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Another Perspective on the Speckled Hen1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Philosophers in the tradition of Berkeley say that the first step in gaining knowledge from perception is to report or describe one's perceptual data, or that which one sees (feels, hears, smells, tastes) ‘immediately'. Further, perceptual data (1) are existing things of some sort, and (2) always are exactly as they appear to be since, as H. H. Price says, “in the sphere of the given … what seems, is”. However, these two claims about perceptual data are sometimes incompatible, as the following case shows. Suppose a man looking at a speckled hen reports that it has many speckles but is not able to report the exact number of speckles it has. If (2) above is correct, the man's perceptual datum, as opposed to the physical hen itself which he sees—according to Berkeleians—in a merely indirect sense, would have to be indeterminate in character. Yet we assume that everything which exists (cf. requirement (1)) is and has to be completely determinate. A person's knowledge is indeterminate if he knows that the planet Mars has either two or three satellites and doesn't know which. But Mars itself at any moment has to have some definite number of satellites.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1971
Footnotes
1
Earlier versions of this paper were read at Brigham Young University, March, 1969, and at the annual meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Winnipeg, June, 1970.
References
2 I am not concerned with the Berkeleian ontology of ‘phenomenalism’ but only with the epistemological view that ‘direct sense knowledge’ provides the foundation and justification for all other (synthetic) knowledge. The contemporary Berkeleian philosophers I have chiefly in mind are Russell, Broad and Price. But I shall not criticise these authors in detail since my concern is with a whole tendency of thought rather than any particular representatives of it.
3 Price, Perception, Methuen, 1964, p. 10.
4 E.g. Ayer. Cf. the account of Ayer's theory given by Chisholm, R. in his paper “The Problem of the Speckled Hen”, Mind, Vol. 51, 1942, pp. 368 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 A further paradox is that Berkeleians characterize such a phenomenal part of an object as nonspatial; but it is difficult to see how a non-spatial something can count as part of a spatial object.
6 There is little doubt that indeterminacy theorists consider this a description of the perceptual datum, despite the fact that it is not formulated in terms of the perceptual datum itself but in terms of physical objects apparently connected with this datum.
7 The primary thing I mean by non-existent ‘strictly speaking’ is non-existent in physical space. I do not deny that the data I speak of may exist in some other, perfectly acceptable sense of the word.
8 Cf. the preceding footnote.
9 The reader is free to say instead that ‘red and ‘rot’ express the same concept, idea, etc. The point I am making will not be affected by such a change.
10 I owe this expression to Wilfrid Sellars.
11 By ‘perceptual knowledge’ I undertand knowledge of one's environment which he acquires noninferentially by means of sense-experience of physical objects, processes, etc.
12 I have discussed the epistemological problems surrounding the idea of acquiring perceptual knowledge by a process of linguistic formulation in another paper, “A Formulation Model of Perceptual Knowledge”, American Philosophical Quarterly, January, 1971.
13 Cf. Russell, B. “On Denoting”, Mind, Vol. 14, 1905, pp. 479–493, esp. p. 480.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 This is what separates my theory of perception from a typical idealist theory. Idealists say that perceiving, correctly understood, turns out to be identical with completely specific judgments or pieces of knowledge. But I deny this. I say that perception (involving perceptual data results in such knowledge, but is not identical with it.
15 Greenness is a property of the external object perceived (the frog) not of the perceptual datum. (What sense would it make to say that a use or function was green?) Also, I do not maintain that the perceptual datum is identical with the greenness of the frog.
16 ‘Less determinate’ in the sense of being incomplete or unsaturated, as opposed to knowledge, which is complete. I do not mean that data are less determinate than knowledge in the sense that ‘colored’ is a less determinate word or concept than ‘red’, since (e.g.) the sentence ‘This wall is colored’ is every bit as complete and as saturated as the sentence ‘This wall is red’.