Knowledge and the Self-Presenting

Abstract

If a man looks towards and sees a table, what he experiences or directly perceives will not be a table, but (as we should say) a table-shaped patch of color. Yet, nonetheless, the man may be such that he knows that there is a table before him. Some philosophers — Empiricists — have suggested that what happens is this: (1) there is a real table, which the man is in front of; (2) there are real perceptions, distinct from the table, which the man is experiencing; (3) the perceptions are table-perceptions, and not chair-perceptions, or door-perceptions, or window-perceptions; that is to say, the perceptions which the man is experiencing exemplify certain properties, because of the kind of perceptions they are, which many other perceptions, because of the kinds of perceptions they are, do not exemplify; and (4) those properties are such that, if, at a given time, a man is experiencing perceptions which exemplify those properties, then he is justified in believing, at that time, the proposition: ‘There is a table before me’. Many, I feel, would take issue with (4), suggesting that (4) is wrong and that the self-presenting can never — in any real sense — be made to justify belief in the non-self-presenting. But, unless I am mistaken, the doubtful step in the above formulation is not (4), but (3). For I think that when we have examined the question as to what properties they are in fact which are such that if certain perceptions exemplify those properties then it is reasonable to believe the proposition: ‘There is a table before me’, we will discover that we can find no such properties, and hence that the proposed view is unjustified.¹