Précis of Empiricism and Experience

Abstract

My principal aim in the book is to understand the logical relationship of experience to knowledge. Say that I look out of my window and see that it is raining. As I look out, I have a visual experience, and I come thereby to believe that it is raining. Plainly, my belief is reasonable, and it is so in part because of my visual experience. But what is the contribution of the experience to the reasonableness of my belief? The following terminology will prove useful: let us say that the given in an experience is the total rational contribution of that experience. Then, the question I am concerned with can be formulated thus: what is the given in an experience? More specifically, what is the logical character of the given? Does the given consist of a totality of propositions, or properties, or objects if so, which propositions, properties, and objects or of something altogether different? Classical empiricism offers a striking answer to our question. The given in experience, according to this seductive doctrine, consists of propositions about a subjective realm: in experience, the subject is acquainted with certain subjective entities, and with some of their properties and relations where acquaintance is understood as a relation that enables the subject to know immediately truths about the entities with which it is acquainted. Conceptions of experience of this general shape call them Cartesian conceptions assume a variety of forms, of which perhaps the most important is the sense-datum theory. The objects of acquaintance, in this theory, are sense-data, which are fleeting mind-dependent entities with various sensible qualities, such as colors, odors, and textures. The sense-datum theory and, more generally, Cartesian conceptions have come under incessant attacks since about the middle of the twentieth century. Many philosophers of this period