Jacques Maritain Center :
Theories of Knowledge / by Leslie J. Walker, S.J.§ 25. It is impossible to examine the truth of theory with any hope of success, unless first we know where fact ends and where theory begins. Theory itself may be, and often, indeed, it claims to be, merely a description of facts, more accurate, more ultimate, and more systematic than that of the data with which we started. Hence the distinction between theory and fact, it may be said, is relative to our point of view. Be that as it may, it is necessary to start somewhere, and it is necessary also clearly to realise where we do start. For, in order to discuss the validity of explanation or theoretical description -- if the latter term be preferred -- it is essential to know precisely what it is we are trying to explain. Philosophers, scientists, all theorists do de facto take for granted certain data which they think will be clear, obvious, 'given' to everybody alike, and will therefore be admitted by all. Much philosophic confusion, however, might have been avoided in the past had theorists taken the trouble at the outset to tell us precisely what their data were, instead of leaving it to critics to discover this for themselves.
§ 26. What, then, are the data upon which the Theory of Knowledge is built? What the facts which an epistemologist may take for granted without being guilty of a petitio principii? The philosopher will reply 'the data of experience;' and of late, philosophising scientists also have taken up this convenient formula. But what are the data of experience? The phrase is a familiar one, yet I doubt if any two persons would interpret it exactly in the same way. Does it mean the data of our experience, or the data of 'pure' experience If the data of our experience, by what means are we to distinguish what is a datum from what is not, i.e., from what is due to interpretation, to preconceived ideas, to a background of theory? And if the data of 'pure' experience is meant, how are these data to be discovered, and where are they to be found?
Mr. Shadworth Hodgson holds that all philosophy should start from the data of pure experience.{1} The distinctions of subject and object, of things and their appearances, of mind and matter, are to be excluded from the realm of the given. They are not data, but accretions with which the pure data of experience have been distorted and defiled.
Although [he says] the ultimate data of experience without which all further or more complex forms of it would be impossible, consists of states or process-contents of consciousness, this by no means implies that they consist of states or process-contents of consciousness as distinguished from realities.{2}
To regard them as such is to adopt the psychological point of view, and hence to introduce into philosophy an assumption which is wholly unfounded in the data of pure experience.
Now, it is a very easy matter to tell us that we must begin to philosophise merely upon the data of 'pure' experience; but it is quite a different matter to attempt to carry this principle out in practice. For, from what source, may I ask, are such data to be obtained? To whose experience do they belong? To that of the amoeba, the savage, the new-born babe, perhaps. But we are neither amoebae, nor savages, nor yet new-born babes; nor can we imagine what is the state of mind of such interesting beings. We cannot even contruct it hypothetically, no matter how powerful our imagination may be, or how apt we may be at making guesses, unless we first study the data of our own experience, and base our fanciful guess upon these. Personally, though I have tried hard, I must confess that I have found myself quite unable to get rid of the subject-object distinction in any of my conscious acts. Either I think of things as part of myself, or else as something other than myself. Even when basking idly in the sun or passively enduring the pleasures of a warm bath, or gazing with absent mind at what is before me, there still seems to be in my mind some faint distinguishing of subject and object. It may be said that I put the distinction there when I reflect. Possibly; but such a statement, at any rate, is not a datum of experience. I seem to be able to introspect a psychical act, even while it is taking place; and there I find the distinction sure enough. But even if all introspection is retrospection it still seems to be true that in any act of cognition which is just going, or which is retained in memory, objects are regarded as something other than myself. Indeed, if introspection is incompatible with direct objective experience, it ought also to be incompatible with retained or remembered experiences, and so to be impossible altogether.
In no case, however, is my argument affected. For unless memory invariably plays us false, the distinction of subject and object, which appears when we reflect, must have been there originally, though it may have belonged to the 'fringe' of consciousness to which we do not directly attend. That all developed human consciousness is noetic, and that in all noetic consciousness subject and object are distinct, is, in fact, admitted now by almost all psychologists. Our experience is certainly not pure experience. It may have been 'pure' when we started life, but of this we neither have nor can have any certain knowledge, for no one remembers what he was like when first he emerged from his mother's womb. It is absurd, then, to base philosophy on data of which we have no certain knowledge, and about which no two philosophers can be found to agree. Our only course, therefore, is to start with knowledge as we have it, with human knowledge, which is the only knowledge common to us all, and upon which each may reflect when he wills.
§ 27. The data of our experience, then, are the data from which the epistemologist must start and which he must seek to explain.{3} These data, thanks to introspection, are readily accessible to all. Our minds are always more or less cognitive. We are always observing, listening, reading, thinking. Even when actively engaged we are not wholly unconscious of what is going on around us, and we certainly think, as a rule, about what we are doing. Each one of us has already acquired a stock of knowledge of greater or less extent, and to this he adds daily by perception, by inference, and by means of information gained from others. It is possible for us to study, not only knowledge as a habit or state of mind, but also knowledge in the making.
There is clearly a difficulty, however, in taking as our starting point the data of our experience. Our experience is certainly not what it was in infancy, and it may be objected that the beliefs which now accompany our cognitive acts and seem to be spontaneous are not so in reality. The data of our experience, it may be said, are so hopelessly intermingled with interpretations due to the process by which knowledge has been acquired in the individual or in the race, that it is impossible to distinguish what is a datum from what is not. The possibility of such an admixture of interpretation with primitive data cannot be denied. But it must be remembered that we do not claim to start with primitive data. It is one thing to say that we have in our experience such and such data, and quite another thing to pretend that these data are the data of 'pure' or original experience. The data of our experience, our beliefs about ourselves and objective reality and the judgments in which such beliefs are acquired, confirmed and expressed, these we know for certain. Of these we are directly conscious, and can discover by introspection, not, indeed, how they arose in the first instance, but how we add to them by the actual cognitive processes which are constantly taking place in our own minds. Such beliefs may or may not be illusory, but it is certain that we have them. They may or may not be 'impure;' they may or may not be due to interpretation and illicit inference; that remains to be proved and can neither be assumed nor straightway denied. But it is certain that at present belief in our own existence, spiritual and corporeal, in an objective and material world, and in other minds and bodies like to our own, appears to be spontaneous and natural. Of the data of 'pure' experience no one can tell us anything for certain. Their very existence is little more than a hypothesis. But the data of our experience are simply the beliefs of the plain man before he begins to philosophise, and the cognitive processes by which fresh beliefs are day by day generated in his mind -- beliefs and processes which, I allow, are not what they were when the man was a child, and which may be illusory and false, but beliefs and processes which, provided we make no assumption as to their objective validity, are certainly obvious to all and disputed by none, and so may be taken as data for a theory of knowledge. from these data every epistemologist, whether Kantian, Pragmatist, or Realist, has begun, and must always begin, for these are the only data that exist for us. Having philosophised already, it may be somewhat difficult, perhaps, to eliminate the influence of one's own philosophic standpoint from one's introspective readings. However, we can but make the attempt, and endeavour to correct the errors of one's own introspection by the assistance of those who are still in the happy state of unsophisticated common-sense; and we may well begin with sense-perception, which, as the primary source from which all knowledge is derived, naturally has the first claim upon our attention.
§ 28. 'At the present moment there is a little tit on my window-sill picking up crumbs of bread.' This statement implies a judgment on my part. I perceived a tit in a certain environment, and have expressed my act of perception in the form of a judgment to the truth of which I give my assent. What is involved in this act of cognition? Was there any activity on my part? Apparently there was, for I refer the act of perception to myself and say that I perceived. I seem to have been conscious, even during the act of perception itself, of my own psychical operation. True, my self-consciousness was very slight. It was with the perceived objects that my attention was chiefly, if not wholly, engrossed. Yet I certainly did not confuse the tit, the window, and the garden which I saw through the window, with myself, nor yet again with one another. To me they at once appeared as things, objective, real, distinct. I saw the little tit with its yellow breast, its greenish-blue wings and the black and white markings of its back. I heard the rattle of its claws and the tapping of its beak. I observed how it threw crumb after crumb aside before it found one to suit its taste. Then, when it flew away and my attention passed to the window and the garden, I recognised them at once. Hedges and trees and plants and soil were clearly distinguished. I was conscious that they were the same as they were a moment ago, the same as they were yesterday and the day before; and to this judgment also I gave my assent. To me, at any rate, my judgment did not present merely a 'claim to truth; ' it was a truth, immediate, factual, self-evident.
Now, all this, the psychologist will tell me, implies that I had sensations of colour, of yellow and black and white, and sensations of sound by means of which I distinguished one object from another, and muscular sensations by means of which I assigned them to their respective distances, and universal ideas under which the different objects were subsumed. This, however, is theory pure and simple. No doubt it is well-founded and true. Nevertheless, sensations were not given as data in the series of perceptions which occurred. Sensations and ideas may have been involved in each of my acts of perception, but I was not aware of it at the time. I did not perceive my sensations nor yet my ideas. What I perceived were external objects. Nor was I conscious either in the act of perception itself or in the reflective act which followed, that I perceived by means of sensations and ideas; though, as a psychologist, I believe this to be actually the case. The colours which I observed, belonged as qualities to the tit; the distances were given as part of what I perceived; the tit, the window, and the garden were objects, things, having the qualities and performing the actions which I have described. All I did was to perceive. It was the objects themselves which possessed qualities, were stationary or moved about, were active or passive, underwent changes or, again, did not change at all.
§ 29. Nor do I seem to have been responsible in any way for what occurred, except in so far as I was conscious of it. I say that I distinguished object from object; yet this seems to be a figure of speech rather than an accurate description of fact. I was not aware of any distinguishing or of any synthesis perceived on my part. What I perceived was not as one whole. The tit was a whole and so were the other objects, but each whole was individual and distinct from the rest. From the outset the tit was clearly distinguished from the window and the garden; and though the trees and hedges of the latter were not distinguished from one another till my attention was directed to them after the tit had gone, they were certainly neither perceived nor felt as a whole. There was, indeed, a certain togetherness about what I perceived. I saw a-tit-through-a-window-overlooking-the-garden. But this simply means that I took in the scene at a single glance, not that the different objects which I perceived were merged in any felt-whole or were in any sense a unity. The only real wholes which I seem to perceive are individual objects. The perception of these doubtless implies the synthesis of qualities distinguished one by one in the past and re-united to form my percept of (v.g.) the tit. But these qualities do not constitute a felt whole. The whole itself, as well as its unity and the different qualities it comprises, seems to be something objective, something distinct from me and independent of any activity on my part, something the parts of which I believe to have been there all along, whether distinguished and again synthesised by me or not. Both analysis and synthesis, in a sense, are mine, since it is I who make them. But in making them I cannot help myself. The object seems to force me to make them, and in so doing to reveal to my mind its own nature its own objective, real, and individual unity in difference.
§ 30. Again, I can find no trace of purpose in the acts of perception I have described. They seemed to occur quite accidentally, and to have nothing to do either with my purposes or with my needs. If you ask me what it was made me perceive what I did perceive, I should say it was just the objects which were there when I looked up. Perhaps I looked up to see what was there? It may be that I did; but I do not see how this affects what I saw. or how it can possibly be said to modify the facts which I observed. If facts are modified or mutilated by purposes, it is certainly not a datum of experience. To the plain man, even when he selects his facts, as when he goes out to look for a golf-ball which he lost the day before, or when he digs in British tumuli in the hope of finding traces of a bygone age, or when he works in the laboratory, arranging apparatus, weighing chemicals, pouring out acids -- in a word, preparing his experiments -- it does not seem that his purposive and selective actions alter what he finds, in the sense of making it less real or less objective. They are still facts, though it was he himself who placed the conditions which brought those facts to light. Perception may often be purposive, but purpose determines the intent, not the content, of thought; it determines what we look for, not what we find. Perception may also be selective, for there are many things which we might observe but do not, because such things are irrelevant to our purpose and so fail to attract our attention. Nevertheless, what we do observe even under circumstances which we ourselves have brought about, we believe to be as objectively true and real as the facts which force themselves upon our notice independently of any pre-formed purpose or pre-conceived idea. Experimental observations seem to be as valid objectively as those which are made by the comparatively passive observer. In neither case is assent determined by purpose or by the power of facts to satisfy our needs; for whether we find what we want or discover something else, whether our experiments turn out as desired or otherwise, we accept as given what we perceive to take place.
§ 31. Ordinarily, too, assent is absolute. Either we assent or we doubt. And if the plain man assents to a fact perceived by himself, rarely can you get him to own that he has made a mistake. Should you succeed, however, a judicious use of the Socratic method will lead to interesting results. The plain man will probably qualify his admission of error by some such phrase as "Well it looked like that at any rate." By which he means that though things in reality were not as he perceived them, yet they appeared to be so at the time. If, however you press the point you will probably succeed in convincing him that his mistake was due, not to false appearance, but to false inference or to a false interpretation of sense-data. And by this means you will be able to prove to him that in perception we not only use the senses but also subsume objects under universal ideas, and that errors of perception are often due to the subsumption of a perceived object under the wrong idea. Indeed, that he has what logicians call universal ideas, he will readily admit. For he knows what is meant (v.g.) by a man. It is a being with a body more or less like his own and performing actions very much in the same way that he does. And there are many objects of this kind to which his idea of man is applicable. Of colours, sizes and shapes he can tell you little perhaps, but he knows that they are qualities which may belong to the same or to different objects. Of honesty, virtue and truth he can tell you more, since these concern him more closely and he has probably thought more about them and often heard them discussed. In any case, he may easily be convinced that of such qualities he has universal ideas and also that these ideas are abstract, for he knows very well that colours are never found without something coloured, and that honesty does not exist except in an honest man.
§ 32. Now, suppose you call the attention of this victim of your philosophic zeal to a dirty, unkempt, and ill-clad object lying by the road-side, and ask him what he takes it to be. Suppose also he replies that 'it may be either a gipsy or a tramp, more probably the latter.' You may then point out that here an inference has been made, and that though this inference is based upon perceptual data, the predicates 'gipsy' and 'tramp' are not actually contained therein as objects of sense-perception. You may show that in many cases of what seems to be immediate perception, inference is involved. For instance, the minds of other men are not perceived directly, but inferred from the perception of their bodies. In the universal idea 'man,' therefore, certain characteristics or 'notes' and not objects of sense-perception, but of inference. and the same may be said of many other universal ideas. At the same time, though we can distinguish in a universal idea, especially when we hesitate in applying it, elements which are not given in sense-data from those which are, both what we perceive and what we infer belongs to the object, and belongs to it, not on account of our way of looking at it or thinking about it, but on account of its own nature, which we seem to be able, by means of perception and inference, to get to know.
Whether we perceive directly or whether we infer, we believe that it is the object itself whose nature is revealed to our intelligence.
§ 33. Thus both universal ideas and inferences are involved in perception, as even the plain man may be forced to admit. Strictly, however, and as applied to perception in general, this is not a datum of perceptual experience, but belongs to theory. Ordinarily, what we perceive, whether it he natural objects, or their qualities, colours, shapes and distances, we perceive immediately. Our subsumption is not deliberate. Our universal ideas function unconsciously. The assertion that all perception involves subsumption under universal ideas and is really inferential in character is itself an inference based on particular cases in which perception halts and stumbles. That universal ideas exist, and function in sense-perception can readily be verified in experience; but whether or not all perception is inferential is quite another matter. Indeed, if it were, it would be difficult to conceive how perception could begin.
§ 34. Similarly, all questions as to the functioning of sensation-complexes and of a priori categories or forms, the synthetic and constructive activity of the mind, the modification of fact owing to selection, purposes and needs, so far as perception in general is concerned, pertain to theory. In some cases hypotheses of this kind explain very well how we perceive, but fail to satisfy other conditions and are often in contradiction with common-sense belief, as, for instance, the theory that universals are a priori forms of the mind; while the hypothesis that the objects of perception are sensations is even worse off, for it explains nothing. It does not even explain how we perceive, still less how we come to believe in an objective and real world consisting of numberless individual objects, quite independent of ourselves, except when directly or indirectly we operate upon them by physical movements or when vice versa they operate upon us. It may be true after all, that what we perceive are at bottom nothing but our own sensations, but this, at any rate is not a datum of experience nor a common belief. It is a theory; nay, more, a metaphysical theory, for which, personally, I can find no adequate foundation in the data of experience, and the value of which for epistemology seems to me to be evanescent. To introspection, what we perceive does not appear as something determined by us, and we certainly believe it to be determined ab extra. The object of perception appears, not as a sensation, nor yet as a synthesis of sense-data under a priori forms, but as a thing having qualities and performing operations, and sometimes in addition this, but never instead of this, serving certain purposes which we wish to realise. Colour appears, not as a sensation, but as a quality of real things; and a thing is something which has qualities but is not itself merely a quality. The plain man knows little of the nature of things and their qualities. He cannot define them. None the less qualities appear to him as distinct from one another, and distinct from himself. He does not say that he has sensations of hardness or roughness, but that things feel hard or soft, rough or smooth. Sounds, too, and even smells, are perceived, not as sensations, but as the qualities of things. We say that we hear a sound or perceive a smell, not that we have an auditory or an olfactory sensation; and this holds even when we fail to localise the sound or the smell.
The object of strictly external perception, then, is always something real and independent{4} of ourselves, and though it implies the functioning of universal ideas, we are not ordinarily conscious of this fact; still less are we aware that our perceptions are due to a priori forms of synthesis, or that their content is determined in any way by human purposes and needs.
§ 35. The perception of our own body and its various qualities and states furnishes us with further and different data. We still perceive objects, indeed; for the distinction of subject and object is never entirely lost as long as we are in any way conscious. But the object of perception is now some part of ourselves. By means of sight we perceive the shape of our limbs, and by means of touch the smoothness and softness of our skin. Perceiver and perceived are, in this case, only relatively distinct, for we recognise that in reality they are one.
Moreover, although what we perceive in this way is usually a state or quality belonging to some part of our bodies in the same way that colour and shape, hardness and softness, belong as qualities to external things, sometimes the object of what may be called perhaps 'internal' perception, is more vague and ill-defined. We feel warm or cold all over. We feel hungry or thirsty, but we cannot say precisely where. We have pains, aches, feelings of discomfort or of healthy exuberance. Sometimes such feelings are, more or less, located; sometimes they are not located at all. But in either case we recognise them not only as states of our body, but as feelings or sensations. There are cases, therefore, in which the object of perception is a sensation. There is, in fact, a kind of gradation between what we perceive as the qualities of objects -- of external things or of our own bodies -- and what we perceive as sensations. On the one hand, colours, shapes, sounds, hardness and other properties perceived by actual contact, are perceived as qualities of objects and not as sensations. On the other hand, the 'voluminous' feelings we get in the body as a whole, as well as various pains and aches and muscular sensations, are certainly recognised to be of the nature of sensation; while temperature and taste seem to form a half-way house. Sometimes we perceive with the tongue the flavour of meat, wine, fruit, or peppermint, with the hand the warmth of water, and with the face the coolness of the breeze. Sometimes we merely 'get a taste,' a sensation of bitterness sweetness localised loosely in the mouth, or we feel hot from the effects of violent exercise or cold on account of a chill.
§ 36. This gradation between what is perceived as sensation and what is perceived as the quality of objects has led to the theory that sensations are always the means by which we perceive (Id quo percipitur), and also to the more questionable theory that the object of perception (id quod percipitur) is at bottom sensation. Both theories may also appeal to the fact that even in external perception we can often distinguish sensation, provided we look for it. For instance, the muscular sensation in the organ of sight may be detected when we change the convergence of the eyes. In touch-contact, too, sensation may be perceived and located in the tips of the fingers, if we attend to them and not to the object touched. Even colour may appear as a sensation when the eyes are almost closed and all variation in tone, tint, and outline are, as far as possible, eliminated. It must be noted, however, that these latter are abnormal and exceptional cases, and in no way render false what has been said about the object of external perception in general, viz., that that object is normally not a sensation but the quality of a real thing.
The data of perceptual experience are not as such sensations, and if the id quod percipitur theory be expressed in this form it is certainly false. That the qualities of objects are ultimately reducible to sensations may or may not admit of proof; but for external perception, in the strict sense of the term, the object perceived does not appear as a sensation. Possibly, it might so appear if our experience were 'pure,' which it is not; but, more probably, as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson says, for 'pure' experience there is no distinction of subject and object, and consequently what is perceived would appear, if it appeared at all, neither as a quality of an object nor a sensation. And under such conditions perception proper would not exist, for there would be neither subjective nor objective reference. Hence, as introspection fails to reveal to us the data of pure experience, we must be content to take experience as we find it; and, this being so, we are forced to admit that for us in our present stage of development the data of experience include what we believe to be the qualities of external objects.
{1} Cf. Studies in Humanism, p. 187, where Dr. Schiller tells us that Fact, "in the wider sense of the term, which includes imaginings, illusions, errors, and which is anterior to the distinction of appearance and reality, is the starting point and final touchstone of all our theories about reality."
{2} The Metaphysics of Experience, vol. i., p. 116.
{3} Cf. Studies in Humanism, p. 144 where we are told that we must start with "immediate experience, with the actual knowing just as we find it in our own adult minds" but contrast p. 187 cited above § 26 where a contradictory assertion is made.
{4} By this I do not mean, of coursc, that the object of perception is unrelated to consciousness, or that quâ the content of perception it is not in consciousness; but that quâ real we believe it to be other than, outside of, and not dependent on ourselves, and to have a nature of its own which as such is not affected by the fact of its becoming known.