[lit-ideas] Re: Popper and Grice on the philosophy of perception

  • From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 21:39:10 -0500 (EST)


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




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