Direct Realism Research Articles

Representationalism in Arnauld's Act Theory of Perception

Notes and Discussions REPRESENTATIONALISM IN ARNAULD'S ACT THEORY OF PERCEPTION In a recent article in this Journal1 Monte Cook examines the controversy between Laird and Ginsberg, who claim on the one hand that Arnauld is a direct realist, and Lovejoy and Church, who claim on the other that Amauld is a representationalist. Cook's thesis is that both sides share a basic misunderstanding which renders their dispute spurious. Both sides treat Amauld as though he had an object theory of ideas, whereas in fact he has an act theory of ideas. I am in fundamental agreement with Cook as far as he goes. I wish to go further. The commentators he discusses tried to come to grips with Arnauld's assertion that perceptions are essentially representative. They failed to see that this assertion must be interpreted in the context of an act theory of ideas. I wish to explore its meaning in that context. Amauld offers his theory of perception as an antidote to Malebranche's. Malebranche says that ideas represent. Arnauld says that perceptions represent. For Malebranche, the entities that represent are objects of perception. For Arnauld, the entities that represent are acts of perception. The temptation is to think that the word "represent" has a different meaning for each and that consequently the controversy between them as to whether it is acts or objects of perception that represent is spurious. The matter is not that simple. Amauld seeks to do away with Malebranche's "representative entities," but he does not seek to do away entirely with the kind of relationship that obtains between Malebranchean "representative entities" and the objects of the physical world. Some, though not all, features of that relation are to be found in his own system in the relation between acts of perception and the objects of the physical world. One may question whether enough of the representation relation gets incorporated into his system to merit the retention of the term "representation," or whether a theory ought to be called "representationalist" if it does not have a direct-indirect object dichotomy. Such questions fall outside the scope of the present discussion. Suffice it to say that Amauld did use the term in the context of his theory. My interest here is in what he meant by it. My thesis is that comparison with Malebranche's theory reveals a common core and explains why Arnauld considers his own theory a kind of representationalism. Behind Malebranche's theory of "representative entities" is the Cartesian principle that there is no perception that does not have an object, or in his words, "to see nothing is not to see." What the principle means for him is that the act of perceiving is "essentially related" to its immediate and direct object. One thing X is "essentially related" to another thing Y if it cannot be the case that X exists and Y does not.2 Such a relation does not obtain between the mind's acts of perception and the objects of the physical world. Monte Cook, "Arnauld's Alleged Representationalism," Journal o! the History of Philosophy, XII (1974), 53-62. 2 Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres compldtes de Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958-1967), IX, 911. [96] NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 97 It is perfectly possible to perceive bodies which do not exist. Thus the need for ideal objects which are perceived instead of bodies. As Malebranche analyzes the perceiving situation, there are three entities (the act of perceiving, the idea or direct object of perception, and the body or indirect object) and two relations (the one between the act and the idea, the other between the idea and the object). The first relation is intentional. The second is representational. The principle that there is no perception without an object says that the first relation, the intentional relation, is an essential relation. The second relation, the relation of representation, is not an essential relation; there can be ideas of bodies which do not exist. There is a further difference between the two relations. The second relation, unlike the first, is a relation of "making known." What does this mean? Among other things, it means that there is something about the idea...

"Epistemological Direct Realism in Descartes' Philosophy," by Brian E. O'Neil

"Epistemological Direct Realism in Descartes' Philosophy," by Brian E. O'Neil

Ideas and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

Ideas and Knowledge in Sewnteenth-Century Philosophy JOHN W. YOLTON THOMASREm's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785)t contains one of the earliest attempts to trace the history of the term 'idea' in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury philosophers. Reid opposed the philosophic use of that term, as the object and not the act of thought, to its use in popular and ordinary language. In this latter use "idea signifies the same thing as conception, apprehension, notion. To have an idea of anything is to conceive it" (p. 16). In a later passage, Reid presents this popular sense of 'idea' even more forcefully. To think of a thing, and to have a thought of it; to believe a thing, and to have a belief of it; to see a thing, and have a sight of it; to conceive a thing, and to have a conception, notion, or idea of it, are phrases perfectly synonymous. In these phrases, the thought means nothing but the act of thinking; the belief, the act of believing; and the conception, notion, or idea, the act of conceiving. To have a clear and distinct idea, is, in this sense, nothing else but to conceive the thing dearly and distinctly. When the word idea is taken in this popular sense, there can be no doubt of our having ideas in our minds. To think without ideas would be to think without thought, which is a manifest contradiction. (p, 174) The contrast which Reid draws repeatedly in his survey of the history of the term 'idea' is doubly important for an understanding of the theories of knowledge and cognition in seventeenth-century philosophy. It is important, firstly, because it echoes many of the debates between philosophers in the seventeenth century and, secondly, for the way it poses the question of direct realism. For Reid, the philosopher's 'idea' was a fiction which, if real, would mean that "we perceive not external objects immediately, and that the immediate objects of perception are only certain shadows of the external objects" (p. 133). Reid thinks we see objects directly, but when he tries to formulate what it is to think of or to cognize an external object, his use of the popular and common sense form of 'idea' and 'notion' brings him close to the views held by Locke and by Arnauld. He is prepared to give credit to Arnauld for coming close to the proper view of cognition. He even concedes that on occasion Locke seems to wish to embrace that view, but overall Locke is classed among the philosophers holding to the fictional view. The standard reading of Locke as a representationist needs emendation. I have recently attempted an extended analysis of his theory of knowledge on this question, offering a variety of reasons why Locke's text does not support reading him as Reid and many others have3 Besides the general claim that Locke was consciously trying to develop a 1 References to this work of Reid are to the 1786 (Dublin) two-volume edition. All references are to volume 1. Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (1970), chap. 5. An earlier and slightly different version of this chapter appeared in YowettPapers, 1968-69, ed. by Khanbhai, Katz, and [145] 146 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY theory of "knowledge consistent with observational science, I called attention to two passages in the Essay which, I think, clearly indicate I.ocke's explicit recognition and acceptance of the Cartesian notion of the objective existence of objects in the understanding . Locke introduces the term 'idea' (in 1.1.8) as expressing "whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species." This vocabulary is taken from a long tradition behind Descartes, going back through St. Thomas to Aristotle) The intelligible species is the object known, as it exists in the understanding. The formal or actual reality of a physical object (e.g., a stone, the sun) is its existence in space. The same object's objective existence is its existence in the understanding when it is known. The distinction between formal and objective existence is found in Descartes' Meditation III. In his "Epistle to the Reader," Locke says of a determinate or determined idea...

Causation and Direct Realism

Direct Realism as a theory of perception has traditionally been thought to collapse on the existence of hallucinations. The cause of that collapse is what is familiar to philosophers as the Argument from Illusion. And what sustains that argument is the equally familiar No-Intrinsic-Difference Claim. The argument and the claim conspire to undermine Direct Realism as follows. We are first given cases in which we are acquainted with perceptual states of affairs that can be neither material bodies nor parts of such bodies. We are told that what we see in such cases is phenomenally indistinguishable from what we see in cases of veridical perception: There is, so the argument goes, no characteristic of either kind of state of affairs available to inspection which enables us to distinguish one from the other. And since there is no phenomenal difference between them, there is also no intrinsic difference; hence, we are never directly aware of material bodies or their parts in perception—from which it is generally inferred that Direct Realism is false.

Cartesian Simple Natures

Cartesian Simple Natures

Aune on Thought and Language

In his recently published book, Knowledge, Mind, and Nature, subtitled An Introduction to Theory of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Mind,1 Professor Bruce Aune has put forward a coherent set of views on a variety of epistemological and metaphysical problems, while placing these views in the context of past and present positions. For the most part his theses are carefully argued, and the discussion is almost invariably stimulating and often enlightening. The book has two main thrusts, epistemological and metaphysical, and Aune is at pains to forge links between the two. In the grand design of the book the epistemological concern is the more basic, though it receives relatively little space, far too little for the demands of the subject. The main epistemological theme is an attack on what is called the picture of knowledge, and a proposal to replace it with a sort of contextualism (though Aune does not himself use this term). The opposition between these epistemological positions provides the basis for the metaphysical discussions that take up most of the book. Aune maintains that the metaphysical positions he attacks-e.g., phenomenalism, direct realism, and behaviorism---result from consistently employing the foundations picture of knowledge in one or another form; while he represents the positions he espouses on mind and nature as arrived at from his preferred epistemological perspective. I am wholly in sympathy with Aune's attack on foundation-

Perception and the Time-Gap Argument

1. Philosophers and scientists have sometimes argued that it is a consequence of the finiteness of the speed of light that what we see is never a part of the physical world.1 G. E. Moore, in some recently published lecturenotes dating from 1928-29, remarks that this argument-the time-gap or time-lag argument-has appeared absolutely conclusive to many people.2 Even though one or another form of direct realism is now far more popular than it once was, the argument is still current. For example, a scientist, Dr. J. R. Smythies, in the course of a recent defence of a representative theory of perception, refers to the famous time gap difficulty in Direct Realist theories ;3 and a philosopher, Professor Maurice Mandelbaum, has lately spoken of it as one of the strongest of all the arguments which can be used against direct realism .4 The argument has, oddly enough, attracted comparatively little attention till very recently from those who would in general wish to reject its conclusion; and its few critics have reached by no means unanimous conclusions about what is wrong with it.5 In the following I want to reconsider this argument.6

A Theory of Direct Realism, and the Relations of Realism to Idealism.

A Theory of Direct Realism, and the Relations of Realism to Idealism.

A Theory of Direct Realism.

A Theory of Direct Realism.

A Theory of Direct Realism: and the Relation of Realism to Idealism

THIS book is the outcome of a bold and engaging enterprise. It sets out to do two things; first (and chiefly) to cut a clean way through the tangled growth of modern epistemology by justifying the plain man's view that the perceiving mind is in immediate contact with the external world, “as this actually exists,” or that ordinary sense-perception, so far as it goes, “is, in principle, veridical”; secondly, to show that Hegelian idealism is entirely compatible with this supposedly antagonistic realist view.

A Theory of Direct Realism and the Relation of Realism to Idealism. By J. E. Turner, M.A., Ph.D. (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1925. Library of Philosophy. Pp. 324.)

A Theory of Direct Realism and the Relation of Realism to Idealism. By J. E. Turner, M.A., Ph.D. (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1925. Library of Philosophy. Pp. 324.)