually perceive' being used by him in a sense which is not narrowly doxastic, but plain and therefore both broadly doxastic and objective. This, I believe, is how it is most natural to take the verb in the context, even if one does not articulate the fact that one is taking it in this way. 14. Illusion, and other matters When we come to illusion-propositions, there is no need to stretch the expression '. . . that p' to cover new things. We already express ourselves in this way quite naturally, in the case of illusion. A pair of kidney-shaped cards, marked in a certain way, will give you the optical illusion that they change their relative size whenever you move one of them to the right or left of the other. In the Muller-Lyer case you get the illusion that the two lines which might represent the shafts of arrow-like objects are of unequal length; similarly there is the illusion that what has been printed or drawn on the paper is not a square but a near-square with concave sides. You may get the illusion that the lines or other parts of a figure are moving, that there are lines or smudges where in fact there are none. In the case of the Ames room, you get the illusion that Bill is twice the height of Henry whom you know to be as tall as Bill. With

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perceptual cases. It is not proper or special to the philosophy of sense-perception. It is at least as broad as, if not broader than, the ordinary biographical notion of an experience discussed in Part 1. Someone who disbelieves in free will may say that he himself has the illusion of free will and is repeatedly illuded that he exercises free will. A moderately experienced philosopher, who knows that he cannot be making points which only an imbecile or an ignoramus could deny, may still get the illusion-I am getting it now-that this is just what he is doing. You can get the illusion that you are moving a goods train by pushing with one hand; well knowing that the engine at the other end is taking the train away. Perfectly aware that you are on the Up platform, you may have the persistent illusion of being on the Down. Young people may get the illusion of being strong enough to jump from summit to summit across a valley. It is at least no misuse of the word 'illusion' to say that during periods of Conservative govermnent, I mean govermnent by the Conservative party, the illusion of participating in a process which gives them a fair chance of achieving their aims is experienced by Socialists whom it does not deceive, as well as by those whom it does. Sometimes you just cannot help its being to you as if something were so, in a sense which excludes its being so; exclusively as if. By suggesting the term 'delusion' as the right one to use whenever there is no object there which we perceive; by equating this set of cases with the ones in which 'something totally unreal is conjured up', and these again with the ones in which there is something wrong with the person, Austin seems to me to equate unlike cases and needlessly to set aside a more usual, though if you like philosophical, distinction between illusion and delusion. In this distinction the second term is identified with mistaken belief, except that psychotic delusions are arguably sui generis, while the first term is conceived in the broad manner just explained in terms of 'its being as if', exclusively. That the relevant sense of 'illusion' is this broad one means that perception-illusion disjunctions can interestingly be compared with various other sorts of illusion-reality disjnnction. An example of an illusion-reality disjunction that is not a perception-illusion disjunction, or at any rate that does not

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that you do not necessarily believe that p, when you are getting the illusion that p. (In our jargon, '» is illuded that P' is not narrowly doxastic.) One at all times firmly disbelieves that those kidney-shaped cards are changing their relative sizes, though they look exactly as if they were doing this. Nor does one ever believe that one has two noses. Most of the cases most frequently cited are, like the optical case just mentioned, and unlike those of the phosphene and the ringing in the ears, cases in which an object, something presented to the eye or other sense, appears to have some characteristic which it does not then and there have. For this reason one can say in partial agreement with Austin (Austin, p. 25) that when illusion is mentioned 'there is the implication', in a loose sense, the associative suggestion, 'from the ordinary use of the word, that there really is something there that we perceive'. However, Austin was surely wrong if he meant, in this untypically unhelpful passage, that illusion, in the ordinary general-cultural sense not to be identified with mistaken belief, logically implies or entails that there is something there that we perceive. The example of the 'ringing in the ears' or the phosphene, when the subject knows full well what the case is, can be given as an example of illusion without misusing language. True, psychologists tend to prefer the word 'hallucination' for this type of case, the type where there is nothing there that we perceive-though the issue is confused by the fact that 'hallucination' is sometimes defined as involving mistaken belief. The fact remains that what they may prefer to call a hallucination not involving mistaken belief, and, what it is doubtless more exact, more specific, to call a hallucination or hallucinatory illusion not involving mistaken belief, is an illusion in a perfectly good non-technical sense. The root idea in this general-cultural sense is 'mock', which is one sense of 'false' and an old sense of 'seeming'. The word 'phosphene' itself shows the sense-there is no light, no phos, in a phosphene or (mere) appearance of light. It is a sufficient, though it is not a necessary, condition for illusion in this general sense if you can truly say, 'I know very well that it is not so; still it seems or appears to be so'. This familiar conception of illusion is a very general one, by no means confined to what you would naturally call sensory or

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disjoin perception of and illusion as to the environment, would be: 'Either I am consciously able to jump that stream, or else I have the illusion of being able to jump it.' You cannot stop someone from condensing this to 'I have the sensation that I can jump that stream', if he wants to. You can and should contest two ideas: (i) the idea that, ifhe jumps the stream, there was a difference between his having the sensation that he could do so and his consciously being able to do so; and (ii) the idea that the statement about the 'sensation' was, under the same conditions, a more precise report of his being consciously able to jump the stream.. I interject the remark that we should not, when thinking of the illusion of seeing a bluish-white flash of light, hypnotize ourselves upon the case of the 'phosphene'. If I perceive a bluish-white flash of light or have the illusion of doing so; and if no bluish-white flash of light occurred-which will of course, by the way, be the case if no flash of light is bluish-white-so that I do not in fact perceive a bluish-white flash oflight; then I have the illusion ofperceiving one. Not altogether dissimilarly, I would say that in the case of a revolving-beam lighthouse you have the. illusion of perceiving a flash of light. I wish to be concerned with the meaning of 'illusion', and not to be bound by its most common applications, either in the sense of validating all of these, or in the sense of validating no other applications. The traditional 'argument from illusion', as Austin points out, tends to cite perspectival and other cases where there is really no illusion in any good sense, because there is in no good sense a false appearance or seeming. With that reservation, however, we may say that the argument from' illusion is genuinely an argument from 'illusion, illusion'; an argument from illusion in the general sense of the word that I have pointed to. The argument from illusion does not depart from premisses about false deeming, the mind's being deceived; it departs for instance from premisses about the eye's being deceived. Since it often does not go directly to the conclusion that we are or may be mistaken in any deeming or belief, but rather goes to the conclusion that there are 'sense-data' or the conclusion that there are 'experiences', we generally miss the point-though perhaps not quite pointlessly-if we retort that

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the mind is not deceived in the cases of illusion with which the argument begins. This is not to say that the argument from illusion or false seeming is a good argument, or even to withhold all sympathy from those who do not quite get the feeling of hearing an argument when they hear it. Still one may want to see what happens if we leave the traditional apparatus of the argument as far as possible set up: this apparatus includes the broad yet legitimate conception of illusion we have indicated. For reasons which I hope are clear, I think it is wrong to say' with Austin that we want to dismantle the apparatus before it gets airborne. . Before we say more about this meaning of 'illusion', let us turn to the syntax of the disjunct of illusion. To put a general question in terms of a particular example, is it '» is being visually illuded that f', or is it 'x is being illuded that x sees that f'? Putting the question in general terms, if lxq is short for 'x is being illuded that q', then what sort of sentence is q? Must q be about x, like 'x sees thatf', or can q be a sentence like '1' itself, which is just about the environment? In which of the two ways should one improve upon such a manifestly inexplicit formulation as-'I don't know which it is, but either I see a flash of light or I am getting an illusion'? This, as it stands, makes it sound as if I might have gone on to say, '-some illusion or other, possibly that of smelling pot-pourri, or that of standing taller than my 19-year-old pupils'. What one means, of course, is_c... that illusion'. But what is 'that' illusion?-the illusion that you see a flash of light? Or the visual illusion that there is one? Obviously either way of speaking is correct for most purposes, but is one of them more correct for our present purposes? The particular example with which we are mainly concerned might suggest that the q of lxq was best taken as an environmental sentence, or at any rate not as a perception-sentence such as 'x sees, visually perceives, that p'. It might also suggest that you need not introduce an adverb. You have said it all when you have said that x is being illuded that there is a flash ?f light; no need to say, visually illuded, and no need to say, Illuded that he sees. However, a formulation which involves some redundancy in a particular case may still be the best in general, and even in the particular case the best for some

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purposes. It is obvious that, for instance, we must either speak of someone as being visually illuded that a car is coming or speak of him as being illuded that he sees that a car is comingas having the illusion of seeing a car coming-if we want to make it clear that the illusion was visual. Our special example of a flash of light hardly helps us to decide which to do, or what to do. By the way, I do not mean to cut the figure of one who would like us all, ordinarily, to go about saying that people 'are illuded that' something is so, rather than that they have the illusion of its being so or have the illusion that it is so. The point is not to change our familiar usages, but to prevent philosophical misconceptions from arising from them. For this purpose the pedantic surfacing of the verb actually involved, which is the verb 'to be illuded', seems desirable from time to time. No change of meaning is to be allowed to occur in this surfacing process: in particular the 'illuded that P' formulation must not be allowed to suggest mistaken belief-as it may, unless deliberately prevented from doing so. Some resistance to the '« is having the illusion that x sees .. .' or "x is being illuded that x sees' type of formulation might spring from the feeling that-surely not all one's illusions are about oneself, if it is not too facetious to put it that way. However, there does not seem to be much in this, except that it might be self-centred always to express oneself in that way, and that variation is desirable not for the sake of elegance but for that of understanding. An equally weak argument in the opposite direction is that in some cases, such as that of the illusion that you are able to do something or the illusion that you are producing a certain effect, you have got to put it in the '« is being illuded that x .. .' form, or in forms only trivially different: someone might want to argue; given that it must sometimes be in that form, why not let it always be? But these cases might just be special cases of 'x is being illuded that q', in which q happened to be of the form Fx: because q is sometimes of that form, we cannot infer that it always is. My view is that you can use either formulation, the '» is being visually illuded thatf' type or the '» is being illuded that x sees that f' type, provided you bear in mind at all times that there is no difference in meaning between the formulation you

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happen to be using and the other one. Each has its own syntax, which must not be mixed up with the other's. Some aspects of the meaning are brought out better by the one formulation, others by the other. The 'x is being illuded that x sees thatf' formulation spotlights the fact that, to the extent that anything is logically proved to be false given that x has the illusion of a flash of light, what is logically proved to be false is not that there is a flash of light, but that he sees one. Similarly, to the extent that it is true to say generally that one who has the illusion is tempted by a false belief, the false belief is not that there is a flash oflight, but that he sees one. For in the case of illusion it may not be false that there is a flash of light; a blind man or a blindfolded man may be given a phosphene at the same time as a light flashes before him. However, this fact does not preclude the other formulation; you could use 'x is being visually.illuded that there is a flash oflight', while bearing in mind what we have just pointed out, even though this formulation does not bring it out well. Another virtue of the 'x is being illuded that x sees that f' type of formulation is that it keeps the syntax of the illusionsentence in line with that of 'It is to x as if x saw thatf', this being something which certainly follows in some sense. To say that it is to x as if he saw that a car was coming is to say something more precise than 'It is to x as if a car was coming', even if this distinction can hardly be made in the particular case off. Once again, this fact does not preclude the other formulation; you could use '» is being visually illuded that a car is coming' while bearing in mind that what logically follows, in terms of 'as if', is not just 'It is to x as if a car was coming' but 'It is to x as if x saw that a car was coming'; if you liked, you could express this as 'It is visually to x as if a car was coming'.

I

For expository convenience I shall assume that the 'x is being illuded that x sees that f' type of formulation is quite in order provided that we bear in mind whatever we have to. In fact I shall use this formulation. So whenever I use, or speak of, the expressions '» is being illuded that q' or 'It is to x as if q', no matter whether 'as if' has a sense akin to illusion or a neutral sense, q will always be a perception-proposition like 'x perceives 8244037

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thatf', when the case of illusion or appearance is perceptual or sensory, and never an environmental proposition like f itself. I will indicate this restriction on q by a circumflex: 'x is being illuded that g'. Consistently with this ruling I shall say that 'x is being illuded that ij' entails the falsity of [; and that the same is true of one sense, the exclusive sense, of 'It is to x as if g'. The first thing would not be quite right if g could be f for instance. True, there is some appearance of the first thing's not being quite right anyway. I shall try to dispel this appearance in a moment; first let me deal with another aspect of the question as to what we mean by 'that illusion' (or, if you prefer, 'this illusion') when we say '» perceives a flash oflight or x is having that (this) illusion'. We may just mean, the illusion of doing so. But sometimes the sense of such a disjunction is, 'Either I perceive a flash oflight of a certain kind (andfor in a certain way) or I am having the illusion of perceiving one of that very kind (andfor in that very way): D*, the disjunction which our hypothetical subject actually states, has this sense as well as involving the notion of 'perfect' illusion. It may seem as if some disjunction of this more complex, pointed sort would always be true given that a disjunction of the blunt sort was true. But is that right? Could you not have the illusion of seeing a flash oflight, without having the illusion ofseeing a flash of light of a certain kind? If you could, then surely the blunt but not the pointed disjunction would be true. Again it may seem that one of the blunt sort will always be true given that one of the more pointed sort is. But is that right? The question is connected with what we are just coming to. Perhaps you can have the illusion of seeing a flash of light which is ... , without having the illusion of seeing a flash of light. If you can, then surely a pointed perception-illusion disjunction would be true without one of the blunt ones being true. At any rate, a disjunction of one ofthese sorts rather than the other may be what a particular person wants to state at a particular time. For instance you will have an incentive to state D* if you have something more specific like Db in your mind, and you are otherwise not very likely to have an incentive to state D* rather than D. Before that excursion I was beginning to admit that it may appear to be not quite right to say that 'x is being illuded that

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g' entails 'not g'; even when we confine g to propositions like 'x perceives thatf'. Suppose that someone is being illuded that he sees a flash oflight to his left, and suppose that at the same time he does see a flash oflight, to his right. Is he being illuded that he sees a flash oflight? Not in our sense, no, For it is not true that he does not see a flash of light. We get this result, which may at first seem paradoxical, because we are adjusting the syntax or accidence of the illusion-proposition so that it presents us with the false proposition which, if the subject is being tempted to a false belief, he is being tempted to believe. In itself the result should not lastingly seem more surprising than the parallel, though quite different, fact that if it is delusion as well as illusion, then that subject does not have the delusion that he sees a flash of light, since this is no delusion: he has the delusion that he sees a flash of light to his left. This in turn should be no more lastingly surprising than the fact that a man can believe in error that he is a great man without believing in error that he is a man. Yet it may well be felt that if there is a sense-s-our sense-in which that subject does not have the illusion of seeing a flash of light, then there is surely another and more familiar sense in which he does. What is this latter sense? Well, he does have the illusion of seeing a flash of light in the sense that for some continuation, 'etc.', he has the illusion of seeing a flash of light, etc. This reply is admittedly homespun; logic should in principle be able to detail the various kinds of 'etc: involved. I suppose one must exclude those whose force is to cancel what went before. Doubtless there is much here that might be explored; it is out of our way. It is enough for present purposes if it can be agreed that there is a sense, even if it is a pedantic one, in which that subject does not 'have the illusion that he sees a flash oflight', he has the illusion that he sees a flash of light to his left. He also has the illusion that he sees two flashes oflight; in the sense of being illuded that he sees at least two. Not in the sense of 'seeing merely at least two illusory flashes of light'; this curious though familiar way of speaking and thinking, which makes it sound as if there was an odd kind oflight, comes out rather surprisingly in our terms as 'being illuded that you see at least one flash of light, and that you see at least two'. The question, 'It is to him as if, but only as if, what exactly?', provided that it is answered in 'as if he . . :

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

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terms, will enable one to effect the transposition from our ordinary ways of speaking and thinking to the one I am using here. This terminology may not find universal favour. However, it is fair to say that one source of dislike for it is the disreputable one, that in proportion as someone's hallucinatory illusion that he sees some specifiable thing is vivid, we are reluctant to adopt a way of expressing the illusion-report which does not count 'the thing he sees' as making one of some kind; as though, by counting the pink elephant Bob saw as one of non-elephants, we could do more than pay an inadequate tribute to the vividness of Bob's hallucination, the extent to which it was to him, in the sense of illusion and a fortiori in the neutral sense, as ifhe saw a pink elephant.

The relation between these two senses of 'as if' must be explored: (i) the sense of illusion, the exclusive or ij-excluding sense of 'It is to x as if q'; note that 'exclusive' and 'exclusively' are not to be confused with the idea of perfect or indistinguishable illusion, and (ii) the neutral sense. A view which is now quite widely rejected, and from which I too wish of course to dissent, is what I will call 'One-way neutralism'. It is that the expression 'x is being illuded that ij', in its exclusive or ij-excluding sense, and similarly any exclusive use of 'It is to x as if ij', can always be reworded with a gain in perspicuity in terms that include some expression equivalent to a neutral meaning of 'It is to x as if ['; a meaning in which this neither entails not-ij nor entails ij. And-or the thought may be, 'and so'-an expression of the latter sort can never be reworded with a gain in perspicuity in terms that include an expression of the former sort. One-way neutralism derives the plausibility it has in our culture from more than a few sources. I will mention seven, using an investigation of this doctrine to explore further the relevant meaning of 'illusion'; for instance, its relationship to being tempted to a false belief (one-way neutralism (v)) and to the notion of being informed by one's senses (vii). But first, anticipating my adverse opinion of oneway neutralism, I will revert for a few pages to matters of syntax and accidence. For it is now possible to suggest tentatively, by means of some proto-Logical symbolism, a certain

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PERCEPTION-ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (2)

~(f-+p)

. ('Pxp vPJx(vpxp)))

125

way of construing the relevant perception-illusion disjunctions. These symbolic suggestions need not be regarded as a part of what is true ex hypothesi. The statement D*, which we supposed the subject, x, to state truly with reference to himself, may perhaps be construed thus: D*) (3p) ((p-+f) .

vPxf

'Pxfb V PIx(vpxfb) vpxf v PIx('Pxf) vpxfb v Ix(Vpxfb) v Ix('Pxf)

Whatever the arrow, the if-then, is in these formulae it is certainly not Material Implication; to read it in that way would make D* entail illusion. I suppose it had better be read as 'entails', but I think it could be taken as Strict Implication. On the above showing D* is not strictly a disjunction; I hope I may be forgiven for calling it a 'perception-illusion disjunction'. f, as was said, is 'There occurs a flash of light' or 'There f1asheth forth light'. Such propositions asf are not symbolizable in a standard way in the standard predicate calculus, but I take this to be a fact with no remarkable consequences: if of no other form, propositions like f are of the form p. vPxp is 'x visually perceives that p', in the sense explained in Section 13, which involves the notions of 'plainly seeing' and so forth. PIx(ij) is 'x is being perfectly illuded that (ij)', in the sense which is explained in this present section. Leti" be 'There occurs a flash of bluish-white light' or 'There f1asheth forth (of) bluish-white light'. Then we have Db) D) Db') D')

~(f-+p)

. vPXp).

that not, our that

and other 'blunt' perception-illusion disjunctions. Since fb entails f and not vice versa, D* can be derived from Db, as we said. By the same token, D* follows from vPXfb and from PIx(vpxfb), as well as from other perception-propositions and illusion-propositions such as (3p)((p-+f) .

To try to answer a very few of the numerous questions arise, does D follow from Db? It may appear as if it did since PIx(VPif) does not follow from PIx(vpxP) under terminological rules. Nevertheless, I should have thought

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D did follow from Db; not in that way, but in virtue of the principle that if I do not perceive a flash of light, and if I have the illusion of perceiving a flash oflight of a specified kind, then I have the illusion of perceiving a flash of light. If I perceive a flash oflight, then D is true on or without the supposition Db. And in virtue of the above principle, if I do not perceive a flash of'Iight and Db is true-so that I have the illusion of perceiving a bluish-white flash oflight-then D is true. What about the doubt as to whether 'blunt' perceptionillusion disjunctions can be called neutral statements about how things appear to a subject, and expressed in 'seem to see' terms? I think it is just that we feel or find these tags and modes of expression more suited to 'pointed' perception-illusion disjunctions; these are what we have in mind, if we have in mind something you can find. A blunt disjunction like D more readily suggests to the mind than does a pointed one like D* such situations as my both seeing a flash of light of one sort and having the illusion of seeing one of another sort. And I think that the feeling, that blunt perception-illusion disjunctions are not what you would want to call neutral appear-statemeuts, is at its strongest when one is making a certain mistake; the mistake of thinking that you can derive, say (D) 'Either I see a flash of light or I am having the illusion of doing so' from (B) 'I see a blue flash oflight and I am having the illusion of seeing a yellow one' by thefollowing steps.B; so (X) I see a flash of light and I am having the illusion ofseeing one; so D. Under our terminological rules you cannot do that, since X is contradictory and does not follow from B. You can nevertheless derive D from B, though not in that way. You can say, B; so I see a flash of light; so D. But here,·D is not being extracted from anything from which it is counterintuitive to think that you can extract a neutral appear-statement. Or is the worry rather, that a blunt perception-illusion disjunction may fail to be derivable from something from which a neutral appear-statement ought to be derivable? What would the 'something' be? What about 'Either (a) I see an a-flash or (b) I am having the illusion of a b-flash'? Well, if (a) then D. And if not (a), then either I see a flash or I don't. If! do, then again D. But.if I don't, and if (b),

T

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then I have the illusion of seeing a flash, so againD. No problem. So I do not see that you would go seriously wrong if you called blunt perception-illusion disjunctions, as well as pointed ones, neutral appear-statements. But a scrupulous and sympathetic inquirer, who wants to point to what lies behind the talk of there being neutral appear-statements, will point to pointed perception-illusion disjunctions rather than to blunt ones. One might say (using a transferred or analogical form of the neutral 'as if') that in the doctrine of 'experiences' it is as if the connnon logical constituent such as f or fb were mistaken for a common conjunct, which then had to be somehow denatured because the disjunct of illusion is manifestly a non-assertive context for f or 1'. In other words, it is as if 'the flash oflight I either perceive or have the illusion of perceiving' were thought of as something that happens in both situations-does it not 'occur in both contexts'?--so that I can happily say 'This is it', and on the other hand, less happily, it must be a burst of nonphotons that gets between me and the photic. This diagnosis associates itself in one's mind with Wittgenstein's remark that a sensation is a grammatical fiction. However, one cannot prove that this confusion occurs; this is why the 'as if', in the statement that it is as ifthe confusion occurred, is transferred or analogical. One only as it were, one only so to speak, 'perceives or has the illusion of perceiving' that that is what someone has been guilty of. For the question as to whether the diagnosis is perception or illusion has no answer, since even the subject's own avowal of guilt is self-incrimination rather than selfperception. In contrast, no as it were or so to speak 'perceiving or being illuded', but just perceiving or being illuded, occurs when one perceives a flash oflight or has the illusion ofso doing. For this is not self-analysis, not introspection.

Seven sources cif Qne-wqy neutralism From what has been said it will be seen that one-way neutralism is a doctrine specifically about neutral appearance; it is all-context one-way neutral appearancism. In what follows I shall largely assume the rejection of a more general idea, which I will call uuidirectionalism: the idea that if you can ever clarify 'X' by saying that it means, or means much the

l28

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION IIe

same as, or is like saying, 'r, then you can never clarify"Y' by saying that it means, or means much the same as, or is like saying, 'X'.

One-way neutralism (i)

(f ~

T(F) TT T(F) T(F) FT FF FT FT

(A.

(F) T T T T T (F) T

~P))=

TFF TTT FFF FFT TFF TTT FFF FFT

(A

== TT TT FF FF TT TF FF FT

(IvP))

TTT TTF TTT TTF FTT FFF FTT FFF

r.

(Excluded,

(Excluded,

(I.P))

~(P.~A))

(Excluded, ditto) (Excluded, ~ (I.~A))

~

We can and do on occasion clarify the notion of illusion in terms of a neutral notion of appearance. For instance, we can always say truly, and sometimes with clarifying effect, that 'x is being illuded that x plainly sees that p' is like, or is like saying, or means much the same as, 'It is to x in a neutral sense "as if" x plainly saw that p, but in fact x does not plainly see that p'. However, it does not follow that one-way neutralism is true. The statement of rough synonymy or meaning-similarity, which we make there, may have a clarifying function consistent with its being equally clarifying in some contexts, or even in the same context, to identify 'its being to x in a neutral sense "as if" x plainly saw that P' with ox's either plainly seeing that p or being illuded that he plainly sees that Each rough identification-rough identification-with, not rough identification-as-is bound to be correct ifthe other is, given two natural assumptions: that 'x is being illuded that x plainly sees that p' excludes '« plainly sees that p', and that this latter proposition excludes 'It is not to x in a neutral sense "as if" x plainly saw thatp'. The equivalence of the two equivalences can be seen by means of an ordinary truth-table. Let 'P be 'x is being illuded that X plainly sees that p'; let 'A' be 'It is to x neutrally as if x plainly saw that p'; let 'P' be 'x plainly sees that p'. Only lines 1 and 7 have F under the main connective, and these lines represent possibilities excluded by the above-mentioned natural assumptions. 1.

2. 3.

4. S. 6. 7. 8.

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Moreover it may be that both 'identifications-with', the equivalences on either side of the main equivalence, are equally clarifying, There would be parallels. For example, we can and do clarify one sense ofthe great ambiguous notion of 'possibility' (without removing all the ambiguities even of this one sense) by saying that 'Possibly P' is the same here as 'Not necessarily not p'; we can go on to say that 'Necessarily P' in this sense is the same as 'Not possibly not P' . More work ofclarification will have been done if we have interpolated, say, a definition of 'Contingently p' as 'Not necessarily p, and not necessarily not p'. But in any case some work of clarification will Or may have been done. As far as clarification goes, we could just fade out like a pop song, even if this is not practicable in the written presentation ofa formal system. Nothing in the nature ofthe clarification of expressions that already have meaning obliges us to accept one·way neutralism. Something in the nature of the case might still do so. Given that I is truth-functionally equivalent to (A.~P) when we bring in the further natural assumption mentioned to the right of line 4 of the table unless the situation described by line 6 can obtain; so that someone who discounts this last possibility, ofthe neutral appearance's occurring 'bare', is likely to regard I and (A. ~P) as truth-functionally equivalent; given this, it may seem to him that their equation must have a clarifying force in that order or direction alone, simply because (A. ~P) involves four terms with a pre-established meaning, for the mere one of 1. This, he may feel, is analysis, a one-way process; and surely analysis is clarification? However, this is rather as if someone were to assume that the value of a pound note always became clearer when you got change for it. If that is what you mean by analysis, then it makes itself true that (A. ~P) analyses I and not vice versa. Making the meaning clearer is, or may for all this shows be, something else.

One-way neutralism (ii)

Locutions like 'only as if, 'false appearance', and 'merely seem', used in connection with illusion, can give the impression that their meaning could in no way be understood except in terms of more general, neutral, notions of 'as if', 'appearance', and 'seeming'. True, the 'only, the 'false', and the 'merely' are sometimes dropped without weakening the sense, but it might

'3'

However, the statement I have just made conflicts with a well-known and attractive general idea about truth ex vi termini, an idea which is an important source of the appeal of one-way neutralism. I mean the idea that only Logical, topic-neutral terms, and not for instance psychological or biological terms like 'perceive' as well, can give rise to that kind of truth. Whenever non-Logical terms appear to do so, clarification of the terms involved will always uncover the Logical terms solely responsible; for instance if it is true ex vi termini that fathers are male, then this is only because 'father' means 'male and a parent'. Ifthis idea is going to provide support for the causal definition of perception mentioned above instead of wasting whatever strength it may have in a futile alliance with the merely conjunctive definition, then the causal 'because' will have to be classed as a Logical, topic-neutral term. This classification cannot be dismissed as merely fanciful. The expression 'q because p', where the two propositions report particular events, is like 'p, and as a result q'. This makes it an enriched 'and', generically similar to 'and what is more', 'moreover'; 'and yet', 'although' ; 'and then', 'whereupon', and the deductive 'and so' , 'therefore'. As for the enrichment, '..'. as a result'; a respected philosophical tradition claims to see no more in this than the bringing to bear of 'all' or 'always', again a topic-neutral term.

One-way neutralism (iv)

PERCEPTION·ILLUSION DISJUNCTIONS (2)

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perceiving that p had got to be defined as something like 'its neutrally being to you as if you saw thatp, because p' (... as a result of the fact that pl. This in turn may appear to preclude the clarification of 'its neutrally being to you, etc.' as 'your either seeing or being illuded that you see, etc.', and hence to force a clarification of illusion in terms of neutral appearance. However, the first step is already a non sequitur. Senseperception does logically entail interaction (in the weak sense, action one way or the other) between the sense-organ and the object or event perceived, even if the ordinary non-scientific, uninstructed notion does not preclude the absurd possibility of the eye's acting on the object; this entaihnent may, however, arise simply from the strength of the term 'sense-perception'. Its existence does not prove that sense-perception must be defined as a less-than-perceptual event which has a certain cause.

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

be thought that this could only be done by means of an intonation or a context which made it plain that those additions were tacitly intended. However, we are nowadays familiar with, and I think we ought to accept, the opposite view: that one can understand an expression which translates the English 'only as if', 'false appearance', or 'merely seem', without understanding that expression in terms of one which translates the neutral use of the English 'seem', 'appear', or 'be as if'. 'Seem' has often been used in a sense in which it excludes 'be' without more ado, esse quam videri, 'scheinproblem'. 'As if' and 'Quasi-' have often had a similar exclusive meaning, in which they are like 'Pseudo-'. 'X-like' has a sense, 'X-oid', in which it excludes 'X'. A child can very well learn the meaning of such expressions without having previously learnt the meaning of any neutral appearword. Though this is minor, it is also harder than might appear at first sight to conclude that 'seem', 'appear', and 'as if' in current English always have the neutral sense, if there is no tacit addition. This involves an interpretation of the relevant 'buts' and 'onlys' as unlike the 'but' or 'only' in 'It was not perception but (only) illusion'. One-way neutralism might admittedly still be correct, because it means to say that clarification in terms of neutral appearance is necessary for philosophical purposes. Here we have only deprived it of the support it may get from the idea that we cannot have so much as an ordinary understanding of the exclusive members of the family of 'appear' expressions except in terms of the neutral members.

One-way neutralism (iii) The idea that illusion, and perception, must always be defined or clarified in terms of neutral appearance has another source, one that is perhaps a little surprising. This is the failure of the attempt to define ox's visually perceiving that p' as the mere conjunction of p with its neutrally being to x as ifhe saw that p. Whatever the second conjunct may mean exactly, the conjunctive definition is in any case a failure, since it does not mention a sufficient condition; x may still be like the blind man who has the illusion of a flash at the very moment when a light is flashed before him. This may make it seem as if your visually

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Suppose the causal 'because' is thought of as a Logical term. The general idea that all truth ex vi termini is from the strength of such terms will then combine with the fact of its being true ex vi termini that 'if x perceives that p, then p', and with the fact of its being true ex vi termini that 'if x visually perceives that p, then there is a causal relation between his eye(s) and the object(s) or event(s) perceived', to make attractive a definition of 'x visually perceives that p' along some such lines as 'p, and it neutrally is to x as ifhe saw that p, and this conjunction is an instance of some universa11aw which lays down some environmental-cum-optical condition as sufficient for its neutrally being to a subject as if he saw that p'. Various things may be said about this; I will say only that the general idea about truth ex vi termini is a problematic, as well as an attractive, one. It is only fair to add that the attractiveness of the idea is underestimated if it is seen either as arbitrarily trying to limit the set of terms from whose strength things can be true, or as merely punning on the broad and truistic sense in which all truth ex vi termini is, as such, Logical or terminological. The attractiveness is connected with the attempt to explain logical consequence in terms of principles as few and hence as general as possible, the attempt to be forced back in as few instances as possible on the explanation that the deduction of Q.a from Pa is valid because the deduction of (Lx from Px is. Yet this motive will surely be satisfied whenever the relevant inference can be presented in a form in which the non-vacuously occurring expressions are Logical; it does not require us to accept that the reformulation which is introduced for this specific purpose is in all contexts and for all purposes a clarification whose direction cannot be reversed. Another way in which that general idea about truth ex vi termini can support one-way neutralism is this. Given that it is true ex vi termini, under our terminological rules, that 'if x is illuded that x sees that p, then x does not see that p', and given the assumption that the 'term, from whose strength' this is true must be a Logical one, it is easy to think that the term must be 'and'. Given that 'x is illuded that q' has got to be clarified as 'something-or-other and not-q', the neutral sense of 'its being to x as if q' neatly suits the role of the something-or-other. However, if the set of Logical terms does not include terms like

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'greater than', then the general idea breaks down over truths ex vi termini like 'if x is greater than y, then y is not greater than x' _ And if 'greater than' is to be counted as Logical or Logicomathematical, then it is not clear why the exclusive sense of 'as if', a broad sense of 'illusion', should not be counted as Logical too. The falsity of a false dawn is not much less Logical than the falsity of a false proposition.

One-wqy neutralism (v) It is plausible to say this: sometimes, you are just tempted by, or inclined to, a false belief, but in a case of sensory illusion you are tempted to a false belief by its being to you, in a neutral sense, as if the proposition in question were true. This said, it is easy to think that illusion must be clarified as 'being tempted to a false belief by a neutral seeming'. There is, I think, nothing wrong with saying that one is sometimes tempted to a false belief by its being to one neutrally as if the belief or proposition were true. However, there may be more than One correct answer to the question as to what one is being tempted by. In those cases in which there is something that you perceive, we can say that you are tempted by perceiving (what is in fact) that thing. For instance, you may be tempted by seeing (what is in fact) a figure whose horizontal lines are equal, to the false beliefs that you see, and that there is before you, a figure whose horizontal lines are unequal. True, there are cases of sensory illusion, in the sense in which we are using the term, where there is nothing that you perceive. In these cases we can say what we can say in all cases of sensory illusion; that if you are tempted to believe mistakenly that ij, then you are tempted by its being to you as if ij, e.g. by its being to you as if you saw that p, in the exclusive sense of 'as if'. Someone may object: 'Its being to x as if ij, in the exclusive sense, is much the same thing as x's being illuded that ij. But we cannot say that he is tempted to a false belief by what is much the same thing as his being illuded. For his being illuded is itself much the same thing as his being tempted.' I reply that we have a choice, here, between two ways of using the verb, 'to be illuded'. We can use it in a weaker sense, not requiring temptation to a false belief, or in a stronger sense which does

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if your aim is to avoid saying that he is tempted by something which logically entails his being tempted. It is important, here, not to confuse two things: (i) its being to x as if g, in the exclusive sense of 'as if', and (ii) its being to x, in the sense of x's thinking or believing or judging, that it is to x as if q, in the exclusive sense of 'as if'. These, of course, are not at all the same thing; any more than in general something's being the case with me is the same thing as my thinking that it is; any more than in particular x's mistakenly believing that q' would be the same thing as his having the 'thought', if you could call it that, that he mistakenly believes that g. Someone who is guilty of that confusion is likely to feel, wrongly, that we must not say that all those who are illuded, in the stronger sense in which this requires temptation to a false belief, are tempted by its being (in the exclusive sense) to them as if. For that objector will wrongly feel as if this would be as much as to say that they all have the thought, 'In the exclusive sense, it is to me as if .. .'. Of course they do not all have this thought, which is what they think if, and only if, they can to that extent identify their situation. Their temptation to the false belief is likely to be at its strongest when they cannot to that extent identify their situation, in which case their thought, where there is no delusion, will be 'In the neutral sense, it is to me as if .. .'. But no matter what their thought is, ex hypothesi their case is that in the exclusive sense it is to them as if; it is to this fact about them that we may attribute their being tempted to a false belief. Someone may reply that even if we may attribute, to this fact about them, the fact of their being tempted, still this fact about them is not what they are tempted by. His idea is likely to be that, in '» is being tempted by .. .', the expression which fills the blank must express x's own answer to the question as to what he is being tempted by; it must be either the actual phrase he would use, or else one that has much the same meaning. And then we return to the fact that when people are illuded, in the sense in which this does not entail temptation to a false belief, and are moreover tempted to a false belief, they would not always (though they would sometimes) answer the question as to what they are being tempted by, by saying 'My being illuded' or 'Its being, in the exclusive sense, to me as if',

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

require this. Either way, there will be no problem about what someone is tempted by. The appearance of a problem arises solely from our vacillating between the two senses. If we use 'to be illuded' in the weaker sense, then 'x is being illuded that g' will be like 'It is to x (a little, quite a bit, very much or exactly) as if g; in the g-excluding sense of "as if"'. This does not entail that x is being tempted to believe that g. (For we all know that it can be to you a little bit as if gwithout your being in any real sense tempted to believe that g; for instance when you have muscae volltantes, spots before the eyes, it may be to you a little bit as if you saw mosquitoes hovering in front of you, without your really being even tempted to believe that you do.) Since illusion, defined in that weaker way, does not entail temptation to a false belief, it follows that when there is both illusion in the weak sense and temptation to a false belief, we can say that the subject is tempted by being illuded in the weak sense: to say this will not be like saying that he is tempted by being tempted. We may prefer to use 'illusion' in the stronger sense, requiring a temptation to a false belief. In this case we can say that someone who is illuded is tempted by 'its being to him as if he', in the exclusive sense. Once again this will not be like saying that he is tempted by being tempted, or illuded by being illuded, or anything like that. Tangentially; you cannot fail to be tempted to the false belief that g, when it is to you exactly as if g, in the g-excluding sense of 'as if'. In other words, when you are peifect{y illuded that g, in the weaker sense of 'illusion'; whose weakness is thus counteracted by the adverb. Why is this? It is a tautology; there is no difference between your being tempted to the false belief that g, and its being to you to a more than negligible extent as if g in the exclusive sense. There is thus no room for a psychological, or a non-psychological, explanation of the fact that you are tempted to a false belief when you are perfectly illuded. In that case, what may someone who is perfectly illuded be said, without infelicity, to be tempted by? Not by its being to him exactly as if g, in the exclusive sense. Not by its being to him to a more than negligible extent as if g, in the exclusive sense. But by its being to him as if g, in the exclusive sense; i.e, by its being to him a little, or quite a bit, or,very much, or exactly as if g-in the exclusive sense. This is what you can say

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illuded that p', instead of 'x is being illuded that ij' where ij is 'x sees that p', may be helpful here. That syntax brings to bear the fact that visual illusion is false visual perception, in the sense of 'false' which we see in 'false dawn', etc. Whatever paraphrase of '» is being illuded that x sees that P' we use, it must not, nor must that expression itself, be allowed to take us away from the sense of 'x is having a false, a bogus, visual perception that P', and hence from the sense of what follows from this, that x's state is, in point of fact, 'perceptionoid'. Not surprisingly, his perceptionoid state may tempt him to a false belief as to what he perceives. To be at all typically 'apperceptionoid' in point of fact, as distinct from merely 'perceptionoid', an event of which one is the subject would, I suppose, be accompanied by the belief that it was perception. If what someone lives through is in fact a false perception and thus is in' fact perceptionoid, this does not debar him from recognizing it as such; equally, it does not require him to do so. A perceptionoid experience is not necessarily perceptionoid in the judgement and finding of the subject; it is any non-perception which is a quasi-perception, in the neutral sense, a perception or illusion. There seem, by the way, to be a good many group, and even individual, variations in the use of expressions like 'seem', 'appear', 'look', and 'as if'. The reader may find that '(In the exclusive sense) it is to me as if I saw two unequal horizontal lines' is just not what he himself would say, when reporting, after measuring the lines, the persistence of 'the Muller-Lyer illusion. In that case I hope he will admit that it could be the word-for-word translation from a foreigu language of some subject's knowing report of that illusion. This is as much as I need or am interested in.

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One-iooy nentralism (vi) On the question of 'visual-ness', whose bearing on one-way neutralism will I hope become clear, let me point to an advantage which the 'x is being illuded that x sees that p' type of formulation has in addition to those mentioned earlier. (It is an advantage which it has over the '» is being visually illuded that P' formulation, rather than over the 'x is having a false visual perception that P' formulation.) The advantage is this,

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

or anything like that. Since that is not what would always be mentioned by the subjects themselves as what they are tempted by, the objector infers that we cannot say that that is what they are all tempted by. Considered as a claim about how the verb 'to be tempted' is ordinarily used, this objector's claim is absurd. We can and do talk about a man's being tempted by a manhating woman, without implying that that is what he thinks he is being tempted by. However, it is not the main point. Let us use the verb 'to be tempted' in accordance with the rule the objector proposes. We will then say that people who are illuded and tempted are not always 'tempted by its being to them exclusively as if .. .', they are often 'tempted by its being to them neutrally as if .. .'. There is no harm in saying this-as long as we do not for one moment imagine that, by carefully re-tailoring our description of what certain people are tempted by, so that it fits or matches their own relative incapacity to identify their own case or situation, we must somehow have achieved a more exact or precise identification of their case or situation. In the particular respect, of avoiding confusion between "x is being illuded that l' (in the looser, weaker, more permissive of the two senses we mentioned) and 'the thought or judgement of x himself is, that in the exclusive sense it is to him as if q' ; in that particular respect the formulation, 'x is being illuded that ij', is itself superior to the formulation, 'In the exclusive sense, it is to x as if [', For nobody will think that being illuded entails, any more than it precludes, your having the thought that in the exclusive sense it is you as i£ Thus the clarifying effect of identifying the broader sense of 'illusion' with the narrower sense of 'as if' is two-way. The broader sense of illusion is clarified as that sense of 'as if' in which this can, as distinct from each and every sense in which it can by no means, be identified with a relatively but not absurdly broad sense of 'illusion'. Obviously the sense, if there is one, in which 'It is to x exclusively as if ij' entails that x thinks so, could be identified only with a startlingly narrow sense of 'illusion'; of course the neutral sense of 'as if' would give an absurdly broad one. Since dissatisfaction with what has been said might be due to something other than mere unidirectionalist prejudice, it is worth pointing out that the other syntax, 'x is being visually

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illuded is to be in every way satisfactory, then it must be no less clear that 'A-ing that you see light' is 'visual' and 'lighty' than it is clear that being illuded that you see light is 'visual' and 'lighty' .) All this is true and relevant or so I believe, but it is not enough. For behind the question which, as it stands, when you look at it, answers itself there lies the 'image', in what is at once exactly the current journalistic sense and an important criticalphilosophical sense, of a general term's being applied in virtue of some index or indices. An index being in principle expressible by a general term, any assertion of the universal rightness of this 'image' is sure to be rejected because of its infinite postponement in theory of decisions constantly effected in practice. Yet the image is abandoned in any given case with reluctance; perhaps not altogether wrongly, since the reluctant abandonment in particular cases of an image or analogue is a respectable method of investigation, but the reluctance can be overdone. An instance of this reluctance is our tendency to feel that there must, whenever I can tell the world that my experience is visual, be something from which I tell that it is. If there is always something from which I tell that a given a-experience is in a broad sense 'visual', how strange it is that we have to cast about among exceptional experiences in order to find an occasion on which someone decided that his experience was visual-and among still more exceptional experiences to find one on which there was something about the experience which made him decide that it was. In this last type of case, in a rare old mix-up or state of distraction, I perhaps decided that it was a case of 'I ... saw ...' and not of 'I heard ' or 'I pain ...' because it was a case of'... red ' or ' . light ' or both. In words suitable to tranquil recollection of the incident, it must have been 'seeing', vision or 'pseudovision, since it was a case- of 'red' or 'light'; there was red or pseudo-red, light or pseudo-light. This kind of inference, this kind of deduction, is something exceptional. There is no reason to think that I always tell, from something, that my experience is visual, when I can tell you that it is; we cannot count as a reason the familiar insult to the memory of Freud, that 'I must ... '-if I want to save the above-mentioned 'image''... almost always do it unconsciously'. Therefore the question

A VERY SPECIAL NOTION

that when the inclination comes upon us to ask the philosophical question as to the sense or way in which a visual perception and its corresponding illusion are both visual, then that formulation helps us to see that whatever may lie behind the question, as it stands it answers itself. For we are given a satisfactory explanation of the fact of some tenn'sbeing applied to two different events or states of which one is the subject; when we are told that in the one case it is to the subject exclusively as ifhe were doing what in the other case he is doing; or told that in the one case the subject has the illusion of doing what he does in the other. It is a familiar principle we use in the development oflanguage that a general term, 'X' or 'X-ing', can always be extended to cover also the illusion of X or of X-ing; quasi-X or quasi-X-ing in that sense; thus bringing about a use of the term in the sense of neutral appearance. The extension is often marked by the use of quotation-marks which have the same force as the prefix 'quasi-' in the one or the other sense: ~X-ing'. This applies as much to 'seeing' and 'visual' as to any other general term. If we never used the principle, we would not want to say that seeing and the illusion of seeing were both instances of 'seeing' in a broader sense. That we do have the principle explains our wanting to say so. That explanation of our wanting ·to say so, whose tendency not to satisfy will next be discussed, may be contrasted with one which would indeed be unsatisfactory. It would be unsatisfactory to suggest that the visualness of the illusion of seeing consisted in its being the something-or-other of seeing, as distinct from the something-or-other of hearing, say. This would amount to saying that the illusion of seeing was visual only in the sense or non-sense in which the denial of seeing, or the lie that one is seeing, is visual. The visualness of the illusion of seeing consists, not in its being the something-or-other of seeing, nor yet in its being the illusion of something-or-other, but in its being the illusion of seeing; hence the concussiveness of the question as to what it consists in. Similarly the 'lighty' or 'photic' character of the illusion of seeing a flash of light consists, not in its being the illusion of seeing something or other, nor yet in its being the something-or-other of a flash of light, but in its being the illusion of seeing a flash of light. (It follows, by the way, that if some paraphrase, 'A-ing', of being

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that lies behind the question that answers itselfis even more of a non-question. The one that answers itself at least has an answer, and is not based on a merely fanciful assumption. When we ask one or both of that pair of questions, demonstrating, by the act, our unawareness of those facts about them to which attention has just been drawn, we may feel as if we had to reply that each case, the visual perception and its illusion, involves a visual event, neither a perception nor an illusion, whose occurrence somehow explains the visualness of each case. The classical Third Man objection already looms large against this rather pathetic response. Yet instead of asking the Third Man question, whether the two encapsulated visual events are themselves both perhaps called visual in virtue of a common visual component, we may feel as if we were on the right lines; and feel that, having postulated a visual component in each case, it would be churlish not to 'explain' the rather more marked similarity between a given perception and its exactly corresponding illusion by positing indistinguishable visual components. In what specific way are they indistinguishable-is one perhaps the perfect illusion of the other? We tend to avoid this and similar questions by talking of ' the same' or 'the very same' component's being involved in each case, as though this 'sameness' could be numerical identity and not exact similarity merely. Ryle ends his article on Sensation (Ryle, 2) untypically with the following words. 'There is something in common between having an afterimage and seeing a misprint. Both are visual affairs. How ought we to describe their affinity with one another, without falling back on to some account very much like a part of the orthodox theories of sense-impressions? To this I am stumped for an answer.' To the extent that afterimagery involves its being to the subject at all as if he saw (visually perceived) this or that, we have answered the question already. In order to get a difficulty, it seems as if we should have to suppose a case in which someone insists on calling his current experience visual while energetically denying that it is to him as if he sees. Is the question perhaps as to how we tell that a subject's experience was visual when the subject, either because he is an infra-human subject such as a cat or for some other reason, does not describe his experience either at the time or

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retrospectively? That would obviously be a matter of physiological and behavioural tests.

One-wqy neutralism (vii)

The last source of the appeal of one-way neutralism that I will mention lies in the familiar way of speaking and thinking which I myself have used, about the 'testimony of' or 'information given by' the senses. It is, of course,quite correct ordinary usage to say that when one plainly sees that p and when one is perfectly (indistinguishably) illuded that one plainly sees that p, the unambiguous testimony of the visual sense or the unambiguous information given to one by that sense is the same; namely, that p. This easily gives rise to the idea that we must unidirectionally define 'being illuded that one sees that p' as 'being informed by the visual sense that p' together with some second condition. (And similarly with 'visually perceiving that p'.) Though familiar and natural, the notion of 'being informed by your sense of sight that p' is, however, ambiguous; not in the sense of having two or more distinct meanings, not in the sense that it ordinarily strikes us as obscure, but in the sense that its precise content proves elusive on close inspection. To stand back, thus bringing to an end an inspection which may be too close for the object to be seen, might be excellent advice in some situations. They could hardly include the present situation, where we have to assess the suggestion that something has got to be unidirectionally defined in tenus of 'being informed'. We may begin about the ambiguity by pointing to the obvious fact that a definition of 'being informed' which would be adequate for many contexts would make it involve as the source of the information a human informant, and at the receiving end another human being who perceives, by means of his senses and with understanding, a conventional sigu or sigus which his informant uses. A further glimpse into the obvious, which may . be found trying but may also help us in testing the ordinary notion of 'information' for the kind of clarity its proposed use here requires, is that neither my eye and I nor my eye and my brain, still less, if that be possible, a dog's eye and the dog or his brain, are participants in such an act of human communication. Nor, since such a transaction involves sense-perception at

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the recelvmg end, could sense-perception be unidirectionally defined in terms of it. Continuing in the regular way one may add that, human communication being what we do not mean by being informed here, the next question is as to what we do mean. It is true that we often speak of someone as gathering, or just getting, information not only where no informant is present, ~ but also where no conventional sigu is involved; information from threatening clouds, animal spoor, or the height of the sun in the sky. But here what remains, more naked than before, is a form of sense-perception; the very thing that was to have been understood by means of the model. All I am saying is that a different, less naive, model or conception of 'being informed' is needed for explanatory purposes here, whether what is to be explained is the nature of perception or, in the manner desired, the meaning of the term. I assume that one's being informed, or one's brain's being informed, is a notion that can be defined or redefined scientifically. But in order to have much relevance to this discussion, the definition would have to be of 'being informed that p'; at least for certain selected cases such as the case where p is f It might not be exactly scientific; it might be a definition in topic-neutral, non-specific terms, of the kind the Australian Central State Materialists generally favour, which without making the notion of, say, 'being informed that l' scientific would make it capable of being satisfied by some publicly ascertainable occurrence. Presumably one would not want it to turn out that the gravel, ten feet below the church tower, was 'informed thatf' by means of the lightning-rodon the spire. I will say only that I do not know of a definition along those lines that would fill the bill here. Itwould have to be established that all, or the relevant, cases of visual illusion have got to be unidirectionally defined in terms of the given scientific or topic-neutral concept. A view would have to be taken of the attempt to disperse confusion and test inferences about perception and illusion, that being the purpose of this inquiry, though ~ in the latter respect it only begins; a view On which definition of that sort was necessary for this purpose. It is perhaps worth adding that the great majority of those who think that 'being visually illuded that P' is unidirectionally definable in terms of some neutral notion of 'being informed

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that p', are not thinking in that physicalistic way at all: they would never recognize a definition of this notion along either of those lines as defining the kind of notion they were thinking of. Finally let me comment briefly on my own favourable reference above, to the talk about the testimony or information given by the senses. I admitted that it was perfectly correct usage to say 'Both when one plainly sees that p and when one is perfectly illuded that one plainly sees that p, the unambiguous testimony of, or information given by, the visual sense is the same, and is that p'. This does not mean that 'plainly seeing that p' and 'being illuded that one plainly sees that p' are ciphers which must be decoded in terms of 'being unambiguously informed by one's visual sense that p'. It may sometimes be at least as clarifying to put it the other way round, that 'being unambiguously informed by one's visual sense that p' means, either plainly seeing that p or being perfectly illuded that you do so. The elimination of 'unambiguous' from the talk about the 'information' would only mean that the clarifying disjunction had to be longer-except that terminological decisions about 'information' would also be needed. If you see, visually apperceive, a cobra looking exactly like a root, are you informed by your visual sense that there is a cobra in your environment? Let us say so. If you otherwise 'properly', but not plainly, see a cobra-i.e. if you see what looks to you like, and is in point of fact, a cobra, but it also looks to you then and there to a nonnegligible extent like some sort of non-cobra-then are you 'informed by your visual sense' that there is a cobra in your environment? Let us say so. In saying yes to both those questions we have virtually constructed the disjunctive clarification; 'being informed by your visual sense that P' is, either visually apperceiving that p without plainly seeing that p, or otherwise properly but not plainly seeing that p, or plainly seeing that p, or having the illusion of doing one of those things. But a further terminological decision about 'information' has to be made, as to whether illusion in the stronger, or only in the weaker, sense is required in the case of illusion. The fact that these decisions about 'information' are necessary, as the alternative to a completely technical, scientific redefinition ofthe term, should surely dispel any lingering feeling that, unless and until a complete

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disjunctive clarification of 'being informed by one's senses that p' is provided, the notions of plainly seeing that p and of having the illusion of so doing ought somehow to be clarified in terms of being informed. This unredefined notion does not harden the ordinary focus, but softens it.

APPENDIX

A. In Section 10, I laid down two requirements for an "E-report' and expressed scepticism as to whether there is anything that meets them. If they are in fact met, and by something of a kind whose existence I wanted to be sceptical about, then of course I am essentially wrong. If they are met by something of a kind whose existence I did not mean to be sceptical about, then I am wrong in a more accidental way-through not having drawn up the requirements tightly enough. One kind of statement about whose existence I did not mean to he sceptical is a statement to the effect that someone has just acquired a certain disposition-where he is not stated to have any awareness ofthe disposition's onset, or where he is stated to have such awareness but is allowed to have it simply in and by perceiving a flash of light, or simply in and by having the illusion of doing so. I hope that my two requirements for an E-report exclude such a statement as that. If they do not, then they need to be supplemented by the ruling that an E-report is not such a statement as that.

B. I wrote in Section 10 (ii) (B) about the indistinguishability of perfect illusion from perception-from, rather than 'and'. I think that what I wrote implies, but it does not clearly state, my answer to the question how perfect illusion should be conceived. A perfect, or as we say the perfect, illusion of a given perception or other reality should be thought of as follows. It is an illusion of that reality, such that if you are involved in the illusion then you cannot tell, simply by being involved in it, that it is not that reality. It should not be defined as an illusion of such a sort that, if you are involved in that reality, then you can by no means tell that you are not involved in an illusion of that sort! The result of defining perfect illusion in this second way would be that no one, who held it to be certain at a given time that he was involved in a specified reality, could admit that there ever occurred such an illusion. And a 'perfect' perceptionillusion disjunction would be rather a strange thing if 'perfect' illusion were taken in this way.

C. I spoke loosely when I said, in Part I, that there is a difference between the act and the object of b-experiencing. What is clear is that there often is such a difference and hence that there can be. In the 'a' case there cannot be. I do not want to take a view as to whether there must invariably be a difference between act and

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APPENDIX

object in the 'b' case. Consequently I have no aprioristic objection to offer, of a kind that would arise from the view that there must always be such a difference, against the following idea: that my perceiving a flash of light on a given past occasion was one and the same event as my then and there b-experiencing a certain brain change, and moreover was one and the same event as that brain change itself On the other hand, I do not at present see a way in which this idea could be substantiated. D. In Section '3, pp. I05-6, the idiomatic 'I don't/didn't know which' that I talk about has in all contexts the full meaning set out on p. I07 in the context of apperception. That is to say that '1 don't! didn't know whether p~, as well as, e.g., '1 don't know whether I perceive thatp', is a part of what is meant. If the reader does not accept that there is such an idiomatic 'I don't/didn't know which', then he may use the appropriate full expansion instead, or introduce an odd and elliptical 'I don't/didn't know whether'.

BIBLIOGRAPHY'

Where a bracketed name is given in the text ofthe book without a number, the reference is to thefirst of the authm"'s works listed here

ANSCOMBE, G. E. M. 'The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature.' In Anaiytical Philosophs, SecondSeries, ed. Butler. Blackwell, 1955. --An Introduction to Wittgemtein's Traotatus. Hutchinson, 1959· - - Intention. Blackwell, 1957. ARMSTRONG, D. M. Perception and the Physical World. Routledge, 1961. AUSTIN, J. L. Sense and Sensibilia. Clarendon Press, 1952. _ _ PhilosophicalPapers. Clarendon Press, 196t. AYER, Sra A. J. The Problem of Knowledge. Pelican, 1956 . - - 'Privacy.' ProGS. Brit. Acad., 1959. --Philosophical Essays. Macmillan, 1954· BARNEs, W. H. F. 'The Myth of Sense-Data.' ProGS. Arist. Soc., 1944-5 COHEN, L. J. 'Criteria of Intensionality.' Proos. Asist. Soc. Supp. Vol., 1968 . - - The Diversity of Meaning. Methuen, 1962 . CORNFORTH, M. Marxism and the LinguisticPhilosophy. Lawrence and Wishart, '965. DENNETr, D. C. 'Geach on Intentional Identity.' Joum. Phil., 1968 . FARRELL, B. A. 'Experience.' Mind, 1950. GEACH, P. T. Mental Acts. Routledge, 1957· - - Reference and Generality. Cornell, 1962. GREGORY, R. L. Eye and Brain. World University Library, 1966. GRICE, H. P. 'The Causal Theory of Perception.' Procs. Arist. Soc. Supp. Vol., 195 r. HAMLYN, D. W. The Psyclwlngy 'If Perception. Routledge, '957· - - Sensation and Perception. Routledge, 1961. HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Thought and Action. Chatto, 1959· _ _ 'Perception and Identification.' Procs. Arist. Soc. Supp. Vol., 196r. G. W. F. Phenomenology of Mind, A. I, 2. Trans. Baillie. Allen and Unwin, 1931. HEGEL,

Vol., 1935.

PAUL, G. A. 'Is There a Problem About Sense-Data?' Procs. Arist. Soc. Supp.

PLATO. Theaetetus. Trans. Levett. Jackson, Glasgow. QunITON, A. M. 'The Problem of Perception.' Mind, 1955· RYLE, G. I. The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson, 1949·

I This Bibliography being partly an acknowledgement of influences, I want to say that I think I was helped by some remarks about 'existing in the mind' that M. A. E. Dummett made in the course of a talk on Existence, and by A. C. J ackson's John Locke Lectures.

'48 BIBLIOGRAPHY

RYLE, G. 2. 'Sensation.' In Contemporary British Philosophy, Third Series. Allen and Unwin, 1956. - - 3· 'Perception.' In Dilemmas. C.V.P., 1954-

1958.

SEARLE, J. R. Speech Acts. C.li.P., 1969. . SMART,].]. C. 'Sensations and Brain Processes.' In The Philosophy of Mind, ed. Chappell. Prentice-Hall, 1962. STR...<\.WSON, P. F. "Perception and Identification.' Procs. Arist. Soc. Supp..Vol., 1961. (Reply to Hampshire, q.v.) VESEY, G. N. A. 'Seeing and Seeing As.' Proos. Arist. Soc., 1955-6. WARNOCK, G. ]. 'Seeing.' In Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing, ed. Swartz.

Doubleday, 1965. WISDOM,]. Other Minds. Blackwell, 1952. --Philosophy andPsycho-Ana(ysis. Blackwell, 1953. --Paradox and Discovery. Blackwell, 1965. WITTG-ENSTEIN, L. I. The Blue and Brown Books. Blackwell, - - 2. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, 1953.

96 fr.

INDEX

-

-

-

wexperiencing,

categorial experiences, .2 1-34 db-experiencing, 16 ff., 29-30 experience 'of', 5, 19, 33-4 experiencing and knowing, I I 'inner' experiences, I, 60 ff

29,64

ca-experiencing, 14 ff., Ig----20, 22-5,

30, (33), (gg)

M

'event ofwhich one is the subject, an', 2, 5ff.,46, (116-17), and passim - conscious subject, 5, 8-34, (63-4), and passim - grammatical subject, 5 ff - test-subject, 5, 7, 18,20, (90) event-report: same event-report and same event, 76 events, (no) difference between, 28,4950, 62-3, 97 ff. exactitude: see precision experiences, -ing: - a, b, 1, 2-experiencing, 13 ff. - a-2-experiencing, 13 fr., 23, 34, 64-5 - b1 (12), 13, 15-20, 27-9, 8g, (Appendix C) b-2-experiencing, 13 ff., 21, 27, 2g-

effect, 75 if. 'either' and 'not neither', 39 empiricism, I, (ror}, 1I3 E-reports, 33 n., 74-102, Appendix. A - precise, 74 - non-precise, 91, 95 ff. eifahren, 20 erleben, 19

delusion, 117, 123 Deutscher, Max, 107 n. disjunction; see D*, 'either', illusionreality disjunctions, 'or else', perception-illusion disjunction(s) disposition, onset of a, Appendix A doxastic sense of a verb: - broadly, 1I2 if. - narrowly, 104 ff., 114, 116

Bracketed references are to pages on which a relevant discussion" though not the term in question, occurs absolutely simple propositions, 94-5 accidence, I I I 'act',6 act and object, 15, 19, Appendix C actions, 28-g adverbs, 18-19

a-experiences, -ing; see experiences, -ing a fortiori reports, 49, 68 afterimagery, 72, 99 analysis, 38 Anscombe, G. E. M., 55 'answering the question as to what is happening to the subject', 38, 46 ff., 63,67 if. apperception, 32, 42, 105, 107, III 'as if': - exclusively, II'l, 1.21 ff., 133 - neutrally, 121, 127, 1.28 if. Austin, J. L., 116 ff. Australian Central-State Materialists, 72, 142, (Appendix C)

J., 32,

awareness, 15, see also consciousness second-order awareness, 24 ff Ayer, A.

-

'bad picture', 12, .29 Bell, Davidson, and Scarborough, 83 n. b-experiences, -ing: see experiences, -ing Brentano, 54, 59 cause and effect: see effect -" 'same cause, same effect', ]6 Cohen, L. J., 55 constituents and conjuncts, 127 consciousness: see states of consciousness and 'event of which one is the subject' 'right sort of', 5, 8-12, 22

-

D* and other disjunctions, 38-45, 63, 67,73, 104, 114, 122, 1.25 ff

'5°

>02

reference, objects of, 75 ff reification, 101 relative incorrigibility, 41, 43

'g', 122 if.

passivity 8, 15 perception, 12, 37 ff., 103 if. - and illusion, something in common between, 93 ~ causal definition of, 57, 130 if. - 'perceiving qua mental act, the', 51 ~ perceiving that p, 105, 109-11 perception-illusion disjunction(s) -'blunt', 39ff., 122, 125ff. - ground for a, (52-3), 94-5 - method for finding the nearest, 92 - more and less specific, 39 ff. - 'perfect' and 'imperfect', 39 ff - 'pointed', 38 ff - proto-Logical symbolism for, 124-5 - what makes one true, 95 phenomenalism, 56 phenomenological description, 57-8, 9S n . Phenomenology, 58 phosphene, 40, 116, 118, 121 pictographs, 57-8 Plato, 107 possibility, 43 if., 129 precision and exactitude, 47 if., 52, 64, 68ff., 81-2, 91-2 Prior, A. N., 98 'proper' sense of a verb, 115; see also seeing psycho-physical law, psychological constituent in a, 58-9

objective sense ofa verb, 112 ff. objects of reference, 75 ff. O'Faolain, Sean,' 7 'or else', 1I3 overentailment, 48-9

neutral appearance, 41-3, 68-70, 95 if., 128 fr.; see also'as if' neutralism, one-way, 124 if. non-assertive contexts, 103-4, 127

Martin, C. B., 107 n. McCulloch, G. L., 82 n. modal logics, I I I Murdoch, Iris, I

INDEX

experiences (cont.): - misexperiencing, 17 - per accidens experiences, Q I, 28 - same experience, the, 94 - sb-l-experiencing, 16 ff., 34 - sdb-experiencing, 17 ff., 34 - ua-experiencing, 14 ff., 23 ff., 28--9, 34 experience-reports, 33 n., 40, 63 ff., 74~ - 'merely generic', 78 ff. experiri, 20 extensionality, 54 external world, I, 6 I, 66

'f', 103, IIg if., 125 ii., 142 false belief, temptation to a, 133 ff.

lIS

Geach, P. T., 93 gene, 88 general and special verbs, 18 generalization and simplification, 91 ghostly impulse, 93 glossocentric philosophy, 26 glossogenic philosophy, 25--6, 102 grammatical fiction, 127

Grice, H. P., 57, 104

Gregory, R. L., 83, hallucination, 34, 62, 116 Hampshire, S. N., 14 101

101

hypostatization,

Hume, David, identification, 63

identity, brain-mind, (7'....), (79) ideology, 10! illusion, 12, 37 ff., 114 ff. - perfect, 38 ff., 93 ff., Appendix B illusion-reality disjunctions, 117-18 'image', 139 incorrigibility, relative, 41, 43 individuality, 60 information, 141 fr. intending and meaning, 93-4 intentionality, 53 fr. 'kinds of thing', 18, (28), (88n.) Linguistic philosophy: see glossocentric philosophy Logical or topic-neutral terms, 131 fr. 'looks', 32 n., 61, 95 n.

,.;:z

R-statements, 63 if. Ryle,Gilbert, 14,30,84,93, 140

Warnock, G. J., 107 n., 110 Wisdom, John, 69 Wittgenstein, L., 14, 93

vague or generalized reports, 48 ff., 68ff. 'visualness', 137

undergoing, 13 ff 'undergoing', an, 10 unidirectional clarification, unidirectionelism, 54 ff., 96, 127 ff

'Tag T', (52), (74), 97 ff. temptation to believe, 41, 1I2, 133 if. terminological questions, 100 things and times lived through, 8 'this', 93 truth ex vi termini, 81, 131 if.

subject-matter in common, 42 synonymy, 20, 96, 128 syntax, 67--8

INDEX

'8',67 ff; Science, argument from, 75 if. science fiction, 9 I seeing, 29 H, ~ having X in sight, 96 ff - plainly, 32 ff., 41-2, 112 fr. - 'properly', 3 I ff., 109 - 'seeing what is in fact X', 30 ff., 109 - seeming to see, 3 I H, - unambiguous testimony of the visual sense, 32 - visual appearances, 3 I, 41 sensations, 82 ff., 1I8, 127 ~ 'indescribability' of, 100 sense-data, sensa, sensibilia, 66, 99-100 Smart, J. J. C., 72 '8$',87 ff '888',87 if. states of consciousness, 22, 29 stating, 40