In a message dated 1/20/2014 7:53:01 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx quotes from Grice, "the objects revealed by perception should surely be constituents of that world'" -- and wonders about the demonstrative, 'that': >What world? The 'world as it is perceived' >i.e. the world as present in perception? >Or the world beyond what is perceived i.e. >the world as present whether perceived or not? --- This is a good question, and we may need further context. I think 'world' should NOT be used by philosophers, however Griceian, or Grice. The word has hardly a philosophical pedigree. The Etymology Online source provides the excuse for a nice excursus --- EXCURSUS on why Heidegger should NEVER have written anything about In-der-welt-sein: 'world'. Old English woruld, worold "human existence, the affairs of life," also "the human race, mankind," a word peculiar to Germanic languages. Cf. Old Saxon werold, Old Frisian warld, Dutch wereld, Old Norse verold, Old High German weralt, German Welt), with a literal sense of "age of man". From (i) Proto-Germanic *wer "man". Old English wer, still in werewolf; see virile + (ii) *ald "age" (see old). Originally "life on earth, this world (as opposed to the afterlife)," sense extended to "the known world," then to "the physical world in the broadest sense, the universe" (c.1200). In Old English gospels, the commonest word for "the physical world," was Middangeard (Old Norse Midgard), literally "the middle enclosure" (cf. yard), which is rooted in Germanic cosmology. Greek kosmos in its ecclesiastical sense of "world of people" sometimes was rendered in Gothic as manaseþs, literally "seed of man." --- The usual Old Norse word was heimr, literally "abode" (see home). Words for "world" in some other Indo-European languages derive from the root for "bottom, foundation" (e.g. Irish domun, Old Church Slavonic duno, related to English deep). The Lithuanian word is pasaulis, from pa- "under" + saule "sun." Original sense in world without end, translating Latin saecula saeculorum, and in worldly. Latin saeculum can mean both "age" and "world," as can Greek aion. World power in the geopolitical sense first recorded 1900. World-class is attested from 1950, originally of Olympic athletes. ----- So we see that in terms of the Graeco-Roman philosophical lexicon, the words to use are COSMOS, or SAECULUM, or perhaps MUNDUS? Well, the online Short/Lewis, Latin Dictionary, notes that 'mundus', in Latin, literally meant (or means) toilet ornaments, decorations, dress (of a woman) -- and figuratively, "like the Gr. κόσμος, the universe, the world, esp. the heavens and the heavenly bodies." -------- So let's get back to Grice: "the objects revealed by perception should surely be constituents of that world". I think Grice may be having in mind different worlds. I am reminded of a good example by McEvoy in a recent post, "I perceive two sparrows in a branch". McEvoy then wrote: "We may tend to think this may be true of “theoretical knowledge” but that our ‘perceptual’ knowledge – for example, when we see two sparrows on a branch – reflects how things are and is not merely our ‘perception’ from a certain perspective or ‘problematique’. Yet those two sparrows that look the same to us may well not look the same to other sparrows." Or to a serpent. I am reminded of Alice in Wonderland. When her neck begins to grow and she starts to look like a serpent, a pigeon, protecting her eggs, screams: "Serpent!". "I'm not a serpent," says Alice. "I'm a little girl". A conversation develops, and Alice discloses that she does like to eat eggs. "Serpent!", the pigeon exclaims. In his book on Lewis Carroll's Logic, Sutherland discusses this as a case of a functional definition of 'serpent' (for a pigeon): whatever eats eggs. ---- McEvoy's point is different. If you are a male sparrow about to reproduce ("How often do you come to this branch?" "Only in the mating season"), then the fact that the other sparrow next to you on the branch being FEMALE becomes VERY relevant. True, a female sparrow does look quite different from a male sparrow. It may be different with Darwin's Finches (see "Darwin's Finches"). So, we seem to have a sparrow world, a homo-sapiens world, and so on. We assume Grice is speaking of 'homo sapiens': "[T]he objects revealed by perception [TO HOMO SAPIENS] should surely be constituents of that world [IN WHICH HOMO SAPIENS inhabits]'" Grice prefers to speak of 'pirots' and he is being serious about it. A plant is a pirot, and a plant (as Prince Charles has taught us profusely) PERCEIVES more than we would be ready to think the plant perceives. This is a PLANT world. There should, strictly, be a world for each species. Those plants who eat flies surely perceive 'their' world (the world in which they inhabit and grow) in ways different from a sea weed in the bottom of the ocean. ----- We may be more relativistic and conceive that, say, Geary, perceives the world different from, say, Speranza. ---- McEvoy is then quoting Grice: "the objects revealed by perception should surely be constituents of that world'" Recall that Grice has also talked about Martian perception. So we have to be careful. If you are about to post a letter, and you perceive a red pillar box (or a pillar box that SEEMS red), then, "surely", to use Grice's colloquial idiom, that pillar box is a constituent of the world of the person about to post the letter. McEvoy waxes more philosophical, if that's the word: "What world? The 'world as it is perceived' i.e. the world as present in perception? Or the world beyond what is perceived i.e. the world as present whether perceived or not?" I would think Grice would go with Hume: esse = percipi. Or not! This basic claim of Berkeley's thought, his "idealism", is sometimes and somewhat derisively called "immaterialism" or, occasionally, subjective idealism. However, the philosopher after whom Grice's university was named (Berkeley), wrote, in Principles #3, using a combination of Latin and English, "esse is percipi, (to be is to be perceived). Most often, the motto is, if slightly inaccurately, attributed to Berkeley as being the purist Latin phrase Esse EST percipi. Or as Grice preferred: esse = percipi. Note that the use of '=' involves a second-order quantification calculus. The red-seeming pillar box is such that I perceive it as such. The phrase appears associated with Berkeley in authoritative philosophical sources, e.g. Berkeley holds that there are no such mind-independent things, that, in the famous phrase, esse est percipi (aut percipere) — to be is to be perceived (or to perceive). When the Americans reached the West, "Westward the course of Empire takes its way", they KNEW what they were talking about! Note that there is no university called Hume, or Locke, or Kant. Only "Berkeley" (strictly, UC/Berkeley), and Grice belonged in there! A rather good summary of Grice's position is to be found at ------------- http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/jmp/Theory%20of%20Knowledge/Caus al.htm ------------ What conditions are necessary and sufficient for one to be said to perceive an object? One might think that what is necessary in order to see a red-seeming pillar box that the following conditions be fulfilled: [a] The red-seeming pillar box is in fact there in front of you, and [b] You have visual experiences which would lead you to think that that red-seeming pilalr box is there in front of you. Is this enough for genuine perception? Many philosophers have been convinced that the concept of perception also contains a causal component. Grice devises examples where these conditions are satisfied and yet where the object in question is not perceived. They may be cases of coincidence or cases of contrivance. A coincidence case is described by Grice as follows: "it might be that it looked to me as if there were a certain sort of pillar in a certain direction at a certain distance, and there might actually be such a pillar in that place." "But if, unknown to me, there were a mirror interposed between me and the pillar, which reflected a numerically different though similar pillar, it would certainly be incorrect to say that I SAW the first pillar, and correct to say that I saw the second." For a contrivance case, consider the following situation. You are standing in front of a red-seeming pillar box, facing towards it, with your eyes open. But, unbeknownst to you, a holographic projector is throwing an image of a very similar, although not the same, red-seeming pillar box into the space between you and the real red-seeming pillar box. You are seeing the holographic image, not the first red-seeming pillar box, although it certainly seems to you just as if you were seeing the first red-seeming pillar box. So you satisfy both conditions [a] and [b]. Yet you do not, it is argued, see the first red-seeming pillar box at all. The only thing you can be said to really see is the holographic image (and, possibly, the second red-seeming pillar box). Examples like this are supposed to show that a third condition is necessary for perception, a causal condition: [c] the red-seeming pillar box present to the observer must CAUSA, in an appropriate way, the visual experiences which lead her to judge that the red-seeming pillar box is present. The argument is that in these examples, it is because the pillar does not cause your experiences, that you don’t qualify as genuinely seeing the pillar box. These examples therefore raise the question of whether our ordinary perceptual concepts somehow contain the concept of a causal link, which must be captured by any successful philosophical analysis of the concepts of perceiving, seeing, hearing, etc. A slightly different argument for the Causal Theory of Perception has been deployed by Peter Strawson, Grice's tutee at St. John's. Strawson writes: "[W]e think of perception as a way, indeed the basic way, of informing ourselves about the world of independently existing things: we assume, that is to say, the general reliability of our perceptual experiences; and that assumption is the same as the assumption of a general causal dependence of our perceptual experiences on the independently existing things we take them to be of. ... It really should be obvious that with the distinction between independently existing objects and perceptual awareness of objects we already have the general notion of causal dependence of the latter on the former, even if this is not a matter to which we give much reflective attention in our pre-theoretical days. ‘Perception and its Objects’, in G.F.MacDonald (ed.), Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A.J.Ayer, with his Replies, (London: Macmillan, 1979), p.51). The idea is that the senses can’t be genuinely cognitive faculties unless our sensory experiences are responsive to our surroundings. And our sensory experiences can’t be responsive to our surroundings unless their character is generally determined (i.e. caused) by the things which surround us. Of all the causal theorists, Strawson is the most insistent that causation is involved in our ordinary concept of perception. He elsewhere says that "[the] notion of the causal dependence of the experience enjoyed in sense-perception on features of the objective spatio-temporal world is implicit from the very start in the notion of sense-perception, given that the latter is thought of as generally issuing in true judgements about the world. It is not something we discover with the advance of science, or even by refined philosophical argument... It is conceptually inherent in a gross and obvious way in the very notion of sense perception as yielding true judgements about an objective spatio-temporal world. Hence any philosophical theory which seeks to be faithful to our general framework of ideas, our general system of thought, must provide for this general notion of causal dependence. It must, to this extent at least, be a causal theory of perception." Strawson complains that this point has been obscured by the assumption that because "the correctness of the description of a perceptual experience as the perception of a certain physical thing logically requires the existence of that thing" (MacDonald, pp.51-2), there can be no causal connection between the experience and the thing perceived. The assumption that a logical relation between two things precludes there also being a causal relation between them is, Strawson thinks, wrong. It is not only logically distinct things that can be causally related. But to show this Strawson refers only to philosophical causal theories of memory and reference, which are themselves dubious. Some recent arguments against the Causal Theory of Perception, and to the effect that there is no causal component in our perceptual concepts. Hyman deals with the arguments for the Causal Theory as defended by Grice. Grice’s stories of coincidences and contrivances don’t show what they are meant to show, Hyman thinks, since they give the wrong account of WHY the relevant red-seeming pilalr box is NOT perceived: Hyman writes: "[T]here is no reason why we should regard them as stories about different ways of causing impressions, when what they are obviously about is different ways of causally preventing someone from seeing something - by an obstacle, by an apparatus, etc." "In the case of the red-seeming pillar box, Grice can see the second pillar and cannot see the first because the second pillar is visible (in the mirror) from where he is standing, whereas the first is hidden from view (by the mirror, as it happens). It would indeed be incorrect to say that Grice sees the first pillar box - because he was prevented from seeing it by an obstacle. Grice’s argument therefore, Hyman thinks, “only succeeds in illustrating the platitude that if I see something, I am free from whatever causal constraints would prevent me from seeing it” (ibid.). This does nothing to show that when I see something, the fact that I see it is causally explained by the fact that it is there. As for Strawson’s argument, that is no more successful. Although we certainly do think of perception as a way of informing ourselves, Hyman notes, "this does not imply that ‘we assume... the general reliability of our perceptual experiences’ unless we also assume that the word ‘ perception’ refers to an experience of the kind envisaged by the causal theory. But if we assume nothing of the kind, and instead construe ‘our perceptual experiences’ as meaning ‘our seeing this and hearing that’, then the remark ‘we assume... the general reliability of our perceptual experiences’ will no longer seem to follow from the preceding remark, ‘We think of perception as a way... of informing ourselves’. Indeed, on this reading, the remark ‘we assume... the general reliability of our perceptual experiences’ becomes false. ‘I see that p’ entails p; hence we do not assume the general reliability of our perceptual experiences, on this reading, any more than we assume the general reliability of modus ponens." The idea that the senses are cognitive faculties has not been shown to contain the idea that there is a causal connection between our environment and our experience. Grice and Strawson both take for granted the essential point at issue, whether an exercise of our perceptual faculties involves two ingredients: a red-seeming pillar box in the perceptible environment, and a psychological episode which can be reported in terms such as ‘It seems to me just as if...’. If these are the right ingredients, then these arguments show that combining them causally is the right way to combine them. But are they the right ingredients in the first place? Grice's Causal Theory states that a perceptual verb is used to say that a person had, is having or will have a sensory experience which was or will be caused by whatever it is an experience of. It needs to show not merely that the things we perceive act causally upon our sense organs (that’s obviously true and no-one denies it), but rather that by doing so they cause us to have experiences which can be correctly reported by saying ‘It seemed to Grice just as if...’, “experiences of a kind which it is possible to have in darkness or in silence” (Hyman, ‘Vision, Causation and Occlusion’, p.210). And it also needs to show that “the existence of this causal chain is not a hard-won piece of scientific knowledge about our physical nature, but part of ‘the ordinary notion of perceiving’” What initially persuaded philosophers that our senses are capacities for having experiences which are reported not just by using a perceptual verb but by prefacing it with some phrase such as ‘It seems to me just as if...’ was, of course, the 'argument from illusion'. But Grice doesn't regard himself as committed to that argument. The main reason why Grice succeeds in restoring the causal theory’s reputation was that they detached it from the notion that the immediate objects of perceptual awareness are psychological entities of some sort... and thus protected it against the charge that it fosters scepticism. Grice, it is true, did use the concept of a sense-datum (as Paul had, in "Is there a problem about sense data?") but it was supposed to be a ‘harmless’ concept, one that didn’t raise the sceptical ‘veil of perception’ problem. But even if we escape the grip of the argument from illusion, the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination can still seem to make it plausible that perceiving involves an experience which is reported by using the phrase ‘It seems to me just as if...’. Strawson introduces this phrase by considering how someone would meet the request to strictly describe their perceptual experience. Such a request would be met, he argues, only by “an account which confines itself strictly within the limits of the subjective episode, an account which would remain true even if he had seen nothing of what he claimed to see, even if he had been subject to total illusion” (Strawson, ‘Perception and its Objects’, p.43). And Strawson supposes that one could meet this demand most simply by prefixing a normal description like ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms...’ with a phrase like ‘It sensibly seems to me just as if...’. So, would the subject in this way succeed in describing what occurs ‘ strictly within the limits of the subjective episode’? Hyman argues that he would not. The issue turns on the question whether it is possible to conceptually skim off a purely psychic event from the exercise of a perceptual power, an event which can also occur when a person perceives nothing at all. If this is possible, then, as Strawson says, a ‘strict account’ of someone ’s experience of seeing something would remain true even if it transpired that he had been subject to ‘total illusion’; and it is clear that a sentence of the form ‘It seems to me (or him) just as if...’ would be tailor-made to furnish such an account. But if it isn’t possible, Grice's causal theory of perception is untenable. Cause and effect are distinct existences. If X is the cause of Y then it is logically possible for Y to exist without X and vice versa. Hence, the sort of experience envisaged by the causal theory must be one which it is possible to have even though nothing which corresponds to it is within sight or within earshot. But it is manifestly implausible to suppose that one might have the experience of hearing something in total silence. Of course, one may under those circumstances imagine that one heard something, but imagining one hears is not a way of hearing. In general, imagining having an experience is not a way of having an experience, and thinking that you are perceiving x is not a way of perceiving x. (Compare the dreaming issue). Obviously what the adherents of the causal theory have in mind when they say things which imply the denial of this truth is that a perception and its corresponding ‘total illusion’ are subjectively indistinguishable: Surely -we want to say - this familiar and indisputable fact implies that the psychological episodes which occur when I hear or see something and those which occur when I am ‘subject to total illusion’ resemble each other perfectly. Isn’t it that the same purely subjective episode is occurring in both cases, but is caused differently in each? Hyman (as well as, in a different way, Paul Snowdon and John McDowell) argues that it is not. Hyman concedes that a perception and its corresponding total illusion may be subjectively indistinguishable, but denies that this implies what the causal theorist thinks. It does not imply that perceiving something involves the occurrence of a subjective episode which can also occur when the person is subject to total illusion. Imagine that two people are gazing up into the night sky. One of them, A, sees a shooting star, and points it out to the other one, B, who misses it, but, in her excitement, fancies that she sees it. Imagine that to B it seemed just as if she saw exactly what A actually did see. What is the relationship between B’s illusion and A’s perception? What B thought she saw and what A saw are the same. But this does not mean that they are one and the same experience. What B thought she saw, and what A did see, was a shooting star (not an experience). The fact that B’s illusion corresponded exactly with A’s perception does not imply that A and B enjoyed similar subjective episodes. The correspondence between the answer to the question ‘What did B seem to see?’ and the answer to the question ‘What did A see?’ cannot show that both answers report the occurrence of a subjective episode. Can B’s experience and A’s be said to be indistinguishable? They cannot. Someone present at the scene may well have been able to tell that B’s excitement had made her think that she saw something she didn’t really see. Even B herself may have realized this, and may have been able to distinguish between her own experience and A’s. But is it not true that there was nothing intrinsic to B’s experience which might have enabled [her] to know that [she] was not seeing what he thought he saw? If this is what is meant by the assertion that B’s illusion and A’s perception are indistinguishable ‘from the subject’s point of view’, can’t we infer that B had the same experience as A? We cannot. We can only infer that presumably (unless he realized), B believed that she had the same experience as A. But this is not the relationship between the perception and the illusion which the causal theory requires. The Causal Theory says that it is part of the meaning or SENSE (rather than IMPLICATURE) of a perceptual statement such as ‘S saw p’ that p was causally responsible for the occurrence of a sensory experience in S, a sensory experience that would be correctly reported by saying ‘It seemed (or appeared) to S just as if she saw p’. Let’s just think for a minute about the concept of meaning. The meaning of a statement is what one understands when one understands it. To grasp the meaning of a statement is to understand it. To be able to understand a statement it is necessary that one should be able to use that statement correctly. So correct use is a criterion of understanding, or knowledge of meaning. Another criterion of understanding is the ability to give a correct explanation of meaning. A third might be the ability to give a correct paraphrase. Now the Causal Theory says that it is part of the meaning of a perceptual statement that the object perceived caused a sensory experience in the perceiver. In other words, this must be something which someone who knew the meaning of a perceptual statement must also know. But all of us know what it means to say things like ‘S saw p’, ‘S heard p’, etc. We all know perfectly well the meanings of perceptual statements like these. This is because anyone who has been taught to speak a natural language knows how to use such statements, and correct use is a criterion of understanding, which itself is grasp or knowledge of meaning. There can’t be any more to the meaning of a statement than can be manifested in our use of that statement. How plausible is it, then, to claim that anyone who knows the meaning of a perceptual statement must also realise that the object perceived caused a sensory experience in the perceiver? And how plausible is it to claim that anyone who knows the meaning of a perceptual statement must also realise that the sensory experience thereby caused can be correctly reported by saying ‘It seemed (or appeared) to S just as if she saw p’? Have you ever come across anyone explaining the meaning of a perceptual statement in these terms? No. But would they count as explanations of the meanings of perceptual statements? Could one teach a child the meaning of perceptual verbs by telling them these things? I think not. Unless it is one of Geach's children, or even Grice's children. Or not, of course. Cheers, Speranza REFERENCES: Quotes and bibliographical references from http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/jmp/Theory%20of%20Knowledge/Caus al.htm with gratitude to the Reading philosophers, including Dancy, and the others.' (c) in part http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/jmp/Theory%20of%20Knowledge/Causal.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html