Reflexivity, Realism, and Consciousness

Rory Madden

doi:10.1163/18756735-00000151

Abstract

Abstract The author raises a puzzle about the compatibility of the two features which, according to Ayers, jointly characterize paradigmatic cases of seeing, viz. ‘perspicuity’ and ‘immediacy’. In Section 1, the author explains why Ayers’s explanation of these two features suggests an inconsistent combination of reflexivity and realism about sense experience. Some of Ayers’s comments about our awareness of causation suggest a way of giving up on reflexivity. In Section 2, the author uses a thought-experiment to support the view that realism rather than reflexivity ought to be given up. In Section 3, the author gives a further reason for Ayers to take this option: it furnishes a response to a troublesome challenge concerning the epistemic significance of consciousness, a challenge which Ayers himself anticipates at the end of Chapter 2 of Knowing and Seeing but does not fully resolve.

Highlights

The second chapter of Knowing and Seeing, ‘Perception and Primary Knowledge’, defends foundationalism, ‘the traditional view of via free access
Something about sensory perception in itself is enough to move us to knowledge
An ordinary episode of sensory experience is in itself a complex situation, which coherently integrates the deliverances of distinct sense modalities to present environmental objects in spatial and causal relations to each other

Summary

The Puzzle

The second chapter of Knowing and Seeing, ‘Perception and Primary Knowledge’, defends foundationalism, ‘the traditional view of. There is more to Ayers’s explanation of the authority of the senses than coherentism in microcosm His phenomenological reflections suggest that the rich, integrated character of ordinary sense experience, has what one might call a reflexive aspect: ‘the perceptual relation is itself an object of perceptual awareness’ (2019, 34); ‘we are perceptually aware, at a practical level, of the causal relation between the object of perception and our experience of it ...’ (2019, 54); ‘... On the face of it, Ayers’s explanation of the perspicuity of sensory knowledge is committed to the reflexivity of sense experience. One way of resisting this result would be to hold that one is aware of the causation of e by o, but one is made aware of it through some distinct higherorder experience e′ which takes e as one of its objects This theory respects the realist thesis that the object of experience is always some distinct existence and thereby stops short of strict reflexivity. Aspects of Ayers’s discussion in Chapter 2 suggest a way for the realist to explain perspicuity without relying on even that general thesis

Causal Relata

Sense organ