Abstract
The difficulties we have found in our common sense views of vision pertain not just to the seeing of distant objects such as stars but to all cases of seeing. Even when we observe things close up, information about them is contained in the light waves that they reflect or emit. The perceiver gains access to this information as a result of his eyes being affected by light which thereby triggers a series of inner episodes in his nervous system and brain. Observation has a quite different meaning in the scientific story than it has for common sense. The directness and immediacy by which we seem to be visually in touch with the ‘external world’ is, for the scientific story, just an illusion. What we call ‘seeing something’ is not a simple inspection of an external fact, but the production of a chain of inner events which then are interpreted in order to extract their informational content.
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Notes
J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962 ), p. 43.
Here is how Edmund Husserl puts the point: “In the perception, in the experiences of consciousness themselves, that of which we are conscious is included as such—…the perception is in itself a perception of something, of ‘this tree.’” The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970 ), P. 85.
This formulation of Descartes’ view owes a great deal to Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” in his Mortal Questions (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 165180.
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1952 ), Chapter One.
G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922 ), p. 20.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid.
William James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” in Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe ( New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1971 ), p. 4.
For this move see B.A. Farrell, “Experience” in V.C. Chappell (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1962 ).
In some recent discussions, a distinction is made between an occurrent and a dispositional sense of “belief,” and what I have classified as judgment is assimilated to the occurrent sense. But as the following paragraphs make clear, I am skeptical whether there is a dispositional sense, and I do not think that datable acts of judgment are properly classified as beliefs.
For a further discussion of an ‘objective’ conception of belief and knowledge, see Karl Popper’s “Epistemology without a Knowing Subject,” in his Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). I make a few further remarks about this ‘objective’ conception in Chapter Eight.
For a battery of arguments against identifying beliefs with states of persons, see Chapter Two of Arthur collins’ The Nature of Mental Things (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987 ).
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Landesman, C. (1993). The Subjective Turn and the Problem of Transparency. In: The Eye and the Mind. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3317-5_2
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