Sense-datum Theory Research Articles

THE VEIL OF ABSTRACTA

Of all the problems attending the sense-datum theory, arguably the deepest is that it draws a veil of appearances over the external world. Today, the sense-datum theory is widely regarded as an overreaction to the problem of hallucination. Instead of accounting for hallucination in terms of intentional relations to sense data, it is often thought that we should account for it in terms of intentional relations to properties. In this paper, however, I argue that in the versions that might address the problem of hallucination, this newer account is guilty of a vice similar to sense-datum theory’s: it draws a veil of abtracta over the concrete world.

Perception, by Howard Robinson.

Howard Robinson's Perception is now rightly regarded as essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the sense-datum theory of perception and its motivations. It should also be regarded as essential reading for those with a more general philosophical interest in perception and sensory consciousness. As well as discussing the history of the sense-datum theory, and the nature of sense-data and their relation to the physical world, Robinson offers critiques of physicalist theories of perception, intentional/representational theories, adverbial theories, and naive realist/disjunctivist theories. Along the way he also discusses Wittgenstein's private language argument and the nature of secondary qualities. Over the course of the book we are presented with a sustained, and forthright, defence of a sense-datum theory in its traditional form. The arguments are clear, briskly delivered, and challenging. Here I highlight two key elements in Robinson's case for a sense-datum theory, which I think pose an especially serious challenge for his opponents. These are his articulation and defence of the ‘phenomenal principle’ and his ‘revised’ causal argument for sense-data.

ON THE LOOKS OF THINGS

In recent publications, Michael Tye and Alva Noë have claimed that there is a sense in which a tilted plate looks round and another sense in which it looks elliptical. This paper argues that their proposal faces decisive objections. On Tye and Noë's account of ordinary, veridical perception, appearances are in constant conflict. As a characterization of ordinary visual experience, this cannot be correct. I examine various responses to this criticism, and conclude that they all fail. I then argue that Noë's account has the further, unintended and undesirable consequence of promoting a version of the sense-datum theory.

Locating projectivism in intentionalism debates

Intentionalism debates seek to uncover the relationship between the qualitative aspects of experience—phenomenal character—and the intentionality of the mind. They have been at or near center stage in the philosophy of mind for more than two decades, 1 and in my view need to be reexamined. There are two core distinct intentionalism debates that are rarely distinguished (Sect. 1). Additionally, the characterization of spectrum inversion as involving inverted qualities and constant intentional content is mistaken (Sect. 3). These confusions can be witnessed from an often-ignored and lonely perspective, that of the sense-datum theorist, and in particular of the projectivist 2 (Sect. 2). In my view we have been so wary of sense-datum theory in recent years that we have failed to see that, even if false, it may permit perspectives on intentionalism issues difficult to occupy from other views.

Précis of Empiricism and Experience

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

Reply to Campbell, Martin, and Kelly

Seeing is a way of learning about the word by exploring how things look. But looks, on the view developed Action Perception, are not mental intermediaries. They are, rather, aspects of the things we see. Our problem is not that of getting from in here to out there, but rather that of learning how things are from a place. Perceptual experience is always an encounter with objects but it is also always an encounter with objects that is shaped by one's situation or perspective. The challenge of the theory of perception is to appreciate how perception can be, this way, an encounter with how things are, when the nature of things necessarily exceeds what can be taken a glance. But this challenge cannot even be brought into focus until one appreciates what I will call the two-dimensionality, or duality, of perceptual content. Sean Kelly rejects the duality of perceptual experience; he says my phenomenology is bad and my proposal otiose. He insists that an important adjunct to Noe's dual content view, for example, is adherence to a certain kind of primacy claim: not only do we represent both the apparent and the real properties of objects, on this view, but the apparent property is some sense the primary one. And he adds: This puts Noe league with a certain kind of sense-datum theorist, and indeed he admits that his view leaves unscathed what is really the sense-datum theory's core idea (Action Peception, p. 81).

Commentary on Action in Perception

Action in Perception commendably sets out to make sense of the nature of sense experience in the light of empirical research. Alva Noe is sensitive to developments in neuroscience and he sets out to explain the character of our sense experience in a way that makes sense of what we know from psychophysics up about perception. He is critical of various models of perceptual cognition and attracted in the enactive approach to an account which can both be true to the phenomenology of perception and make sense of the place of perceiving subjects within a physical world. Even if its author is diffident of offering a theory of consciousness as such, still the account is one of how we are able to visually perceive objects and the world around us. According to Noe, we should think of perceivers as actively engaged in perception, as exploring the world around them. In particular, in the case of vision, they come to see the world around them through exercising their sensorimotor understanding of the visual appearance of objects through active exploration. The book is very rich in its themes and arguments. I want to focus on just one strand of this central theme: the ways in which appearances or looks might be basic in perception. In some ways Noe's approach echoes elements of older sensedatum theories. The sensorimotor skill, understanding, or knowledge that Noe emphasises as part of our coming to be perceptually aware of the world around us parallels the sense-datum theorists' talk of perceptual acceptance, pseudo-intuitive consciousness, and pre-judicial mental act. Where Moore or Price talk of sense-data, Noe talks of elements which are present 'strictly speaking' in experience. Neither side denies that perceptual consciousness involves more than this;

The reality of qualia

This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and ‚ordinary’ grounds. I␣distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent ‚representational’ or ‚intentional’ theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality of qualia as phenomenally available intentional contents in Brentano’s original sense of ‚intentionality’.

Direct realism: Proximate causation and the missing object

Direct Realists believe that perception involves direct awareness of an object not dependent for its existence on the perceiver. Howard Robinson rejects this doctrine in favour of a Sense-Datum theory of perception. His argument against Direct Realism invokes the principle ‘same proximate cause, same immediate effect’. Since there are cases in which direct awareness has the same proximate cerebral cause as awareness of a sense datum, the Direct Realist is, he thinks, obliged to deny this causal principle. I suggest that although Direct Realism is in more than one respect implausible, it does not succumb to Robinson’s argument. The causal principle is true only if ‘proximate cause’ means ‘proximate sufficient cause’, and the Direct Realist need not concede that there is a sufficient cerebral cause for direct awareness of independent objects.

The Transparency of Experience

A common objection to sense–datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind–independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I argue that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sensedatum theories. In the first part of the paper I explore the form of explanation that an intentional theory of perception can offer of this fact, and I contrast this with an alternative picture labelled naïve realism which can also accommodate and explain the fact of transparency. In the second part of the paper I explore the connection between sensory experience and sensory imagining, arguing that various features of sensory imagining support the hypothesis that in visualising a tree one imagines seeing a tree. In the final part of the paper I argue that the conclusion concerning sensory imagination presents an explanatory challenge for intentional theories of perception which parallels the challenge to sense–datum theories.

Matching sensible qualities: A skeleton in the closet for representationalism

The intransitivity of matching sensible qualities of color isa threat not only to the sense-data theory, but to allrealist theories of sensible qualities, including thecurrent leading realist theory: representationalism.I save representationalism from this threat by way ofa novel yet empirically plausible hypothesis about theintrospective classification of sensible qualities of color.I argue that due to limitations of the visual system's abilityto extract fine-grained information about color fromthe environment, introspective classification of sensiblequalities of color is sensitive to features of context.I finish by arguing for the superiority of mysolution over two alternative solutions: one by NelsonGoodman, the other by C.L. Hardin.

Naturalism, introspection, and direct realism about pain

This paper examines pain states (and other intransitive bodily sensations) from the perspective of the problems they pose for pure informational/representational approaches to naturalizing qualia. I start with a comprehensive critical and quasi-historical discussion of so-called Perceptual Theories of Pain (e.g., Armstrong, Pitcher), as these were the natural predecessors of the more modern direct realist views. I describe the theoretical backdrop (indirect realism, sense-data theories) against which the perceptual theories were developed. The conclusion drawn is that pure representationalism about pain in the tradition of direct realist perceptual theories (e.g., Dretske, Tye) leaves out something crucial about the phenomenology of pain experiences, namely, their affective character. I touch upon the role that introspection plays in such representationalist views, and indicate how it contributes to the source of their trouble vis-à-vis bodily sensations. The paper ends by briefly commenting on the relation between the affective/evaluative component of pain and the hedonic valence of emotions.

The Location Problem for Color Subjectivism

According to color subjectivism, colors are mental properties, processes, or events of visual experiences of color. I first lay out an argument for subjectivism founded on claims from visual science and show that it also relies on a philosophical assumption. I then argue that subjectivism is untenable because this view cannot provide a plausible account of color perception. I describe three versions of subjectivism, each of which combines subjectivism with a theory of perception, namely sense datum theory, adverbialism, and the virtual color proposal, and argue that each version faces serious objections. Considering these three theories of perception to be exhaustive of those available to the subjectivist, I conclude that subjectivism is untenable and that the scientifically motivated argument for this view is unsound. I then offer the diagnosis that the philosophical assumption on which this argument relies is mistaken.

Admiration: A New Obstacle

Her eyes are blue and I admire them. To admire them, I have to believe that they are there and blue. I cannot believe that the object of my admiration is merely an independently existing power which produces in me an experience as of her blue eyes. Her actual eyes don't have to be a content of my experience in order for me to admire them. It would be enough for them to be there and accurately represented by an internal object of my experience. But that her actual eyes are a content of my experience is perhaps the most likely and even the most agreeable way in which the conditions would be satisfied for me to admire them without illusion. Various doubtful philosophical arguments exist against the doctrine that perceptual experience has a content which is nothing other than a part of the independently existing world. But a new and ingenious causal argument against that doctrine has recently been advanced both by Howard Robinson and by J. J. Valberg.' Robinson wants a sense datum theory of perception, from which he can negotiate a further passage to the ultimate haven of Berkeleian idealism. Valberg aims rather to reveal a tension between our commonsensical commitment to a causal picture of the world and what he thinks is our inability not to believe in the immediate presence of external objects, given that we have any picture of the world. You may not share either of these concerns. You may also resist the currently popular picture of direct realism as our only saviour from the 'Cartesian sceptic', as uniquely capable of dispelling what is rightly or wrongly seen as the fatal illusion 'of a gulf, which it might be the task of philosophy to bridge, or declare unbridgeable, between the realm of subjectivity and the world of ordinary objects.'2 Why after all should the mere existence of direct realism ' Robinson, H., Perception (London: Routledge, 1994), ch. VI (an expanded version of some of his essay 'The General Form of the Argument for Berkeleyian Idealism' in Robinson, H. and Foster, J. (eds), Essays on Berkeley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 163-186. Valberg, J. J., The Puzzle of Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 106, 111. 2 McDowell, J., 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space' in Pettit, P. and McDowell, I. (eds), Subject, Thought and Content (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 146. Cf. McCulloch, G., Mind and World (London: Routledge, 1995), 15: 'it is because the mind, according to Descartes ..., is self-contained with respect to the surrounding material world, that sceptical questions immediately seem so urgent.

Grice and Kierkegaard: Implication and Communication

When I speak about Kierkegaard's notion of indirect communication, I find that it is often mistaken for something like a Gricean implicature types of implications involved in language which are characterized by H. P. Grice. The two ideas are quite distinct and I intend to show that Grice offers us something that slightly touches on, but in no way portrays what Kierkegaard meant by indirect communication. Beginning with Grice's account of linguistic implication, I will examine the two doctrines separately and then discuss the lack of identity between them. I do not intend to analyze, defend, or apply either of them; my purpose is to get clear on them so that the difference between them will be apparent. H. P. Grice' develops a notion of implication in his analysis of an objection to sense-data theories which employ looks to me idioms. The target objection holds that such statements purportedly sense-data statements carry the implication Qf actual or potential doubt or denial with regard to that which looks to x and therefore cannot be used for normal straightforward perceptual situations (which are, purportedly, not subject to doubt or controversy). Sense-data theorists want their perceptual statements to be true so that such statements can be analyzed in terms of the notion of sense-data. If looks to me statements cannot address straightforward perceptual situations, using them in such situations would corrupt the causal theory of perception. Grice believes that such an objection has serious problems. He suggests that implication may not necessarily constitute part of the meaning of an expression, i.e., that it might just be a general feature or principle of the use of language.' If implication can be shown to be distinct from something that is stated, then the objection to looks to me statements would

A Defense of Sense-Data

In recent years, the sense-datum account of visual experience has fallen into disfavor. The primary reason for its demise is the widespread belief that the adverbial approach provides an alternative theory which accommodates the data of visual experience as well as the sense-datum theory but has the advantages of being a simpler theory and one which avoids some puzzling problems faced by its competitor. It is only recently, however, that the adverbial approach has been developed in sufficient detail so that its claim to superiority can be evaluated. The two philosophers who are primarily responsible for articulating the theory are R. M. Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars. A careful examination of their views, however, reveals serious deficiencies.' Michael Tye has recently attempted to elaborate the adverbial approach in a manner which remedies the shortcomings of his predecessors.2 One of the chief virtues of Tye's paper is that it recognizes that the adverbial approach can be elaborated in a number of different ways. Tye goes on to distinguish a number of-different adverbial approaches and argues that two of them provide viable alternatives to the sense-datum theory. My primary purpose is to show that neither of these adverbial approaches is successful. The argument of this paper provides further support for the more general thesis that there presently exists no viable alternative to the sense-datum theory.

A Defence of Sellars

There have recently been a number of attacks on the philosophy of perception developed by Wilfrid Sellars. Matters have come to a head largely because of Sellars' series of Carus Lectures,' in which he showed himself, not only unrepentant in his commitment to sensings, but prepared to discourse upon them with some confidence. In two subsequent articles' he shows no sign of retreat. Sellars is among that very small group of philosophers who espouse a theory postulating representing media; there is an even smaller number who share with him the claim that it is possible to reconcile the existence of such media with a physical account of reality without committing oneself to any form of dualism. Most philosophers today, according to R. E. Tully, inclined to think sense-datum theory no longer needs autopsy but only embalmment.' As a result, any representational theory is seen by many to have been laid to rest, and they may take it as an anomaly that Sellars continues to concern himself with what is no longer a live topic. According to his critics, what seems so patently old-fashioned in his view are the following theses:

Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 437 Berkeley. Yolton presents the world Hume describes as one largely provided by imagination, and then concludes PerceptualAcquaintancewith the sentences: Many of the writers we have examined took such knowledge [of a world of external objects] to be direct, in the sense that our cognitive responses are to objects, not in the sense that objects are in some mysterious, mystical way absorbed by, incorporated into the mind. There are lessons to be learned from Arnauld, from Berkeley, and from Hume about what is and is not, about what can and cannot be direct awareness of objects. Before we can profit from those writers, we must correct the long misunderstanding of their doctrines. (~22) The question is, does Yolton seriously mean to imply that Berkeley and Hume are direct realists in the vulgar sense? In conclusion, Yolton presents a very provocative--but highly condensed and often puzzling because of what is left out--direct-realist interpretation of the way of ideas from Descartes to Reid. He eviscerates selected texts of two centuries to discover a development of ideas that underwrites contemporary concerns in linguistic philosophy and philosophical psychology. This is a challenge to those historians who have followed the same course to discover---exactly contrary to Yolton--that Berkeley and Hume are the direct predecessors of the sense-datum theories of Russell and Carnap. Yolton is certainly right about the distinction between Arnauld's perceptionidea and Malebranche's entity-idea. But Yolton's sympathy for the claim that cognizing is just cognizing is too unqualified, for the problems of error and of counterfactuals rule out as unsatisfactory the position that cognizing is a simple or unanalyzable act. Finally, there are so many lacunae, confusions, opacities, and problems in the notions (1) that an idea just is the act of direct perceptual acquaintance with external objects, and (2) that cognitive content or meaning is solely epistemic and non-ontic, that these difficulties in themselves stand as a severe obstacle to accepting Yolton's revision of doctrine. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University John Richetti, PhilosophicalWriting: Locke,Berkeley,Hume. Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983 . Pp. 287 . $25.oo. John Richetti's book is a welcome attempt to dissolve the arbitrary boundaries between "philosophy" and "literature," the sort of project rendered fashionable by current trends in French philosophy. (See for example, Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology,' and the work of Paul de Man, whom Richetti cites.) The study celebrates those habits of style which disturb ordinary analytic expectations or which "enact" or "stage" the authors' peculiar intentions or hesitancies: the "philosopher," we discover, has metamorphosed into a narrator of (or even dramatic character in) his own text. For example , Locke's Essay"is essentially a comic, quasi-novelistic document" (111). Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, t976). 438 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:3 JULY ~985 Moreover, we learn that "the situation Locke evokes in the Essay accustoms the reader to a world of paradox, inconsistency, description, change, and even unexpected transformation" (111); and Locke persuades us to accept the "partially revealed" nature of reality and remain "satisfied with the ironic certainty of uncertainty" (ibid.). Berkeley draws the reader more propulsively towards a clear and eagerly-awaited telos--the rhapsodic vision of Siris. Despite Berkeley's linguistic scepticism, his writing forges an overarching parallel metaphor of language and vision (146) in which, paradoxically , "our constructions in visual perception resemble our constructions in reading , and by extension and intensification, this kind of reading reveals being and divinity " (165). And lastly, Hume's urbanity provides a forum in which his irony helps both to "dramatize" the problematic "epistemologicai scene" and ultimatcly to contain and redirect it towards the social ends the style itself adumbrates. Since this review appears in a philosophical journal, albeit with a historical bias, we might ask whether Richetti propounds a satisfactory rapprochement between his two potential audiences. I think ultimately not: in explicitly denying a revaluation of what the authors say (47), and by offering, rather, methodologically quite conventional stylistic "readings," we must treat the book primarily as a sophisticated "literary " vindication of prose works which students and teachers of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature have...

A Revival of Idealism?

The two works under consideration here defend claims that, although different from each other, are to a large extent complementary. Their arguments are to some degree overlapping; and, taken together, they herald a revival of idealism. Robinson argues that the main contemporary forms of materialism in the philosophy of mind are 'quite hopeless' (p. I 24). Foster contends that ultimate contingent reality is wholly non-physical and that the physical world is best taken as a logical product of facts about human sense experience. Although he does not claim to prove that ultimate reality is wholly mental, he suspects that it is (p. 294); and the position at which he arrives bears strong resemblances to the views of Bishop Berkeley. Both authors can be read as developing, in a most stimulating way, certain views advanced earlier by Professor H. D. Lewis. The central argument Robinson uses against materialist theories of the mind is 'quite sinriply, that the materialist cannot within his system allow for consciousness. Ayer has expressed this by saying that the materialist must pretend that he is anaesthetized' (p. 4). To drive home his point, Robinson asks us to consider the following thought-experiment. A deaf scientist becomes the world's foremost authority on the physiology of hearing. He comes to know everything there is to know about his subject except one crucial fact, which science will not tell him: 'what it is like to hear' (p. 4). Robinson emphasizes that the force of his argument does not depend on adopting a particular theory of what we perceive, e.g. that we directly perceive only sense data. Even if one rejects the sense-datum theory, adhering instead to direct realism or the adverbial theory, the problem remains. Something, regardless of how one wishes to characterize it theoretically, occurs when we are conscious; and this the materialist cannot explain. (This is not to admit that direct realism is a plausible theory of knowledge: see the discussion by Foster, pp. 58, 96 ff.) Robinson's argument will be familiar to all readers of Professor Lewis, as it is one which he has insisted on again and again in volumes such as The Elusive Mind and The Elusive Self Lewis succinctly states the main issue at the beginning of the latter book: 'At some point we have to recognize an

Identification and Description in Ayer's Sense-Datum Theory

Identification and Description in Ayer's Sense-Datum Theory