Abstract
Mill’s denial that any items of human knowledge are justifiable through the operation of rational faculties affording a priori insight into truth represents one major strand of his empiricism. Here his quarrel was with a priorist views about the mode in which certain things which human beings know are warranted. He did not dispute that we do have genuine knowledge about logic and mathematics, but he challenged the notion that the basis of that knowledge lies in any kind of a priori intuition. We saw that he was willing to allow that some propositions of logic may be beneath the call for justification altogether; but he never ceased to insist that experience alone could provide a justification for those propositions which required one.
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Chapter Seven
Hamilton’s quotations from authors alleged to have accepted the relativity principle are in his Discussions on Philosophy [&c], pp. 640–42. Mill’s criticism of Hamilton’s use of these authorities is rather oddly absent from post-1862 editions of the Logic; possibly Mill felt that the material was more appropriately reserved for the Examination (first edition 1865), where Hamilton’s views of earlier writers are given adverse notice at pp. 18–19.
Cf. Hamilton: ‘Of things absolutely or in themselves, be they external, be they internal, we know nothing, or know them only as incognisable’ (Hamilton (1866), p. 638).
But Mill, unlike Hamilton, at least admitted that some major eighteenth century philosophers had not accepted the relativity of knowledge, among whom he singled out Reid for special mention (SL, p. 61). Hamilton’s treatment of Reid is very curious. Reid proposed that from the sensation of smelling a rose, ‘I am led, by my nature, to conclude some quality to be in the rose.’ This is fairly evidently intended as an indirect realist analysis, yet Hamilton, who as Reid’s editor should have understood his author rather better than this, construed Reid as asserting that the quality in the rose ‘is, in fact, except as an imaginary something, unknown’ (Reid, p. 310).
Note that the Kantian version of the relativity doctrine is still inconsistent with indirect realist theories of perception, which do not accept that the external objects which cause our sense impressions are unknowable.
Mill’s argument is not, in fact, very convincing. It is not clear why our not having suitable faculties to apprehend the inner nature of noumena, if there are any such, should prevent our saying meaningfully that God could know that nature, on the basis of his superior faculties. A more plausible assertion Mill could have made is that if God were able to apprehend the inner nature of noumena, he could not convey his understanding to us (or not, at any rate, unless he provided us with suitable faculties).
A similar line of thought informs John Foster’s recent book The Case for Idealism. Foster claims that ‘to construe the physical world as non-mental is to put its intrinsic nature beyond the scope of positive transparent specification of even the most generic kind’ (p. 122). Non-mental space and its non-mental occupants are simply outside the range of meaningful human discourse, though we usually make the mistake of believing that ordinary physical object language can refer to them. Mill would have regarded Foster’s argument as a powerful application of the relativity doctrine.
And a further kind of case, which Mill did not consider: if you and I both look at the bookcase, our sensations of its brown colour are numerically distinct, though we take them to inform us of a single colour quality of the bookcase.
Godfrey Vesey, in’ sensations of Colour,’ has noted further difficulties arising from Mill’s view that attributes are to be explained as mere resemblances among sensations. One problem is that the possibility of a common meaning for words like ‘brown’ employed on the basis of sensation becomes dependent upon the coincidence in the subjective senses of resemblance of different individuals; for there is no reference allowed to resemblances being resemblances in some common, non-subjective respect to ground the claim that a term like ‘brown’ is univocal (cf. Vesey, p. 121). But it less clear that Vesey’s criticism finds the right target when he makes the further objection that it is obscure how, on Mill’s theory, a person can describe a sensation he is having for the first time as a sensation of brown, it being an implication of that theory that someone who applies an attribute term must satisfy the condition that he be aware of a resemblance among sensations (such resemblances being what attribute terms stand for) (Vesey, p. 122). For it would be open to an individual in this circumstance to suppose that his sensation resembles those previously had by other people, providing that he is entitled to assume that other people do have sensations which resemble his own; the true difficulty, however, is that his right to assume this can be challenged (because what is required is that he be justified in supposing that other people’s qualia resemble his own; and it is not clear that he can have this justification).
For a full account of resemblance nominalism and its difficulties, see Armstrong, ch. 5.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands
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Scarre, G. (1989). The Relativity of Knowledge. In: Logic and Reality in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Synthese Historical Library, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2579-3_8
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