Reduction and Secondary Qualities

Abstract

Progress in philosophy has often been curvilinear, its history filled with examples of circles come full. In their belief that Unified Science can accomplish far more than the explanation of every level of phenomena, many philosophical materialists now consider the Democritian millennium to be at hand. 'Scientific theories are ways of looking at the world,' one of them has written, 'and their adoption affects our general beliefs and expectations, and thereby also our experience and conception of reality.' They judge that microphysical terms would be adequate to portray the vast range of perceptual phenomena in the world as we know it, and all tend to regard the common sense view of the world as a kind of primitive, unformalized and transient theory of reality which will give way in the course of time to a more rigorous scientific account. The philosophical issue thus raised is a crucial one for the dualist: might the theoretical terms of science, which could be used to explain the physical conditions of perception, equally serve to express what it is to perceive? The fact that materialism and dualism are opposed on this issue has nothing to do with the limits of science, but everything to do with the way we conceive and describe the world. The dualist contends that any language subserving these ends, however enriched it is by the vocabulary of microphysics, would contain an irreducibly perceptual element. In his eyes, the unification of the sciences, far from rebutting this claim, does not even afford an insight into the nature of description. In this paper I want to argue the case for irreducibility, not in connection with a class of entities or properties, but with regard to a type of locution, one that happens to be central, for it concerns our use of language to identify and describe objects which are common to our perceptual experience. I shall concentrate on the