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IMPRESSIONS of EMPIRICISM in the Same Series ROY AL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY LECTURES VOLUME NINE . 1974-1975 IMPRESSIONS OF EMPIRICISM In the same series THE HUMAN AGENT TALK OF GOD KNOWLEDGE AND NECESSITY THE PROPER STUDY REASON AND REALITY PHILOSOPHY AND THE ARTS UNDERSTANDING WITTGENSTEIN NATURE AND CONDUCT ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY LECTURES VOLUME NINE· 1974-1975 IMPRESSIONS OF EMPIRICISM Edited by GODFREY VESEY PAL GRAVE MACMILLAN Copyright © 1976 Royal Institute of Philosophy Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1976 978-0-333-19159-0 All rights reserved. For information, write: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Printed in Great Britain Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-29964 First published in the United States of America in 1976 ISBN 978-1-349-02806-1 ISBN 978-1-349-02804-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-02804-7 CONTENTS Foreword by Godfrey Vesey vii Memory as Direct Awareness of the Past NORMAN MALCOLM 2 Locke and the Meaning of Colour Words 23 P. M. S. HACKER 3 Hume and Wittgenstein 47 OSW ALD HANFLING 4 An Empirical Account of Mind 66 D.M.TAYLOR 5 The Status of Sense Data 79 D. J. O'CONNOR 6 Wittgenstein on Seeing and Interpreting 93 P. B. LEWIS 7 New Phenomenalism as an Account of Perceptual Knowledge 109 ALAN HOBBS 8 Hume's Impressions 122 R. J. BUTLER 9 What is the Verifiability Criterion a Criterion of? 137 STUART BROWN 10 Empiricism in Science and Philosophy 154 ERROL E. HARRIS 11 Why Should the Science of Nature be Empirical? 168 L. JONATHAN COHEN 12 The Empiricist Account of Dispositions 184 R. S. WOOLHOUSE 13 Nature and Necessity 200 GUY ROBINSON 14 Empiricism in Ethics 216 STEPHAN KORNER Index 231 FOREWORD Two senses of 'empiricism' may be distinguished. The term may be used to refer to a method: the empirical method of basing theorising on, and testing it by, observation and experiment. Alternatively it may be used to refer to a philosophical theory, held in one form or another by, amongst others, John Locke, David Hume, the two Mills, and, more recently, Russell and Ayer. The theory is about knowledge and meaning. It has roots in dualistic theories of perception and communication, and fruits in epistemological problems about how we can possibly know things it does not ordinarily occur to us to question, such as that tables and chairs continue to exist when unperceived, and that other people have minds. The papers in this collection are about empiricism in both senses, and about how they are related. Some of them touch on that most exciting question (exciting tQ an empiricist manque, that is): whether empiricism, as a theory, is itself empirical. Others, towards the end of the volume, challenge a widely accepted view: the view that science, whatever else it should be, should at least be empirical. The final contribution is an original defence of empiricism - the method, not the theory - in ethics. To provide a point of reference for my comments on some of the individual lectures I shall say a little about the philosophical theory, in the form it takes in Locke's Essay. Empiricism as a theory has, as I said, roots in dualist theories of perception and communication. The theory of perception is one according to which a person's mind, as well as his body, is acted on when he perceives something. And just as there is something, the 'stimulation' of the sense-organ and nervous system, which is the result of his body being acted on, so there is something else, sometimes called a 'sense-impression' vii viii Foreword or 'sensation', which is the result of his mind being acted on. l It is on these sense-impressions - and on the inner awareness of the operations of the mind (remembering, discerning, reasoning, etc.), the ideas of which could not be had from sense-perception - that all our knowledge is founded. The theory of communication is that to be found in Hobbes' Leviathan and in numerous other writings up to the present day (including George Steiner's After Babel), the theory that language is needed only because one person cannot get at another person's thoughts directly. I translate my thoughts into sentences, which you hear or see, and then translate back into thoughts. To this 'translation' theory of communication has to be added the notion that thinking is a matter of being employed about things called 'ideas': ideas are the objects of the understanding in thinking. In the everyday use of the term 'idea' this may seem a fairly innocuous thing to say. It may seem to be not more than a rather pompous way of saying what is implicit in our use of expressions like 'I've got a good idea: let's go and call on Aunt May', 'He had an idea she was hiding something', and 'The same idea had obviously occurred to both of them'. But Locke's use of the term 'idea' is not the everyday one. It is a philosophically highly-charged one. For with the one word 'idea' he identifies the things we are said to be employed about when we think, with the things supposedly passively received by the mind in perception, otherwise called 'sense-impressions'. According to Locke, sense-impressions are ideas are the things we are employed about in thinking. And translating our thoughts (Locke: 'mental propositions') into sentences ('verbal pro­ positions') is a matter of 'signifying' ideas with words. There has to be more to it than this, of course. Otherwise a sentence would be at best a string of proper names.2 There must be general words, and hence, if words have meaning by standing for ideas, general ideas. But how can there be general ideas if ideas are impressions on, or in, the mind? Surely impressions come in the category of particulars, not universals. To meet the difficulty Locke invokes the doctrine - or, rather, doctrines - of abstraction. There are two doctrines, one of which is invoked for words for sensible qualities, like 'white', the other for words like 'man'. The doctrine of abstraction for words like 'white' is as follows. In external objects such qualities as colour and shape are 'united and blended', but the ideas they produce in the mind enter by the senses The term 'sense-impression' - or 'impression', for short - has its origin in the assimilation of the passivity of the mind in perception to that of wax in receiving an impression from a seal. See Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule 12. 2 I say 'at best' because of the problem, with sense-impressions, of satisfying the conditions for the use of a proper name, e.g. that the thing named should be re-identifiable. Foreword ix 'simple and unmixed'. For example, if I am looking at something white and round, like a snowball, the idea of white and the idea of round enter the mind separately. There are two separate ideas, one of white and the other of round. And I can consider them as such. This act of considering an idea as separate from other concomitant ideas is called 'abstraction'. In addition to being able to abstract ideas (i.e. consider them in their simple and unmixed state), I can notice that other ideas conform to, or agree with, the idea so abstracted (now called an 'abstract idea'). In virtue of this ability to notice agreement of ideas I can lay up the abstract idea in my memory to serve as a pattern or standard for all ideas of that sort. I can use it, in my thoughts, as a representative of all such ideas. So used, it may be called a 'general idea', though it is still a particular; its generality consists in the use to which it is put. The general word 'white' signifies the general idea of white. The use of the word by someone else excites, by a process of association of the word with the idea, the appropriate idea in my mind. The doctrine of abstraction for words like 'man' is different. It has to be, since 'man' is not a word for a sensible quality, and it would be too implausible to hold that the idea of man enters the mind simple and unmixed. 'Abstraction' now comes to mean something more than a mere act of considering an idea that is already separate from other ideas. It becomes the act of separating out, from a number of complex ideas, what they 'have in common'. Abstract ideas, in this sense, are 'the workmanship of the understanding'. I have a number of complex ideas, of Peter and James, Mary and Jane, observe what they have in common, and accordingly frame an abstract idea in which what is peculiar to each is left out and what is common to them all is retained. Locke recognised some of the difficulties in his account. He wrote, for instance, of 'the pains and skill required to form the general idea of a triangle' which 'must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once'. He even said that such an idea is, in effect, 'something imperfect, that cannot exist; an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together'. I suppose he meant that it could exist only as an idea, not as a real thing; but even as an idea its existence may be questioned. Or it might be better to say that what may be questioned is that Locke can mean by the term 'idea' in talk of 'the general idea of a triangle' what he means by it when he identifies an idea with a sense-impression.
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