Abstract
Abstract Michael Ayers’s Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a New Empiricism is a rich and detailed development of two ideas. The first is that perception presents reality to us directly in a perspicuous way. We thus acquire primary knowledge of the world: “knowledge gained by being evidently, self-consciously, in direct cognitive contact with the object of the knowledge.” (Ayers 2019, 63) The second idea is that concepts are not needed in perception. In this article, the author examines Ayers’s view. The author proceeds as follows: In the first section, he identifies the target of Ayers’s attacks, conceptualism. He then describes why many philosophers have felt this conceptualist view to be attractive. In the next section, he discusses Ayers’s criticisms of conceptualism in an attempt to disentangle these criticisms from the statement of his positive view, which the author discusses in the following section. He ends by describing some problems for Ayers’s positive position that are, so he argues, the result of his vehement opposition to conceptualism.
Highlights
If we examine Ayers’s example of the footprints of the bear again, it seems as if we start with a belief or a hypothesis that is formed on the basis of perceptual knowledge of the footprints and the droppings
This suggests that the belief that there has been a bear, which is a propositional attitude directed towards a proposition, has been turned into a piece of knowledge that has as its object a fragment of reality, namely the state of affairs that there has been a bear
The puzzle Davidson’s slogan encapsulates is generated by the conjunction of four theses (Cunningham 2018, 257): – Reasons Priority: perceptual knowledge is belief held in the light of perceptual reasons. – The Doxastic Thesis: believing for a reason requires that one believes the proposition which is one’s reason
Summary
The two threads, the phenomenology of perception and the anticonceptualist stance, come together in Ayers’s discussion of the objects of knowledge Faithful to his anti-conceptualism, Ayers defends the view that the objects of primary knowledge are states of affairs in reality and not propositions, as the majority of contemporary epistemologists maintain. “Knowing is a relation of the knower to what it is in the world that is known.” (Ayers 2019, 99) Second, this knowledge relation is irreducible; just like the mental states of love and regret, it cannot exist without something actual being known Those who maintain that in perception the fundamental phenomenon is that of seeing that such and such is the case are misled by language. Ayers rejects both propositions and facts as candidates for being the object of knowledge, mainly on the basis of the causal principle They are too abstract to be able to play any kind of causal role in acts of perception. This account raises the question of how to distinguish in more detail than just by appealing to ‘extraneous reasons’, first, primary knowledge from secondary knowledge, second, primary knowledge from beliefs, and third, secondary knowledge from beliefs
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