Whitehead’s Resistance to Scepticism in Relation to Santayana

Abstract

Without ever becoming central, the refutation of scepticism constitutes one of the pervading themes of Whitehead's philosophy of perception. His way of resisting scepticism about the external world was the doctrine of the two pure modes of perception, presentational immediacy and causal efficacy, and of the mixt mode of symbolic reference. In the present study, I try to evaluate Whitehead's theory of perception as a rampart against scepticism. First, I expose, in relevant outline, Whitehead’s theory of perception as it first appears in S, with the necessary refinements adduced in PR, and I find it wanting. Next, I show that Whitehead’s doctrine of subjective forms works as a patch for the theory, and allows it to counter some varieties of scepticism.