Abstract
Much of Chisholm’s well deserved reputation results from his work in epistemology concerning the definition of ‘S knows that P’, his formulations of epistemic rules, and his defense of a foundational theory of empirical knowledge. Yet I believe that a less noticed area of his work may well have more important consequences for future developments in philosophy. I am referring to his nonepistemic theses about perception, especially his development and defense of the sensing terminology as preferable to the sense-datum terminology, and his analysis of ‘S perceives x’ in terms of sensing. And although these views concern terminology and analysis of certain linguistic phrases, I believe we can see both of them as contributions to what might be called the metaphysics of perception rather than to a theory of perceptual knowledge. My main aim in this paper is to transform his linguistic claims into ‘factual’ or metaphysical claims about perception and to evaluate some of his reasons for his theses. I shall also, however, consider briefly his view of secondary qualities to bring out what seems to be a theory of the nature of the external world as well as our perception of it.
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Notes
P: Perceiving, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1957.
NEE: ‘On the Nature of Empirical Evidence’, in R. Chisholm and R. Swartz (eds.), Empirical Knowledge, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973, pp. 224–249.
TK: Theory of Knowledge, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966.
Chisholm discusses this problem in ‘The Problem of the Speckled Hen’, Mind 51(1942), 368–373. A. J. Ayer replies to Chisholm in Philosophical Essays,St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1954, pp. 90–98.
See my Materialism and Sensations,Yale University Press, New Haven, 1971, Chap. 6.
W. R. Brain, The Nature of Experience, Oxford University Press, London, 1959, p. 20.
J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Houghton-Mifìin Boston, 1966, p. 306.
J. Hochberg, Perception, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964, pp. 9–10.
L. Hurvich and D. Jameson, The Perception of Brightness and Darkness, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1966, pp. 57–59.
See W. Sellars’ discussion of the sensing theory in Science, Perception, and Reality, The Humanities Press, New York, 1963, pp. 94–95.
See my ‘Can Eddington’s “Two” Tables be Identical?’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 52 (1974), 22–38.
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© 1975 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Cornman, J.W. (1975). Chisholm on Sensing and Perceiving. In: Lehrer, K. (eds) Analysis and Metaphysics. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9098-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9098-8_2
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